Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 10.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[285] the men who fought for her, as much as they detest the general custom of the North to pass by her soldiers and honor instead “those who were invisible in war and are now invincible in peace.”

The Man who saw the Beginning and the End.

Major Wilmer McLean, who died in Alexandria recently, was the man who literally saw the beginning and end of the late war. It was on his farm that the battle of Bull Run was fought, and General Lee surrendered in his house at Appomattox, to which he had moved with his family, in order to be free from the annoyances of the war.

Did the Confederate Authorities ever Refuse any Proposition to Mitigate the Sufferings of Prisoners?

The Michigan Post and Tribune makes the recent speech of President Davis in New Orleans the occasion of a vile attack upon him, and among other slanders prints the following, which we only reproduce in order to brand it as false in every particular, and to ask our readers to turn again to the abundant proofs we have given that the Confederate authorities never refused a proposition looking to the amelioration of the condition of prisoners. The extract is as follows:

A citizen of Andersonville who was in and around the murder ground there during the awful days of 1864, related to the writer hereof, who visited the place a year and a half ago that the horrors of the stockade had incited the people of Americus, twenty miles south of Andersonville, to pity; that they bought and contributed a few carloads of provisions and sent them to the dying men; that the rebel scoundrels refused these generous people the pleasure of relieving the suffering soldiers, and forced them to take their laden cars back to Americus unopened. Jeff Davis's rebel Surgeon-General reported to Jeff Davis's rabble in session at Richmond that the unutterable woe he found at Andersonville should be ameliorated, and that the fields of corn and potatoes which stretched abroad in that vicinity not only would be the means of giving life and health to the starving thousands, but could and should be devoted to that purpose, and yet, not an ear of succulent corn, nor a healthful vegetable of any sort, passed into those gates of death. The Hon. Jefferson Davis himself was enthroned in Richmond during his brief disgraceful reign, and he must have forgotten that in November, 1863, the United States Government sent Captain Irving up the James with the steamer Convoy laden with clothing and