From the Richmond Dispatch, 5/27/1863, p. 1, c. 5

Yankee Misrepresentation. – The New York Tribune, of May 19th, contains the following paragraph:

“That infernal brute, Capt. Turner, a few days since, had charge of some of our prisoners from Richmond to City Point, and caused a man of the 119th Pennsylvania to be bayoneted because he could proceed no further. The villain would not give the poor fellow even a drink of water. A soldier of an Ohio regiment, taken at Rome, Ga., was shot on Wednesday while reaching for a cracker at Belle Isle Prison. Our prisoners were compelled to walk from their places of capture at Fredericksburg to Richmond, thence to City Point. Some gave out on the march. A member of the 20th New York regiment died on the route.”

The delicate allusions in the foregoing are made to Capt. Thos. P. Turner, Commandant of the Libby Prison in this city. A contradiction would hardly seem to be necessary, yet we will state that Capt. Turner did not accompany the Yankees to City Point – one party being in charge of Lieut. Bossieux, the other of Lt. LaTouche. Nobody was bayoneted for inability to proceed, nor was water denied any of the vandals. One man, who was advised by Capt. Turner to stay because too weak to undertake the journey, insisted upon going, and died, for which he had nobody to blame but himself. While the Yankees were on Belle Isle a spent ball, fired by a party of amateur sportsmen under the Petersburg bridge, reached Belle Isle and inflicted a slight flesh wound in the calf of an Ohio soldier, who was standing not far from Capt. Turner at the time. He left Belle Isle with his comrades. The idea of riding seven or eight thousand Yankees on the cars from Fredericksburg to City Point would have entered the head of nobody else but the editor of the New York Tribune.

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