Part 8

In August, 1864, Brigadier-Generals Wessells and Seymour were sent South to look into the condition and treatment of Union prisoners. From a report of General Seymour to Colonel Hoffman, Commissary-General of Prisoners, Washington, D. C., I take the following extract, which proves how little the United States authorities were concerned on account of the sufferings of their soldiers who were held as prisoners of war:

“The Southern authorities are exceedingly desirous of an exchange of prisoners. General Wessells and myself had an interview with General Ripley at Charleston, S. C., on this point. Their urgency is unbounded, but we asserted that it was the poorest possible policy for our Government to deliver to them 40,000 prisoners, better fed and clothed than ever before in their lives, in good condition for the field, while the United States receives in return an equal number of men worn out with privations and neglect, barely able to walk, often drawing their last breath, and utterly unfit to take the field as soldiers.”

Major-General Ben Butler, referring to the frustration of his efforts, while in command at Fortress Monroe, to bring about an exchange of prisoners, says in his book:

“His (Grant’s) proposition was to make an aggressive fight upon Lee, trusting to the superiority of numbers and to the practical impossibility of Lee getting any considerable reinforcements to keep up his army. We had 26,000 Confederate prisoners, and if they were exchanged it would give the Confederates a corps larger than any in Lee’s army, of disciplined veterans, better able to stand the hardships of a campaign and more capable than any other,” etc.

At the last session of the Confederate Congress a joint committee of the two Houses was appointed to take up and investigate the “Condition and Treatment of Prisoners of War.” This committee took a vast amount of testimony--sworn depositions of witnesses--surgeons, officers and soldiers, private citizens and Federal prisoners.

The object of this was to correct the unjust statements and misrepresentations which were circulated, and to remove false impressions and unfounded prejudices--to present to the world “a vindication of their country and relieve her authorities from the injurious slanders brought against her by her enemies.”

From the extremely lengthy Report of this committee I give here a few extracts:

“This Report is rendered especially important by reason of persistent efforts lately made by the Government of the United States and by associations and individuals connected or co-operating with it, to asperse the honor of the Confederate authorities and to charge them with deliberate and wilful cruelty to prisoners of war. Two publications have been issued at the North within the past year and have been circulated not only in the United States but in some parts of the South and in Europe. One of these is the Report of the joint select committee of the Northern Congress on the Conduct of the War, known as ‘Report No. 67.’ It is accompanied by eight pictures or photographs alleged to represent United States prisoners of war returned from Richmond in a sad state of emaciation and suffering.

“The intent and spirit of this report may be gathered from the following extract: ‘The evidence proves beyond all manner of doubt, a determination on the part of the rebel authorities, deliberately and persistently practised for a long time past, to subject those of our soldiers who have been so unfortunate as to fall into their hands to a system of treatment which has resulted in reducing many of those who have survived and been permitted to return to us to a condition both physically and mentally which no language we can use can adequately describe.’--Rep. p. 1.

“The other (Report) purports to be a ‘Narrative of the Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War,’ and is issued as a Report of a Commission of Inquiry appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission.

“The disingenuous attempt is made in both these publications to produce the impression that these sick and emaciated men were fair representatives of the general state of the prisoners held by the South, and that all their prisoners were being rapidly reduced to the same state by starvation and cruelty, and by neglect, ill-treatment and denial of proper food, stimulants and medicines in the Confederate hospitals. The facts are simply these:

“The Federal authorities, in violation of the cartel, having for a long time refused exchange of prisoners, finally consented to a partial exchange of the sick and wounded on both sides. Accordingly a number of such prisoners were sent from the hospitals in Richmond. General directions had been given that none should be sent, except those who might be expected to endure the removal and passage with safety to their lives; but in some cases the surgeons were induced to depart from this rule by the entreaties of some officers and men in the last stages of emaciation, suffering not only with excessive debility, but with ‘nostalgia,’ or home-sickness, whose cases were regarded as desperate, who could not live if they remained, and might possibly improve if carried home. Thus it happened that some very sick and emaciated men were carried to Annapolis, but their illness was not the result of ill-treatment or neglect. Such cases might be found in any large hospital North or South. They might even be found in private families, where the sufferer would be surrounded by every comfort that love could bestow. Yet these are the cases which, with hideous violation of decency, the Northern Committee have paraded in pictures and photographs. They have taken their own sick and enfeebled soldiers, have stripped them naked; have exposed them before a daguerrean apparatus, have pictured every shrunken limb and muscle, and all for the purpose, not of relieving their sufferings, but of bringing a false and slanderous charge against the South.

