DECEMBER 27, 1864:
Walt Whitman sends a letter to the editors of The New York Times and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle decrying the
continued cessation of prisoner exchanges. Such exchanges had ceased when it
was discovered that the Confederacy was enslaving or re-enslaving United States
Colored Troops rather than paroling them.
The cessation of the exchanges was
undoubtedly morally right, but for Union men taken prisoner it meant that they
faced starvation and epidemic conditions in rudely constructed and chaotically
managed Southern Prisoner of War Camps.
Whitman clearly felt that the policy regarding U.S.C.T. cost the Union too high a price, calling their numbers "a drop in the bucket" and ignoring the especial brutalities they experienced as Southern captives. And so Whitman wrote passionately but blindly:
What Stops the General Exchange of Prisoners of
War—Three-fourths of Our Men Already Exchanged by Death, or Mental and Bodily
Ruin, and the Rest will soon Follow.
To the Editor of the New-York Times:
The public mind is
deeply excited, and most righteously so, at the starvation of the United States
prisoners of war in the hands of the Secessionists. The dogged sullenness and
scoundrelism prevailing everywhere among the prison guards and officials,
(with, I think, the general exception of the surgeons,) the measureless
torments of the forty or fifty thousand helpless young men, with all their
humiliations, hunger, cold, filth, despair, hope utterly given out, and the
more and more frequent mental imbecility, I have myself seen the proofs of in
so many instances, that I know the facts well, and know that the half has not
been told, nor the tithe either. But there is another and full as important
side to the story. Whose fault is it at bottom that our men have not been
exchanged? To my knowledge it is understood by Col. MULFORD, our capital
Executive Officer of Exchange, and also by those among us who have had longest
and nearest contact with the secession exchange officers, that the Government
of the latter have been and are ready to exchange man for man as far as
prisoners go, (certainly all the whites, and, as I understand it, a large
proportion of the blacks also.)
Under the President
(whose humane, conscientious and fatherly heart, I have abiding faith in,) the
control of exchange has remained with the Secretary of War, and also with
Major-Gen. BUTLER. 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 repleted 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.
Maj.-Gen. 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.
This is the spirit in
which the faith of the Government of the United States toward fifty thousand of
its bravest young men—soldiers faithful to it in its hours of extremest
peril—has been, for the past year, and is now, handled. Meantime, while the
thing has been held in abeyance in this manner, considerably more than
one-fourth of those helpless and most wretched men (their last hours passed in the
thought that they were abandoned by their Government, and left to their fate),
have indeed been exchanged by deaths of starvation, (Mr. Editor, or you,
reader, do you know what a death by starvation actually is?) leaving half the
remainder closely prepared to follow, from mental and physical atrophy; and
even then the remnant cannot long tarry behind. So that the Secretary and the
Major-General mentioned, may find their policy work out more even than they
calculated.
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.
WALT WHITMAN.
