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.

The following extracts from the letter show it to be what Butler claims for it, "not diplomatic but obtrusive."

"In May last I forwarded to you a note desiring to know whether the Confederate authorities intended to treat colored soldiers of the United States Army as prisoners of war. To that inquiry no answer has yet been made. To avoid all possible misapprehension or mistake, hereafter, as to your offer now, will you now say whether you mean by 'prisoners now held in captivity,' colored men duly enrolled and mustered into the service of the United States, who have been captured by the Confederate forces; and if your authorities are willing to exchange all soldiers so mustered into the United States Army, whether colored or otherwise, and the officers commanding them, man for man, officer for officer ?" Then, after referring to Davis's proclamations, he proceeds: "By your acceptance of our proposition is the Government of the United States to understand that these several claims, enactments, and proclaimed declarations are to be given up, set aside, revoked, and held for naught by the Confederate authorities, and that you are ready and willing to exchange man for man these colored soldiers of the United States, duly mustered and enrolled as such, who have heretofore been claimed as slaves by the Confederate States, as well as white soldiers?"

This is evidently not an attempt to win any concession on the subject of negro prisoners. The language is goading. Butler is also careful to guard against committing his government to an exchange, even if the Confederates made the humiliating concession. He proceeds:

"If this be so, and you are willing to exchange these colored men claimed as slaves, and you will so officially inform the Government of the United States, then, as I am instructed, a principal difficulty in affecting exchanges will be removed."

After arguing in extenso that the right of the United States government to the negro as conquered property involved the right to make a man and soldier of him, he takes his opportunity to ply the lash in this fashion.

"I unite with you most cordially, Sir, in desiring a speedy settlement of all these questions, in view of the great suffering endured by our prisoners in the hands of your authorities, of which you so feelingly speak. Let me ask, in view of that suffering, why you have delayed eight months to answer a proposition, which, by now accepting, you admit to be right, just, and humane, allowing that suffering to continue so long? One cannot help thinking, even at the risk of being deemed uncharitable, that the benevolent sympathies of the Confederate authorities have been lately stirred by the depleted condition of their armies and a desire to get into the field, to affect the present campaign, the hale, hearty and well fed prisoners held by the United States in exchange for the half-starved, sick, emaciated, and unserviceable soldiers of the United States now languishing in your prisons. The events of this war, if we did not know it before, have taught us that it is not the northern portion of the American people alone who know

how to drive sharp bargains. . . . Will you suffer your soldier, captured in fighting your battles, to be in confinement for months rather than release him by giving for him that which you call a piece of property, and which we are willing to accept as a man? You certainly appear to place less value upon your soldier than you do upon your negro. I assure you, much as we of the North are accused' of loving property, our citizens would have no difficulty in yielding up any piece of property they have, in exchange for one of their brothers or sons languishing in your prisons. Certainly there could be no doubt that they would do so, were that piece of property less in value than $5,000, in Confederate money, which is believed to be the price of an able-bodied negro in the insurrectionary States."

This letter is a masterly execution of the task imposed; for it made the exchange impossible, and gave us "a ground on which we could stand:" and yet there can hardly be a doubt but that a release of every man in Southern prisons, negroes and all, might have been effected by an equal amount of strategy differently directed.

The Confederate authorities, not content with the efforts of Ould alone, put all the prisoners in Virginia and North Carolina into Gen. Lee's hands, instructing him to open a correspondence with Grant and the Christian Commission, with a view to an exchange, in the interest of humanity. But he could not elicit a reply from either* until Feb., 1865, when Grant, now sure of success, opened exchanges freely with him. The negro question dropped out of sight as soon as it was convenient to let it do so.

To Hood's pressing calls for an exchange that would set free the Andersonville prisoners, Sherman offered 2,000 men, but refused a general exchange on the ground that it would not strengthen his army.t

In this unanimity of refusal the Confederates recognized a plan, and felt it to be a death blow to their armies, which, unable to be recruited any further, must succumb by gradual disintegration. They fought through the last eight months of the war in the full view of this certainty.

*Southern writers, who seem to have conspired to throw all the blame on Secretary Stanton, say that as soon as the matter was put into Grant's hands, his good sense found a quick solution of the difficulty. Lee, on the other hand, testified before the Congressional Committee of Reconstruction, "I never heard anything from either Grant or the Christian Commission." The truth is that Grant, as he subsequently testified, felt the sufferings of prisoners most keenly, and opened exchanges as soon as he thought it safe. But during nearly a year he never shrank from any of the consequences of his plan.

Sherman's Memoirs, ii. 192.

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 skeletons 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.