feet from the muzzles of mounted guns, loaded with grape, and canister, and musket-balls, doing nothing. When they are commanded to march through fire, and reach the ditch, they must be provided with the means to cross it, or jump into it, and sticking their bayonets into the slope of the scarp, form with them ladders by means of which the more active can mount the parapet. But before men are sent into a position-recollecting that every ditch will be swept by a flank fire-they must not only be instructed in their duties, but supported by a steady fire upon the enemy. Advantage must be taken of darkness or the weather; false assaults must be made in conjunction with the true one, and so supported, too, that the false attack may, if circumstances favor it, be followed up and made the real one." Indeed, the great calamity of Bethel was, that it concealed from the country for a time the merit of the man who, more than most, was able to give it the service it needed. The country wanted a man who could not be scared by phantoms, and whose energy and talents could keep phantoms from growing into grim realities. The man was at hand, but imperfectly recognized. A complete success at Great Bethel, added to the fame of Baltimore and Annapolis, would have given General Butler a position before the country which could not have been disregarded. The failure there nearly cost him a rejection by the senate. He was saved by two votes only, and that bare majority he owed to the friendly exertions of that Colonel Baker whose life was squandered at Ball's Bluff. Colonel Baker had served with his regiment at Fortress Monroe. An interesting correspondence between General Butler and Colonel Magruder, shows us that the question of the exchange of pris oners was not regarded as a difficult one, at that stage of the war, by either of those officers. Colonel Magruder had been an acquaintance of General Butler in happier times. They had last met, I believe, at a ball at Newport: COLONEL MAGRUDER TO GENERAL BUTLER. "HEAD-QUARTERS, YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA, June 12th, 1861. "MAJOR-GENERAL B. F. BUTLER, Commanding Fortress Monroe, &c. "SIR: Our people had orders to bring any communications intended for the commander of the forces at County Bridge' or Bethel to this place, and by a particular route-hence the delay. "I understood from Captain Davies, the bearer of the flag, that you have four prisoners, to wit: One trooper and three citizens; Messrs. Carter, Whiting, Lively and Mariam, the latter three being citizens of Virginia, in your possession; and you state that you are desirous to exchange them for a corresponding number of federal troops, who are prisoners with me. I accept your offer, so far as the trooper, who was a vidette, in question, and will send to-morrow, at four o'clock in the afternoon, if it will suit your convenience, a federal soldier in exchange for him. With respect to the wounded, my first care was to have them attended to. Medical advice and careful nursing have been provided, and your dead I had buried on the field of battle, and this was done in sight of the conflagration which was devastating the homes of our citizens. "The citizens in your possession are men who doubtless defended their homes against a foe who, to their certain knowledge, had, with or without the authority of the federal government, destroyed the private property of their neighbors, breaking up even the pianos of the ladies, and committing depredations, numberless and of every description. The federal prisoners, if agreeable to you, will be sent to or near Hampton, by a sergeant, who will receive the vidette (Carter) who was captured by your troops. I do not think a more formal proceeding necessary, you having but one prisoner, and he not taken in battle. "If my proposition to deliver one federal prisoner at or near Hampton in charge of a sergeant, to be exchanged for private Carter, the captured vidotte, be accepted, please inform me or the officer in command at Bethel church, and it shall be done. "It is scarcely necessary to say that the gentlemen who bear your flag have been received with every courtesy by our citizens, as well as ourselves. I have the honor to be, "Very respectfully, your obedient servant, "J BANKHEAD MAGRUDER, Colonel Commanding." GENERAL BUTLER TO COLONEL MAGRUDER. HEAD-QUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF VIRGINIA, "COLONEL J. B. MAGRUDER, Commanding Forces at Yorktown. "SIR:--Your favor of June 12, by Captain Davies, with a flag of truce, was this morning received. I desire first to thank you for the courtesy shown to the flag and its messengers. I will accept the exchange for private Carter. The two citizens, Whiting and Lively, were taken with arms in their hands, one of which was discharged from the house of Whiting upon the column of our troops when all resistance was useless, and when his attack was sim ply assassination, and when no offense had been committed against him. The house from which this shot was fired, and a building which formed a part of your outpost are the only conflagrations caused by the troops under my command. And the light of these had ceased hours before your men ventured out from under their earthworks and ditches, to do us the courtesy of burying our dead, for which act you have my sincere thanks. "After our troops returned from the field-hours after-a building was burned which had furnished our wounded some shelter, and from which we had removed them, but not by our men. For your kind treatment of any wounded you may have, please accept my assurance of deep obligation, with the certainty that at any and every opportunity such courtesy and kindness will be reciprocated. I am sorry that an officer so distinguished in the service of the United States as yourself could for a moment suppose that the wanton destruction of private property would in any way be authorized or tolerated by the federal government and its officers, many of whom are your late associates. Even now, while your letter is being answered, and this is on its way to you, a most ignominious and severe punishment, in the presence of all the troops, is being inflicted upon men who had enlisted in the service of the United States-not soldiers-for plundering private property. All private property which would not, by the strictest construction, be considered contraband of war, as means of feeding and aiding the enemy, which has been brought within my lines or in