CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY. 491 Prison Exchange Influenced by this view of war General Grant sent a dispatch to General Butler August 18, 1864, in the midst of the Andersonville horrors, containing these words : "It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. Every man released on parole or otherwise becomes an active soldier against us at once, either directly or indirectly. If we commence a system of exchange which liberates all prisoners taken, we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated. If we hold those caught, they amount to no more than dead men. At this particular time to release all rebel prisoners north would insure Sherman's defeat and would compromise our safety here." This remarkable confession was made with thorough knowledge of the vast resources of the United States. But General Grant did not assume this responsibility without the previous sanction of the civil government. The policy had been fixed at Washington, and the cabinet secret was divulged in a speech by General Butler at Lowell, Massachusetts, August, 1865, in which he informed the public that this continued imprisonment of Union as well as Confederate soldiers was the policy of Mr. Stanton, the secretary of war. In the speech he "stated positively that he had been ordered by Mr. Stanton to put forward the negro question to complicate and prevent exchanges," and he boastfully declared at another time that he had discharged this task so offensively as to produce the required result, thus justifying the charge made by other Northern men that the miseries and deaths of these Union soldiers were "due alone to Edwin M. Stanton's peculiar policy and dogged obstinacy." In addition also to Grant's military reasons for desiring that no prisoners of war should be exchanged, there is given by General Butler in his official report to the committee on the conduct of the war a very remarkable personal objection to exchange, as follows : "In case the Confederate authorities should yield to the argument,and formally notify me that their former slaves captured in our uniform would be exchanged as other soldiers were, and that they were ready to return us all our prisoners at Andersonville and elsewhere in exchange for theirs, then I had determined with the consent of the Lieutenant General (Grant), as a last resort to prevent exchange, to demand that the outlawry against me should be formally reversed and apologized for before I would further negotiate the exchange of prisoners." General Butler coolly excuses himself in the same reports for complicity in the schemes of cruelty, by the statement "that those lives were spent as a part of the attack upon the rebellion devised by the wisdom of the general-in-chief of the armies to destroy it by depletion, depending on our superior numbers to win the victory at last." The battle for the Union was accordingly transferred in 1864. from the soldiers in the field to the sufferers in the prisons. Victory was to be won over the South by the confinement of fighting men in prisons, although they should die there like sheep in the shambles. A statement of Colonel Ould, agent of exchange, was made and published in 1868, verifying the facts concerning the questions relating to prisoners between the two governments and his testimony remains unimpeached. He says that the first cartel of exchange, which bears date July 22, 1862, was designed to secure the delivery of all prisoners of war, the fourth article providing that all prisoners of war should be discharged on parole in ten days after their capture. >From this date until the summer of 1863 the Confederacy held the excess of prisoners, and during that interval of about a year the Confederate authorities made prompt deliveries of all prisoners except the few held under charges. On the other hand, during the same time the cartel was notoriously violated by the Federal authorities on various pretexts. In the summer of 1863, the Federal authorities insisted on limiting exchanges to such prisoners as had been placed in confinement, which was in violation of the cartel, and was proposed after the excess of prisoners had changed to the Federal side. The new proposition nullified that part of the cartel which required the discharge on parole or delivery of prisoners within ten days after capture. The cartel was thus for a time interrupted, but in August, 1864, the Confederate government, moved by the sufferings of prisoners, abated their demand for the delivery of the excess on parole according to the cartel, and formally consented to exchange officer for officer and man for man. The official note to General Mulford, then assistant agent of exchange, containing this consent to the exchange, was unanswered, and after two weeks, the same proposal was forwarded to General Hitchcock, the Federal commissioner of exchange. No answer to either letter was received. General Mulford, on August 31, 1864, informed Ould that he had no communication from his government on the subject. An offer which would have released within ten days every Northern soldier in the Confederate prisons, but at the same time have left a large number of Southern soldiers in Northern prisons because the excess was then on the Federal side, was not even noticed. CONT'D Part III