The Approaching Fury: Political and Legislative Developments leading up to the Civil War

Last time I spoke here, I gave an overview of the ethnic composition of the country on the eve of the Civil War, and I suggested how that dynamic may have contributed eventually to the war.  Tonight, I'll describe how those various tribes in the prewar era expressed their differing views in politics and in law. 

I want to start out with two quotations, with the first being from a Union soldier from Iowa, Eugene Fitch Ware, who declared in his postwar memoirs:  "The Civil War was a battle of ideas interrupted by artillery."  The other is from the noted French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1835:  "There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question."  These two quotes well encapsulate our great matter tonight. 

I'll start at the beginning of the country by debunking a certain revisionist historian by the name of Abraham Lincoln.  One contention of his to be viewed with great skepticism concerned the relative importance of slavery in early America.  Lincoln argued in the 1850s that the Founders were deeply embarrassed by slavery and strove to restrict it.  His most memorable statement to this effect was the 1854 Peoria Speech.  [SLIDE]  In criticizing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he said the words "slave" and "slavery" do not even appear in the Constitution itself because the Founders wanted slavery hidden away "just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer."  Instead, they used phrases like "a person held to service of labour" or "other persons," that is, other than free persons. 

The trouble is that from my research, it's difficult to conclude that slavery was that big an issue at the time, such that many of the Founders were terribly embarrassed about it.  True, some spoke very eloquently against slavery at the Constitutional Convention, but hardly most of them.  After all, slavery existed in every one of the original thirteen states in 1776, and by 1787, the time of the Constitutional Convention, it had been completely abolished in only one, that being Massachusetts.  In 1858, Stephen Douglas pointed out that first fact at the Ottawa debate and the second one at the Alton debate, to neither of which did Mr. Lincoln make a peep.

Another problem with Lincoln's revisionism lies in what I call the composition technique of "flexible vagueness."  Often in drafting contracts or laws, the wording may be left somewhat general to allow for future developments, to allow for wiggle room.  The Constitution does use the expression "persons held to service or labour" in the so-called fugitive-slave clause, which authorizes the retrieval of escaped slaves.  It's most likely, then, that the Founders used that general broader term because at that time, indentured servitude was still a fact of life in many parts of the country.  You didn't want to use the word "slave" because that might limit you.  So rather than being offensive, the terms "slave" and "slavery" may have simply suffered from being too technically restrictive.

Even the infamous 3/5ths clause whereby each non-free person was counted for 3/5ths of a free person for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives seemed more an accounting issue than a moral one.  The starting position of the North was that if slaves are property, you don't count them for representation.  But in the end, the 3/5ths clause was apparently arrived at quite amicably.  Creditors in the North were particularly anxious to have the South in the Union in order to have the full faith and credit clause so they could enforce judgments in the Southern states, so this was worth compromising over.  The Constitution, after all, has a heavy economic aspect to it.  

Another event at around this same time that provided fodder to revisionist historian Lincoln was the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 by the Continental Congress before the ratification of the Constitution.  [SLIDE]  It prohibited slavery from that area granted to the United States by the Treaty of Paris that was west of the original thirteen states, north of the Ohio River, and extending out to the Mississippi.  It was also ratified by the first Congress under the Constitution.  Now the Northwest Ordinance is a little mysterious, and there is not much legislative history about it.  But again, Lincoln certainly seized on it in the 1850s to support his view that the Founders intended to restrict slavery.  It is not at all clear, though, that the issue was “fully briefed,” that is, whether anyone who would care was really paying attention. 

Some historians have concluded that the South did not resist it because other issues were more important, and so letting it pass was more a matter of "horse -trading,” more a matter of mere bargaining.  And other historians believe that the South actually did not want slaves in this region as it would mean economic competition from another slave economy.  So it is hard to conclude that the Northwest Ordinance established any broad moral principle of restricting slavery.  It did certainly establish, however, the narrower precedent that the Founders believed that Congress had authority to legislate as to slavery in the territories, and we will see that become a hot-button issue later and an important argument against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision.

After the Constitutional Convention and the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, we don’t have much activity on slavery until 1819, about twenty years later.  In that year, Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state.  [SLIDE]  And this was not at all unexpected as it had been part of the Louisiana Purchase where slavery had been allowed by both the Spanish and French colonial authorities.  And in fact, the treaty entered into in conjunction with the Louisiana Purchase had guaranteed its inhabitants their rights in property including slaves.  The trouble comes up when a New York congressman named James Tallmadge offers an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill that would prohibit slavery in the future state. 

Now we really start to see the Union fraying.  But it is still not necessarily about morality.  Rather, many in the North were bothered by the continuing application of the 3/5ths clause.  Why should the South benefit in the House of Representatives when it was the North whose white population was growing.  It seemed that the South was breeding its population base for the House of Representatives, and as we well know, for additional votes in the Electoral College.  For its part, the South took offense at the idea that Missouri not being allowed into the Union because it sought admission as a slave state.  It was an affront to their societies. 

I should explain also that at this time, much more of the North was becoming “free,” for example, by 1819, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont had all joined Massachusetts as either immediately free or gradually free states.  (In some cases, that would be very gradual:   According to the 1850 Census, New Jersey still had 50 slaves.)  And by 1819, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had been admitted as free states, in accordance with the Northwest Ordinance. 

In the end, a compromise was reached by legislative maneuvering.  Part of the deal was statehood for free Maine, which had applied for statehood after Missouri, but, of course, it immediately became hostage to Missouri’s fate.  The critical part of the deal was the Thomas amendment proposed by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois.  That amendment provided for the Missouri Compromise line, whereby except for Missouri slavery would be “forever” prohibited in the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36° 30′. 

The Missouri Compromise represents the first time since the adoption of the Bill of Rights that you have a significant "tinkering" in a political science sense with the nature of the country.  Previously with the admission process, you just had an up-or-down vote.  During the Illinois statehood debate, some had objected that its proposed constitution was not sufficient anti-slavery, but that didn't amount to much, and the nation just kept growing and growing.  Generally, little discussion was had over the nature of the individual societies seeking statehood.  But now, you have a line in the sand.  So the Union is definitely changing. 

