Cite correspondence by Grant to the “high Command” Grant was up to his ass at Vicksburg at the time the prisoner of war negotiations were going on.
Cite correspondence by Grant to the “high Command” Grant was up to his ass at Vicksburg at the time the prisoner of war negotiations were going on.
When Ulysses S. Grant became overall commander of the Union Army in March, 1864, he brought an end to exchanges. He told General Benjamin F. Butler that “He said that I would agree with him that by the exchange of prisoners we get no men fit to go into our army, and every soldier we gave the Confederates went immediately into theirs, so that the exchange was virtually so much aid to them and none to us.”
The decision of Ulysses S. Grant obviously increased the suffering of prisoners held by both sides but his defenders argued that this policy helped to reduce the length of the war. Grant’s policy was also partly responsible for the disaster at Andersonville. The Confederate Army was so burdened with Union prisoners that by November, 1864, they began to send them back to the North without gaining anything in exchange.
After the conflict came to an end the War Department published figures to show that of the 200,000 members of the Confederate Army captured, over 26,500 died in captivity. Of the 260,526 prisoners that the Confederates took, 22,526 members of the Union Army died. This indicated that 13% of Confederate prisoners died compared to 8 per cent of Federal prisoners.
http://spartacus-educational.com/USACWexchange.htm
First link that came up. I’d read it before anyway. It was brutal but I don’t disagree with his math.