Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/522



HERE were two obstacles to exchange of prisoners from the outset of the war, one of which was theoretical, and is noticed by Hon. S. S. Cox in his &quot; Three Decades of Federal Legislation.&quot; It was the theory that the fighting which was going on was not public war, but only an insurrection. Dilemmas occurred almost daily in the career of this theory, out of which the only extrication was to affirm the singular doctrine that the United States had the privilege of saying when the fighting was public war and when it was only insurrection. The facility with which statesmen accommodated principles to conditions in those dreadful days of peril to life and liberty, now astounds sober reason. The other obstacle was that practical one, appearing later in the struggle, which General Grant presented from the military standpoint in opposition to exchange of prisoners near the opening of the spring campaign of 1864, in these words: &quot;I did not deem it advisable or just to the men who had to fight our battles to reinforce the enemy with thirty or forty thousand disciplined troops at that time.&quot;

Grant’s view was practical military cruelty, while the theoretical idea was the product of the combined genius for extricative expedients for which Mr. Seward and Mr. Stanton had no equals. Mr. Cox punctured the theory at the outset in 1861 when Mr. Lincoln applied it to the case