ARTICLE II.-ANDERSONVILLE.

THE tone in which topics connected with our late civil war are discussed has undergone a great change within a few years. The great body of pen-fighters who came forward on each side as soon as the clashing of swords died away, waging a war fierce though bloodless, resembled the first troops who reached the seat of war, both in abundance of zeal and lack of knowledge. It was impossible for them to write the true history of the war. Nor was it likely that the world would remain long satisfied with two accounts of the same war, in one of which the laurels were all ascribed to the North, and in the other to the South. Even the North itself could not long remain content with its own polemical histories. The desire to know the truth was a motive strong enough to make us look into those so-called histories, coming from the other side, which displayed such an exasperating lack of respect for the victors, always speaking of the Southern armies as handfuls struggling against hordes, and alluding to Grant's glorious victories from the Rapidan to the James as a series of bloody repulses. And, now, we are willing to admit that, in many cases the truth lies at the half-way point between these accounts and those to which we formerly trusted.

Hardly anybody in the North now believes that the war could have been finished by a simple forward march on the part of McClellan after Fair Oaks; no more is the South able to cling to the idea that Lee threw away a similar opportunity at Fredericksburg. Though some questions of the war will doubtless remain disputed till the day of judgment, yet it has been settled by an indisputed verdict that these two "decisive battles left the situation entirely unchanged. The only possibility which they opened up was that of a pitched battle with very even chances.

So many questions of the war have been settled in about the same way that one gets a strong presumption in favor of a method that professedly proceeds to find the truth by finding

the middle point. Indeed the true history of the war has been gradually elicited by a constant application of the formula Pollard + Lossing 2; but as the terms are not numerical, the striking of this via media involves a careful consideration of testimony and weighing of probabilities.

Many at the North, who would be willing to admit this method of settlement for most of the disputed points of the war, would be unwilling to apply it to Andersonville, maintaining that here we have a case of wholesale murder with no extenuating circumstances. The subject has hardly been touched in the interest of truth, but has always been made a field for crimination and recrimination. The voluminous Report No. 45, made to the 40th Congress by the Committee on the Treatment of Prisoners during the War, is as thoroughly ex parte, though more moderate in its language, as the numerous narratives of Andersonville which it characterizes as ephemeral literature.

The treatment which the subject received on its unfortunate revival in 1876, in the acrimonious debate between Senators Blaine and Hill, was completely. polemical. The elaborate defense of the South, put forth at that time in the Southern Historical Papers, though furnishing, like Report No. 45, a good many facts that will make for a pacific settlement of the question, yet by its animus, made the breach wider than ever. Even now, it is doubtful whether an attempt to strike the via media in this matter would not have to meet the scorn of both parties. For of all topics connected with the war, Andersonville is the one that most stirs the passions.

The mere mention of Fredericksburg or Gettysburg, to be sure, is enough to call forth a tempestuous discussion; but each party feels that it has a well founded claim to inscribe those names with pride on its escutcheon. To have been one of "Pickett's Men" in that immortal repulse at Gettysburg is a glory that men will not willingly relinquish in the South to-day. The laurels being in some sort evenly distributed already, the discussion cannot become so bitter, as when the subject of Andersonville is stirred; for here the charge is that the South is guilty of the great crime of modern warfare. No wonder that the representatives of that short-lived government have

come forward to repel that charge with an indignation that is evidently no counterfeit. They believe their adversaries have been acting on the principle that where much mud is thrown some will stick. They see with anger that damned spot affixed to the robe of the Southern Confederacy, becoming fastened there by repeated assertion, which will pass for history, so that no fuller can whiten it. It will be a long time, then, before anyone will need to apologize for treating of a dead subject when he treats of Andersonville. It is not dead: at the most

it only sleepeth.

Perhaps a sufficiently worthy excuse for not letting the subject sleep may be a conviction that the facts which have hitherto been treated polemically may be treated pacifically. There would be a satisfaction not merely in proving that humanity had not yet been capable of such a national crime as that charged upon the South, but also in finding a more rational explanation of Andersonville than the deliberate intention to destroy the prisoners. Magnanimity and love of truth are two very strong inducements calling us to a review of the facts with a view to a readjustment of the blame if the facts demand it.

The residuum of fact, taken apart from the question of blame, seems to be that there was in our war such suffering and mortality of prisoners as to make it in that respect a marked retrograde step in Christian warfare. The conduct of civilized nations has been, on this point, drawing nearer and nearer to fixed principles, so that, latterly, under the guidance of philanthropy and selfishness combined, arrangements have easily been made between the contending parties on each occasion, by which prisoners should, with the least possible suffering, be mutually returned to the ranks of combatants.

The tactics of modern warfare having been directed mainly to the annihilation of large armies by decisive battles, the slaughter of fragments of the hostile army, after the victory had been gained, has came to be regarded as inhuman. But in a war that was a strange mixture of civil and national, singularly wanting in decisive battles and deficient in strategy, we were drawn more or less by force of circumstances to such

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