[#3Fan]

I don't buy your assertion. You might take a look at Immortal Captives, The Story of Six Hundred Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn. It details the treatment and death by intentional starvation of some Confederate officers by the US Army.

I'm not going to read a book by some lying neoconfederate wacko if that's what the author of that book is. If Confederate POWs were massacred, you should be able to link me to historical proof.

Also, on January 24, 1864, long before the bulk of men died at Andersonville, Judge Robert Ould, Confederate Agent of Prisoner Exchange, sent the following letter: The US Secretary of War turned this offer down.

Why was it turned down? It makes no difference on the Confederate side regardless. Failure to release those they couldn't feed was murder and holding them hostage to demands was terrorism.

[rustbucket]

You might be interested in the opinion of Walt Whitman in a December 1864 letter to the New York Times:

In my opinion, the Secretary has taken and obstinately held a position of cold-blooded policy, (that is, he thinks it policy) in this matter, more cruel than anything done by the secessionists. ... In my opinion, the anguish and death of these ten to fifteen thousand American young men, with all the added and incalculable sorrow, long drawn out, amid families at home, rests mainly on the heads of members of our own Government..."

By the way, the Immortal Captives book is extremely well documented. I bought my copy at Andersonville Prison in the Park Service store.

[rustbucket]

An on-line copy of Judge Ould's offer to the Feds can be found in the Official Records at the bottom of the following page.

http://www.ehistory.com/uscw/library/or/119/0871.cfm

The Federal reply to Ould's offer is on the next page. No reason why Ould's offer was refused was given, but I suspect that something this important would have been discussed at cabinet level.

Ould published some of his offers concerning prisoners in the Confederate papers of the time. I've found them. Some of them were also reported in Northern papers, if I remember correctly.