because we found ours starved, diseased, unserviceable when we received them, and did not like to exchange sound men for such men?
Answer. There never has been any such reason as that. That has been a reason for making exchanges. I will confess that if our men who are prisoners in the South were really well taken care of, suffering nothing except a little privation of liberty, then, in a military point of view, it would not be good policy for us to exchange, because every man they get back is forced right into the army at once, while that is not the case with our prisoners when we receive them. In fact, the half of our returned prisoners will never go into the army again, and none of them will until after they have had a furlough of thirty or sixty days. Still, the fact of their suffering as they do is a reason for making this exchange as rapidly as possible.
Question. And never has been a reason for not making the exchange?
Answer. It never has. Exchanges having been suspended by reason of disagreement on the part of agents of exchange on both sides before I came in command of the armies of the United States, and it then being near the opening of the spring campaign, I did not deem it advisable or just to the men who had to fight our battles to re-enforce the enemy with thirty or forty thousand disciplined troops at that time. An immediate resumption of exchanges would have had that effect without giving us corresponding benefits. The suffering said to exist among our prisoners South was a powerful argument against the course pursued, and I so felt it.
We had intended to discuss fully
THE NEGRO QUESTION
in its bearing upon exchange of prisoners, but find that we have barely space to state it. When the war began the Federal Government distinctly declared that it had no power and no desire to interfere with slavery in the States. But as it progressed the slaves were not only declared free, but were enlisted as soldiers in the United States armies. The question at once arose whether the Confederate Government should recognize these captured slaves as prisoners of war, or should remand them to their masters, from whom they had been forcibly taken. The Confederates, of course, took the ground that as both the constitution of the United States and that of the Confederacy recognized slaves as the property of their owners, when these slaves were abducted and enlisted in the Federal army, their masters had a right to reclaim them whenever and wherever they could recapture them.
General Butler says that he was directed by his Government to put forward this question offensively, in order to stop exchanges; but