Now again we have to deal with another revisionist historian, now one John C. Calhoun.  [SLIDE]  In later railing against the Missouri Compromise in the 1840s, Calhoun argued that it had been almost uniformly opposed by the South and that the region as a whole had never agreed to such a restriction on slavery.  And in making this astounding claim, he liked to quote Jefferson's statement that the Missouri Compromise was a "fire bell in the night," that is, a dire signal of the country being divided up.  It's certainly true that Mr. Jefferson was concerned, for despite his youthful idealism, he had become increasingly conservative in his last years, particularly after the slave uprising in Santo Domingo, present-day Haiti.  But still, the fact remains that the Missouri Compromise could simply not have passed without significant Southern support.  And in a pattern that would repeat again and again, the compromise was achieved through the efforts of moderates in both regions, while extremists in both regions voiced full-throated but ineffective opposition. 

And to debunk Calhoun a little further, many in the South did believe that they were getting the better part of the deal with just having the area south of 36° 30′.  Let's take a look at the map again.  [SLIDE]  Remember we have a different perspective nowadays.  Even though the area of the Louisiana Purchase south of 36° 30′ seems pretty limited, what was in the north?  Or more specifically, who was in the north?  There were the Sioux and other rather powerful tribes.  Admittedly in the south, you still had New Spain and later Mexico to contend with, but already we had aspirations of manifest destiny, even though the term hadn't been coined yet. 

After the Missouri Compromise, slavery as an issue receded somewhat for few years.  One reason may be that Missouri was out at the far range of settlement, and it took the rest of the country some time to catch up, so as to make the Missouri Compromise line even relevant.  And after all, Michigan, for example, did not be become a state until another sixteen years after Missouri, so that's some indication of how uneven the advance of civilization was.  We visualize the pioneers moving west in a sort of rippling wave effect. 

The slavery issue doesn't heat up again until 1831.  In that year, William Lloyd Garrison founds his newspaper "The Liberator" and begins turning abolitionism into large-scale movement.  Also, in that same year, Nat Turner leads his bloody slave uprising, which certainly shakes up the South.  [SLIDE]  Now the mails will be searched for abolitionist material, and Northerners travelling in the South will be hassled, a foretelling of Easy Rider.  Even though you have this abolitionist movement gaining steam along with a Southern backlash, slavery as an issue is still somewhat suppressed or dampened by the two-party system.  Jacksonian Democrats are mostly Southern but still don't want to unduly antagonize their Northern brethren.  And at the same time, most Whigs are Northerners who don't want offend their Southern wing.  So for a long time, slavery is one of those issues that people prefer to paper over somehow.  Let's not talk about it.  Let's just watch football. 

But in the 1840s with the acquisition of Texas and later, after the Mexican War, with the acquisition of the Mexican Cession, this issue can't be easily ignored.  [SLIDE]  We have more questions as to how we are to expand.  Will it be an empire of liberty or an empire of slavery?  As I alluded to earlier, this is the time that John C. Calhoun begins to challenge the status quo, even while claiming, as Lincoln did, the legacy of the Founders.  In particular, he stressed the idea of the territories as common property into which Southerners are allowed to bring their slaves.  To deny this would be to deny Southerners their property rights under the Fifth Amendment. 

Anti-slavery forces also become assertive.  For example, when the Mexican War began, the Polk Administration sought an appropriation of $2 million.  We then see the appearance of the Wilmot Proviso, the most famous un-enacted legislation in American history.  David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, was annoyed over a number of things that President Polk had done.  He had not agreed to the level of tariff Wilmot and other Democrats wanted.  He vetoed an internal improvements bill.  And he sold out Oregon, or at least what they called Oregon, and what we today call roughly British Columbia. 

You see, Northerners wanted to expand too, and up to the line of 54° 40′, hence the slogan "54 40 or fight."  But anticipating Lincoln's dictum of "one war at a time," Polk entered into his own non-aggression pact with Britain, settling on the 49^th parallel, so the U.S. could focus on Mexico.  So the Northern Democrats were upset about those specifics but also about the general Southern orientation of the Polk Administration.

The Wilmot Proviso was offered as a rider to the appropriations bill sought by President Polk and was modeled on the Northwest Ordinance:  "Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the money herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted." 

With the support of Northern Democrats and anti-expansionist Whigs, such as Congressman Lincoln, the appropriations bill with the Wilmot Proviso attached passes the House.  The effect was to embarrass the Polk Administration and to place Southern Democrats in the awkward position of delaying expansion in favor of slavery.  Congress adjourned before the bill could go to the Senate, but in the next session, the House passed the bill again with the proviso attached, and it was defeated in the Senate where the South held the balance of power with 15 slave states and 14 free.  Eventually, Polk got his money by arm-twisting Northern Democrats, which goes to suggest that the Wilmot Proviso maybe was less a matter of sacred principle than a matter of expressing discontent with Polk.  But the Wilmot Proviso left a legacy in that it was repeatedly revived and many politicians, including Lincoln, came to call themselves "Wilmot men."

In 1848, Zachary Taylor, a Southern Whig slaveholder, is elected President.  In some ways, he is like Andrew Jackson as a general with more of a national than a regional perspective, and similarly, like Jackson, he tended to disappoint Southerners.  Under his presidency, pressures are building due to the immense acquisition of territory from Mexico.  Particularly with the Gold Rush and the huge increase in population in California, the need was desperate to organize the Mexican Cession.  And of course whether these areas would be slave or free was paramount.  Outgoing President Polk had suggested simply extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific.  The Wilmot men proposed instead a free territorial government for California. 

Once Taylor assumed office, he decided to accelerate the admission process for both California and the New Mexico.  (Keep in mind, at this time, New Mexico referred to current New Mexico, Arizona and the southern part of Nevada.  And what was called Utah was current Utah, the rest of Nevada, and a hunk of western Colorado.)  Since both those regions had already displayed clear anti-slavery tendencies, the South accused Taylor of tipping his hand.  And the feeling of betrayal by Southern Whigs was profound.  Alexander Stephens [SLIDE], later Vice-President of the Confederacy and one of the leaders of the Southern Whigs now became a vociferous Southern-rights advocate, insisting that slavery could not be excluded from California and New Mexico.  So this was the beginning of the end of the Whig Party.

As in 1820, we have another compromise, although one much more complex.  And it is due mostly to the master politician, Henry Clay [SLIDE], the Great Compromiser.  California was admitted free and intact.  Texas gave up its claims to Greater Texas in exchange for the Federal Government assuming its debt.  The territories of Utah and New Mexico are allowed to apply the concept of Popular Sovereignty, that is, let the people there in those territories decide.  Also the slave trade is banned in the District of Columbia, and a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law is enacted.  So there is something for everyone.  Southerners had wanted to split California, but they succeeded in preventing the Wilmot Proviso from being applied to New Mexico.  Everyone seemed pretty happy for a while.

