Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/534

496 cines, stipulating that they might be brought into the Confederate lines by United States surgeons and dispensed by them solely for the benefit of Union prisoners. To this offer there was no reply. In the meantime the blockade was effective and medicines were contraband.

Colonel Ould declares concerning Colonel Mulford that &quot; while he discharged his duties with great fidelity to his own government he was kind and tender to Confederate prisoners an honorable and truthful gentleman to whom he could appeal for the truth of statements with which he was familiar,&quot; and other corroborations of Quid’s testimony are to be found in the report of Major General Butler to the committee on the conduct of the war. Ould was subpoenaed to testify in the trial of Wirts and expressed his intention to tell the whole story as to the conduct of the two administrations in the matter of the treatment of prisoners, but his subpoena was revoked by the prosecution. Mr. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, was conspicuously active from the beginning to the close of the Confederate war in attempts to secure the usual exchanges of prisoners common among civilized nations at war, on which account he was particularly qualified to speak as a credible witness. Condemning the cruel and untenable position of the Federal administration that the crew of the Savannah and all other ships of the Confederate navy were pirates, he expresses the opinion in his work prepared since the war that the desistance of the authorities at Washington from this position was due alone to fear of England, and that the cartel for general exchange afterward agreed to was forced by public sentiment. The policy pursued by the administration at Washington as he viewed its effects, produced the difficulties of exchange, and the consequent intolerable sufferings and deaths in Northern and Southern prisons. The question of exchange was treated by the Federal authorities almost solely as a policy of war, by which captured men