“A candid reader of these publications will not fail to discover that, whether the statements they make be true or not, their spirit is not adapted to promote a better feeling between the hostile powers. They are not intended for the humane purpose of ameliorating the condition of the unhappy prisoners held in captivity. They are designed to inflame the evil passions of the North; to keep up the war spirit among their own people; to represent the South as acting under the dominion of a spirit of cruelty, inhumanity and interested malice, and thus to vilify her people in the eyes of all on whom these publications can work.

“But even now enough is known to vindicate the South, and to furnish an overwhelming answer to all complaints on the part of the United States Government or people, that their prisoners were stinted in food or supplies. Their own savage warfare has wrought the evil. They have blockaded our ports; have excluded from us food, clothing and medicines; have even declared medicines contraband of war, and have repeatedly destroyed the contents of drug stores, and the supplies of private physicians in the country; have ravaged our country, burned our houses and destroyed growing crops and farming implements. One of their officers--(General Sheridan)--has boasted in his official report that in the Shenandoah Valley alone he burned 2,000 barns filled with wheat and corn; that he burned all the mills in the whole tract of country, destroyed all the factories of cloth, and killed or drove off every animal, even to the poultry, that could contribute to human sustenance. These desolations have been repeated again and again in different parts of the South. Thousands of our families have been driven from their homes, as helpless and destitute refugees. Our enemies have destroyed our railroads and other means of transportation, by which food could be supplied from abundant districts to those without it. While thus desolating our country in violation of the usages of civilized warfare, they have refused to exchange prisoners; have forced us to keep 50,000 of their men in captivity, and yet have attempted to attribute to us the sufferings and privations caused by their own acts.”

The report also contains a great amount of testimony concerning the cruel treatment of Confederate prisoners in Northern prisons.

Pollard, in his history of the “Lost Cause,” after reciting the extraordinary efforts made by the Confederate authorities to relieve the sufferings at Andersonville, says:

“Who was responsible for the sufferings of the sick and wounded prisoners at Andersonville, from August to December, 1864? The world will ask with amazement if it was possible that thousands of prisoners were left to die in inadequate places of confinement, merely to make a case against the South--merely for romance! The simple fact gives the clue to the whole story of the deception and inhuman cruelty of the authorities at Washington with reference to their prisoners of war--the key to a chapter of horrors that even the hardy hand of history shakes to unlock. To blacken the reputation of an honorable enemy; to make a false appeal to the sensibilities of the world; to gratify an inhuman revenge, Mr. Stanton, the saturnine and malignant Secretary of War at Washington, did not hesitate to doom to death thousands of his countrymen, and then to smear their sentinels with accusing blood.”

ABOUT DEAD-LINES

Much has been written and spoken of the “dead-lines” in Southern prisons. One would suppose they were unknown in Northern prisons. The fact is, they were as common at the North as in the South. There was not a Northern prison-camp but had its “dead-line,” and at all these prisons men were shot at and many killed _for passing over them_. And there was no reason to complain of this, for the lines were plainly marked, and it was known that anyone attempting to cross them would be shot. So, any man--no matter whether North or South--killed in violating this regulation did not deserve any sympathy.

Even in the Old Capitol Prison guards with loaded guns were stationed around the prison, within and without, and any prisoner attempting to escape, or overstepping the bounds, was liable to be shot. Two men, at least, were killed there--Wharton and Stewart, as described in my Prison Diary, page 36. And this in the city of Washington, a fortified city, within the Union lines, surrounded by camps, with thousands of soldiers, and the prisoners confined in a walled prison-house heavily guarded.

MAJOR HENRY WIRZ, C. S. A.

_The True History of the Wirz Case._

I was living in Washington at the time Captain Wirz underwent the travesty of a trial--a farce which ended in a tragedy.

I frequently met and conversed with Louis Schade, his counsel, and his associate, Judge Hughes. I also met and conversed with witnesses on the trial.

Rev. Father Boyle and Father Wiget, who attended Wirz during his imprisonment and ministered to him in his last moments on the scaffold, were both warm personal friends of mine--Father Wiget particularly. I not only regarded him as a spiritual father, as he was, but with all the respect and affection which a devoted son would have for a kind, loving father. Had I any doubts in the matter of the guilt or innocence of Wirz, I would take the word of either of these good and true men before that of the whole tribe of hired perjurers who testified against him.

There are many persons at the present day who know nothing as to the truth or falsity of the record of events which took place during and immediately after the Civil War, except what they have heard or perhaps read in histories written in the heat of passion, with prejudice and malice, and their minds are often poisoned and their judgments warped by the misrepresentations and sensational stories invented at the time to exasperate the people of the North.