Our next turning point comes in 1854.  The question remained of what to do with the remaining unorganized parts of the Louisiana Purchase, and now on stage enters Stephen Douglas.  [SLIDE]  He had been instrumental in facilitating the Compromise of 1850, but now he really takes center stage.  Douglas was anxious to see a railroad from Chicago to San Francisco, and to do that, the regions in between had to be organized.  So he presented a bill, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to organize most of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30′, under Popular Sovereignty.  It was good enough for New Mexico and Utah, let's use it here.  The bill passes the House, but stalls in the Senate where Southerners want a Wilmot Proviso in reverse.  They want the Missouri Compromise line of 1820 explicitly repealed, so as to allow slavery to sweep into the plains.  Douglas agrees to this result, arguing Popular Sovereignty conflicts with the Missouri Compromise line, which is true.  If the people in the Dakotas want slavery, the Missouri Compromise line would prohibit that.  Douglas then bullied President Franklin Pierce into making the Kansas-Nebraska Act a party measure for Democrats, and with enough arm-twisting, he was able to get it through.

In understanding how the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed with any Northern support, we must recall the realpolitik assumption of many that slavery had reached its natural limits.  It would just not take root outside of the old South.  Either the indigenous society or nature would prohibit it.  And this was not a new view.  When the Wilmot Proviso was first proposed, even an anti-slavery stalwart like John Quincy Adams, suggested it was unnecessary as slavery would not take hold in the Mexican Cession.  And in the debates leading up to the Compromise of 1850, Daniel Webster had asked, why re-enact the will of God?  Now of course, many Southerners claimed that slaves could be used in the mines and elsewhere.  But still, many Northerners were willing to take that chance in the name of compromise.

With the shotgun wedding of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the blowback was immediate, leading to the so-called anti-Nebraska movement.  (And if there are any Huskers in the audience, please don’t take that personally.)  And this movement evolved into the Republican Party.  And naturally, this story of how one side perceives legislation as being shoved down its throat being followed by widespread resistance to that legislation should be familiar to anyone who has followed American politics of the last eight years or so.  And nowadays, of course, we are seeing widespread resistance to repeal of that same legislation, so we continue to be a passionate people.  But I digress.   

The Kansas-Nebraska Act is also what brought Abraham Lincoln back into politics, and it is his Peoria Speech that entered history as that de facto platform of the emerging Republican Party, which expressly opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, while still being moderate in letting slavery be for now in the Southern states. 

Concomitantly, the Kansas-Nebraska Act is the end of the Whig Party.  And it is one of the mysteries of our political history why the Whigs could not capitalize on the anti-Nebraska discontent and at least remain a power in the North.  No agreement on that by historians.  One view is that it never had the clout, the authority, to maintain itself.  After all, many had seen it as a retread of the old Federalist Party, which imploded after the War of 1812 for being too soft on the British.  And it had actually only won two elections, and the second time only with Zachary Taylor pretending not to be a Whig.  (He was a WINO, Whig in name only.)  In any event, the anti-slavery Whigs join the disaffected Democrats and other factions to create this admittedly sectional Northern party. 

The scene now shifts to bleeding Kansas [SLIDE], and the events occurring there are to the Civil War what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II, that is, a sort of dress rehearsal of the ideologies in conflict and some of the same actors.  The proslavery elements move in from Missouri and elect a bogus territorial government at Lecompton, while settlers from the Midwest, supported by the New England Emigrant Aid Societies, establish a competing government in Topeka.  Always anxious to appease the South, President Pierce brands the Topeka government revolutionary but also does nothing to stop it.  Violence escalates with the sack of Lawrence, the Pottawatomie massacre by John Brown, and in the midst of it all comes the savage beating of Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts, by a South Carolina congressman, following Sumner's Senate address entitled "The Crime against Kansas."

The conflict provides the background to the presidential election of 1856, when the Republican Party runs its first candidate, John C. Fremont.  But the election of 1856 can almost be called another one of the prewar compromises we've seen tacked together at the last moment.  The general mood of the electorate was to save the Union at any cost, and so even another pro-Southerner such as James Buchanan was preferable to war.  At the same time, it is obvious the clock is ticking down to war since Fremont wins all the upper North, making it only a matter of time before demography supplies the answer. 

In March, 1857, two days after the inauguration of Buchanan, the Justices of the Supreme Court file their various opinions in the Dred Scott case, another seismic event comparable to the effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  [SLIDE]  To give you my freshman brief of the case, Dred Scott was the slave of an Army surgeon, John Emerson, who originally lived in Missouri, but who was later assigned to a posting in Illinois and to Fort Snelling, on the west side of the Mississippi River in modern-day Minnesota.  Illinois was certainly a free state, and Fort Snelling was in free territory according to the Missouri Compromise.  Dr. Emerson took Dred Scott with him, and they resided in each posting for about two years.  Once back in Missouri, Dred Scott, encouraged by abolitionist friends, sued in state court for his freedom, arguing he should be free by virtue of his extended residences in a free state and in a free territory.  And in the past, such suits had succeeded, even in Missouri state courts.  But this time, the litigation took over 11 years and involved both the Missouri courts and the Federal courts, finally culminating in the most infamous decision in Supreme Court history.  It could easily consume several hours to narrate all the various strategies and arguments that arose in all those years because not only do you have the natural creativity of lawyers at work, but you also have a lot of political considerations, some of which did not necessarily benefit Dred Scott as a client. 

Let me boil down most astringently what was at stake:  First, was Dred Scott a citizen such that he was even entitled to sue in the courts in the first place?  Second, did his extended residences in Illinois and at Fort Snelling have the effect of freeing him?  Every justice of the Supreme Court wrote some kind of opinion, with the final tally being that seven said Dred Scott should not be freed and two said he should.  The majority opinion came to be recognized as the opinion of Chief Justice Roger Taney.  [SLIDE]  (By the way, that is spelled T-A-N-E-Y but pronounced "taw-nee.") 

Taney began his opinion by discussing Negro citizenship as that had an effect on the court's jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place.  Taney found that Negroes, either emancipated or enslaved, could simply not be citizens.  To him, they were not part of the sovereign people covered by the Declaration of Independence.  In his view, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, they had "no rights that a white man is bound to respect."  The two dissenters strenuously objected to this view, noting especially how Negroes had been recognized as citizens and voters and jurors and soldiers in several of the original thirteen colonies, including North Carolina. 

Taney went on to the merits by addressing Dred Scott's residence at Fort Snelling.  He explained that it was not truly free territory because the Missouri Compromise line was unconstitutional insofar as it prevented a slaveholder from taking his property there.  To prevent a slaveholder from moving his slaves, that is, his property, without due process of law would violate the Fifth Amendment. 

