Confederate Shop
The difficulty has been for the North and South to understand each other. A pertinent illustration of this is in the delicate matter of the treatment of prisoners by the respective parties when the war was flagrant. Andersonville (Georgia) had its counterpart in Johnson's Island (Ohio) and Libby (Richmond, Va) in Fort Delaware. While these may be said to be sad evidence of the unhappy past—each had a history that is much misunderstood. Immediately upon the close of the war, vicious literature, masquerading as history, flooded the country which influenced the passions and warped public judgment.
The Confederates were then practically without means of publishing their side of these matters. Hence, error and slander went forth through the press without explanation or contradiction, and the one-sided statements were taken as truth, and easily found lodgment in the popular mind. Since, however, the correspondence between two belligerent powers has been published officially by order of the government, that popular judgment has undergone a great change—forced into honest minds by reading both Federal and Confederate official records.
Without detail, or reviewing the correspondence, or the cartels resulting therefrom, I beg in this connection to read a short paragraph of the report of then Secretary of War Stanton, the highest Federal authority in these matters:
"As to comparative deaths in prison of Federal and Confederate soldiers, Secretary Stanton in his report, dated July 19, 1866, said: 'Confederates in Northern prisons, 220,000; Union soldiers in Confederate prisons, 270,000; excess of Union prisoners, 50,000; deaths in Northern prisons, 26,436; deaths in Southern prisons, 22,756.'"
This report of Secretary Stanton was corroborated the next June by the report of Surgeon General Barnes, and when down to pure mathematics means that twelve percent of all Confederate prisoners died in Northern prisons, while less than nine percent of Union soldiers died in Southern prisons. If these facts are true, and they are a matter of record, does this not show the falsity of the South's maltreatment of prisoners in her hands?
The time has come when genuine peace should prevail in all sections of our country, a no rankling from our civil war left in the hearts of our people. The record of their patriotism, their courage, their sufferings, and sacrifices—on both sides—is imperishable.
