wide deviation from custom in the treatment of our respective prisoners of war, that it may be seriously questioned whether the proposition made by Stonewall Jackson at the beginning of the war, that the South should raise the black flag and take no prisoners, would not in the end have proved more humane than the course actually pursued.

Any attempt to discuss the blame of Andersonville as an isolated fact is absurd. It can be fairly discussed only in connection with the whole cause of the war in general, and the question of exchanges in particular.

In the matter of exchanges the Federal Government was consistent with itself from the beginning to the end of the war; but shifting circumstances made it seem vacillating. It was as reluctant to exchange as the South was eager, and only in the interest of suffering humanity, did it lay aside this reluctance.

Two tolerably innocently sounding abstract questions, when stirred into the cauldron of war, made bloody work-State Rights and Rights of the Negro.

The heart and conscience of the North was committed to the maintainance of the proposition that it was a nation dealing with a rebellion. The magnitude of that rebellion made no difference. A letter of Judge Holt to Colonel Ludlow, our agent of exchange, written May 16, 1863, represents pretty fairly this feeling. He says: "This government is in no degree responsible to the rebels in arms for the action of its military courts, and it seems to me that it would utterly degrade itself by recognizing any such responsibility. Any such recognition would involve an ignoring of the great truth that this is a war on crime and criminals, which cannot be lost sight of without incurring the risk of becoming in the judg ment of the world criminals ourselves."

This late utterance of this feeling seemed converted by the position of the contending parties into an anachronism, but in the first months of the war the U. S. Government confidently refused to concede to the Confederates any of the rights of belligerents which they claimed on the ground of being independent States. The only thing which restrained it from treating its prisoners like criminals was the fear of retaliation upon

a larger number of its own men in Confederate hands. It refused to enter into any agreement for exchange, but tacitly allowed a custom of paroling the bulk of the prisoners on either side as a matter of convenience, to suffice. It took officially the same attitude which England took when it refused to enter into negotiations with the Colonies in the war of the Revolution concerning this very subject.

At length, under the influence of mutual distrust, detention became the rule, and paroling the exception, until prisoners began to accumulate to such an extent, especially in Confederate hands, that it became necessary for the Federal Government to waive what was felt to be a just claim, in the interest of humanity, and an arrangement for a basis of exchange was mediated in February, 1862, by Gens. Wool and Cobb. But, as this arrangement stipulated for a delivery of prisoners at points on the frontiers of the contracting parties, it was set aside by the Federal Government before it ever went into operation, as containing a masked claim of territorial independence on the part of the Confederacy.

But just at this time the capture of Fort Donelson threw the balance of prisoners into our hands, and the South asserts that this is the only cause of the failure of the Wool-Cobb agreement. It is certain that those 14,000 prisoners, whom we were in no haste to parole, made us breathe more freely while the matter was still under discussion. It was, however, too pressing a question to remain long unsettled, and on the 22d of July, 1862, when it began to seem whimsical to refuse the rights of belligerents to the men who had driven back McClellan's magnificent army from Richmond to Harrison's Landing, a cartel for paroling and delivering within ten days, at specified points, and subsequent exchanging of all prisoners taken on either side, a cartel having for its model in all essential points the one agreed upon by England and the United States in the War of the Revolution, was mediated by Gens. Dix and D. H. Hill.

The course of the war itself seemed to have settled the question of exchanges by battering down the reluctance of the Federal Government to acknowledge the belligerent rights of its adversary. But, in the exceedingly embittered state of

feeling, it resulted that no sooner had the matter been nominally settled than the dispute reached a bitterer stage.

There was much dissatisfaction at the North with the gentlemanly way in which McClellan waged war, using United States troops, as was alleged, "to guard rebel peach-orchards," and great exultation when Pope took the field with his high sounding proclamation of the intention of living on the enemy's country. His order for a general confiscation of property within his lines was dated July 22d, the very date of the cartel. But it was more especially his stringent order of July 23d, in regard to the treatment of non-combatants that made the first stone of stumbling.

