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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, Appendix D: the struggle for pay. (search)
which they were enlisted. This is what will be done, should Mr. Wilson's bill, legalizing the back pay of the army, be defeated. We presume too much on the supposed ignorance of these men. I have never yet found a man in my regiment so stupid as not to know when he was cheated. If fraud proceeds from Government itself, so much the worse, for this strikes at the foundation of all rectitude, all honor, all obligation. Mr. Senator Fessenden said, in the debate on Mr. Wilson's bill, January 4, that the Government was not bound by the unauthorized promises of irresponsible recruiting officers. But is the Government itself an irresponsible recruiting officer? and if men have volunteered in good faith on the written assurances of the Secretary of War, is not Congress bound, in all decency, either to fulfil those pledges or to disband the regiments? Mr. Senator Doolittle argued in the same debate that white soldiers should receive higher pay than black ones, because the famil