The Black Phalanx Part 14

"This missive was duly sent, with many misgivings that it would not get through the routine of the War Department in time to be laid before Congress previous to the adjournment of that honorable body which was then imminent. There were fears; too, that the Secretary of War might think it not sufficiently respectful, or serious in its tone; but such apprehensions proved unfounded. The moment it was received and read in the War Department, it was hurried down to the House, and delivered, _ore retundo_, from the clerk's desk.

"Here its effects were magical. The clerk could scarcely read it with decorum; nor could half his words be heard amidst the universal peals of laughter in which both Democrats and Republicans appeared to vie as to which should be the more noisy. Mr. Wickliffe, who only entered during the reading of the latter half of the doc.u.ment, rose to his feet in a frenzy of indignation, complaining that the reply, of which he had only heard some portion, was an insult to the dignity of the House, and should be severely noticed.

The more he raved and gesticulated, the more irrepressibly did his colleagues, on both sides of the slavery question, scream and laugh; until finally, the merriment reached its climax on a motion made by some member--Schuyler Colfax, if we remember rightly--that 'as the doc.u.ment appeared to please the honorable gentleman from Kentucky so much, and as he had not heard the whole of it the Clerk be now requested to read the whole again'--a motion which was instantaneously carried amid such an uproar of universal merriment and applause as the frescoed walls of the chamber have seldom heard, either before or since. It was the great joke of the day, and coming at a moment of universal gloom in the public mind, was seized upon by the whole loyal press of the country as a kind of politico-military champaign c.o.c.ktail.

"This set that question at rest forever; and not long after, the proper authorities saw fit to authorize the employment of 'fifty thousand able-bodied blacks for labor in the Quartermaster's Department,' and the arming and drilling as soldiers of five thousand of these, but for the sole purpose of 'protecting the women and children of their fellow-laborers who might be absent from home in the public service.'

"Here we have another instance of the reluctance with which the National Government took up this idea of employing negroes as soldiers; a resolution, we may add, to which they were only finally compelled by General Hunter's disbandment of his original regiment, and the storm of public indignation which followed that act.

"Nothing could have been happier in its effect upon the public mind than Gen. Hunter's reply to Mr. Wickliffe, of Kentucky, given in our last. It produced a general broad grin throughout the country, and the advocate who can set his jury laughing rarely loses his cause. It also strengthened the spinal column of the Government in a very marked degree; although not yet up to the point of fully endorsing and accepting this daring experiment.

"Meantime the civil authorities of course got wind of what was going on,--Mr. Henry J. Windsor, special correspondent of the New York _Times_, in the Department of the south, having devoted several very graphic and widely-copied letters to a picture of that new thing under the sun, 'Hunter's negro regiment.'

"Of course the chivalry of the rebellion were incensed beyond measure at this last Yankee outrage upon Southern rights. Their papers teemed with vindictive articles against the commanding general who had dared to initiate such a novelty. The Savannah _Republican_, in particular, denouncing Hunter as 'the cool-blooded abolition miscreant who, from his headquarters at Hilton Head, is engaged in executing the b.l.o.o.d.y and savage behest of the imperial gorilla who, from his throne of human bones at Washington, rules, reigns and riots over the destinies of the brutish and degraded North.'

"Mere newspaper abuse, however, by no means gave content to the outraged feeling of the chivalry. They therefore sent a formal demand to our Government for information as to whether Gen. Hunter, in organizing his regiment of emanc.i.p.ated slaves, had acted under the authority of our War Department, or whether the villany was of his own conception. If he had acted under orders, why then terrible measures of fierce retaliation against the whole Yankee nation were to be adopted; but if, _per contra_, the iniquity were of his own motion and without the sanction of our Government, then the foreshadowed retribution should be made to fall only on Hunter and his officers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUILDING ROADS]

"To this demand, with its alternative of threats, President Lincoln was in no mood to make any definitive reply. In fact no reply at all was sent, for, as yet, the most far-seeing political augurs could not determine whether the bird seen in the sky of the Southern Department would prove an eagle or a buzzard. Public opinion was not formed upon the subject, though rapidly forming. There were millions who agreed with Hunter in believing that 'that the black man should be made to fight for the freedom which could not but be the issue of our war;' and then they were outraged at the prospect of allowing black men to be killed or maimed in company with our n.o.bler whites.

"Failing to obtain any reply therefor, from the authorities at Washington, the Richmond people determined to pour out all their vengeance on the immediate perpetrators of this last Yankee atrocity; and forthwith there was issued from the rebel War Department a General Order number 60, we believe, of the series of 1862--reciting that 'as the government of the U. S. had refused to answer whether it authorized the raising of a black regiment by Gen. Hunter or not' said General, his staff, and all officers under his command who had directly or indirectly partic.i.p.ated in the unclean thing, should hereafter be outlaws not covered by the laws of war; but to be executed as felons for the crimes of 'inciting negro insurrections wherever caught.'

"This order reached the ears of the parties mainly interested just as Gen. Hunter was called to Washington, ostensibly for consultation on public business; but really on the motion of certain prominent speculators in marine transportation, with those 'big things,' in Port Royal harbor,--and they were enormous--with which the General had seen fit to interfere. These frauds, however, will form a very fruitful and pregnant theme for some future chapters.

At present our business is with the slow but certain growth in the public mind of this idea of allowing some black men to be killed in the late war, and not continuing to arrogate death and mutilation by projectiles and bayonets as an exclusive privilege for our own beloved white race.

"No sooner had Hunter been relieved from this special duty at Washington, than he was ordered back to the South, our Government still taking no notice of the order of outlawry against him issued by the rebel Secretary of War. He and his officers were thus sent back to engage, with extremely insufficient forces, in an enterprise of no common difficulty, and with an agreeable sentence of _sus. per col._, if captured, hanging over their devoted heads!

"Why not suggest to Mr. Stanton, General, that he should either demand the special revocation of that order, or announce to the rebel War Department that our Government has adopted your negro-regiment policy as its own--which would be the same thing.

"It was partly on this hint that Hunter wrote the following letter to Jefferson Davis,--a letter subsequently suppressed and never sent, owing to influences which the writer of this article does not feel himself as yet at liberty to reveal,--further than to say that Mr. Stanton knew nothing of the matter. Davis and Hunter, we may add, had been very old and intimate friends, until divided, some years previous to our late war, by differences on the slavery question.

Davis had for many years been adjutant of the 1st U. S.

Dragoons, of which Hunter had been Captain Commanding; and a relationship of very close friendship had existed between their respective families. It was this thorough knowledge of his man, perhaps, which gave peculiar bitterness to Hunter's pen; and the letter is otherwise remarkable as a prophecy, or preordainment of that precise policy which Pres't.

Johnson has so frequently announced, and reiterated since Mr. Lincoln's death. It ran--with some few omissions, no longer pertinent or of public interest--as follows:

"TO JEFFERSON DAVIS, t.i.tULAR PRESIDENT OF THE SO-CALLED CONFEDERATE STATES.

"SIR:--While recently in command of the Department of the South, in accordance with the laws of the war and the dictates of common sense, I organized and caused to be drilled, armed and equipped, a regiment of enfranchised bondsmen, known as the 1st South Carolina Volunteers.

"For this action, as I have ascertained, the pretended government of which you are the chief officer, has issued against me and all of my officers who were engaged in organizing the regiment in question, a General Order of Outlawry, which announces that, if captured, we shall not even be allowed the usual miserable treatment extended to such captives as fall into your hands; but that we are to be regarded as felons, and to receive the death by hanging due to such, irrespective of the laws of war.

"Mr. Davis, we have been acquainted intimately in the past.

We have campaigned together, and our social relations have been such as to make each understand the other thoroughly.

That you mean, if it be ever in your power, to execute the full rigor of your threats, I am well a.s.sured; and you will believe my a.s.sertion, that I thank you for having raised in connection with me and my acts, this sharp and decisive issue. I shall proudly accept, if such be the chance of war, the martyrdom you menace; and hereby give you notice that unless your General Order against me and my officers be formally revoked, within thirty days from the date of the transmission of this letter, sent under a flag of truce, I shall take your action in the matter as finale; and will reciprocate it by hanging every rebel officer who now is, or may hereafter be taken, prisoner by the troops of the command to which I am about returning.

