The weather is very pleasant. We are still on duty guarding
the main road to Beaufort. The trains have all gone in for supplies. All is
quiet in front. This low-country, before the war, was planted to cotton, the
planters living in town while their plantations were managed by overseers and
worked by slaves brought down from the border states. We can see rows of the
vacant negro huts on these large plantations, set upon blocks so as to keep the
floors dry. The negroes are all gone, being employed in the armies of both
sections.1
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1 When I think of the vacant
plantations I saw all through the South, when I recall the hardships of the
negroes, and the different modes of punishment Inflicted upon the slaves, all
with the consent of the Southern people, then I can understand how they could be
so cruel in their treatment of the Union prisoners of war. They put them in
awful prison pens and starved
them to death without a successful protest from the better class of the people
of the South. The guards of these prisons had lived all their lives witnessing
the cruel tortures of slaves; they had become hardened and thus had no mercy on
an enemy when in their power. Many an Andersonvllle prisoner was shot down Just
for getting too close to an imaginary dead-line when suffering from thirst and
trying to get a drink of water.
Not all Southerners were so cruel, for I lived in the same
house with an ex-Confederate soldier from Georgia, when in southern Florida
during the winter of 1911 and know that he had some feeling. He had been guard
at Andersonville for a short time, and told me that he would have taken water
to them by the bucketful, for he could not bear to hear the poor fellows
calling for water; but that he did not dare to do it. This man's name was
McCain, and at the time I met him his home was at College Park, Atlanta, Ga. — A.
G. D.
Source: Alexander G. Downing, Edited by Olynthus B.,
Clark, Downing’s Civil War Diary, p. 247
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