So to Taney, slaveholders would be deprived of constitutional protection if they could not take their slaves anywhere they wanted in Louisiana Purchase, and this Congress could not do through the device of the Missouri Compromise line. 

Taney next discussed Dred Scott's residence in Illinois, describing it more as a "sojourn," something in the nature of a mere transit through a free state, which status had traditionally been allowed slaveholders traveling in the North.  But even if it had been a long enough stay to free Dred Scott, since he sued once he returned to Missouri, the doctrine of "reversion" came into effect to cause a returned freed slave to revert to the status of a slave. 

Now not only did the Dred Scott opinion invalidate the Missouri Compromise line, but it effectively outlawed the platform of the Republican Party.  And as in our time, the strategy was then to elect a President who would appoint justices who would overturn it. 

Now was Stephen Douglas laughing at the discomfort of the Republicans?  No, because Dred Scott also invalidated Popular Sovereignty, specifically declaring that no territorial legislature had the authority to prohibit slavery.  So how did Douglas respond to this decision?  Douglas made the strange argument that even if the people of the territories could not formally prohibit slavery, they could effectively prohibit it by failing to enact legislation to protect it.  This became known as the Freeport Doctrine, as it came in an answer to Lincoln the next year in the debate at Freeport, Illinois.  And it was interesting how in those debates, it was a continuing theme of Douglas's to describe Republicans as revolutionaries because they opposed the Dred Scott decision, yet with this "unfriendly legislation" angle, Douglas is shameless in supposedly honoring a Supreme Court decision in the abstract, while endorsing anything that will undo its underlying spirit. 

In 1858 [SLIDE], the Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates served to clearly articulate how the North viewed the Dred Scott decision.  On the one hand, Lincoln made the case that the slave power and their Northern allies wished to nationalize slavery, and all it would take was a second Dred Scott decision, which we will call Dred Scott II, a case where a slave was held in a free state for longer than a "sojourn."  And since Dred Scott I said Congress and a territorial legislature could not prohibit slavery due to the Fifth Amendment, how could a state ever prohibit slavery?  So it would mean the realization of the prophecy of Lincoln in his House Divided speech that we will become all one thing or all the other, but now the one thing would be all slavery.  I was picking on Lincoln earlier for not being an exacting historian, but I have to agree he was a great prophet.   

In response, Douglas gave his most unconvincing argument by insisting that the Supreme Court would never hand down a Dred Scott II decision.  And many in the North held a similarly blinkered view.  But at that same time, Dred Scott II was coming.  The case was called Lemmon v. The People.  In Lemmon, a slave trader sent a number of slaves to New York City for further transshipment to Texas.  While in New York, the slaves sued for their freedom under New York state law. 

So this is a distinction, correct, from Dred Scott as they seized the moment and sued in a free-state forum?  You would not have reversion, which was Dred Scott's partial undoing.   In March, 1860, the New York Supreme Court held for the slaves and freed them.  There is little doubt that if the war hadn't intervened, the slaveholder would have appealed to the Supreme Court, and there is no reason to believe that the stern logic of Dred Scott would not have applied to the case.  The New York Supreme Court would be ruled to have violated the slaveholder's Fifth Amendment rights. 

So on the eve of the election of 1860, we are at the end of a train of crucial political and legal events stretching back to 1819.  As Lincoln the prophet explained it, the South would not be satisfied until the whole country, not just the territories, was open to slavery.  In this view, the irony is that it was the North, through the engine of the Republican Party, that was truly fighting for states' rights, not the South. 

POSTSCRIPT:

If I could go off tangent for a minute, many writers have applied the alternative history method to the Civil War, starting back in the fifties with a novel called "Come the Jubilee," which apparently inspired Phillip K. Dick to write his alternative history of World War II "The Man in the High Castle."  These are worthwhile exercises, assuming they are grounded in some logical premises.  Usually the South wins or at least isn't defeated.  But I would like to pose this kind of thought experiment several years before the war.  For example, what if Polk was more anti-British and decided to push up into Canada, precipitating the third Anglo-American war.  And to facilitate that, Polk decides to enter into a non-aggression pact with Mexico, and we reach a modus vivendi whereby the western Texas border is worked out but California, Arizona, and part of New Mexico remain under Mexico.  Would the South then realize that it could not expand west with the slave power and so resign itself to staying in the Union, but only as long as it gets Cuba and other islands in the Caribbean.  So maybe then the Spanish-American war takes place about thirty years sooner.  In the meantime, gold is discovered in Alta California.  With the undoubted influx of immigrants from the United States, would Mexico develop into a more diverse society and perhaps even a liberal democracy?  Would Mexico end up in greater parity with the United States on this continent? 

Another turning point to speculate on is the Compromise of 1850.  What if it was worked out that Missouri Compromise line was extended to the Pacific, cutting California almost in half.  Slavery would be theoretically allowed, but as so many wondered, would it be feasible?  Or would it die out as it did in the North?  And then the question becomes what would have happened to slavery in the deep South?  Even Thomas Jefferson believed it may eventually come to an end.  After all, slavery was eventually outlawed in Brazil without great disruption.  Without this matter of the territories being closed off would you have had this trigger that began the war?

The Approaching Fury PowerPoint Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/GordonGidlund/the-approaching-fury-political-and-legislative-developments-leading-up-to-the-civil-war

Civil War Prisoner Exchange Procedures

I first became interested in this subject when reading about a kerfuffle between these two men, Ulysses S Grant and Henry Halleck.  [SLIDE]  Years ago, I read in General Grant’s memoirs how annoyed he was for being chastised over his handling of the surrendered Confederates at Vicksburg.  You see, rather than take into captivity the Vicksburg garrison, Grant “paroled” them. Parole is a term of art that I will describe in much more detail over the evening.  For now, suffice to say that in paroling the Confederate soldiers, he was securing their pledge not to fight again until certain conditions were met.  I’m not sure we would call it a contract, but it was close, especially in that such a transaction was memorialized in a written document signed by one of the parties. As Grant tells the story in his Memoirs, after the great success at Vicksburg, with the surrender of over 30,000 Confederate soldiers, and all that, the very first dispatch he received from the Government was a “snippy” letter from “Old Brains” Halleck.  It was a terse little message:

“I fear your paroling the prisoners at Vicksburg, without actual delivery to a proper agent as required by the seventh article of the cartel, may be construed into an absolute release, and that the men will immediately be placed in the ranks of the enemy.  Such has been the case elsewhere.  If these prisoners have not been allowed to depart, you will detain them until further orders.”  Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, p. 227 (1885).

