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Updated: May 14, 2025
Touching the matter in hand, Johnson was a fool to have captured Davis, whom it would have been wiser to assist in escaping. Nothing would be done with him, as the executive had only pluck enough to hang two poor devils such as Wirtz and Mrs. Surratt. Had the leading traitors been promptly strung up, well; but the time for that had passed.
He showed me duplicates of requisitions and appeals for relief that he had made to different authorities, and these I indorsed in the strongest terms possible, hoping to accomplish some good. I know nothing of this Wirtz, whom I then met for the first and only time, but he appeared to be earnest in his desire to mitigate the condition of his prisoners.
While engaged in my work, as the weather became very warm, I often rested an hour or two in the capitol to listen to the many witnesses who testified to the awful condition of our soldiers at Andersonville Prison, under Henry Wirtz.
Wirtz wrote Jefferson Davis that one-fifth of the meal was bran, and that he had no meat, no medicine, no clothing. Men burrowed in the ground, dug caves like rats, and not infrequently fifty bodies were carried out in a single day. Wirtz destroyed men faster than did General Lee.
In this journey through Georgia, at Andersonville, I passed in sight of a large stockade inclosing prisoners of war. The train stopped for a few moments, and there entered the carriage, to speak to me, a man who said his name was Wirtz, and that he was in charge of the prisoners near by.
While I did not feel like following her example because of his murdering my cousin, yet I told General Auger that it was well for Henry Wirtz that his case was not tried by mothers and sisters of the thousands who had suffered and died under his cruelties. Said the general, "I do not know but it would be the best thing for him if mothers and sisters were his judges."
At the statement made concerning his stabbing and shooting the soldiers for leaning against the "dead line," the guilty man, Wirtz, shook as he arose from the sofa upon which he was reclining, and swore "that was a lie;" but General Auger, the president of the court, told him that he had nothing to say, and bade him sit down, which he did with cursing in great excitement.
I have a book full of his childish fancies now, all elaborately colored on week-days "Joseph and his Brethren" in gaudy turbans, and wonderfully inexpressive countenances, reminding me of Flurry's dolls; the queen of Sheba, coming before Solomon, in a marvelous green tiara and yellow garments; a headless Goliath, expressed with a painful degree of detail, more fit for the Wirtz Gallery than a child's scrap-book.
Something of the distinction here discussed can be seen by comparing Mr Sime's drawings with the pictures of the mad painter Wirtz, whose abominable gallery at Brussels is a chamber of unimaginative horrors.
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