Page:The Immortal Six Hundred.djvu/49

    fire of the Confederate batteries shelling that point, we will tell it truthfully, without the least exaggeration, that those who read may make honest judgment and render fair verdict. It's not intended that this work shall be a general history of military prisons. It is only a history of the Six Hundred Immortals that will refute, so far as it can, the repeated and almost constant charge made by the pulpit and press of the North that the Confederate authorities were cruel and inhuman to their prisoners of war. These charges of cruelty made by the North are worthy the attention of the South's historians; and now that the passions of the war have, to a great degree, cooled, the facts can be presented and the responsibility fixed, so that when the Confederate soldier of the war of 1861-65 has passed over the picket line of life into the unknown land, and the honest verdict of history is rendered, our good names and records as soldiers will not be blackened by the blot of cruelty, nor our peerless leaders be painted by the