The Burlington Weekly Hawk Eye

The Killing of Prisoners.—The Federal authorities now hold about eighty thousand Rebel prisoners of war—more than half of them paroled and at home while the Rebels have some thirty thousand of our men as prisoners in their hands. It is greatly desirable, on the score of humanity, that there should be an exchange of all held in durance forthwith; for our brethren suffer terribly from the scarcity of provisions, medicines, clothing, medical skill, &c., &c., at the South. We are ready to exchange man for man so far as the rebels can go, and anxious to have that exchange effected at once. Gen. Meredith is now at Fortress Monroe, ready to confer with the rebel Commissioner—whoever he may be—on this point, and save the Confederacy the expense and trouble of sending a Vice President and a gunboat all the way to Washington. We want nothing but what is fair and equal, and the rebels are certainly not in a condition to demand anything more.

Then what is the obstacle?

The Richmond Enquirer, in a leader, which we transfer to our columns, declares that "it is scarcely possible that any satisfactory conclusion can be arrived at" by the Commissioners. Why not? Because "the Federal Government has planted itself insolently on the demand that our runaway negroes, when taken in arms against their masters, shall be treated as prisoners of war;" and "this is a thing which the temper of the country [Dixie] cannot endure."

That is bad, certainly. Revolted negroes must be subject to death or enslavement; "revolted" whites alone are to be treated as prisoners of war. But what writer on international law, or the laws of war, ever laid down the principle that rebellion was the privilege of Whites alone? What authority, human or Divine, is there for maintaining that our prisoners are all entitled to exchange, while those taken by the rebels are not? We do not learn.

Our Richmond contemporary attributes the Yankee "outrage" of insisting on a general exchange to our "temporary luck in holding an excess of prisoners." It asserts that we virtually hold the Confederates "rebels and criminals who have no rights." But no—we have never asserted that "rebels have no rights." It would ill become us to do that, since we date our history from a rebellion. What we do insist on is that one set of rebels shall be treated as well as another. Here are Pemberton, Gardner, Buckner, and thousands more of prominent rebels against our Government—natives of loyal States, graduates of our Military Academy, officers of our National army—who rebelled, went over to the enemy, fought against us, were beaten, captured, paroled and exchanged. If there are "revolted" negroes in our service, they cannot have deserved worse of their ex-masters than Pemberton & Co. have at our hands.

We propose, then, to exchange evenly all men captured in fair, open warfare, leaving the fate of spies, and all their kind to be settled by the established laws of war. Who can suggest an improvement on this rule? And who does not feel that those who refuse to be governed by it are solely responsible for the miseries suffered by prisoners of war who might be exchanged but are not, because the Confederate chiefs prefer the interest of Slavery to that of their brave and unfortunate soldiers,—N.Y. Trib.