August 14, signed by Gen. Stoneman and others, representing eighteen hundred officers confined at Charleston, asking nothing for themselves, but praying that the privates at Andersonville might be saved from death by immediate exchange, and arguing that the rights of the negro might be temporarily left in abeyance. A meeting of the prisoners at Andersonville, Sept. 28, declared among other resolutions:

"Resolved, That while allowing to the Confederate authorities all due praise for the attention paid to the prisoners, numbers of our men are daily consigned to early graves in the prime of manhood, far from home and kindred, and this is not caused by the Confederate government, but by force of circumstances. The prisoners are obliged to go without shelter, and, in a great portion of cases, without medicine."

While some, exhibiting a moral heroism rarely seen, refused even to complain or petition their government for a release, a considerable number, thinking themselves deserted by their government, undertook to save their lives by enlisting in the Confederate service.*

The Democratic Convention at Chicago, which nominated McClellan, made the matter a national issue, inserting in its platform:

“Resolved, That the sympathy of the Democratic party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiers of our army, who are and have been in the field, under the flag of our country; and, in the event of our attaining power, they will receive the care, protection, regard and kindness that the brave soldiers of the Republic have so nobly earned."

A good many taunts came up from the South. Davis, in his bragging speech at Macon, said: "Your prisoners are kept as a sort of Yankee capital. I have heard that one of their generals said that their exchange would defeat Sherman." Ould writes to the Secretary of War, November, 1864: "I am satisfied that their conduct is the result of a conviction forced upon them by the events of the war, that a Confederate soldier is more valuable than a Federal. The miseries of tens of thousands of their own people are as nothing when weighed against a calculation." These taunts of inferiority made little impression, because everybody knew that a soldier counted for more in an army acting on the defensive, and that many of the Andersonville prisoners were men whose terms of service had already expired, while

* The Adj. General's Report gives the number of Union Soldiers who joined the Confederate army during the whole war, as 3,161.

every Confederate was in "for the war:" so that an exchange would have been a gratuitous strengthening of the armies of the Confederacy.

But some sort of defense was necessary before the army, the great Democratic party of the North, and the world.

At this crisis the services of General Butler were put in requisition. Grant had already telegraphed to him from City Point, August 14: "It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humane to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. If we commence a system of exchanges which liberates all prisoners taken, we will have to fight on till the whole South is exterminated. If we hold those caught, they count for no more than dead men." In accordance with this request, Butler was silently waiting while Ould was addressing Mulford and Hitchcock, thinking, perhaps, that he would be able to force Ould to recognize him. He now wrote, at Grant's dictation, a letter in reply to Ould's proposals of exchange. "In this letter," says Butler, in his famous Lowell speech, "these questions were argued justly as I think, not diplomatically, but obtrusively and demonstratively, not for the purpose of furthering an exchange of prisoners, but for the purpose of preventing and stopping the exchange, and furnishing a ground on which we could stand."+

*This consideration, though a most powerful hindrance to exchange, was mentioned only with bated breath by the United States authorities, because it exposed them to the odious charge of selfishness. Sherman, however, ventured to express it, and asserted that prisoners whose terms of service had expired were not fit subjects for exchange. The sergeants' petition, above referred to, speaks of the prisoners as "most of them young men whose terms of enlistment have expired."

This letter, published in the New York Times, with an explanatory note dated Fifth Av. Hotel, September 5, 1864, is itself dated Headquarters of Department of Virginia and North Carolina, in the Field, August - 1864.

Report No. 45 assumes that this was first sent to Ould between his two communications of the 10th and the 20th. But Butler himself speaks of Ould's haste to appear in the newspapers as a reason why he is obliged to reply by the same avenue of communication. Davis, in his Macon speech, says: "Butler the Beast with whom no Commissioner of Exchange would hold intercourse, had published in the newspapers that if we would consent to the exchange of negroes all difficulties might be removed." The newspaper reply was probably the first and only one, and the withholding it so long was a part of the plan to make Ould recognize Butler as the proper Commissioner of Exchange. The form of date at the head of the letter looks as if it was prepared and held ready for fulmination at the convenient moment.

