The Exchange of prisoners.
A correspondent of the New York Times writes to that paper a long complaint about the conduct of the United States Government in leaving its men in the Confederate prisons. He says:‘ In my opinion, the Secretary has taken and obstinately held a position of cold-blooded policy, (that is, he thinks it policy,) in this matter, more cruel than anything done by the secessionists. Ostensibly and officially saying he will not exchange at all unless the secession leaders will give us, on average terms, all the blacks they capture in military action. The Secretary has also said (and this is the basis of his course and policy) that it is not for the benefit of the Government of the United States that the power of the secessionists should be depleted by some 50,000 men in good condition now in our hands, besides getting relieved of the support of nearly the same number of human wrecks and ruins, of no advantage to us, now in theirs.
’ Major-General Butler, in my opinion, has also incorporated in the question of exchange a needless amount of personal pique and an unbecoming obstinacy. He, too, has taken his stand on the exchange of all black soldiers, has persisted in it without regard to consequences, and has made the whole of the large and complicated question of general exchange turn upon that one item alone, while it is but a drop in the bucket. Then he makes it too much a personal contest and matter of vanity who shall conquer, and an occasion to revenge the bad temper and insults of the South toward himself.
In my opinion, the anguish and death of these ten to fifteen thousand American young men, with all the added and incalculable sorrow, long drawn out, amid families at home, rests mainly upon the heads of members of our own Government; and if they persist, the death of the remainder of the Union prisoners, and often worse than death, will be added.
The Times, in an editorial on the same subject, uses the following language:
‘ It is worse than useless to disguise or ignore the fact that the condition of Union prisoners in rebel hands is exciting the profoundest feeling in the public mind, and that the action of the Government upon the subject is not regarded with satisfaction. This feeling is perfectly natural and not unreasonable. So far as the public has been informed of the action of the Government, that action does not seem adequate to the awful emergencies of the case. And while the whole subject is surrounded with difficulties, it is felt that nothing but absolute necessity — no question of etiquette, no fear of embarrassing concessions, no question of policy and expediency merely, should lead the Government to permit forty thousand of our soldiers to perish by starvation and exposure at the hands of their Southern captors.
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