“Yours truly,
“R. OULD.
“P. S.—General Butler’s correspondence is all on one side, as I was instructed, at the date of his letters, to hold no correspondence with him. I corresponded with Mulford or General Hitchcock.
“R. OULD.”
In another letter, written about the same time, Colonel Ould thus invites investigation:
“General Mulford will sustain every thing I have herein written. He is a man of honor and courage, and I do not think will hesitate to tell the truth. I think it would be well for you to make the appeal to him, as it has become a question of veracity.”
But though President Davis and Colonel Ould are known by thousands of people, North and South, to be men of unimpeachable truthfulness, and though no honorable enemy would question their statements, we can not hope that their testimony will make headway against the intolerant prejudices and passions of faction. General B. F. Butler is doubtless sufficiently orthodox, and, besides, his testimony is voluntary. Says this exponent of latter-day “loyalty:”
“The great importance of the question; the fearful responsibility for the many thousands of lives which, by the refusal to exchange, were sacrificed by the most cruel forms of death; from cold, starvation, and pestilence of the prison-pens of Raleigh and Andersonville, being more than all the British soldiers killed in the wars of Napoleon; the anxiety of fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, to know the exigency which caused this terrible—and perhaps as it may have seemed to them useless and unnecessary—destruction of those dear to them, by horrible deaths, each and all have compelled me to this exposition, so that it may be seen that these lives were spent as a part of the system of attack upon the rebellion, devised by the wisdom of the General-in-Chief of the armies, to destroy it by depletion, depending upon our superior numbers to win the victory at last.
“The loyal mourners will doubtless derive solace from this fact, and appreciate all the more highly the genius which conceived the plan and the success won at so great a cost.”
The New York Tribune will also be accepted as competent authority. Referring to the occurrences of 1864, the Tribune editorially says:
“In August the rebels offered to renew the exchange, man for man. General Grant then telegraphed the following important order: ‘It is hard on our men, held in Southern prisons, not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. Every man released on parole or otherwise becomes an active soldier against us at once, either directly or indirectly. If we commence a system of exchange which liberates all prisoners taken, we will have to fight on till the whole South is exterminated. If we hold those caught, they amount to no more than dead men. At this particular time, to release all rebel prisoners North would insure Sherman’s defeat, and would compromise our safety here.’”