There was but one answer to be returned to Ould's proposal, made at the end of August, that the sick prisoners should be mutually returned without equivalents, each party furnishing transportation for its own men. There appears, however, to have been culpable tardiness on the part of the United States Government in furnishing transportation for its sick. But at last, in November and December, they came. It was the appearance of these sick men in the North that first spread the news of the Andersonville horror. The able-bodied men were left behind; the living skeletons came back, and, scattering themselves in their various homes, carried to nearly every vil lage of the North an impression that can never be eradicated. It suited us at that time that the impression should be strong. There was a readiness to accept these as fair samples of the whole number of prisoners at the South. But from the various prisons of the North cargoes of living skeletous were also sent, to be scattered over the South. If these men inspired tears of pity in the Union soldiers, heated by the events of the war, what must have been the impression made by their appearance in the South!

A review of the whole case makes it certain that the United States Government was responsible for the failure of exchanges during the last year of the war, and that to its policy in this matter, it owes in a large measure, its final success. But it would be hasty to brand it with odium for this bare fact. That is the course of those who wish to make out a case against it. Vattel laid it down long ago, as a principle of international law, that "whoever makes a just war, has a right, if he thinks proper, to detain his prisoners till the end of the war." But the United States Government committed two sins. By failing to avow openly its determination not to exchange, and putting forward a quarrel as a mere pretext, it exposed itself to the charge of trying "to blacken the reputation of an honorable adversary." By leaving out of account the peculiar condition of the South, which made starvation and disease of prisoners natural, if not inevitable, it incurred the charge of dealing foully with its own soldiers.

There was one course left open to the South to preserve its honor, and those who have its good name at heart must

ever regret that it did not pursue this course. Alexander H. Stephens recommended to Gen. Howell Cobb, commanding the Department of Georgia, that, in view of the impossibility of exchanging or subsisting the prisoners, they should be paroled and sent to the North without an equivalent. This plan was deemed Utopian, inasmuch as it left the Confederate prisoners at the mercy of the North, and, in view of the bitter quarrel over the subject of exchanges, and the threats arising therefrom it is no wonder that it was not adopted. Had it been adopted it would have shed a greater luster upon the dying Confederacy than the halo of military glory won by its famous army of Northern Virginia.

Whether there was not a possibility of a Waterloo or Sadowa on the Rapidan instead of an "attrition" campaign continued through a year will always remain an interesting question. But at any rate, as the course of events actually turned, the men who languished at Andersonville played, in their sufferings and death, a most essential part in the campaign. This part was not so stirring as charging on the guns, or meeting in the clash of infantry lines. But their enforced, long continued hardship made it possible for mere superiority of numbers to decide the struggle, and for the Confederacy to crumble without its Waterloo, and to terminate its existence by the surrender of those less than eight thousand muskets at Appomatox.

ARTICLE III.

-WESTERN COLLEGES: THEIR CLAIMS

AND NECESSITIES.*

By Shaicom The Gregor Dana.

IT is only when we survey the cordon of colleges, extending from the Ohio River to the shores of the Pacific, that the great work accomplished by the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West, can be appreciated. Since its organization in June, 1843, a quiet, constantly extending work has been followed up, while the results have demonstrated the sagacity and statesman-like views which animated its projectors and patrons. The exigences of struggling institutions have been met by the timely assistance this Society afforded them, and the energies and resources of friends of Western education have been happily combined, and wisely utilized. An immense amount of scepticism had to be met and overcome, as to the practicability or necessity of any scheme for aiding the feeble collegiate institutions of the West. The objections made to the Society's plans and appeals, read like a chapter from the history of a far remote age. But it was less than forty years ago, that to the efforts to found and foster to a vigorous life Western seminaries of learning, it was objected that Eastern colleges needed all the funds that could be raised in the East for educational purposes; that the West had already too many colleges; that these were mere pretenders and quacks in education; or further still, were the nurseries of all the worst ultraisms of the day. Moreover it was alleged at that early date in Western development, that the West will create, and ought to sustain, its own collegiate institutions. These may serve as a sample of the objections prevalent at the time of the Society's formation, all of which were measurably overcome, so that under its economical régime the work of aiding and founding the colleges which have been, and are so invaluable to the Commonwealths of the Interior and the far West, went on with increasing success. The total net resources of the

Read before the Minnesota Congregational Club, Sept. 27, 1880.