In view of the ease with which Confederate soldiers could transform themselves into seemingly harmless citizens, and back again into soldiers, watching all his movements and killing stragglers, he issued the famous order that non-combatants should be escorted beyond his lines, and, if afterwards found within them, should be treated as spies. A civilian's dress, of course, did not save any man caught shooting his soldiers. But one of his lieutenants, Gen. Steinwehr, went a step farther, and, when several of his stragglers had been shot, ordered that an equal number of citizens from the place where the act had been committed should be shot in retaliation. This called forth a storm. The Confederates protested that they would never have signed the cartel, had such atrocities come to light a few days earlier. They excepted Pope and his commissioned officers from its provisions, threatening them, if captured, with the treatment of criminals.

Lee, in a letter to Halleck, protesting against Steinwehr's proposed hanging of citizens, called it murder, and Halleck returned his letter, saying that he could not receive it, as it contained language insulting to the United States Government. The threatened retaliations and re-retaliations never got any further than talk; for no one was ever put to death in accordance with Steinwehr's threat; but the matter was highly important as a beginning of obstructions in the way of the orderly working of the cartel.

Even earlier than this, Butler, also seeking to carry through the theory of fighting rebels, had tried and executed Mumford

in New Orleans for tearing down a National flag, and more recently had given his soldiers authority by a special order to treat the ladies of New Orleans who insulted them while on duty, "as women of the town plying their avocation." This called forth from Davis a proclamation of Dec. 23d, 1862, declaring Butler "a felon deserving capital punishment an outlaw and common enemy of mankind," ordering also "that in the event of his capture, the officer in command of the capturing force do cause him to be immediately executed by hanging." All commissioned officers serving under Butler were also excluded from the provisions of the cartel, and threatened with the treatment of criminals rather than prisoners of war. From this point the United States Government began to hold Confederate officers as a security for its own, and the exchange of officers was seriously obstructed.

Likewise, just about coincident with the signing of the cartel, came the first beginnings of putting negro troops into the field, which during the early part of 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation, became the pronounced policy of the North. It was this more than anything else that proved fatal to the cartel. The Richmond Examiner said of this measure: "It is not merely the pretension of a regular government affecting to deal with rebels, but it is a deadly stab which they are aiming at our institutions themselves, because they know that, if we are insane enough to yield this point, to treat black men as the equals of white, and insurgent slaves as equivalent to our brave soldiers, the very foundation of slavery would be wounded." The South was indeed touched at a vital point, and when its prisoners were sent in for exchanges no negroes appeared. The Confederate Congress passed, May 1st, 1863, a bill, of which section 4 provided: "That every white person, being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death, or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court."

Sec. 7 provides "That all negroes and mulattoes who shall be engaged in war, or be taken in arms against the Confederate States, or shall give aid or comfort to the enemies of the Con

federate States, shall, when captured in the Confederate States, be delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured, to be dealt with according to the present or future laws of such State or States."

This meant, of course, reducing the enlisted negro soldiers of even Massachusetts or New York to slavery. The other exceptions had affected only officers; this touched enlisted men, and the honor of the United States Government was plainly pledged by the mere fact of arming the negroes to see that they received the same treatment, when captured, as other enlisted men. It threatened, and in a few cases, practiced retaliation, imposing confinement on officers and hard labor on men.* On this point, then, both parties had taken an attitude from which they could not recede with honor. The question of negro exchanges might remain in abeyance as long as it was for the vital interest of both parties that the general exchange should not be stopped; but it was sure to come up and prove fatal to the cartel as soon as that necessary condition should no longer exist. Accordingly the whole heat of the diplomatic quarrel in the summer of 1864, raged about this as a vital question, but for the present it became customary to hold officers as prisoners and parole enlisted men.

The detention in the South, for a whole year after the adop tion of the cartel, of the few regulars surrendered in Texas by General Twiggs, at the very opening of the war, before the fall of Fort Sumter, ought to be mentioned as an item of minor importance which caused great indignation at the North and was felt to be a flagrant violation of that provision of the cartel which prescribed delivery of all prisoners within ten days, or, if not, as soon afterwards as was practicable.

Meanwhile the exchanges went regularly forward, with these exceptions growing more and more frequent, and threats of cruelty growing more vehement, though both sides were withheld from violence by fear of the consequences that might result to the large number of hostages held for slaughter. Although not a man was executed, in spite of all these bloody-sounding

*It was only after Vicksburg and Gettysburg had given him great light, that President Lincoln issued his general order of July 30, 1863, proclaiming prompt and full retaliation as the rigid policy of the United States Government.