I said that Grant was annoyed by getting “gigged” in this way, but he doesn’t actually reveal that explicitly.  You have to read between the lines in his rather deadpan delivery of this event; it’s rather subtle.  And if you study Grant’s career, you know he had several similar officious, bureaucratic, Mickey-Mouse run-ins with Halleck.  Later we’ll talk more about Grant and the routine of prisoner exchanges, and it’ll be worthwhile to keep this incident in mind.

Well, now to the topic itself.  For background, I think we all presume that if we go back into early human history, the fate of a prisoner of war was pretty awful.  If they were lucky enough to survive, they would probably be enslaved for what remained of their miserable existence.  For the longest time, it was accepted practice to simply execute prisoners.  [SLIDE]  In Western history, one particularly bloody affair was that of Richard the Lionheart on the Third Crusade when he had almost 3,000 Muslim prisoners massacred.  And otherwise in Western history, if you were lucky enough to be a nobleman, you might be ransomed, the key word being “might.” 

But with the enlightenment in Europe, we have dramatic changes:  The notion evolves that maybe it’s just not nice to kill prisoners, but then there is the problem of what to do with them.  You don’t want to expend your own resources on feeding enemy soldiers.  And so the idea of exchanges comes more into vogue.  Further, as to the excess of any prisoners on one side, the idea of the parole develops, which is a promise not to fight until otherwise released from that promise, such as by an exchange.  So in Europe, at least, this whole idea of a more humane way to treat prisoners comes into its own.

By the time of the American Revolution, then, there are exchanges and paroles of prisoners, even though the British have some concern about parlaying with these upstart colonists.  And by the time of the War of 1812, we have a reasonably set understanding of how you should treat prisoners, and the two governments even enter into a so-called cartel to handle the exchange of prisoners.  And this agreement ends up providing the basis of the cartel agreed upon in the Civil War, which I’ll go into detail later.

When the Civil War began, as we’ve heard so many times, neither side expected it to last very long; we’ve all heard that line about the spilling of only a thimble’s worth of blood, so no provision was made for long-term planning as to prisoners.  The first instance of prisoners being taken was actually before Fort Sumter, in February, 1861, and that was in Texas, where General David Twiggs [SLIDE], commander of the District of Texas comprising over 2,000 troops, decided that he would simply surrender his command, explaining, “If an old woman with a broomstick should come with full authority from the State of Texas to demand the public property, I would give it up to her.”  Most of these Federal troops were paroled, but about a third of them were taken prisoner by the Texas militia and held for some time.  Shortly after the surrender, coincidentally, General Twiggs was made a general of the Confederacy.  A year later, he died in his sleep, saving him from later being hanged for the traitor that he was. 

And about this same time, in Missouri, approximately 700 Confederate militiamen were captured by Federal forces.  So even before Fort Sumter, we have prisoners being taken by each side. 

Then we have the fall of Fort Sumter, and by contrast to what happened in Texas and Missouri, Major Anderson and his command were simply let go, he simply evacuated.  I don’t know if that was a sign of respect to Anderson, or maybe a gesture to prevent matters from escalating.  In any event, he and his men ended up in New York for a hero’s welcome.  But then again later, after Bull Run, we see over 1,000 Union captives taken and ignominiously hauled off to Richmond and other sites for imprisonment, including the infamous Libby Prison. 

So early in the war, you don’t know what will happen.  The players are feeling their way along, and the same goes with prisoner exchanges. 

[SLIDE]  The first documented exchange I can find occurred in Missouri in the summer of 1861, when General Gideon Pillow suggested to Colonel W.H.L. Wallace that they exchange prisoners.  Colonel Wallace at first declined, explaining that the two sides had no overall agreement on the question.  General Pillow continued to pursue the negotiations, trying to sweeten the deal by including those Union prisoners captured at Bull Run.  And I should explain that Pillow continued to make these overtures in the belief that Wallace held a greater number of prisoners than he actually did, so this exchange has the elements of an old-fashioned horse trade.  But Wallace again declined.  Pillow also suggested including civilian prisoners.  There was, for example, a U.S. Congressman who had been a spectator at Bull Run and who was at this point sojourning in Libby Prison.  But again Wallace said no.  Later, Wallace’s commander, General John Charles Frémont, got involved and agreed to an exchange but stipulated that it could only be of regular soldiers, not home guard.  Well, after all this back and forth, what happens?  Each side received only three privates back. 

[SLIDE]  In October of 1861, General Leonidas Polk, also known Bishop Polk, proposed an exchange to General John A. McClernand.  But instead of negotiating any formal deal, he simply sent three Confederates back.  Polk responded by sending back sixteen Union prisoners.  Now the two of them continued this piecemeal process for some weeks, but not on any strict exchange system.

And at this time, there were other limited exchanges arranged by commanders in the field.  Some may have been more formal like the Pillow-Wallace exchange in Missouri based on the understandings of the prior usages and customs of war, going back to the War of 1812 and earlier, and some may have been more like the good-faith, informal arrangement between Polk and McClernand.  It’s safe to say that the whole system was rather ad hoc in these early days.

Now with the accumulation of prisoners on the Southern side especially, there came calls on both sides for some general agreement on the handling of prisoners.  But the Lincoln Administration was loath to take a step that would confer any legitimacy on the rebels.  Does anyone recall how Lincoln referred to Jefferson Davis?  Did he call him President Davis?  Did he even call him by his name?  He typically called him, “the insurgent leader.”  How about that?  Like something from the Iraq war.  

A series of events that set the Lincoln Administration’s approach in sharp relief was the capture of certain Confederate privateers.  Now in 1861, the South, like the American revolutionaries before them, had issued letters of marque to private-sector individuals.  They would then be allowed to carry on war.  This was a form of outsourcing your naval obligations.  Naturally, the North did not recognize these letters of marque.  [SLIDE]  Matters came to a head on June 3, 1861, when the U.S.S. Perry caught up with the privateer Savannah off the coast of South Carolina and captured 14 officers and men.  They were not taken to a prison camp but were instead delivered, in chains, to a Federal jail in New York City.  [SLIDE]  A few weeks later, the U.S.S. Albatross recaptured the Boston schooner Enchantress along with a prize crew from the Privateer Jeff Davis, and those men were likewise taken, in chains, to a Federal jail, this time in Philadelphia.  [SLIDE]  And at around this same time, a third privateer, the Petrel, was sunk when the merchant ship it thought it was chasing turned out to be a big, old warship, the U.S.S. Lawrence.  Its survivors were fished out of the drink and also delivered, in chains, also to a Federal jail in Philadelphia.  (And not surprisingly by the way, the interest of investors in the South in obtaining letters of marque tanked at about this time.)