Major Henry Wirz was a native of Switzerland. He came to this country, and in 1861 was a physician practising his profession in Western Louisiana.

He entered the Confederate Army at the beginning of the war, was wounded--his right arm shattered by a ball, so that he remained a cripple permanently. As his right arm was powerless he did not have the physical ability to ill-treat prisoners as some of the witnesses testified at his trial. Even if this charge had been true, that he exercised undue severity toward some of the prisoners, he might have been justified in so doing, when their fellow-prisoners were compelled to hang a half a dozen in self-defense.

In 1862 he was promoted to the rank of Captain “for bravery on the field of battle,” and to that of Major a few months before the close of the war.

He was an impulsive man--some said he was rough in his manner. This apparent roughness in persons of foreign birth sometimes proceeds from difference in language and their mode of expression, which may only need a little prejudice or ill-will to distort into something offensive. But that he was a man kind at heart is shown by his earnest endeavors to relieve the sufferings of the prisoners under his charge.

In the Official Records of the Rebellion, published by the United States Government, will be found letters of Wirz to Captain R. D. Chapman, Acting Adjutant of Post, and Colonel D. S. Chandler, Assistant Adjutant and Inspector-General, showing his efforts to better the condition of the prisoners, both with regard to rations and hygiene.

In the Southern Historical Society Papers is a letter from General John D. Imboden, written in 1876, from which the following extracts are taken:

“I have already alluded to Captain Wirz’s recommendation to put up more shelter. I ordered it, and thereafter, daily, a hundred or more prisoners were paroled and set to work in the neighboring forest. In the course of a fortnight comfortable log-houses, with floors and good chimneys--for which the prisoners made and burnt the brick--were erected for twelve or fifteen hundred men.

“This same man (Captain Wirz) who was tried and hung as a murderer, warmly urged the establishment of a tannery and shoemaker’s shop, informing me that there were many men among the prisoners skilled in these trades, and that some of them knew a process of very rapidly converting hides into tolerably good leather. There were thousands of hides at Andersonville from the young cattle butchered during the previous summer and fall, whilst the country yet contained such animals. A few weeks later many of the barefooted prisoners were supplied with rough, but comfortable shoes. Another suggestion came from the medical staff of the post, that I ordered to be at once put into practice: It was to brew corn beer for those suffering from scorbutic taint. Captain Wirz entered warmly into this enterprise. I mention these facts to show that he was not the monster he was afterward represented to be, when his blood was called for by infuriated fanaticism. I would have proved these facts _if I had been permitted to testify on his trial, after I was summoned before the Court by the United States_, and have substantiated them by the records of the prison and of my own headquarters.”

When the Federal troops were sent to Georgia Major Wirz was placed under guard and taken to the Old Capitol Prison, in Washington, D. C., where he remained from the 10th of May, 1865, until November 10th, 1865, when he was hung.

For three weary months he was kept a close prisoner, and then he was taken before a Military Commission for trial (?).

In the case of Major Wirz the usual course of procedure was reversed--he was first condemned, then tried, and finally executed. Yet this was not the final act, for the malignity of his persecutors followed him even after death. When Father Boyle and others sought to give the body of Wirz Christian burial in consecrated ground the request was denied and the body deposited beside those executed for the assassination of President Lincoln, in the yard of the old arsenal.

The regard for law and justice which usually governs in a Civil Court had no holding in the proceedings of a Military Commission, where the decisions of the Court were rendered in accordance with the opinions of the Judge Advocate, who admitted or rejected testimony as he thought it affected the case. Consequently persons whose testimony was considered vital for the defense, were not allowed to testify, while witnesses for the prosecution were permitted to give their evidence, no matter how inconsistent or manifestly false it was.

In a letter dated August 17th, 1868, to the _National Intelligencer_, Robert Ould, who was Confederate States Agent of Exchange, says:

“I was named by poor Wirz as a witness in his behalf. The summons was issued by Chipman, the Judge Advocate of the Military Court. I obeyed the summons and was in attendance upon the court for some ten days.... Early in the morning of the day on which I expected to give my testimony I received a note from Chipman requiring me to surrender my subpoena. I refused, as it was my protection in Washington.... I engaged, however, to appear before the court and did so the same morning. The Judge Advocate endorsed on my subpoena these words: ‘The within subpoena is hereby revoked; the person named is discharged from further attendance.’ I have got the curious document before me now, signed with the name of ‘N. P. Chipman, Colonel,’ etc. I intend to keep it, if I can, as the evidence of the first case _in any court of any sort_, where a witness who was summoned _for the defense_ was dismissed _by the prosecution_.”

