Chapter XXXII: Conclusion

Reader, while I do not claim for this volume any rare literary merit, I trust a perusal of its pages may have afforded you some little pleasure, and instruction. I can cheerfully place it in the hands of my old prison associates, confident that they will testify to its truthfulness and fairness.

While the language is my own, I can confidently claim that it conveys no imaginary sufferings and privations. I have endeavored to speak of the Southern prisons and of the treatment meted out to those whom the fortunes of war compelled to endure and suffer the hardships, tortures and privations of a lingering confinement in those loathsome pens of starvation, provided by the self-styled Southern Confederacy, as a punishment for loyalty to country and the flag, just as I found them. Not to the _people of the South_ do I lay the blame of the frightful mortality among prisoners, in those pens of starvation, but to Jeff. Davis and the infamous Winder; who boasted that they were doing more execution among the prisoners, than Lee's whole army was doing in the field; to them I say that the blood of thirty-five thousand loyal hearted patriots, cry from the ground of Andersonville, Salisbury, Florence and Belle Island, unto a just God, for vengeance upon those who so cruelly, heartlessly and fiendishly _murdered them_.

To them I say that should they flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, they cannot escape the contempt of an outraged world, nor the curse of the thousands of mothers, widows, and fatherless children, whom they have in their fiendish hatred, robbed of their beloved sons, husbands and fathers.