Now did the sailors all just molder in these jails?  No, they were put on trial in U.S. District Court.  What do you think they were charged with?  Piracy!  To the North, they were what we might today call unlawful combatants.   And in any event, a conviction for piracy carried the death penalty. 

As you can imagine, it did not go over well in the South that the privateers might be hanged as pirates.  The Confederate Congress duly authorized Jefferson Davis to execute an equal number of Union captives.  Davis sent a letter to Lincoln threatening retaliation for the deaths of any of these sailors.  And the names of the Union captives, all officers, to be executed were made public, as well as made known to the men themselves.  As Samuel Johnson said, there’s nothing like the prospect of being hanged to focus your mind.  [SLIDE]  And one of those condemned men was Paul Revere, that is, the grandson of the great Revolutionary War hero.  So this is getting personal. 

So what happened?  Trials proceeded simultaneously in New York and Philadelphia.  And luckily in a way for the Lincoln Administration, defense counsel made the argument that the men themselves reasonably believed that the Confederacy had the authority to issue letters of marque, and so they did not have the requisite intent to be pirates.  The jury in the New York trial deadlocked, possibly influenced by the threats against the Union captives or maybe by this intent argument, but the jury in the Philadelphia trial convicted.  The U.S. Government, though, never carried out the sentence.  You could say Lincoln blinked, or maybe he was able to justify mercy by buying the defense’s intent argument.  In any event, after an appropriate passage of time, all the privateers were recognized as lawful combatants and were eventually exchanged.

Now the South had always wanted some more formalized general exchange agreement, but as I explained before, the Lincoln Administrative was hesitant to officially deal with the rebels for fear of implicitly recognizing them as an equal sovereign.  But pressure came from Congress and the Northern public to initiate general exchanges.  [SLIDE]  And in early February, 1862, General John Wool began talks with General Howell Cobb.  Now according to the South, the North engaged in consistent bad faith in the Wool-Cobb negotiations.  The North would insist on a condition, and the South would accede.  The North would insist on another condition, and again, the South would accede.  Finally, on February 26, 1862, after the South had agreed to all conditions, the North abruptly broke off the talks, General Wool explaining that now there would only be man-for-man trades, and no paroling of excess prisoners.  According to the South, that date is significant because it came right after the surrender of 15,000 Confederate troops at Fort Donelson and another 2,500 at Roanoke Island.  So now it was the North that had a surplus of prisoners.  Now is that what really happened?  It’s hard to say because the Union actors did not leave behind much of a record. 

But eventually the two sides did come back together in the summer of 1862, [SLIDE] this time with the negotiators General John Dix of Fort Dix fame, and General D. H. Hill.  And again the timing is significant as you had in the meantime, Stonewall Jackson rampaging in the Shenandoah, you had Shiloh, and you had McClellan’s failed Peninsula Campaign, which meant now that more Union soldiers had been captured, and thus initiating more pressure on the Lincoln Administration from the prisoners’ families.  After some back and forth, these two come up with what is known as the Dix-Hill Cartel, and which is essentially an adaptation of the agreement from the War of 1812.  It came into effect on July 22, 1862, and the overriding principle was that prisoners should be exchanged promptly, at most within ten days, and if not exchanged, then paroled.  Now it is quite simple if all you have are privates for exchange.  But what happens when one side has a private and another side has a captain.  Well, luckily, [SLIDE] the Dix-Hill Cartel provided a handy, dandy conversion table:

1 general-commanding-in-chief             =      60 privates

1 major general                                   =      40 privates

1 brigadier general                               =      20 privates

1 colonel                                             =      15 privates

1 lieutenant colonel                             =      10 privates

1 major                                               =      8 privates

1 captain                                             =      6 privates

1 lieutenant                                         =      4 privates

1 noncommissioned officer                   =      2 privates

I am sure that looking at this chart, someone will be reminded of the remark from Sam Watkins’s memoir “Company Aytch,” to the effect that in battle, he always made sure to shoot at privates since they were the ones doing the real fighting and officers were merely “harmless personages.”  But in any event, that was the arrangement, and it stemmed from the War of 1812.  So if you caught either Robert E. Lee or Grant in their heyday, you get back 60 privates.  Now what if one side catches a colonel and the other catches two captains, what do you do?  Well, according to this rate of exchange, the one colonel is still worth more, right?  He’s worth 15 privates, but the two captains combined are only worth 12.  But how do you handle such fractions?  Let me defer that issue, and we’ll discuss later. 

And by the way, the chart also referred to naval ranks as well, and it made a special point, undoubtedly insisted upon by the Confederates, that privateers were to be treated as other lawful combatants, so you wouldn’t have any more piracy trials. 

Now how was the Cartel supposed to operate?   Generally, the system contemplated that prisoners would be transported to two exchange points, one in the east, Aiken’s Landing, and in the west, Vicksburg, although the Cartel assumed the fluidity of war, and so it was understood that these points might shift, as they did indeed in the east, where the exchange point was later changed to City Point.  Now at these exchange points, each side was to have an agent for exchange, and they were supposed to communicate with their opposite numbers, and compare lists, and generally make the appropriate arrangements.  Now strangely, battlefield exchanges could still be conducted by individual field commanders, otherwise.

It’s interesting that one key principle of the Cartel was that if there was any disagreement, you were supposed to just keep the line moving, you didn’t protest by halting the process, whatever dispute was to “be made the subject of friendly explanation.”

Now how were the exchanges conducted mechanically?  By the terms of the Cartel, you had the exchange agents for each side getting together, preparing lists of prisoners, comparing the lists, and in general facilitating the whole process.  Now I deferred the earlier question of how they decided who to exchange and who to parole.  And I implied that I had an answer.  Well, I shouldn’t have done that since I really don’t.  From my research, though, I have made a reasonable guess that the process was not all that scientific.  Because by this point in the war, they were dealing with large numbers of troops, they could not really engage in that kind of analysis.  When you have, say, 300 on one side, and 100 on the other, which 200 that you parole is probably just the luck of the draw, where you were standing in the chow line.  Most likely, whoever gets off the boat first, or whoever is toted up first on the list is exchanged, and the remainder is paroled.  It was probably like some inventory tracking method.  This being first in, first out, FIFO. 

