Over 4,000,000 cases were treated in the
main and adjudicatory army hospitals. The number sounds strange, but
it is true. More than two-thirds of the deaths were from prostration
or disease. To-day there lie buried over 300,000 soldiers in the
various National army Cemeteries, more than half of them (and that is
really the most significant and eloquent bequest of the war) mark'd
"unknown." In full mortuary statistics of the war, the greatest
deficiency arises from our not having the rolls, even as far as they
were kept, of most of the Southern military prisons--a gap which
probably both adds to, and helps conceal, the indescribable horrors
of those places; it is, however, (restricting one vivid point only)
certain that over 30,000 Union soldiers died, largely of actual
starvation, in them. And now, leaving all figures and their "sum
totals," I feel sure a few genuine memoranda of such things--some
cases jotted down '64, '65, and '66--made at the time and on the spot,
with all the associations of those scenes and places brought back,
will not only go directest to the right spot, but give a clearer and
more actual sight of that period, than anything else. Before I give
the last cases I begin with verbatim extracts from letters home to my
mother in Brooklyn, the second year of the war.--W.W.]
_Washington, Oct. 13, 1863_.--There has been a new lot of wounded and
sick arriving for the last three days. The first and second days, long
strings of ambulances with the sick.
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