Serious Charges

A correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette makes a horrible exposure of the villainous conduct of H. C. Hewitt, the Medical Director of Gen. Grant’s army, every charge of which the correspondent says can be proved by medical witnesses.  If such be the case, he cannot be punished too severely.  He deserves as severe punishment as the man who would give a soldier poisoned food.  One statement related by the correspondent, if true, ought to insure Hewitt at least a drumming out of the army.  He says: “Appeals to the Medical Director, and descriptions of the suffering of their sick by the surgeons elicited only this response, which I give word for word as he repeated the expression to different parties: ‘What of it?  What’s the use of complaining?  What did soldiers enlist for but to sicken and die and be killed?’”  Instances are common where he got drunk when his services were imperatively required.

It appears, too, that he has an opinion of his own in regard to the Union that would suit admirably for a minion of Jeff Davis.  Here him “The Union is gone.  It can never be constructed, and I don’t want it to be.  I think and hope that our difficulties will crystallize into a stronger military despotism, instead of our present form of government, and I hope to be fortunate enough to be one of the crystals.”

This state of affairs must be particularly distressing to the people of Iowa, who are so deeply interested and largely represented in Gen. Grant’s army; it is to be hoped that these charges will be at once sifted, and their truth or falsity be positively ascertained.

There were loud complaints by our committee at Mound City, of the criminal mismanagement at that hospital, such as allowing wounds to remain undressed for a number of days, as in the case of Sergeant Doolittle.  One case is mentioned where a tourniquet was placed on a man’s arm above and wound, and left there for several days!  If anything would justify lynching, it is just such flagrant misconduct as this on the part of men to whom are entrusted the lives of hundreds and thousands of their fellows.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Saturday Morning, April 12, 1862, p. 2