Page 191 - Arkansas Confederate Women

ANDERSONVILLE VINDICATED.

By Chas. Coffin, of Walmit Ridge.

There is one thing concerning the conduct of the war that
Northern people have held against us, and that is the treatment
of Northern prisoners in Southern prisons. They have always
held it as a blot on our record.

But we know the truth, and I think it is time they

knew it. We know that the Northern, soldiers in Southern

prisons had the same rations in kind and quantity that guards
over him had, and that the soldiers in the field had, with this
difference: They were kept together in large numbers in a lim-
ited area, necessarily so, in a climate they were not assimilated

to, and on a diet they were not accustomed to. Add to this

then the fact that they' were prisoners without hope, condemned

—to imprisonment during the war by their own government for

it was not the Confederates authorities who stopped the exchange
of prisoners of war. The great military triumvirate of the
North, Staunton, Grant, and Sherman were responsible for that.
Everybody knows what Sherman said war was. Sherman said
"War was hell !" and Staunton and Grant were wise enough to

—know that the Confederacy was playing with a limit that they

had only so many men out of whom it was possible to make

soldiers, and if they could succeed in capturing and holding
them it was only a question of time when the war must end ; add
to this the fact that the prisoners at Andersonville had among
them an epidemic for which the doctors had no antidote, nos-

— —tralgia home-sickness the direst of all diseases, for it has its

origin in that "hope deferred" that makes the heart sick even
unto death. Under these conditions, of course they sickened
and died.

But I submit if in the good year of our Lord, 189S, at a time
when our doctors have become intimateely familiar with bacilli
and bacteria, the germs of disease and death; when the science