[186] limited quantity of food — such as diarrhoea, dysentery and scurvy — I cannot state; but, to the best of my knowledge, information and belief, there were scores every month. We could at any time point out many for whom such a fate was inevitable, as they lay or feebly walked, mere skeletons, whose emaciation exceeded the examples given in Leslie's Illustrated for June 18, 1864. For example: in some cases the inner edges of the two bones of the arms, between the elbow and the wrist, with the intermediate blood vessels, were plainly visible when held toward the light. The ration, in quantity, was perhaps barely sufficient to sustain life, and the cases of starvation were generally those whose stomachs could not retain what had become entirely indigestible.For a man to find, on waking, that his comrade by his side was dead, was an occurrence too common to be noted. I have seen death in almost all the forms of the hospital and battle-field, but the daily scenes in Camp Sumter exceeded in the extremity of misery all my previous experience.
The work of burial is performed by our own men, under guards and orders, twenty-five bodies being placed in a single pit, without head-boards, and the sad duty performed with indecent haste. Sometimes our men were rewarded for this work with a few sticks of firewood, and I have known them to quarrel over a dead body for the job.
Dr. White is able to give the patients a diet but little better than the prison rations — a little flour porridge, arrow-root, whiskey, and wild or hog tomatoes. In the way of medicine, I saw nothing but camphor, whiskey, and a decoction of some kind of bark-white oak, I think. He often expressed his regret that he had not more medicines.
We beg leave to call especial attention to the passages in the above extract which we have italicised, and which are very significant in testimony which was gotten up to prove “Rebel barbarity.”
Another Andersonville prisoner testifies as follows before the United States Congressional Committee:
We never had any difficulty in getting vegetables; we used to buy almost anything that we wanted of the sergeant who called the roll mornings and nights. His name was Smith, I think; he was Captain Wirz's chief sergeant. We were divided into messes, eight in each mess; my mess used to buy from two to four bushels of sweet potatoes a week, at the rate of fifteen dollars Confederate money per bushel. [They got twenty dollars of Confederate money for one dollar of greenbacks in those days.] Turnips were bought at twenty dollars a bushel. We had to buy our own soap for washing our own persons and clothing; we bought meat and eggs and buiscuit. There seemed to be an abundance of those things; they were in the market constantly. That sergeant used to come down with a wagon-load of potatoes at a time, bringing twenty or twenty-five bushels at a load sometimes.
