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
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