Why Was The Prisoner Exchange Stopped?

Why Was The Prisoner Exchange Stopped?

Why the prisoner exchange was stopped became a hotly controversial subject following the war, and many blatantly self-serving theories were forthcoming from the North.  James Madison Page, the Union officer who wrote THE TRUE STORY OF ANDERSONVILLE PRISON (1908) describes some of these theories: "The South refused to exchange a negro for a rebel prisoner." "The rebels would not exchange on an equitable basis as to relative rank of officers;" "The rebel Government resorted to frivolous pretexts to delay exchange as death was doing its work at Andersonville, Salisbury and other prisons."
Page dismisses all of these arguments as mere subterfuge. Even today, howThe Movieever, many of these old Yankee lies have been dusted off and reissued with Ken Burns the most prominent quartermaster. In the PBS series "The Civil War," Burns had the audacity to suggest that Grant stopped the prisoner exchange because he was morally offended by the Confederate Government's refusal to exchange negro prisoners!

In his text, Ken Burns states: "...Grant ordered an end to the prisoner exchange in effect since early in the war, until and unless the South formally agreed to recognize 'no distinction whatever in the exchange between white and colored prisoners.’ " (Page 336.)
So we see that the real reason the prisoner exchange was stopped was because Grant was an egalitarian who was willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of Union prisoners as an act of moral principle. Even considering Mr. Grant's demonstrated proclivity for expending Union lives, one might conclude that Ken Burns, and his Reconstructionist forbears, would be deterred by simple embarrassment at advancing such an unlikely tenet. After all, black prisoners of war were a minuscule number of the total Union soldiers in Confederate hands. Melvin Grigsby, a Union POW at Andersonville, wrote: "There was not a negro soldier in Andersonville or in any other prison for a considerable time. When they were captured they were either sent back to their old masters or put to work on rebel fortifications, and they were not starved and did not suffer. [Secretary of War] Stanton and others who insisted on this point, might as well have insisted that every black in the South, whose liberty had been granted him by the Emancipation Proclamation and who was detained by his old master, should be a subject of exchange."

James Madison Page agrees. In July of 1864, Henry Wirz had paroled five prisoners to act as emissaries for the others. These emissaries carried a petition to Washington that was signed by almost every Union soldier in Andersonville, demanding that the U.S. Government abide by the original exchange agreement. Their efforts were not successful, and some of them returned to Andersonville to report to their fellows. Page writes, "When the Andersonville emissaries returned from Washington there was not one word about the exchange of negro soldiers being in the way of our release. It was then not thought of. I know that for the past forty-two years that matter has been published broadcast in the North as the reason why we were not exchanged. Grigsby is right in this. The Washington authorities had concluded to stop the exchange before there were any Negro prisoners."
In spite of all the Northern post-war moralizing, the real reason the Union soldiers were not exchanged is because the Northern government considered them expendable. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, "We will not exchange able-bodied men for skeletons," and "We do not propose to reinforce the rebel army by exchanging prisoners."

Ulysses S. Grant later confirmed this in his memoirs, explaining that exchange meant reinforcement of the rebel army, and that the exchanged rebel soldier behind brigades and fortifications fighting on the defensive was equivalent to three Union soldiers attacking him.
Page writes, "This was the Stanton policy, and if this atrocious and inhuman doctrine is anyway meritorious, the 'War Secretary' is entitled to the credit."