any way has come in the possession of my troops and discovered, with the strictest examination has been taken account of and collected together to be given to those peaceable citizens who have come forward to make claim for it. A board of survey has been organized, and has already reported indemnity for the property of peaceable citizens necessarily destroyed. In order to convince you that no wrong has been done to private property by any one in authority in the service of the United States, I do myself the honor to inclose a copy of a general order from this department, which will sufficiently explain itself. And the most active measures have been taken rigidly to enforce it, and to punish violations thereof. That there have been too many sporadic acts of wrong to private property committed by bad men under my command, I admit and most sincerely regret, and believe they will in the future be substantially prevented; and I mean they shall be repaired in favor of all loyal citizens so far as lies in my power. "You have done me the honor to inform me that vidette Carter is not a prisoner taken in battle. That is quite true. He was asleep on his post, and informs me that his three companions left in such haste that they neglected to wake him up. And they being mounted and my men on foot, the race was a difficult one. If it is not the intention of your authorities to treat the citizens of Virginia taken in actual conflict with the United States, as soldiers, in what light shall they be considered? Please inform me in what light you regard them. If not soldiers, must they not be assassins? "A sergeant of Captain Davies's command will be charged to meet your sergeant at four o'clock, at the village of Hampton, for the purpose of exchange of private Carter. "I need not call your attention to the fact that there will be unauthorized acts of violence committed by those who are not sufficiently under restraint of their commanding officers. My men complain that the ambulance having the wounded was fired into by your cavalry. And I am informed that if you have any prisoners, they were taken while engaged in pious duty to their wounded comrades, and not in battle. It has not occurred to my mind that either firing into the ambulance or capturing persons in charge of the wounded men was an act either authorized, recognized, or sanctioned by any gentleman in command of the forces in Virginia. Before this unhappy strife, I had not been so accustomed to regard the acts of my late associate citizens of the United States, and I have seen nothing in the course of this contest in the acts of those in authority, to lead me to a different conclusion. "I have the honor to be, most respectfully, your obedient servant, "BENJ. F. BUTLER, "Major-General Commanding United States Forces." General Butler learned the lesson first taught by the failure at Great Bethel, since repeated on so many disastrous fields. That lesson was, the utter insufficiency of the volunteer system as then organized, and the absolute necessity of officers morally and professionally superior to the men under their command. The southern social system, at least, leads to the selection of officers to whom the men are accustomed to look up. Our officers, on the contrary, must have a real superiority, both of knowledge and of character, in order to bind a regiment into coherency and force. General Butler had under his command captains, majors and colonels who owed their election chiefly to their ability to bestow unlimited drinks. There were drunkards and thieves among them; to say nothing of those who, from mere ignorance and natural inefficiency, could maintain over their men no degree whatever of moral or military ascendancy. The general saw the evil. In a letter to the secretary of war, June 26th, he pointed out the partial remedy which was afterward adopted. "I desire," he wrote, "to trouble you upon a subject of the last importance to the organization of our volunteer regiments. Many of the volunteers, both two and three years men, have chosen their own company officers, and in some cases their field officers, and they have been appointed without any proper military examination before a proper board, according to the plan of organization of the volunteers. There should be some means by which these officers can be sifted out.. The efficiency and usefulness of the regiment depend upon it. To give you an illustration: In one regiment I have had seven applications for resignation, and seventeen applications for leave of absence; some on the most frivolous pretexts, by every grade of officers under the colonel. I have yielded to many of these applications, and more readily than I should otherwise have done, because I was convinced that their absence was of benefit rather than harm. Still, this absence is a virtual fraud upon the United States. It seems as if there must be some method other than a court-martial of ridding the service of these officers, when there are so many competent men ready, willing, and eager to serve their country. Ignorance and incompetency are not crimes to be tried by court martial, while they are great misfortunes to an officer. As at present the whole matter of the organization is informal, without direct authority of law in its details, may not the matter be reached by having a board appointed at any given post, composed of three or five, to whom the competency, efficiency, and propriety of conduct of a given officer might be submitted? And that upon the report of that board, approved by the commander and the department, the officer be dropped without the disgrace attending the sentence of a court-martial ?" Meanwhile, the general labored most earnestly to raise the standard of discipline in the regiments. The difficulty was great, amounting, at times, to impossibility. At one time there were thirty-eight vacancies among the officers of the New York regiments alone. The men, accustomed to active industry, and now compelled to endure the monotony of a camp, sought excitement in drink. It was, for some weeks, a puzzle at head-quarters where the soldiers obtained such abundant supplies of the means of intoxication. "We used," said General Butler, in his testimony before the war committee, "to send a picket guard up a mile and a half from Fortress Monroe. The men would leave perfectly sober, yet every night when they came back we would have trouble with them on account of their being drunk. Where they got their liquor from |