In regard to the policy of exchange of prisoners, Gen. B. F. Butler has irrefutably fixed the responsibility on the government at Washington and on General Grant.1
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The proclamation was not published until after the date on which Davis knew I was to leave New Orleans.
If it had been published while I was in command in New Orleans and before I got to sea, there would have been an answer made to it which might have astonished both Benjamin and Davis.
Being “outlawed,” I should have given their rebel friends a taste of the law of the outlaw.
This proclamation was mere brutum fulmen. It was directed as much against the government as myself.
Afterwards, when I consented to return to the service, I was put in charge of all the rebel prisoners as commissioner of exchange, and Davis and his government had to deal with me and me only; and he did so for months, and none of the outlawing of negro soldiers was attempted to be carried into effect.
The proclamation also threatened that no officer would be paroled until I was punished by hanging.
Yet the parole went on in all the armies precisely as though the proclamation had never been published.
And when in Virginia, in 1864, a portion of my colored troops raised in Virginia were captured and put by Lee into the trenches to work on the rebel fortifications, I wrote him a note stating that if they were not immediately taken out and treated as prisoners of war, I would put in Dutch Gap to work, under the fire of the rebels, the Virginia reserves whom I had captured, who were highly respectable gentlemen of Richmond, over sixty years of age. It is needless to say that afterwards the negroes were treated as prisoners of war.
Jefferson Davis did not believe one word of the proclamation himself.
That is evinced by the fact that while that document declared me to be utterly vile and a felon, yet he treats me quite differently in his “Rise and fall of the Confederate government.”
In that work he discusses the exchange of prisoners, and, after quoting page after page of my report to my government showing the plans and conditions upon which the exchange of prisoners were carried on, he closes by saying:--
1 Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. II., p. 607.
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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