great Republic-for the principle it lives by and keeps alive -for man's vast future-thanks to all.

"Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost. And then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while I fear there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart and deceitful speech they strove to hinder it.

"Still, let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy, final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in His own good time, will give us the rightful result."

Nothing that Lincoln ever uttered, so his biographers assure us, had a more instantaneous success than this letter of August 26th, to the Union men of Illinois. Hardly was it published-and it took but ten minutes to read it to the Convention than responses began pouring in upon Lincoln. Doubtless no letter which the president received moved him more profoundly than that from Josiah Quincy, then ninety-one years of age: "What you say concerning emancipation, your proclamation, and your course of proceeding in relation to it was due to truth and to your own character, shamefully assailed as it has been. The development is an imperishable monument of wisdom and virtue. I write under the impression that the victory of the United States in this war is inevitable; compromise is impossible. Peace on any other basis would be the establishment of two nations, each hating the other, both military, both necessarily warlike, their territories interlocked with a tendency of neverceasing hostility. Can we leave posterity a more cruel inheritance, or one more hopeless of happiness and prosperity?"

It was Josiah Quincy, the author of this letter, expressive of the will and heart of the North in 1863, who more than half a century before, on January 14, 1811, on the floor of the House of Representatives, speaking in opposition to the bill for the admission of Louisiana into the Union, had said: "I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion, that, if this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are, virtually, dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that as it will be the right of all, so will it be the duty of some, to prepare, definitely, for a separation: amicably, if they can; violently, if they must.' Quincy had evidently outlived his Confederate opinions.

The Peace Party went to the polls and to ignominious defeat in the fall elections of 1863. John Hay, on election day, records Stanton's remark: "The disheartening thing in the affair was that there seemed to be no patriotic principle left in the Democratic party, the whole organization voting solidly against the country."

The general enlistment and arming of negroes for the national defense was no part of the policy of the administration at the time of the announcement of the preliminary emancipation proclamation, in July, 1862, but at that time the ever-increasing multitude of fugitive slaves in Union camps and in the wake of the Union armies presented many serious problems both to commanders in the field and to the president. He had a conviction that to turn the power of slavery against slavery and rebellion must hasten the end of the war, but public opinion North was not prepared for so extreme an innovation. The pressure of the problem for solution led the president, in August, 1862, to authorize, through the secretary of war, commanders in the field to employ for purely defensive purposes slaves that came within their lines, and General Saxton, at Port Royal, was given authority to arm, uniform, equip and drill, for the defense of the plantations about Port Royal, 5,000 volunteers from this African contingent. The act of Congress of July 17th,

of that year, empowered the president to employ negroes in the general defense and for the suppression of the rebellion, either in the army, the navy or in camp service, negroes thus employed to receive ten dollars a month and one ration, and clothing to the value of three dollars, to be deducted from the monthly wage. When in September, the president issued the preliminary emancipation proclamation, it announced the change of policy by declaring that persons of African descent would be received into the armed service of the United States. As early as April, 1862, General Hunter had begun arming negroes, but the act did not receive the support of public sentiment, generally, at the North nor the approval of commanders in the field: the army officers as yet looked with contempt on the negro as a possible soldier; yet there were able officers who thoroughly believed in the right and policy of the innovation. Among these was Colonel T. W. Higginson, of Massachusetts, whose Army Life in a Black Regiment tells the story of the negro soldier in the Civil War. In New Orleans, General Butler enlisted one regiment during the summer and autumn, but they were free persons of color, the prejudice against enrolling such being less in Louisiana than elsewhere. Free persons of color had fought under General Jackson in the battle of New Orleans. And Governor Moore had raised a regiment of free negroes for rebel uses, but had not armed it. After the Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, the recruiting of negro regiments went on rapidly under General Butler. Thus by the time of the final Emancipation Proclamation, at the opening of 1863, negro regiments were no longer an experiment and the public mind, stirred by reports of their courage and devotion, was accustoming itself to the change and the president had adopted it as a fixed element in his policy. In March, General Banks, at New Orleans, reported twenty-one negro regiments, making from 10,000 to 12,000 men, infantry, cavalry and artillery-the result of his four or five months' activity, and regiments were from this time reported by commanders in

the lower South and in the Southwest: at Memphis, at Corinth, at Vicksburg, and elsewhere. General Grant favored the use of negro soldiers and General Thomas reported that the prejudice in the army to employing them was fast dying out. A negro regiment was raised by Governor Sprague, of Rhode Island, in September, 1862, and another by Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, in May following, and a third, the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Colored, in June. These regiments were immediately sent south. When it is remembered that the laws of the free States, as well as of the slave, before the War discriminated against negroes and that both the laws and the constitutions of the Northern States forbade the enrollment of negroes in the militia, the arming of organized negro regiments in any Northern State was, legally, quite as much of an innovation as at the South. In the border States public prejudice refused to tolerate the thought of negro regiments. General Grant gave vigorous support to the president's policy of arming the negroes. "There is no objection," he wrote the president, August 26, 1863, "there is no objection, however, to my expressing an honest conviction; that is, by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers, and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us. I am therefore most decidedly in favor of pushing this policy to the enlistment of a force sufficient to hold all the South falling into our hands and to aid in capturing more."

That opponents of the administration at the North included the enrollment of negroes as one of the errors of the president is clear from his reply, in his letter to the Illinois Convention, on the subject. To that reply there could be no rational rejoinder. The Copperhead element at the North never ceased, however, taunting Lincoln's supporters with the ignominy of fighting with negroes for negroes.

Despite this desperate love of country, the Copperheads were compelled to witness the spread of public approbation of the president's policy, which, as developed by Congress,

resulted, during the last two years of the war, in the active service of 186,000 negro soldiers, of whom nearly 124,000 were in service at one time, distributed through all the arms -infantry, cavalry and artillery. No comment on this aspect of Lincoln's statesmanship is wiser than that of his biographers, Nicolay and Hay:

"This magnificent exhibit is a testimony to Mr. Lincoln's statesmanship which can hardly be over-valued. If he had adopted the policy when it was first urged upon him by impulsive enthusiasts, it would have brought his administration to political wreck, as was clearly indicated by the serious election reverses of 1862. But restraining the impatience and the bad judgment of his advisers, and using that policy at the opportune moment, he not only made it a powerful lever to effect emancipation, but a military overweight aiding effectually to crush the remaining rebel armies and bring the rebellion, as a whole, to a speedy and sudden collapse."

To the whole policy of Lincoln the Confederacy, of course, made opposition, but for the policy of emancipation and arming of negro soldiers the Confederacy initiated retaliation. The whole literature of war contains no more elaborate scheme for bloody reprisal than the scheme authorized by the Richmond government. It declared that General Hunter and other commissioned officers of the United States "employed in drilling, organizing, or instructing slaves, with a view to their armed service in this war-shall not be regarded as a prisoner of war, but held in close confinement for execution as a felon at such time and place as the president shall order." Negro slaves captured in arms were to be turned over to State authorities to be dealt with according to the black code, and General Butler was specially designated-with his officers, as "robbers and criminals deserving death," to be "whenever captured, reserved for execution." The rage of the Confederate president and his advisers fulminated itself in proclamations, edicts and laws the substance of which was the death sentence of every