A. J. Johnson to Fourth Regiment Veteran Reserve Corps, Comdg. Post, November 23, 1864

Rock Island, Ill., November 23, 1864.

Mr. EDITOR: In your issue of the 21st instant I notice an article on the treatment of prisoners of war at this depot. Up to this time I have passed unnoticed the numerous erroneous articles that have appeared in the papers of this vicinity in relation to the occurrences at this post, but in this case I will deviate from an established rule and give your article of the 21st instant the notice it seems to merit. Owing to the fact that your paper has a wide circulation among the relatives of a large number of the prisoners, it is desirable that the antidote should quickly follow the poison in order to save the wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of the prisoners unnecessary grief. Your assertions are founded on what you term a talk with several “newly made Union men,” and it would be difficult to imagine it possible to put together a greater amount of error and misrepresentation in the same space.

You start with an issue of eight ounces of bread and a small piece of salt meat the size of two fingers daily; give large numbers the scurvy,

CORRESPONDENCE, ETC.—UNION AND CONFEDERATE. WE

and deliberately and willfully torture them to death, and call for fearful judgment on the guilty parties. Did you not blush when you published in your issue of the 22d instant the official report of the deaths of prisoners at this depot, amounting to three for the previous week? That report was a scorching answer to your whole article of the 21st instant.

On the Ist of June last the issue of rations to prisoners was reduced to the following: Pork or bacon, ten ounces (in lieu of fresh beef); fresh beet, fourteen ounces; flour or soft bread, sixteen ounces; hard bread, fourteen ounces (in lieu of tlour or soft bread); corn-meal, sixteen ounces (in lieu of flour or soft bread); beans or peas, twelve pounds and a half to 100 rations; rice or hominy, eight pounds to 100 rations; soap, tour pounds to 100 rations; salt, three pounds and a quarter to 100 rations; vinegar, three quarts to 100 rations. The bread and meat issue is two ounces per day less than is issued to the troops. The prisoners have no labor to perform while the troops are worked hard. When prisoners are worked they do so voluntarily, and receive additional rations and also pay. Hundreds of dollars are expended every month to purchase tobacco to distribute among them. They have always been allowed to receive necessary clothing from their relatives, and scarcely a day passes without a large number of the most needy are brought out to receive clothing furnished by the Government. Thousands of snits of clothes, and likewise of blankets, have been issued, and the Government furnishes more clothing to destitute prisoners in one day than friends do in two months. Only about one-fifth of the prisoners have received clothing from friends, while the other four-fifths are supplied entirely by the Government, and as a general thing that one-fifth are rebels and are supplied by rebels and rebel sympathizers.

The above issue of rations is made to the letter. Each company of prisoners receives ten days at a time, in bulk, they having the entire ‘ontrol of the distribution among themselves, and the few Union prisoners in each company are at the mercy of a rebel majority. That, perhaps, will account, if true, for the eight ounces of bread and the small piece of meat received by them.

Did it ever occur to you that, while you can spend the necessary time to pen an article like that and use nearly a column of your paper for its publication, your files may be searched in vain for the smallest editorial paragraph in condemnation of the rebel authorities for the brutal treatment of our men in their hands? You seem to be in doubt as to whom belongs the treatment of the prisoners at this depot. I will enlighten you. The treatment of them here and all issues to them are made strictly in accordance with orders from the War Department. 1 will embrace this opportunity to state that by a perusal of the columns of the Argus for the past year I am enabled to form a correct opinion of your position, and I have no objection to give you, in plain terms, what would be my action in regard to the treatment of prisoners In my charge if discretionary power rested with me: In the first place, instead of placing them in fine, comfortable barracks, with three large stoves in each and as much coal as they can burn, both day and night, I would place them in a pen with no shelter but the heavens, as our poor men were at Andersonville. Instead of giving them the same quality and nearly the same quantity of provisions that the troops on duty receive, I would give them, as near as possible, the same quantity and quality of provisions that the fiendish rebels give our men; and instead of a constant issue of clothing to them, I would let them wear

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their rags, as our poor men in the hands of the rebel authorities are obliged to do; or, in other words, had I the power, strict retaliation would be practiced by me. Again, if discretionary power rested with me, I would arrest and confine the known sympathizers with the rebellion residing in Rock Island and Davenport, and quite a large number would be quickly added to our list of prisoners, and those communities would be relieved from a more dangerous element than open rebels in arms. You will oblige me by publishing this communication entire. I am, sir,

very respectfully, your most obedient servant,

Colonel Fourth Regiment Veteran Reserve Corps, Comdg. Post.

HEADQUARTERS WEs1″s BUILDINGS HOSPITAL,

Baltimore, Md., January 30, 1865.*

Surg. A. CHAPEL, U.S. Volunteers, Commanding Hospital:

SIR: I have the honor to submit the following inspection report of

the condition of the prisoners of war at this station for the week

ending January 28, 1865: ;