Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities
Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry, appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission. With an Appendix, containing the Testimony. Printed by the . Philadelphia.
THAT uniform thoroughness and accuracy which have marked all that has been done by the Sanitary Commission, not in the field alone, but in the committee-room and the printing-office, were never better shown than in this Report. It attempts something which, unless done thoroughly, was not worth doing; since, on a subject which appeals so strongly to the feelings, mere generalities and gossip do more harm than good. It is the work of a special Commission of Inquiry, composed of three physicians, (Drs, Mott, Delafield, and Wallace,) two lawyers, (Messrs. Wilkins and Hare,) and one clergyman (Mr. Walden). This commission has performed a great amount of labor, and has digested its result into a form so systematic as to be logically irresistible. The facts on which the statement rests are a large body of evidence, taken under oath, from prisoners of both armies, and confirmed by the admissions, carefully collated, of the Rebel press. The conclusion is, that, in the Southern prisons, “tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture or burning at the stake, because nearly as agonizing and more prolonged,”
The next stop is to fix the responsibility for all these horrors. All theories of apology—as that the sufferings were accidental or exceptional, or that, badly as our soldiers may have fared, the Rebel soldiers fared little better — are taken up and conclusively refuted, the last-named with especial thoroughness. The inevitable inference drawn by the Commission is, that these inhumanities wore “designedly inflicted on the part of the Rebel Government,” and were not “ due to causes which such authorities could not control.”
The immediate preparation of this able Report is understood to be due to the Rev. Treadwell Walden, an Episcopal clergyman of Philadelphia, not unknown to the readers of the “ Atlantic.” His present work will be the permanent authority for the facts which it records, and will justify to future generations the suggestion with which it ends, that these cruelties are the legitimate working of a form of government which takes human slavery for its basis. The record of such a government is fitly written in these pages : it is as appropriate as is, for a king of Dahomey, his funeral pyramid of skulls.