Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/546

 a picture of helpless, hopeless misery, impossible for words to portray. Millions of flies swarmed over everything and covered the faces of the sick patients and crowded their open mouths, depositing their maggots in the gangrenous wounds of the living, and in the mouths of the dead.

“These abuses were due to the total absence of any system or any sanitary regulations. When a patient died he was laid in front of his tent, if he had one, and often remained there for hours.”

This was the language of a distinguished surgeon of the Confederacy who recites what he actually witnessed. His soul revolted at the cruelties that he saw on every side and the indifference of the officials who were directly responsible for the awful, needless sufferings that he so graphically describes. The condition of the perishing victims of this horrible prison was repeatedly reported by the Confederate surgeons in attendance upon the prisoners and to the Confederate Government at Richmond but not a word of rebuke came to check the horrid work of Winder and Wirz. Winder, the superintendent of prisoners, appointed by Jefferson Davis, openly boasted that “in 1864 he had destroyed more Yankee soldiers at Andersonville than had General Lee with twenty of his best regiments in the field.” Thus perished 12,853 Union soldiers in less than a year. They were buried in a cemetery near the scene of their awful sufferings and lingering deaths. These heroic men were repeatedly offered release from the horrors of the prison, if they would enlist in the Confederate army but to their enduring honor let it be here recorded that they spurned the offers with a patriotism unsurpassed in the annals of history and remained to suffer the martyr’s death. The following is the roll of honor of the Iowa victims of Andersonville, the number being that inscribed on the marble slab that marks the soldier’s grave: