Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

The practical application of Davis's inhuman order, here referred to, was met by a letter from the Secretary of War to the Secretary of the Navy, which made the Conspirators pause, for it showed a determination on the part of the Government to use the law of retaliation, when necessary.¹ Yet the Confederates refused to treat the negro as a subject for exchange, and that humane arrangement in war entirely ceased in March, 1864, because justice required it. Then the Government referred the matter of exchange to General Grant, when that officer first instructed General Butler, in charge of the business at Fortress Monroe, with the active Colonel Mulford (who afterward became the chief Commissioner of exchange of prisoners) as his assistant, to decline, until further ordered, all negotiations for exchange, and afterward instructed him to consider the determination of the Confederate authorities to make a distinction between white and colored prisoners, as a refusal on their part to agree to further exchange. Thus the Conspirators, by their perfidy and barbarity, shut the door of exchange, increased the number of Union prisoners, and fearfully augmented their sufferings.

Unimpeached and unimpeachable testimony shows, that in refusing to acknowledge the captive negro soldiers, and the officers who led them, to be proper subjects for exchange, and other acts which they well knew that, through the high sense of honor and justice which always guided the Government, would lead to a cessation of exchange, was only a part of a plan of the Conspirators, deliberately formed, for murdering, or permanently disabling by the slow process of physical exhaustion, the Union captives in their hands. This is a grave charge, and should not be made against any man or body of men, without a firm conviction of its truth, and the most conclusive proof. With such conviction, and satisfied that such proof is not only conclusive, but abundant, the charge is here made, and put on record, that the world may know somewhat of the character of the men who conceived, planned, and carried on a rebellion against a beneficent Government, without any other excuse than that of the sorely tempted sinner — the overpowering influence of that depravity which the slave system generated by allowing an unbridled exercise of the baser passions of human nature²--a depravity which culminated after a career of two hundred years or more, in what Blackstone declares to be the sum of all wickedness denounced in the Decalogue, namely, treason. Proofs from ten thousand tongues certify and justify the conclusions