CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY. 491 Prison Exchange In January, 1864, and even before that date it was feared by the Confederate authorities that prisoners of war on both sides would be held in captivity without the benefits of exchange. Colonel Ould, the Confederate agent of exchange, therefore wrote, January 24, 1864, officially to General Hitchcock, the Federal agent of exchange, a formal proposal to have surgeons appointed by both governments to take charge in the prisons of the health and comfort of the prisoners. The surgeons were also to act as commissaries with power to receive and distribute money, food, clothing and medicines. But even this very humane offer was not answered, although its acceptance would have alleviated the sufferings and saved the lives of thousands of brave men. In the summer of 1864, Colonel Ould was instructed by Mr. Davis to offer to deliver all sick and wounded prisoners without any exchange whatever, and accordingly he did offer to send ten or fifteen thousand to the mouth of the Savannah river without requiring any equivalents, but the acceptance of this noble proposal was delayed for months. Finally, about the last of the year, vessels were sent to receive this free offering, and Ould turned over as many as could be transported-some thirteen thousand-among whom were over five thousand well men. In return the Federal agent sent in at the mouth of the Savannah river about 3,000 sick and wounded Confederates from Northern prisons. During this same summer the deficiency in medical supplies became so embarrassing that the Confederate administration offered to buy from the United States, payable in gold, cotton or tobacco, these needed medicines, stipulating that they might be brought into the Confederate lines by United States surgeons and dispensed by them solely for the benefit of Union prisoners. To this offer there was no reply. In the meantime the blockade was effective and medicines were contraband. Colonel Ould declares concerning Colonel Mulford that "while he discharged his duties with great fidelity to his own government he was kind and tender to Confederate prisoners-an honorable and truthful gentleman to whom he could appeal for the truth of statements with which he was familiar," and other corroborations of Ould's testimony are to be found in the report of Major General Butler to the committee on the conduct of the war. Ould was subpoenaed to testify in the trial of Wirts and expressed his intention to tell the whole story as to the conduct of the two administrations in the matter of the treatment of prisoners, but his subpoena was revoked by the prosecution. Mr. Stephens, VicePresident of the Confederacy, was conspicuously active from the beginning to the close of the Confederate war in attempts to secure the usual exchanges of prisoners common among civilized nations at war, on which account he was particularly qualified to speak as a credible witness. Condemning the cruel and untenable position of the Federal administration that the crew of the Savannah and all other ships of the Confederate navy were pirates, he expresses the opinion in his work prepared since the war that the desistance of the authorities at Washington from this position was due alone to fear of England, and that the cartel for general exchange afterward agreed to was forced by public sentiment. The policy pursued by the administration at Washington as he viewed its effects, produced the difficulties of exchange, and the consequent intolerable sufferings and deaths in Northern and Southern prisons. The question of exchange was treated by the Federal authorities almost solely as a policy of war, by which captured men should be made to suffer for their cause in prison whenever such suffering contributed to the crushing of the rebellion. Confederate sentiment unvaryingly required the opening of the prisons by equal exchange and the settlement of the issue by treaty or battle. "I insit," says Mr. Stephens, "upon irrefutable fact that but for the refusal of the Federals to carry out an exchange, none of the wrongs or outrages, and none of the sufferings incident to prison life on either side could have occurred." CON'TD Part IV