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

[594] Or, if the Confederates chose to turn them against Sherman they would bring his force to such inferiority in numbers as to determine his campaign. While the great sufferings of our prisoners remaining in their hands was much to be regretted, yet, being held, it gave us their equivalent and many more, because in their desperation the rebels would have no hesitation in putting, as they had done, their paroled prisoners before exchange was declared, directly into their armies, which we had never done; and this ought to be taken into consideration as to the question of exchange. He was further inclined to think that if exchanges were to cease that fact would take away the great temptation to that class of our soldiers who were not Americans, or if Americans who had not enlisted voluntarily into our armies or were induced by great bounties to do so, to surrender themselves prisoners so as to escape the perils of the campaign and be exchanged and go home. If these men came back at all, it was only upon the temptation of still larger bounties. Therefore one of our prisoners detained in custody in rebel hands was equivalent to at least three soldiers in the rebel line. He concluded by saying that at all hazards exchanges were to be stopped.

I told him that I had no doubt, as I had expressed it in a letter to the Secretary of War, that all the points of difference between us would be yielded by the rebels, except the question of the exchange of our colored soldiers captured by them. I said I doubted whether, if we stopped exchanging man for man, simply on the ground that our soldiers were more useful to us in rebel prisons than they would be in our lines, however true that might be, or speciously stated to the country, the proposition could not be sustained against the clamor that would at once arise against the administration. For such a course would be thought to be a sanction and permission by the government to the rebels to continue the alleged starvations, hardships, and slow torture. I doubted whether the government could or would stand the pressure of our people, intensified, as it would be, by the letters, communications, and complaints of all our prisoner soldiers; and I suggested that the effect of this course was well worth considering because of the use the Copperhead party would make of it in the coming presidential election which was to be debated while we were carrying on the coming political campaign.