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By Root 1285 0

use black men against them as it did to use elephants, wild cattle, or dogs. But the North had no right to arm a slave against his master. Nor did the South have any obligation to return such slaves. In a war, property recaptured from the enemy reverted to its owner, or could be disposed of in any way the captor deemed proper—and slaves were property. In March 1864, a Confederate lieutenant inquired of his commanding officer if he could sell the four black soldiers he had captured and divide the profits among those who had participated in the mission; the commanding officer advised him “not to report any more such captures.” What complicated the question of prisoner exchange were certain principles said to be immutable that outweighed any legal considerations. To argue an equality between white and black prisoners, as one Richmond newspaper observed, was nothing less than an act of northern insolence. “Confederates have borne and forborne much to mitigate the atrocities of war; but this is a thing which the temper of the country cannot endure.”59

The most efficient way to deal with the vexing issue of black prisoners was to take no prisoners. This was not even necessarily a racial matter but a time-honored military principle. Few wars have failed to arouse charges and countercharges regarding the disposition of soldiers after they have surrendered. In the Civil War, the presence of armed black men, most of them former slaves, thereby aggravated an already sensitive issue. For the common Confederate soldier, the need to confront blacks in armed combat was still difficult to accept, and the military setbacks he suffered exacerbated his frustrations and hatreds. “I hope I may never see a Negro soldier,” a Mississippian wrote to his mother, “or I cannot be … a Christian Soldier.” After the Battle of Milliken’s Bend, in which black troops distinguished themselves, the Confederate commander reported that substantial numbers of blacks had been killed and wounded; “unfortunately,” he added, “some fifty, with two of their white officers were captured.” The nature of warfare dictated that such matters could not be easily controlled by official edicts, whether these emanated from Richmond or from the immediate commanding officer. Every black prisoner “would have been killed,” a Confederate soldier wrote after the Battle of the Crater, “had it not been for gen Mahone who beg our men to Spare them.” Still, as he noted, one of his fellow soldiers, who had already killed several blacks, could not restrain himself. Even when General Mahone told him “for God’s sake” to stop, the soldier asked to kill one more, as “he deliberately took out his pocket knife and cut one’s Throat.” Late in the war, as white southern frustrations mounted, a clash with black troops at Mark’s Mill, Arkansas, resulted in a battlefield “sickening to behold.” “No orders, threats, or commands,” a Confederate soldier reported, “could restrain the men from vengeance on the negroes, and they were piled in great heaps about the wagons, in the tangled brushwood, and upon the muddy and trampled road.”60

Whether or not these were the normal atrocities of warfare, the reports out of the South aroused blacks already deeply disturbed over other manifestations of unequal treatment for black soldiers. The failure of the government to guarantee protection for black troops, in the event of their capture, had already reportedly caused a slackening in the recruitment campaigns. To ensure “full rights and immunities” for all prisoners, regardless of color, black spokesmen urged the Lincoln administration to adopt a policy of retaliation: “For every black prisoner slain in cold blood, Mr. Jefferson Davis should be made to understand that one rebel officer shall suffer death, and for every colored soldier sold into slavery, a rebel shall be held as hostage.” When Frederick Douglass resigned his post as a recruiting agent, he was most emphatic about this particular issue. Even “the most malignant Copperhead,” Douglass charged, could hardly criticize President Lincoln for “any undue