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dollars and a half per month for clothing.
If the other half were delayed two days, they receive seven dollars per month and are allowed three dollars per month for precisely the same articles of clothing.
If one of the former class is made first sergeant, his pay is put up to twenty-one dollars per month; but if he escaped two days later, his pay is still estimated at seven dollars.
It had not occurred to me that anything could make the pay-rolls of these regiments more complicated than at present, or the men more rationally discontented.
I had not the ingenuity to imagine such an order.
Yet it is no doubt in accordance with the spirit, if not with the letter, of the final bill which was adopted by Congress under the lead of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens.
The ground taken by Mr. Stevens apparently was that the country might honorably save a few dollars by docking the promised pay of those colored soldiers whom the war had made free.
But the Government should have thought of this before it made the contract with these men and received their services. When the War Department instructed Brigadier-General Saxton, August 25, 1862, to raise five regiments of negroes in South Carolina, it was known very well that the men so enlisted had only recently gained their freedom.
But the instructions said: “The persons so received into service, and their officers, to be entitled to and receive the same pay and rations as are allowed by law to volunteers in the service.”
Of this passage Mr. Solicitor Whiting wrote to me: “I have no hesitation in saying that the faith of the Government was thereby pledged to every officer and soldier enlisted under that call.”
Where is that faith of the Government now?
The men who enlisted under the pledge were volunteers, every one; they did not get their freedom by enlisting; they had it already.
They enlisted to serve the Government, trusting in its honor.
Now the nation turns upon them and says: Your part of the contract is fulfilled; we have had
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Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co. University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge. 1870.
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