"I am alone clothed with full power for the purpose of arranging for the exchange of prisoners. Being thus empowered, I am ready to confer with you on the subject, or the Honorable Messrs. Seddon and Conrad, or any other persons appearing for that purpose. I am prepared to arrange for the restoration of all the prisoners to their homes on fair terms of exchange, man for man, and officer for officer of equal grade, assimilating the grade of officers of the army and navy, when necessary, and agreeing upon equitable terms for the number of men or officers, of inferior grade, to be exchanged for any of higher grade when the occasion shall arrive. That all the surplus prisoners on either side be exchanged on parole, with the agreement that any prisoners of war taken by the other party shall be returned in exchange as fast as captured, and this system to be continued while hostilities continue.

"I would further inform you, or any other person selected for the purpose of making arrangements for the exchange of prisoners, that the prisoners taken on board of vessels, or otherwise in maritime conflict, by the forces of the United States, have been put, and are now held, only in military custody, and on the same footing as other prisoners taken in arms.”

The proposition, it appears, was readily accepted by our government, and a memorandum made as a basis for a cartel. It was proposed in this memorandum that the prisoners of war in the hands of each government should be exchanged, man for man, the officers being assimilated as to rank, &c.; that our privateersmen should be exchanged on the footing of prisoners of war; that any surplus remaining on either side, after these exchanges, should be released, and that hereafter, during the whole continuance of the war, prisoners taken on either side. should be paroled within ten days after their capture, and delivered on the frontier of their own country.

General Wool promptly agreed to all the propositions except two. In lieu of the compensation basis of equivalents contained in one of the items of the memorandum, he proposed the cartel of equivalents adopted by Great Britain and the United States, in the war of 1812, and General Cobb accepted it.

He also objected to the provisions in another item, which required each party to pay the expense of transporting their prisoners to the frontier of the country of the prisoners. The provision met his entire approval, but he did not feel authorized, by his instructions, to incorporate it into the proposed cartel, and, therefore, desired time to consult his government on the subject.

The interview closed with the promise from General Wool that he would notify General Cobb, as soon as he could hear from his government, on that point.

On the first of March General Cobb held his second interview with him, in which he (General Cobb) proposed to enter into a cartel, containing the stipulations previously set forth. Gen. Wool then replied that his government would not agree to the proposition that each party should pay the expense of transporting their prisoners to the frontier, when General Cobb promptly waived it, thus leaving the cartel free from all his objections, and just what General Wool had himself proposed in his letter of the 13th February, to General Huger.

Upon this, General Wool informed General Cobb that his government had changed his instructions, and abruptly broke off the negotiation.

In the mean time our government, in a very curious or very foolish anticipation of the good faith of the North, had directed the discharge of the prisoners held by us as hostages for the safety and proper treatment of our privateersmen, who were confined in felons' cells and threatened with the gallows. Cols. Lee, Cogswell, and Wood, and Major Revere were sent to their own country; the remaining hostages were brought on parole from distant points to Richmond, on their way to be delivered up, at the expense of this government, and their surrender was only suspended on receipt of intelligence from General Cobb, that he saw reason to suspect bad faith on the part of the enemy.

The perfidy of the North was basely accomplished.*

The

*This act of deception on the part of the North was but one of a long series of acts of Yankee perfidy, and of their abnegation of the rights of civilized war. When McDowell left Washington city to take Richmond, his army was supplied with handcuffs to iron rebels. After the battle of Bull Run they sent a white flag to ask permission to bury their dead. It was humanely granted. They left their dead to bury their dead, and attempted, under the protection of that white flag, to erect batteries for our destruction. On the battle-field of Manassas they unfurled a Confederate flag, and shouted to our troops not to fire upon them, that they were our friends, and then they fired upon our troops and fled. At Manassas and Pensacola they repeatedly and deliberately fired upon our hospitals, when over them a yellow flag was waving. In Hampton Roads they hung out a white flag, and then prostituted the protection it secured to them to the cowardly assassination of our brave seamen. At Newbern, in violation of the laws of war, they attempted to shell a city containing several thousand women and children, before either demanding a surrender, or giving the citizens notice of their intentions. A Kentuckian went into a Federal camp to reclaim a fugitive slave, and they tied him uf

correspondence of the Federal authorities, to which we have alluded, on this subject, constitutes a chapter of diplomacy qualified to attract the scorn of all civilized and honorable nations. At the time when it was believed our government held the larger number of prisoners, the Federal government proposed to exchange all prisoners, and to place on parole, in their own country, the surplus held by either party; and our government agreed to the proposition. Before the agreement could be reduced to writing, and signed by the parties, the casualties of war, in the fall of Fort Donelson, reversed this state of things, and gave the Federal government the larger number of prisoners. With this change of things that government changed its policy, and deliberately, and perfidiously, and shamelessly receded from the propositions to which it had been distinctly committed by every obligation of truth, honor, and good faith.

