he Pennsylvania
Penitentiary, were transferred to Point Lookout. These officers
described the treatment which they received as having been much better
than that adopted toward us, yet one of their number had become insane.
All that I have attempted to describe, however, must have been ease and
luxury compared with the hardship, hunger and harsh cruelty inflicted
upon the Confederate private soldiers imprisoned at Camps Morton and
Douglass and at Rock Island. These men would often actually pick up and
devour the scraps thrown out of the scavenger carts. Some of them froze
to death--insufficient fuel was furnished, when it was furnished at
all, and the clothing sent them by friends was rarely given them. The
men of my regiment told me of treatment, inflicted upon them at Camp
Douglass, which if properly described and illustrated with engravings,
and if attributed to Confederate instead of Federal officials, would
throw the whole North into convulsions. Many of these men, of this
regiment, had escaped in the first two or three months of their
imprisonment, and a bitter hatred was then excited against the less
fortunate. They were, in some instances, tied up and beaten with the
belts of the guards, until the print of the brass buckles were left on
the flesh; others were made to sit naked on snow and ice, until palsied
with cold; others, again were made to "ride Morgan's mule" (as a
scantling frame, of ten or twelve feet in hight, was called), the
peculiar and beautiful feature of this method of torture, was the very
sharp back of "the mule." Sometimes, heavy blocks, humorously styled
spurs, were attached to the feet of the rider. As for the shooting of
men for crossing the "dead line" (upon which, so much stress has been
laid in accounts of Andersonville), that was so well understood, that it
was scarcely thought worthy of mention. But an elaborate description of
life in the Federal prisons is unnecessary.

The eighty thousand Confederate prisoners of 1864 and 1865, or rather
the survivors of that host, have already told it far better than I can,
in their Southern homes, and we have had sufficient experience of the
value of sympathy away from home, to make no effort for it. Moreover, a
contest with the Yankee journalists is too unequal--they really write so
well, and are so liberal in their ideas regarding the difference between
fact and falsehood, have so little prejudice for, or against either,
that they possess, and empl