Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[610] from cold, starvation, and pestilence in the prison pens of Raleigh, Salisbury, and Andersonville,--many more in number than all the British soldiers ever had by Great Britain on any field of battle with Napoleon;¹ the anxiety of fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, to know the exigency which caused this terrible, and perhaps as it may have seemed to them useless and unnecessary, destruction of those dear to them by horrible deaths,--each and all have compelled me to this exposition, so that it might be seen that these lives were spent as a part of the system of attack upon the Rebellion, devised by the wisdom of the general-in-chief of the armies to destroy it by depletion, depending upon our superior number to win the victory at last. The loyal mourners will doubtless derive solace from this fact and appreciate all the more highly the genius which conceived the plan and the success won at so great a cost.

Before closing this exposition of the exchange of prisoners, I deem it my duty to call attention to two or three correlative matters of complaint which have been very much magnified on the part of the Confederates and the people of the North.

While I do not mean to apologize for or palliate the manner in which our prisoners were treated, which was inexcusable, I feel bound to say that from careful examinations of the subject I do not believe that either the people or the higher authorities of the Confederacy were in so great degree responsible as they have been accused. In the matter of starvation the fact is incontestable that a soldier of our army would have quite easily starved on the rations which in the latter days of the war were served out to the Confederate soldiers before Petersburg. I examined the haversacks of many Confederate soldiers captured on picket during the summer of 1864 and found therein, as their rations for three days, scarcely more than a pint of kernels of corn, none of which were broken but only parched to blackness by the fire, and a piece of most, most frequently raw bacon, some three inches long by an inch and a half wide and less than a half an inch thick. Now, no Northern soldier could have lived three days upon that, and the lank, emaciated condition of the prisoner fully testified to the meagreness of his means of sustenance. I have been informed by a major-general commanding one of the larger corps of