"Believe me that I rejoice at the aspect now being given to the war by the course you have adopted. In my judgment, if the undoubted felony of treason had been treated from the outset as it deserves to be--as the sum of all felonies and crimes--this rebellion would never have attained its present menacing proportions. The war you and your fellow conspirators have been waging against the United States must be regarded either as a war of justifiable defence, carried on for the integrity of the boundaries of a sovereign Confederation of States against foreign aggression, or as the most wicked, enormous, and deliberately planned conspiracy against human liberty and for the triumph of treason and slavery, of which the records of the world's history contain any note.

"If our Government should adopt the first view of the case, you and your fellow rebels may justly claim to be considered a most unjustly treated body of disinterested patriots,--although, perhaps, a little mistaken in your connivance with the thefts by which your agent, John B.

Floyd, succeeded in arming the South and partially disarming the North as a preparative to the commencement of the struggle.

"But if on the other hand--as is the theory of our Government--the war you have levied against the U. S. be a rebellion the most causeless, crafty and b.l.o.o.d.y ever known,--a conspiracy having the rule-or-ruin policy for its basis; the plunder of the black race and the reopening of the African slave trade for its object, the continued and further degradation of ninety per cent. of the white population of the South in favor of a slave driving ten per cent. aristocracy, and the exclusion of all foreign-born immigrants from partic.i.p.ation in the generous and equal hospitality foreshadowed to them in the Declaration of Independence,--if this, as I believe, be a fair statement of the origin and motives of the rebellion of which you are the t.i.tular head, then it would have been better had our Government adhered to the const.i.tutional view of treason from the start, and hung every man taken in arms against the U. S. from the first butchery in the streets of Baltimore, down to the last resultless battle fought in the vicinity of Sharpsburg. If treason, in other words, be any crime, it is the essence of all crimes; a vast machinery of guilt, multiplying a.s.sa.s.sinations into wholesale slaughter, and organizing plunder as the basis for supporting a system of National Brigandage. Your action, and that of those with whom you are in league, has its best comment in the sympathy extended to your cause by the despots and aristocracies of Europe. You have succeeded in throwing back civilization for many years; and have made of the country that was the freest, happiest, proudest, richest, and most progressive but two short years ago, a vast temple of mourning, doubt, anxiety and privation; our manufactories of all but war material nearly paralyzed; the inventive spirit which was forever developing new resources destroyed, and our flag, that carried respect everywhere, now mocked by enemies who think its glory tarnished, and that its power is soon to become a mere tradition of the past.

"For all these results, Mr. Davis, and for the three hundred thousand lives already sacrificed on both sides in the war--some pouring out their blood on the battle-field, and others fever stricken and wasting away to death in overcrowded hospitals--you and the fellow miscreants who have been your a.s.sociates in this conspiracy are responsible. Of you and them it may, with truth be said, that if all the innocent blood which you have spilled could be collected in one pool, the whole government of your Confederacy might swim in it.

"I am aware that this is not the language in which the prevailing etiquette of our army is in the habit of considering your conspiracy. It has come to pa.s.s--through what instrumentalities you are best able to decide--that the greatest and worst crime ever attempted against the human family, has been treated in certain quarters as though it were a mere error of judgment on the part of some gifted friend; a thing to be regretted, of course, as causing more or less disturbance to the relation of amity and esteem heretofore existing between those charged with the repression of such eccentricities and the eccentric actors; in fact, as a slight political miscalculation or peccadillo, rather than as an outrage involving the desolation of a continent, and demanding the promptest and severest retribution within power of human law.

