Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[584] as an illustration of the fact that in none of our battles, even the most successful, did we obtain what is known to military history as a victory, which I understand to be a conflict between two armies in which one is overcome, and its efficiency as an army substantially destroyed. The army in this case was only repulsed, and allowed quietly to retreat across the Potomac in a condition not to be further molested by our army.

There is one episode in my life of the greatest possible interest and importance, not only to myself personally but to the whole country. It caused the deepest feeling and the most acrimonious discussion, and as the true history of it is necessary to be stated at some length, it may as well be done here as elsewhere, as it wholly disconnects itself from any subsequent phase of my history.

Fortress Monroe was the point from which all exchange of prisoners, east of the Alleghanies, had been made during the disagreement between the commissioners of exchange on the part of the United States, and the rebel commissioner, Mr. Ould. This disagreement was substantially as to the number which had been determined and credited on either side, and in consequence of it all exchange of prisoners had ceased. The rebels were confessedly in debt to us in a balance of some eighteen thousand prisoners for whom they had given us no equivalent.

Major-Generals Grant and Banks had paroled large numbers of prisoners at Port Hudson and Vicksburg. If they had been held as prisoners they could not have been put again into the Confederate service without a corresponding number being given us in exchange. The fact that these men were soon afterwards re-enlisted was claimed by us to be a breach of the cartel on the part of the Confederates. Meanwhile our prisoners, to the number of some thirteen thousand, were suffering and dying by cold and starvation in Richmond and elsewhere, while we held in our prisons some twenty-six thousand of the rebel officers and men well cared for, properly clothed, and well fed.

I had been appointed to the command of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina Nov. 2, 1863, and subsequently commissioner for the exchange of prisoners.

Upon assuming command my attention was called to the suffering of the prisoners at Belle Isle and Libby Prison, at Richmond. In