On reaching home, I found that sister had arrived, with the children. There was a big mail, too, with letters from our friends in Richmond and Baltimore, and a quantity of Northern papers they sent us. I hate the Yankees more and more, every time I look at one of their horrid newspapers and read the lies they tell about us, while we have our mouths closed and padlocked. The world will not hear our story, and we must figure just as our enemies choose to paint us. I get in such a rage when I look at them that I sometimes take off my slipper and beat the senseless paper with it.
Nothing is sacred from their disgusting love of the sensational.
They were the ones that refused to exchange prisoners. I have seen both Northern and Southern prisoners, and the traces of more bitter suffering were shown in the pinched features and half-naked bodies of the latter than appeared to me even in the faces of the Andersonville prisoners I used to pass last winter, on the cars. The world is filled with tales of the horrors of Andersonville, but never a word does it hear about Elmira and Fort Delaware. Splendid monuments are being reared to the Yankee dead, and the whole world resounds with paeans because they overwhelmed us with their big, plundering armies, while our Southern dead lie unheeded on the fields where they fought so bravely, and our real heroes, our noblest and best, the glory of human nature, the grandest of God's works, are defamed, vilified, spit upon. Your monuments are raised in the hearts of a people whose love is stronger than fate, and they will see that your memory does not perish.