I expect the poor Yank [Peter Louis] is glad to get away from Anderson on any terms. Although matters have improved somewhat with the cool weather, the tales that are told of the condition of things there last summer are appalling. Mrs. Brisbane heard all about it from Father Hamilton, a Roman Catholic priest from Macon, who has been working like a good Samaritan in those dens of filth and misery. It is a shame to us Protestants that we have let a Roman Catholic get so far ahead of us in this work of charity and mercy. Mrs. Brisbane says Father Hamilton told her that during the summer the wretched prisoners burrowed in the ground like moles to protect themselves from the sun. It was not safe to give them material to build shanties as they might use it for clubs to overcome the guards. These underground huts, he said, were alive with vermin and stank like charnel [burial] houses. Many of the prisoners were stark naked, having not so much as a shirt to their backs…. Father Hamilton said that at one time the prisoners died at a rate of 150 a day…. Dysentery was the most fatal disease…. My heart aches for the poor wretches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen…. And yet, what can we do? The Yankees are really more to blame than we, for they won't exchange these prisoners, and our poor, hard-pressed Confederacy had not the means to provide for them when our own soldiers are starving in the field. Oh, what a horrible thing war is when stripped of all its pomp and circumstance!

Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864–1865 (New York: D. Appleton, 1908), 76–79.