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 prisons were the offsprings of the brains of perjured men, some of them never in a Confederate prison, nor never south beyond Washington City. The word of an ignorant nigger or a Confederate deserter was given credence by the Washington authorities, when the testimony of, and letters of, such men as Generals Wessells, Scammon, and other honorable officers of the United States army, who were prisoners of war, was ignored. The records show most conclusively there were never any Union prisoners of war under fire in Charleston City or at any other point in the Confederacy; and, further, there never was any premediated and planned cruelty perpetrated upon Union prisoners of war in Southern prisons like that inflicted upon Confederate prisoners of war in Northern military prisons. There were men, no doubt, both in the North and South, who took delight in treating prisoners of war cruelly. Such men were both moral and physical cowards, and acted upon their