Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[601] with this offer on your part to exchange prisoners, and which seems to include all prisoners of war, the Confederate authorities have made a declaration that the negroes heretofore held to service by owners in the States of Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri are to be treated as prisoners of war when captured in arms in the service of the United States. Such declaration that a part of the colored soldiers of the United States were to be treated as prisoners of war would seem most strongly to imply that others were not to be so treated, or, in other words, that colored men from the insurrectionary States are to be held to labor and returned to their masters, if captured by the Confederate forces while duly enrolled and mustered into, and actually in, the armies of the United States.

In the view which the Government of the United States takes of the claim made by you to the persons and services of these negroes; it is not to be supported upon any principle of national or municipal law.

Looking upon these men only as property, upon your theory of property in them, we do not see how this claim can be made, certainly not how it can be yielded. It is believed to be a well-settled rule of public international law, and a custom and part of the laws of war, that the capture of movable property vests the title to that property in the captor, and therefore when one belligerent gets into his full possession property belonging to the subjects or citizens of the other belligerent, the owners of that property are at once divested of their title, which vests in the belligerent government capturing and holding such possession. Upon this rule of international law all civilized nations have acted, and by it, both belligerents have dealt with all property, save slaves, taken from each other during the present war.

If the Confederate forces capture a number of horses from the United States, the animals immediately are claimed to be, and, as we understand it, become the property of the Confederate authorities.

If the United States forces capture any movable property belonging to persons in the Rebellion, by our regulations and laws, in conformity with international law and the laws of war, such property is to be held by our government as its property. Therefore, if we obtain possession of that species of property, known to the laws of the insurrectionary States as slaves, why should there be any doubt that the title to that property, like any other, vests in the United States?

If the property in the slave does so vest, then the “（jus disponendi,” the right of disposing of that property, rests in he United States.

Now, the United States have disposed of the property which they have acquired by capture in slaves taken by them, by giving that right of