"For myself, I have never been able to take this view of the matter. During a lifetime of active service, I have seen the seeds of this conspiracy planted in the rank soil of slavery, and the upas-growth watered by just such tricklings of a courtesy alike false to justice, expediency, and our eternal future. Had we at an earlier day commenced to call things by their right names, and to look at the hideous features of slavery with our ordinary eyesight and common sense, instead of through the rose-colored gla.s.ses of supposed political expediency, there would be three hundred thousand more men alive to-day on American soil; and our country would never for a moment have forfeited her proud position as the highest exampler of the blessings--morals, intellectual and material--to be derived from a free form of government.

"Whether your intention of hanging me and those of my staff and other officers who were engaged in organizing the 1st S.

C. Volunteers, in case we are taken prisoners in battle, will be likely to benefit your cause or not, is a matter mainly for your own consideration. For us, our profession makes the sacrifice of life a contingency ever present and always to be accepted; and although such a form of death as your order proposes, is not that to the contemplating of which soldiers have trained themselves, I feel well a.s.sured, both for myself and those included in my sentence, that we could die in no manner more damaging to your abominable rebellion and the abominable inst.i.tution which is its origin.

"The South has already tried one hanging experiment, but not with a success--one would think--to encourage its repet.i.tion. John Brown, who was well known to me in Kansas, and who will be known in appreciative history through centuries which will only recall your name to load it with curses, once entered Virginia with seventeen men and an idea. The terror caused by the presence of his idea, and the dauntless courage which prompted the a.s.sertion of his faith, against all odds, I need not now recall. The history is too familiar and too painful. 'Old Ossawatomie' was caught and hung; his seventeen men were killed, captured or dispersed, and several of them shared his fate. Portions of his skin were tanned, I am told, and circulated as relics dear to the barbarity of the slave-holding heart. But more than a million of armed white men, Mr. Davis, are to-day marching South, in practical acknowledgement that they regard the hanging of three years ago as the murder of a martyr; and as they march to a battle which has the emanc.i.p.ation of all slaves as one of its most glorious results, his name is on their lips; to the music of his memory their marching feet keep time; and as they sling knapsacks each one becomes aware that he is an armed apostle of the faith preached by him,

"'Who has gone to be a soldier In the army of the Lord!'

"I am content, if such be the will of Providence to ascend the scaffold made sacred by the blood of this martyr; and I rejoice at every prospect of making our struggle more earnest and inexorable on both sides; for the sharper the conflict the sooner ended; the more vigorous and remorseless the strife, the less blood must be shed in it eventually.

"In conclusion, let me a.s.sure you, that I rejoice with my whole heart that your order in my case, and that of my officers, if unrevoked, will untie our hands for the future; and that we shall be able to treat rebellion as it deserves, and give to the felony of treason a felon's death.

"Very obediently yours, DAVID HUNTER, _Maj.-Gen._"

"Not long after General Hunter's return to the Department of the South, the first step towards organizing and recognizing negro troops was taken by our Government, in a letter of instructions directing Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton--then Military Governor of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, within the limits of Gen. Hunter's command--to forthwith raise and organize fifty thousand able-bodied blacks, for service as laborers in the quartermaster's department; of whom five thousand--only five thousand, mark you--might be armed and drilled as soldiers for the purpose of 'protecting the women and children of their fellow-laborers who might be absent from home in the public service.'

"Here was authority given to Gen. Saxton, over Hunter's head, to pursue some steps farther the experiment which Hunter--soon followed by General Phelps, also included in the rebel order of 'outlawry'--had been the first to initiate. The rebel order still remained in full force, and with no protest against it on the part of our Government; nor to our knowledge, was any demand from Washington ever made for its revocation during the existence of the Confederacy. If Hunter, therefore, or any of his officers, had been captured in any of the campaigns of the past two and a half years, they had the pleasant knowledge for their comfort that any rebel officers into whose hands they might fall, was strictly enjoined to--not 'shoot them on the spot,' as was the order of General Dix, but to hang them on the first tree; and hang them quickly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OFF FOR THE WAR.

Negro men marching aboard a steamer to join their regiments at Hilton Head, S. C.]