Once it started, the cartel process emptied the prison camps on both sides rather expeditiously.  [SLIDE]  In the first week of August 1862, for example, at Aiken’s Landing, 3,021 Union prisoners were sent back and 3,O00 Confederate, a number that is suspiciously well rounded. 

During the ten months or so that the Dix-Hill Cartel was officially operating, about 20,000 Confederate prisoners were turned over, and about 12,000 Union prisoners.  Now were there problems?  As with any sort of legalistic document, yes, there were differences in interpretation.  [SLIDE]  The Confederate exchange agent in the eastern theatre was Judge Robert Ould.  He was known particularly before the war as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in which role he prosecuted then-Congressman, later-General Daniel Sickles for murdering his wife’s lover in Lafayette Park in front of the White House. For your information, Sickles got off by virtue of the insanity defense.  Anyway, over ten years after the war, Judge Ould published an article in the Annals of the War series detailing a number of complaints against the Union in the conduct of the Cartel.  In particular, he alleged that certain Confederate officers were simply detained, sometimes in irons, on frivolous charges.  Also, he alleged that certain Confederate enlisted men were detained on the ground that they were guerillas or bushwhackers, what today again we might call unlawful combatants. 

Now when Judge Ould made his allegations in 1878, a Union officer saw fit to respond, countering that Union prisoners were improperly detained on frivolous charges.  The most notable case being that of Colonel Abel D. Streight, [SLIDE] who in the Spring of 1863 made a daring raid into Alabama.  He was forced to surrender his command to Bedford Forrest.  He and his soldiers were then sent to Richmond for exchange, which is what happened to the enlisted men, but Col. Streight and his officers were detained on the orders of the insurgent leader himself, Jefferson Davis.  It had been decided that Col. Streight and his officers would be sent back to Alabama at the request of the Governor of Alabama, to be tried on the charge of helping slaves to escape.  Apparently, when he surrendered to Bedford Forrest, Colonel Streight had a number of liberated slaves as camp followers.  Now that threat was never carried out, and ten months later, Col. Streight and his officers managed to escape. 

But despite the charges and counter-charges, you’re a bushwhacker, you’ve helped slaves to escape, the Cartel did function rather smoothly.  It seems like each side would occasionally poke and prod the other, but each side knew it could only go so far.  There was a heavy dose of brinkmanship in all this, as Judge Ould himself had admitted, the whole process being overshadowed by the threat of retaliation.  Now in a few minutes, we’ll see how the whole system broke down, but before we do that, I have to back up and talk about paroles a little further. 

Originally, in the war, at least when a Union soldier was paroled, he would go back with his piece of paper and ask to be furloughed home and there to wait till recalled.  Early in the Cartel process, with large numbers of prisoners being paroled due to the lack of sufficient Confederate prisoners to exchange, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton became concerned about how you control these guys and whether you can get them back when you want them. 

As a result, the Union established three so-called parole camps:  Benton Barracks near St. Louis, Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio, and Camp Parole near Annapolis, Maryland.  [SLIDE]  Incidentally, there is still today a town called Parole where Camp Parole once stood.  I don’t know if any of the residents are descendants of former parolees or not.  Conditions in these three camps were generally pretty bad.  Many of the soldiers insisted that the terms of their paroles required that they perform absolutely no military duties.  For example, the camp commanders would want them to drill or to stand guard duty, to maintain discipline and fighting abilities, but many of the soldiers would simply refuse.  General Lew Wallace, later the author of Ben Hur, was the commander for a time of Camp Chase and found it pretty much unmanageable.  At Camp Parole, there was even a riot at one point. 

And the Confederate parole camps were little better.  The main Confederate parole camp was at Demopolis, Alabama.  And the Confederate parolees were on the same frequency as their Union counterparts in insisting on doing no military duties.  Many went even further and refused to show up at the parole camps.

Now I want to spend a little time on this aspect of the parole, as to what paroled prisoners could do.  And for that, I would like to focus on the terms of the parole.  [SLIDE]  Article 6 of the Cartel provided that paroled prisoners “shall not be permitted to take up arms again, nor to serve as military police, or constabulary force in any fort, garrison, or field work, held by either of the respective parties, nor as guards of prisoners, deposit, or stores, nor to discharge any duty usually performed by soldiers . . . .”

Further, while there was some variation in language in the actual parole documents themselves, for the most part they followed the intent of the Cartel.  Here is a parole given by a Confederate. [SLIDE]   And here’s one given by a Unionist.  [SLIDE]

That language seems rather all-encompassing, doesn’t it?  But at the same time, does it sound reasonable that the signatories to the Cartel would have envisioned the parolees as essentially lay-about hotel guests?  Does that sound at all reasonable?  As I said, they would not even stand in formation. 

Let me provide you with a scenario to test this language.  The Cartel began in 1862.  Another event occurring in 1862 was the Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota.  [SLIDE]  This was a rather large affair with great loss of life on both sides.  What would you say if a Minnesota soldier who had been paroled and let’s say, furloughed back home, decided to defend his hometown by signing on with the local militia.  Would that be okay under the Cartel?  Show of hands. Who says no?

Well, I should explain that was not a hypothetical and in fact, there was a whole regiment, the Third Minnesota, which had surrendered in Tennessee, was paroled, and went back to Minnesota, where many of them did in fact fight the Sioux.  Now the Confederacy objected to this and to paroled Union soldiers otherwise being sent out to the Plains to fight Indians, which is something Stanton and those running the parole camps heartily approved of. 

Does anyone see an irony in the Confederate objections?  As we will learn shortly, the Confederates, Jefferson Davis especially, would later find it inconceivable that the Union would enlist African-American troops, as though that were just the depths of barbarism.  Yet here, the Confederacy was pretty happy to have settlers attacked by the Sioux, as though they were functionally their allies. 

And my problem with their objections more legalistically is that the Sioux were not parties to the Dix-Hill Cartel.  And I would say the same result would obtain, if, let’s say, something like the Trent Affair had escalated, and Britain had launched a punitive expedition down from Canada.  I would say paroled Union soldiers would be allowed to oppose a British invasion of Maine, for instance.  But that’s just my opinion.  The counter-argument would be, well, if they were in Belle Island Prison, they couldn’t fight the Sioux or the British.  The audience is encouraged to consult their own law-of-war attorneys.  And incidentally, the British did draw up plans for an invasion of Maine, so I’m not just smoking something.   

