Davis. That refusal is not only a flagrant breach of the cartel, but can be supported by no rule of reciprocity or equity. It is utterly useless to argue any such matter. I assure you that not one officer of any grade will be delivered to you until you change your purpose in that respect.
You have charged us with breaking the cartel. With what sort of justice can that allegation be supported, when you delivered only a few days ago over ninety officers, most of whom had been forced to languish and suffer in prisons for months before we were compelled by that and other reasons to issue the retaliatory order of which you complain? Those ninety-odd are not one-half of those whom you unjustly hold in prison. On the other hand, I defy you to name the case of one who is confined by us, whom our agreement has declared exchanged. Is it your idea that we are to be bound by every strictness of the cartel, while you are at liberty to violate it for months, and that, too, not only in a few instances, but in hundreds? You know that our refusal to parole officers, was a matter exclusively of retaliation. It was based only upon your refusal to observe the requirements of the cartel. All that you had to do to remove the obnoxious measure of retaliation, was to observe the provisions of the cartel and redress the wrongs which had been perpetrated.
Your last resolution, if persisted in, settles the matter. You need not send any officers to City Point with the expectation of getting an equivalent in officers, so long as you refuse to deliver any for those whom we have released on parole in Tennessee and Kentucky. If captivity, privation, and misery are to be the fate of officers on both sides hereafter, let God judge between us. I have struggled in this matter, as if it had been a matter of life and death to me. I am heartsick at the termination, but I have no self reproaches.
Respectfully, your obedient servant,
Robert Ould,
Judge Ould thus closes his correspondence with Colonel Ludlow :
MR. OULD TO LIEUTENANT-COLONEL LUDLOW.
War Department,
Richmond, Virginia, July 26, 1863.
Colonel William H. Ludlow, Agent of Exchange:
Sir—Your communication of the 22d contests my declaration of exchanges of officers made on the 17th instant. You say "the cartel provides for the exchange of equal ranks, until such are exhausted, and then for equivalents." If you had been at Fortress Monroe, where you could have seen the cartel, instead of New York, from which your letter is dated, you would have written