``Mr. Lincoln, I have a great favor to ask of you. Hear me! My only child, Clarence J. Prentice, God help him, is a major in the Confederate service. A few weeks ago he came into Kentucky and being cut off from his command he came by night to his home to see me and his mother and his baby. He was seen coming and in a few hours arrested. He is now at Camp Chase and his mother in Columbus. He desires I know to serve no longer in the war. He would be a great loss to the Confederates, for he has been one of their most effective officers.
``I do not suppose . . . that you can parole my boy upon his taking the noncombatant's oath to remain in the United States though I should be most happy if you could; but I fervently appeal to you to let him go upon his taking that simple oath anywhere outside of the United States and of the rebel Confederacy. I know his plans. His mother will go with him and he will never bear arms against us again. I will be surety for this with fortune and life. I have written to General Burnside to let my son remain at Camp Chase till I hear from you. Please let it be soon for I am most unhappy.'' (OR, II, V, 527-28).
As printed in the Official Records, Prentice's letter of April 28 bears three endorsements. The first, Joseph Holt to Stanton, May 16, 1863, is as follows: ``Clarence J. Prentice himself has made no communication to the Government purposes. When prisoners of war are willing to take the oath of allegiance it is the practice to permit them to do so. When they are not thus willing they have been invariably exchanged under the cartel. The intermediate course now proposed has not been pursued because the Government would thereby lose the advantage of the exchange and because no satisfactory . . . guaranty would exist that the prisoner thus tenderly dealt with would not at the first opportunity reenter the rebel military service. . . . He left his home in a State then and still loyal and voluntarily and wantonly banded with traitors. . . . It is for the Secretary to determine whether the established policy . . . shall be modified in his favor.''
The second endorsement, Brigadier General Edward R. S. Canby to Colonel William Hoffman, commissary general of prisoners, is dated May 22: ``Colonel: I submitted this paper to the Secretary of War yesterday and he said that he was under the impression that the President had given an order permitting Prentice to go abroad. Has it been done?''
The third endorsement, Hoffman to Canby, undated, is as follows: ``There is no record in this office of any special orders in the case of Major Prentice. On the 13th instant he was sent from Camp Chase to City Point for exchange.''
One infers that Prentice's letter of May 6, bearing Lincoln's order of May 16 endorsed on the verso, was ``lost'' in the War Department. Major Clarence Prentice was exchanged and fought on until the end of the war as major and later colonel in the Confederate Army.