The Cartel system cranked along for almost a year with some problems, but for the most part, it seemed to work, in a European, Napoleonic sort of fashion.  But in late 1862, after the qualified Union victory at Antietam, President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1, 1863.  One section of the proclamation announced that now African-American men would be enlisted in the Union Army.  [SLIDE]  That is the section that Jeff Davis had called the most “execrable act of guilty man.”  That seems an overstatement when you consider all human history.  And as I just mentioned, it is apparently even worse than condoning the slaughter of women and children in Minnesota. 

In a resolution passed on May 1, 1863, the Confederate Congress declared that captured African-American soldiers would be turned over to the states, presumably to slavery or some other horrible fate.  White officers of such troops would be “deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall if captured be put to death or otherwise punished at the discretion of the court.” 

The North immediately objected, noting that the race of the troops involved was nowhere mentioned in the Cartel and that the Union would “throw its protection around all officers and men without regard to color” and would promptly retaliate for any violation of the Cartel.  On May 25, 1863, orders went out that no Confederate officers were to be paroled or exchanged, and that was either through the agents for exchange or by commanders in the field.  On July 13, 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, ordered that no more prisoners of any rank would be delivered to the exchange points. 

Now it has become an article of faith among Lost Cause types that the Union only let the Cartel collapse, thus leading proximately to the horrors of Andersonville, Camp Douglas, and other dreadful locations, simply because with the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, it was now in a stronger position vis-à-vis the South as to the whole prisoner calculus.  And cobbled together from later statements by General Grant, the Union supposedly believed that it was more able to absorb the losses from its troops being imprisoned than was the South.  And as the war continued, what was happening at Andersonville became widely known, and Grant was further reinforced in his views because he believed that it was not a fair trade to take back the poor devils at Andersonville who were in no condition to fight anymore and give up hale and hearty Confederate prisoners who would immediately take up their place in the line again.  Now obviously, Grant did not realize how bad conditions were at Camp Douglas and other Northern prisons.  Further, he did not factor in how Confederate prisoners, even if they were healthy, may not want to go back and fight anyway.  The war had been dragging on, and many Southern areas had been occupied by the Union in any event. 

But just because General Grant had these cold-blooded, utilitarian views, does not mean that that is why the Cartel collapsed.  The chronology seems quite clear.  The South announces they will enslave African-American troops and likely execute their white officers.  The North says, okay, you want to go there, the Cartel is done. 

Now the Lost Cause types always explain how the South kept trying to have the Cartel re-established, that they were the humanitarians in this whole affair, but the problem is that they would not rescind that resolution of the Confederate Congress.  As one historian has noted, the South could have easily called the North’s bluff by simply rescinding the resolution, but they just wouldn’t do it.  Later in the war, Benjamin (Beast) Butler [SLIDE] became the Union exchange agent in the East who had to deal with Judge Ould.  And he had many lawyerly discussions with Judge Ould.  After all, the old beast was a prominent lawyer before the war, and as he once put it to the judge:  “You care more about your Negroes than your own men.”  Oh, ice cold!  But that was the gist of it since their own men were currently suffering at Camp Douglas and other hellholes in the North.

One thing that this debate misses I think is so what about the actual motivation of the Union.  Grant wanted to end the war as soon as possible.  Was that a bad motivation? 

This reminds me of the story from a few years about a controversy in World War II.  And I apologize if this sounds like a poor analogy, but I think it casts some light on this matter:  It was revealed at one point that President Roosevelt had been presented with a plan to bomb the rail lines leading in to the Auschwitz concentration camp.  The Allies by then were aware of what was happening and this was suggested as a possible response.  It turns out that plan was not acted on.  Many considered this heartless, but others questioned what good it would.  Still others noted that maybe the best way to help anyone in the camps was to end the war as soon as possible, by having bomber crews risk their lives going after the Ploesti oil fields and other strategic targets.  And maybe we can say the same of General Grant.  The best way to save the prisoners at Andersonville and elsewhere was to end the war swiftly. 

[SLIDE]  Now even after the Cartel collapsed, exchanges still occasionally occurred between commanders in the field, very often of wounded troops especially.  The Cartel only came back into some functioning form in early 1865, when the Confederate Congress agreed to selectively rescind its policy of turning white officers in command of African-American troops over to the states for possible execution.  Now they did not agree to rescind the policy on enslaving African-American troops, but apparently the rescission of the officer-execution policy and the approaching end of the war was enough to allow the Union to agree once again to begin exchanges of some prisoners, which started again in February, 1865, but only starting with those Southerners from occupied states.

Now on April 2, 1865, with the imminent collapse of the Confederacy, Grant again suspended the exchanges, and then [SLIDE] with the surrenders of large numbers of Confederate soldiers at Appomattox Courthouse and at Bennett Place, the soldiers, including Robert E. Lee, were paroled, but now the language of the paroles was altered to be more of a loyalty oath to the Union. 

One interesting postscript is one Confederate would was not offered a parole was Judge Ould.  He complained in that Annals of the War article I mentioned earlier how he was taken into custody and put on trial before a military commission.  According to Judge Ould, he was singled out for this treatment because of his prior career.  You remembered I said before the war, he prosecuted old Dan Sickles for shooting his wife’s lover.  Does anyone happen to know who Sickles hired for his defense attorney?  [SLIDE]  Edwin Stanton.  Yes, and according to Judge Ould, this was why he was not given proper treatment.  Now it turns out that the military commission acquitted Judge Ould, but his bitterness and suspicion remained.  

Before I open this up for questions, I just want to conclude by saying how many will characterize the Civil War as the first modern war and others will characterize it as the last classical war.  I would point to this aspect of prisoner exchanges as showing how it was a little of both.  You begin with these humane notions of the enlightenment, but then once someone decides to recruit soldiers of a different skin color or someone decides this has to be a war of conquest, not just one of pitched battles, then it has a determinedly modern feel.  

Now from my research, prisoner exchanges never seem to have again been conducted on the scale or level of formality that they were under the Dix-Hill Cartel, but they certainly have continued to pop in conflicts over time, most notably in modern times between the Israelis and the Arab countries.  But typically those have been ad hoc and quite disproportionate, with the Israelis exchanging hundreds of prisoners for a few or maybe only a single Israeli.  Sometimes they have even exchanged live prisoners for the bodies of their men.  Recently, in the Syrian Civil War, some Iranian fighters captured by the Syrian rebels were exchanged for some of their people captured by the Assad regime.  And you may have read the Taliban have proposed that the U.S. exchange five of their operatives held at Guantanamo for the only known American prisoner, Bowe Bergdahl of Idaho, being held somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan.    

Any questions?

Delivered July 17, 2013