"With the subsequent history of our black troops the public is already familiar. General Lorenzo Thomas, t.i.tular Adjutant-General of our army, not being regarded as a very efficient officer for that place, was permanently detailed on various services; now exchanging prisoners, now discussing points of military law, now organizing black brigades down the Mississippi and elsewhere. In fact, the main object seemed to be to keep this Gen. Thomas--who must not be confounded with Gen. George H. Thomas, one of the true heroes of our army,--away from the Adjutant-General's office at Washington, in order that Brigadier-General E. W.

Townsend--only a Colonel until quite recently--might perform all the laborious and crushing duties of Adjutant-General of our army, while only signing himself and ranking as First a.s.sistant Adjutant-General. If there be an officer who has done n.o.ble service in the late war while receiving no public credit for the same,--no newspaper puffs nor public ovation,--that man is Brigadier-General E. W. Townsend, who should long since have been made a major-general, to rank from the first day of the rebellion.

"And now let us only add, as practical proof that the rebels, even in their most rabid state, were not insensible to the force of proper "reasons," the following anecdote: Some officers of one of the black regiments--Colonel Higginson's, we believe--indiscreetly rode beyond our lines around St. Augustine in pursuit of game, but whether feathered or female this deponent sayeth not. Their guide proved to be a spy, who had given notice of the intended expedition to the enemy, and the whole party were soon surprised and captured. The next we heard of them, they were confined in the condemned cells of one of the Florida State prisons, and were to be "tried"--i. e., sentenced and executed--as 'having been engaged in inciting negro insurrection.'

"We had some wealthy young slave-holders belonging to the first families of South Carolina in the custody of Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. Hall--now Brigadier-General of this city, who was our Provost Marshal; and it was on this basis Gen. Hunter resolved to operate. 'Release my officers of black troops from your condemned cells at once, and notify me of the fact. Until so notified, your first family prisoners in my hands'--the names then given--'will receive precisely similar treatment. For each of my officers hung, I will hang three of my prisoners who are slave-holders.' This dose operated with instantaneous effect, and the next letter received from our captured officers set forth that they were at large on parole, and treated as well as they could wish to be in that miserable country.

"We cannot better conclude this sketch, perhaps, than by giving the brief but pregnant verses in which our ex-orderly, Private Miles O'Reilly, late of the Old Tenth Army Corps, gave his opinion on this subject. They were first published in connection with the banquet given in New York by Gen. T. F. Meagher and the officers of the Irish Brigade, to the returned veterans of that organization on the 13th of Jan. 1864, at Irving Hall. Of this song it may, perhaps, be said, in verity and without vanity, that, as Gen. Hunter's letter to Mr. Wickliffe had settled the negro soldiers' controversy in its official and Congressional form, so did the publication and immediate popular adoption of these verses conclude all argument upon this matter in the mind of the general public. Its common sense, with a dash of drollery, at once won over the Irish, who had been the bitterest opponents of the measure, to become its friends; and from that hour to this, the attacks upon the experiment of our negro soldiery have been so few and far between that, indeed, they may be said to have ceased altogether. It ran as follows, and appeared in the _Herald_ the morning after the banquet as a portion of the report of the speeches and festivities:

"SAMBO'S RIGHT TO BE KIL'T.

(_Air--The Low-Backed Chair._)

Some say it is a burnin' shame To make the naygurs fight, An' that the thrade o' being kilt Belongs but to the white; But as for me, upon me sowl, So liberal are we here, I'll let Sambo be murthered in place o' meself On every day in the year.

On every day in the year, boys, An' every hour in the day, The right to be kil't I'll divide wid him, An' divil a word I'll say.

In battle's wild commotion I shouldn't at all object, If Sambo's body should stop a ball That was comin' for me direct; An' the prod of a Southern bagnet, So liberal are we here, I'll resign and let Sambo take it, On every day in the year.

On every day in the year boys, An' wid none o' your nasty pride, All right in a Southern bagnet prod Wid Sambo I'll divide.

The men who object to Sambo Should take his place and fight; An' it's betther to have a naygur's hue Than a liver that's wake an' white; Though Sambo's black as the ace o' spades His finger a thrigger can pull, An' his eye runs sthraight on the barrel sight From under its thatch o' wool.

So hear me all, boys, darlins!