Rev. Father Whelan, of Savannah, Ga., a venerable Catholic priest, who had been in the habit of visiting and ministering to the prisoners at Andersonville, went to Washington, as a witness. He was asked by the prosecuting attorney what he knew, and after telling his observations at the prison, he was told he was not wanted and could go home.

In an old diary of mine, I find this entry:

“A man named Marini was in the store to-day. He was called as a witness in the Wirz case. He had been a prisoner at Andersonville. He said many of the witnesses had sworn falsely. Some swore he had been bitten by bloodhounds. This he said was false; that he had shown them his person to prove there were no marks of wounds. ‘If I had been torn by the dogs as they swore I had,’ said he, ‘would there not have been at least some scars to show it?’ He said that at the time some of the witnesses swore Wirz had shot prisoners, Wirz was not at Andersonville, but was absent from the post for about four weeks on surgeon’s certificate, suffering from gangrene; that the accounts of the prisoners being killed by Wirz were false. Marini was in the employ of the United States Government as a spy during the war. He said that one of the witnesses swore he had been sick during the whole time he was at Andersonville. ‘So he should have been,’ said Marini; ‘he didn’t wash himself the whole time he was there; he was too lazy.’”

The star witness for the prosecution was the Marquis De la Baume, who claimed to be a grand nephew of Lafayette. He testified to the “individual killing” or murder “committed by Wirz.” Before the conclusion of the trial he was, _on the recommendation of the members of the Military Commission_, appointed to a clerkship in the Interior Department at Washington. He was afterward recognized as a deserter from the Seventh New York Regiment, and his name was plain Felix Oeser. When this fact became known he was dismissed from his office, a few weeks after the execution of Wirz. There was no further need of his services.

Another witness against Wirz was John Rainbow. In September, 1894, he was sentenced in Union County (N. J.) Court to one year in State Prison for stealing a watch. A petition, signed by Grand Army men, was presented to the court and this sentence was revoked and he was committed to the county jail for six months.

In the charges upon which Wirz was condemned and hung were thirteen specifications of men said to have been murdered by him, but though all the most minute details were given, it is a singular fact that there is not given the _name_ of any one of these persons--in every instance mentioned, it is “name unknown.”

In the first specification Wirz was charged with conspiring with Jefferson Davis, James A. Seddon, Howell Cobb, and others, named and unnamed, “to injure and impair the health and destroy the lives,” etc., “of soldiers in the service of the United States.” On this charge Wirz was declared guilty and hanged. Why were none of the other conspirators punished? Did he conspire alone?

Had the case been brought in any Civil Court--no matter where--it would have been thrown out of court.

What must have been the agony of this poor victim, sitting in the courtroom, day after day, and week after week, listening to the recital of the horrible tales, describing him as a fiend incarnate, by wretches who were swearing his life away. He looked in vain upon the faces around for a glance of pity, but on all sides he met the glaring eyes of men thirsting for his blood.

Foiled in their efforts to incriminate Jefferson Davis, his cruel and vindictive persecutors determined to wreck their vengeance upon Wirz, poor and friendless, whom they had in their power, and who had rejected their proposal to purchase his life by swearing falsely against Jefferson Davis.

Major Richard B. Winder, M.D., and dean of the Baltimore Dental College, was a prisoner in the Old Capitol, Washington, at the time of Wirz’s imprisonment and execution. A statement of his in regard to an occurrence which took place the evening before Wirz was executed has been extensively published, but an extract from it will not be out of place here:

“A night or two before Wirz’s execution--early in the evening, I saw several male individuals (looking like gentlemen) pass into Wirz’s cell. I was naturally on the _qui vive_ to know the meaning of this unusual visitation, and was hoping and expecting too that it might be a reprieve--for even at that time I was not prepared to believe that so foul a judicial murder would be perpetrated. I think--indeed, I am quite certain--there were three of them. Wirz came to his door, which was immediately opposite mine, and I gave him a look of inquiry, which was at once understood. He said: ‘These men have just offered me my liberty if I will testify against Mr. Davis, and criminate him with the charges against the Andersonville Prison. I told them that I could not do this, as I neither knew Mr. Davis personally, officially or socially, but if they expected with the offer of my miserable life to purchase me to treason and treachery to the South they had undervalued me.’”

In reply to a letter of inquiry from Hon. Jefferson Davis, Rev. Father Boyle wrote:

“On the evening before the day of the execution of Major Wirz a man visited me, on the part of a cabinet officer, to inform me that Major Wirz would be pardoned if he would implicate Jefferson Davis in the cruelties at Andersonville. No names were given by this emissary, and, upon my refusing to take any action in the matter, he went to Mr. Louis Schade, counsel for Major Wirz, with the same purpose and with a like result.