In the final days of 1863, Col. Hermann Lieb’s report concerning the investigations into the death of Capt. Corydon Heath reached the United States Adjutant General’s office in Washington. Lieb included additional reports from Maj. John G. Davis and Gen. Mortimer Leggett. Together, these three items recounted the findings of a short investigation made when Gen. John Stevenson’s division entered Monroe, Louisiana in late August 1863. There, Unionist civilians as well as captured Confederates stated that Heath and another officer (who was Lt. George F. Conn of the 11th Louisiana Infantry, A.D.) were killed while in Confederate custody.

Lieb’s report was quickly sent from the Adjutant General’s office to the Secretary of War on January 2. This was part of a larger investigation seeking information about “alleged acts of inhumanity of the rebels in their treatment of the Union dead, wounded, and prisoners.”

Two other reports were sent to the Secretary at the same time, one concerning an April 1862 effort to destroy communications on the Georgia State Railroad, and another from Surgeon H.R. Wirtz of Dec. 23, 1862, relating the destruction of a Federal hospital at Holly Springs, Mississippi by Confederate forces. The three reports (including Lieb’s) were unrelated, but all were submitted in response to the request for information about the mistreatment of Federal wounded and prisoners.

Lieb’s report, in part, contributed to the cessation of prisoner exchanges. This was because Union authorities declined to make any agreements that treated men (black or white) captured from the U.S. Colored Troops differently than soldiers captured from all-white regiments. As a result, thousands of prisoners on both sides suffered immeasurably, penned up in prison camps with poor sanitation, vermin, diseased water, and relatively little to eat.

By no means was Lieb’s report of the actions taken after Milliken’s Bend solely responsible for the breakdown in prisoner exchanges, but due to the number of high-ranking officials who must have examined it, including the Secretary of War, it unquestionably played a role in their decision to cease exchanges.