Spending a lonely Christmas Day in the capital at the end of 1863, Sumner visited some military hospitals. Walking past the rows of injured bodies, he was amazed at the state of “our poor soldiers” and the misery inside. While he was impressed with the dignity of the injured Union troops, he was repelled by the character of the Confederate soldiers being held as prisoners in the Washington hospitals. They “seemed in a different scale of existence. They were mostly rough, ignorant, brutal, scowling.”
