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EPILOGUE At the end of April 1865, poet Walt Whitman — then a nurse at the Armory hospital in Washington, D.C. — made the following entry in his diary: The releas’d prisoners of war are now coming up from the southern prisons. I have seen a number of them. The sight is worse than any sight of battle-fields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest . There was, (as a sample,) one large boat load of several hundreds , brought about the 25th, to Annapolis; and out of the whole number only three individuals were able to walk from the boat. The rest were carried ashore and laid down in one place or another. Can those be men — those little livid brown, ash-streak’d, monkey-looking dwarfs? — are they really not mummied, dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them, quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips (often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth.) Probably no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth.1 At this time, the remainder of the 12th Iowa, fresh from major victories at the Battles of Nashville and Spanish Fort, was pursuing a Confederate force in the direction of Montgomery, Alabama. On April 22, in Greenville , Alabama, a staff officer rode up their lines shouting, ‘‘Official dispatch , Lee has surrendered!’’ His call was met in succession with a swelling wave of cheers behind him as he rode. David W. Reed reported: as men fully realized that such surrender meant an end of the war and that their fighting days were over, they gave themselves over to wildest demonstrations of joy. The dispatch from the Secretary of War, announcing the surrender, directed . . . a salute of two hundred guns be fired at every station of troops in the United States. At 3 o’clock p.m. all the guns of all the batteries in the corps unlimbered and joined in that grand salute. The sound of the guns was answered by the mighty cheers from the whole army welcoming the dawn of peace.2 { 259 } However, upon arrival at Montgomery on the afternoon of the 25th, painful remembrances of the war began. Many of the men with the 12th who had been captured at Shiloh, now more than three years before, had been sent to prison in Montgomery in the summer of 1862. A party of men went to the grounds of the abandoned prison. Years later, Reed wrote: ‘‘Some of the men visited the cemetery and tried to find the graves where their comrades were buried. They succeeded in finding in a neglected corner of the grounds a long trench, and in the records just these words opposite the lot number: ‘Yankee Prisoners.’ Nothing to designate the names or number of those buried there.’’3 To add to the psychological devastation, official word was received on April 29th of the assassination of President Lincoln. The men stood in stunned silence as the announcement was read. From sunrise to sunset on May 1, flags were lowered to half mast and guns were fired every half hour — and every minute between noon and 1 p.m. — as a show of mourning for the slain president. For Lieutenant Colonel John H. Stibbs, the news of surrender came to him in Washington, D.C. Stibbs had been granted a leave of absence in mid-January 1865 and went home, but before his leave ended he was detailed on court martial in anticipation of the end of the war. Soon he was appointed to the commission that would try and convict the Lincoln conspirators. The nation reeled from the weight of so many sudden changes. In a period of weeks, the surrender was signed at Appomattox; one president, Jefferson Davis, was hunted and jailed; the other was assassinated in his theater box. For the general citizenry, the long-heard rumors of atrocities in Southern prisons were appearing in the flesh on the docks at Annapolis in the form of released prisoners, bringing stories of places like Cahaba , Macon, Montgomery, Libby, and Andersonville. In July, seven of the Lincoln conspirators were hanged in Washington , D.C. The executions fueled a growing demand to convene a commission to try those responsible for atrocities in Southern prisons. On August 23, 1865, Stibbs was one of four officers appointed to the commission to decide the fate of the former commander of Andersonville, Henry Wirz. On November 10...

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