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.
The exchange of prisoners ended in July 1863. Most of the Confederate prisoners of war from Gettysburg went to prison camps for the remainder of the war. Those Confederates that surrendered at Vicksburg were paroled upon surrender and had dispersed before Grant learned that the exchange of prisoners had ended. In his memoirs, Grant estimates that only half of the 29,000 Confederates soldiers paroled at Vicksburg ever returned to Confederate service.
Of course you would since they are unsourced and bear little resemblance to the truth.
Prisoner exchanged actually began in August 1861 with a prisoner exchange in Missouri. In December 1861 Congress authorized exchanges and initial discussions began in February 1862 and not July 1862. Discussion continued in fits and starts until July when the agreement was reached.
The agreement almost immediately broke down when Jefferson Davis General told Robert E. Lee to inform the Federals that Union general John Pope, and certain of his subordinates, would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war should they be captured. A few weeks later the Davis government announced that Union general David Hunter and other officers would be held for execution as felons instead of as prisoners of war. Their crime, for which they were subject to execution, was raising regiments of former slaves for the Union service. In December Davis issued the same orders for Benjamin Butler should he be captured. While prisoner paroles had continued during this period with Union armies and Confederate armies paroling over 20,000 prisoners from various battles, formal exchanges were on hold. Hard to exchange prisoners when the other side says they are going to selectively kill your own officers. I noticed that Spartacus overlooked that in his treatise.
Exchanges were reauthorized in March 1863 and were almost immediately halted again. The reason? The Confederate Congress passed a law stating that the officers of black troops in the Union army would be tried under Confederate law for inciting servile insurrection. When convicted they would be executed. The black troops themselves would be "delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured to be dealt with according to the present or future law of such State or States." E. Kirby Smith himself instructed one of his subordinates, Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor: "I have been unofficially informed that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms. I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers. In this way we may be relieved from a disagreeable dilemma." A year later Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon wrote to Maj. Gen. Howell Cobb, commanding the Georgia militia: "As to the white officers serving with negro troops, we ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners." Spartacus overlooked that little item as well in his haste to blame everything on the North.
Now as to the question of the Grant quote. I agree to its accuracy but Spartacus, like you, cares little for context. The quote is from the last line of a letter Grant wrote to Stanton concerning the quality of recent recruits. The paragraph in it's entirety goes like this:
"Of this class of recruits we do not get one, for every eight bounties paid, to do good service. My provost-marshal-general is preparing a statement on this subject, which will show the reinforcements received from this class of recruits. Take the other side, the desertions from the enemy to us. Not a day passes but men come into our lines, and men, too, who have been fighting for the South for more than three years. Not infrequently a commissioned officer comes with them. Only a few days ago I sent a regiment numbering 1,000 men for duty to General Pope's department, composed wholly of deserters from the rebel army and of prisoners who took the oath of allegiance and joined it. There is no doubt but many prisoners of war have taken the oath of allegiance and enlisted as substitutes to get the bounty and to effect their return to the South. These men are paraded abroad as deserters who want to join the South and fight her battles, and it is through our leniency that the South expects to reap great advantages. We ought not to make a single exchange or release s prisoner on any pretext until the war closes. We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination."
So there is the truth of the matter. Prisoner exchanges most often broke down due to rebel duplicity and refusal to follow the rules of war, the Lieber Code if you will. Executing prisoners, something the rebels did on some frequency. Refusing to recognize black soldiers as prisoners. Threatening captured officers with death for commanding Union troops. The Confederacies attitudes towards prisoners were far harsher and cruel than anything the Union came up with.
Spartacus' and your opinions to the contrary notwithstanding.
Do you have an original (primary) source for this imaginary quote?