times ten thousand young men!  The average population of the State does not exceed sixteen to the square mile, yet Andersonville was peopled at the rate of one million four hundred thousand to the square mile.  With millions of acres of unsettled, useless, worthless pine barrens all around them, the prisoners were wedged together so closely that there was scarcely room to lie down at night, and a few had space enough to have served as a grave.  This, too, in a country where the land was of so little worth that much of it had never been entered from the Government.

Then, as to shelter and fire:  Each of the prisons was situated in the heart of a primeval forest, from which the first trees that had ever been cut were those used in building the pens.  Within a gun-shot of the perishing men was an abundance of lumber and wood to have built every man in prison a warm, comfortable hut, and enough fuel to supply all his wants.  Supposing even, that the Rebels did not have the labor at hand to convert these forests into building material and fuel, the prisoners themselves would have gladly undertaken the work, as a means of promoting their own comfort, and for occupation and exercise.  No tools would have been too poor and clumsy for them to work with.  When logs were occasionally found or brought into prison, men tore them to pieces almost with their naked fingers.  Every prisoner will bear me out in the assertion that there was probably not a root as large as a bit of clothes-line in all the ground covered by the prisons, that eluded the faithfully eager search of freezing men for fuel.  What else than deliberate design can account for this systematic withholding from the prisoners of that which was so essential to their existence, and which it was so easy to give them?

This much for the circumstantial evidence connecting the Rebel authorities with the premeditated plan for destroying the prisoners.  Let us examine the direct evidence: 

The first feature is the assignment to the command of the prisons of “General” John H. Winder, the confidential friend of Mr. Jefferson Davis, and a man so unscrupulous, cruel and bloody-thirsty that at the time of his appointment he was the most hated and feared man in the Southern Confederacy.  His odious administration of the odious office of Provost Marshal General showed him to be fittest of tools for their purpose.  Their selection—­considering the end in view, was eminently wise.  Baron Haynau was made eternally infamous by a fraction of the wanton cruelties which load the memory of Winder.  But it can be said in extenuation of Haynau’s offenses that he was a brave, skilful and energetic soldier, who overthrew on the field the enemies he maltreated.  If Winder, at any time during the war, was nearer the front than Richmond, history does not mention it.  Haynau was the bastard son of a German Elector and of the daughter of a village, druggist.  Winder was the son of a sham aristocrat, whose cowardice and incompetence in the war of 1812 gave Washington into the hands of the British ravagers.