While Mr. Benjamin, Secretary of War, by a curious act of supererogation was releasing our most important prisoners of war in advance of the conclusion of negotiations, sending them North without waiting to have them regularly and safely exchanged under a flag of truce in Norfolk harbor, the enemy were conveying the prisoners captured at Fort Donelson to Chicago and other points more distant from their homes, and were parading the officers who fell into their power through the entire breadth of the land, from western Tennessee, to Fort Warren in Boston harbor, where they were incarcerated. For the prisoners so curiously, and with such unnecessary haste, dispatched to the North by Mr. Benjamin, not a single officer taken at Fort Donelson, nor a single captive privateersman, had been restored to his home. With an excess of zeal well calcuand gave him twenty-five lashes upon his bare back, in the presence of his runaway slave. It was repeatedly proposed by the people of the South to treat such an enemy without ceremony or quarter, by hanging out the black flag, and making the war a bellum internecinum; but while the South debated, talked, and threatened, the North acted, availing itself of the most ferocious and brutal expedients of the war, arming the slaves, breaking faith on every occasion of expediency, disregarding flags of truce, stealing private property, ravishing women, bombarding hospitals, and setting at defiance every law of civilized warfare. Such was the perfidy and brutality of the North, to which the South responded with the puerile threat of a black flag, which was never hoisted, and which did not even serve the purposes of a scarecrow to its bold and unscrupulous enemy

lated to draw attention from his own part of the transaction, Mr. Benjamin proposed, as a retaliation upon the perfidy of the North, to discharge our own citizens who were subject to parole; but happily a counsel, which proposed to redress a wrong by an act disreputable to ourselves and in violation of what were the obligations of our own honor in the sight of the civilized world, was rejected alike by the government and the country, who were content to commit the dishonor of their enemy, without attempting to copy it under pleas of retaliation, to the justice of history and the future judgments of the world.

CHAPTER XI.

Organization of the permanent Government of the South.-The Policy of England. -Declaration of Earl Russell.-Onset of the Northern Forces.-President Davis's Message to Congress.-The Addition of New States and Territories to the Southern Confederacy. Our Indian Allies.-The Financial Condition, North and South.-Deceitful Prospects of Peace.-Effect of the Disasters to the South.-Action of Congress. -The Conscript Bill.-Provisions vs. Cotton.-Barbarous Warfare of the North.-The Anti-slavery Sentiment.-How it was unmasked in the War.-Emancipation Measures in the Federal Congress.-Spirit of the Southern People.-The Administration of Jefferson Davis.-His Cabinet.-The Defensive Policy.-The NAVAL ENGAGEMENT IN HAMPTON ROADS.-Iron-clad Vessels.-What the Southern Government might have done. The Narrative of General Price's Campaign resumed.-His Retreat into Arkansas.-The BATTLE OF ELK HORN.-Criticism of the Result.-Death of General McCulloch.-The BATTLE OF VALVERDE.-The Foothold of the Confederates in New Mexico.-Change of the Plan of Campaign in Virginia. - Abandonment of the Potomac Line by the Confederates.-The BATTLE OF KERNSTOWN.-Colonel Turner Ashby.Appearance of McClellan's Army on the Peninsula.- Firmness of General Magruder. -The New Situation of the War in Virginia.-Recurrence of Disasters to the South on the Water.-The Capture of Newbern.-Fall of Fort Pulaski and Fort Macon.Common Sense vs. "West Point."

THE permanent government of the Confederate States was organized on the 22d day of February, in a season of reverses to our arms and at a dark hour in our national fortunes.

All hopes of foreign interference were positively at an end. On the meeting of the British Parliament in the early part of February, Earl Russell had declared that the blockade of the American ports had been effective from the 15th of August, in the face of the facts that the dispatches of Mr. Bunch, the English consul at Charleston, said that it was not so; and that authentic accounts and letters of merchants showed that any ships, leaving for the South, could be insured by a premium of seven and a-half to fifteen per cent. England had accepted the Treaty of Paris, and yet did not hesitate to violate the principles that had been definitely consecrated by article four of that treaty, by declaring the Federal blockade effective, for no other reason than that "considerable prudence was necessary in the American question." In the House of Commons, Mr. Gregory asserted that the non-observation of the Treaty of