Page:The Immortal Six Hundred.djvu/18

 PREFACE N presenting this Second Edition of the history of the Six Hundred Confederate Officers, Prisoners of War, who were placed on Morris Island, S. C, under fire of their own guns shelling that Island in 1864-65, and the wanton cruelty subsequently inflicted upon them by order of the United States Government, it is told without malice. But it is told to refute the slanders made by the pulpits and press of the North that the Confederate Government was inhuman and cruel to Union prisoners of war in Southern prisons.

We shall tell the story truthfully and backed, as the story is, by the official orders and records of the United States Government, we do hope to prove the South was not guilty of the charges made against it. But that the real culprits guilty of inhumanity to prisoners of war, was the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, and his colleagues in Washington City, in 1861-1865. The charges of cruelty, made against President Davis and the Confederate Government to the Union prisoners of war, in Southern prisons, were made by these officials to hide from the people of the North those really guilty of the inhumanity, and shift from their own shoulders, the responsibility of violating the cartel of exchange, which was the cause of all the suffering of Union prisoners of war in Southern prisons. The Confederate