January 30, 1919.

The Confederate Veteran Company,

                                    Nashville, Tenn.

 

Gentlemen:-

            I am enclosing a clipping from the New York Herald that I think should not go unchallenged.

 

            Unless I am in error the men who guarded the Andersonville prison camp and perhaps all other such camps of prisons were Confederate soldiers, many of them veterans who had fought on scores of bloody fields and were no longer able to stand the strain of active service on the front. Some of them were crippled from wounds received in battle but all no doubt were honorable Confederate soldiers, incapable of even mistreating a prisoner. To stigmatize these men as this French writer has done I say should not go unchallenged. And who were these prisoners? Many of them Germans who would compare favorably with any Confederate troops.

 

            But among the Germans were men who had come to America for no other purpose than to get the bounty offered by the U.S. Government, and to enter the army and help fight the battles of the North, Prussian bred and Prussian trained, some no doubt even fathers or grandfathers of the very devils who did such cruel and beastly work in France.

 

            It seems to me that this Frenchman who allowed such a document as this to reach America just at a time when thousands of our soldiers, many of them sons or grandsons of the very men who had charge  of the Andersonville prison camps are still in France aiding in putting her beyond the possibility of another such confict. This Frenchman has made a mistake. But what is to be said of the American journal that published it?

 

            I feel quite sure that the Confederate Veteran Company will see that the matter is properly dealt with.

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