Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/628

596 Negro soldiers in the Northern armies. [1862-3 such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service." While Lincoln had hitherto discouraged the formation of negro regiments for use in active campaigns, and while two or three tentative experiments to put arms into their hands to strengthen the local defence of the Port Royal cotton fields and the sugar plantations adjacent to New Orleans had proved unsuccessful, the purpose of eventually making the negroes a military resource had long been enter- tained by him, and was indeed one of the principal reasons for adopting the policy of military emancipation. So far back as July, 1862, when the collapse of McClellan's Richmond campaign had forced the President to make an anxious forecast of the future military struggle, he had indicated in a conversation his determination to use the great and decisive element of military strength which lay as yet untouched and unappropriated in the slave population of the South. The reasons which then existed against it prejudice on the part of the whites, and the want of a motive on the part of the blacks were removed, the first by the stress of war, the second by the two proclamations of freedom. There- after the government urgently pushed the formation of negro regiments among the Southern blacks ; and before the end of the war 150,000 of their number carried bayonets in the Unionist armies, and worthily vindicated their right to freedom by bravery in battle. The fondness of Southern politicians and statesmen for redundant and florid rhetoric was aggravated by the passions of the Civil War into a hot and vindictive intemperance of language with which, in their official correspondence and State papers, they ascribed the meanest motives and most shocking excesses to their antagonists. The Con- federate President, followed by some of the leading generals, could hardly find phrases sufficiently strong to express their feelings. They accused the North of conducting the war in a "cruel," "barbarous," "merci- less," " inhuman " manner. This violence of language came to a climax whenever it touched the subject of negro soldiers. Forgetting their own wholesale use of slaves in various military labours, they affected to feel surprise and horror when Unionist commanders began to organise them for local defence. "The best authenticated newspapers received from the United States," wrote General Lee, " announce as a fact that Major-General Hunter has armed slaves for the murder of their masters, and has thus done all in his power to inaugurate a servile war, which is worse than that of the savage, inasmuch as it superadds other horrors to the indiscriminate slaughter of ages, sexes, and conditions." The Con- federate War Department issued a general order that officers organising negro soldiers should be subject, if captured, to execution as felons. General Butler's earliest effort to repeat what the Confederates them- selves had done in New Orleans to organise a regiment, not of slaves,