Exchange of Prisoners

There is a dark chapter in the history of the Civil War, over which the writer would gladly draw the veil of forgetfulness, if it were possible. It relates to Union prisoners and their treatment. Soon after hostilities commenced and there were captives taken, the question was considered by President Lincoln's cabinet, Can the Government exchange prisoners with rebels against its authority, without acknowledging them as belligerents? Humanity took precedence of the law of nations, and an arrangement was made for an exchange. The business went on successfully until it was violently interrupted by Jefferson Davis at near the close of 1862. His anger had been kindled because of the employment of negroes in the military service, by the National Government; also by some proceedings of General Butler at New Orleans, already noticed. He first issued the savage proclamation (December 23, 1862) mentioned on page 1576, ordering Butler, and all commissioned officers serving under him, to be hanged, when caught, without trial, as outlaws. This was followed (January 12, 1863) by another proclamation, in which he announced his determination to deliver all officers of the National army commanding negro troops that might be captured after that date, to the respective State authorities to be hung, and to treat those troops as rebels against their masters. The government paused. In Congress, measures for retaliation were proposed; but humanity and not policy bore sway, and such measures were not adopted. The exchange of prisoners, however, was interrupted; for the Confederate Commissioner, under instructions from Davis, refused to consider captive colored troops as prisoners of war. In several instances no quarter had been given them, in battle or afterward; and the black flag was carried against officers commanding them. And when, in August, 1863, the National Commissioner (Meredith) demanded that negro troops and their officers should be treated as prisoners of war, the Confederate Commissioner (Ould) replied: "We will die in the last ditch before giving up the right to send slaves back into slavery." That determination, acted upon by Davis and his associates, caused an absolute cessation of the exchange of prisoners, for the Government would not be unjust toward any class of its defenders, especially the weaker. The consequence was that the number and sufferings of the Union prisoners fearfully increased, and the horrors of the prisons and prison-pens at Richmond, Salisbury, Charleston, Millen and Andersonville, occurred.

Well-supported facts seem fairly to warrant the unpleasant conclusion, that Davis's proclamations were made by him for the purpose of obstructing exchanges, that the Union prisoners might, by long and acute suffering, be rendered physically and mentally useless as soldiers thereafter. The United States Sanitary Commission appointed a committee, of which the eminent Dr. Valentine Mott of New York was chairman, to ascertain by inquiry and observation, as far as possible, into the matter of alleged cruelty to Union prisoners. They reported in September, 1864, saying: "It is the same story everywhere; prisoners of war treated worse than convicts; shut up either in suffocating buildings, or in out-door inclosures, without even the shelter that is provided for the beasts of the field; unsupplied with sufficient food; supplied with food and water injurious and even poisonous; compelled to live on floors often covered with human filth, or on ground saturated with it; compelled to breathe an air oppressed with an intolerable stench; hemmed in by a fatal dead-line, and in hourly danger of being shot by unrestrained and brutal guards; despondent even to madness, idiocy, and suicide; sick, of disease (so congruous in character as to appear and spread, like the plague) caused by the torrid sun, by decaying food, by filth, by vermin, by malaria, and by cold; removed at the last moment, and by hundreds at a time, to hospitals corrupt as a sepulchre, there, with a few remedies, little care and no sympathy, to die in wretchedness and despair, not only among strangers, but among enemies too resentful either to have pity or to show mercy. These are positive facts. Tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture or burning at the stake, because nearly as agonizing and more prolonged. This spectacle is daily beheld and allowed by the rebel government. No supposition of negligence, or indifference, or accident, or inefficiency, or destitution, or necessity, can account for all this. So many, and such positive forms of abuse and wrong cannot come from negative causes. The conclusion is unavoidable, therefore, that these privations and sufferings have been designedly inflicted by the military and other authorities of the rebel government, and cannot have been due to causes which such authorities could not control." One of the chief instruments employed in the infliction of cruelties upon Union prisoners was Brigadier-General John H. Winder, an inciter of the mob which attacked the Massachusetts troops in Baltimore. So notorious for his cruel acts had he become, that when (at the age of seventy years) he was sent to Georgia to carry on his horrid work at Andersonville, the Richmond Examiner exclaimed: "Thank God Richmond has, at last, got rid of old Winder! God have mercy upon those to whom he has been sent!"