Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[660] there was no time to drill and perfect negro recruits before the resumption of the active and decisive campaign; and it is a striking evidence of the shiftlessness of the Confederate Government and the impracticability of the Congress, that there should have been debated a bill to put two hundred thousand negroes in the Confederate armies at a time when there were not five thousand spare arms in the Confederacy and our returned prisoners could not actually find muskets with which to resume their places in the field.

Whatever may have been the general merits of the question of enlisting the negro and competing with the enemy in this branch of the recruiting service, the time and circumstances in which the measure was actually discussed in Richmond rendered it impracticable and absurd, and gave occasion to a controversy which, however barren of proper results, created parties and drew lines of exasperated prejudice through different classes of the people. The country, in its exhausted state, could not half feed and clothe the few soldiers left in the ranks. Hence, under all possible circumstances, the negroes could but add to the painful embarrassments already existing. The policy of the government in this, as well as nearly all its measures, was lamentably weak and short-sighted. To suppose that it could accomplish with negro soldiers what it had totally failed to do with the white, who had a much greater interest in the issue, was supremely absurd. The actual results of the legislation of Congress on the subject were ridiculously small, and after the pattern of all its other productions in its last session — a pretence of doing something, yet so far below the necessities of the case, as to be to the last degree puerile, absurd, and contemptible. The proposition to arm negroes was made in November, 1864; it was debated until March, 1865; and the result was a weak compromise on the heel of the session by which the question of emancipation as a reward for the negroes' services was studiously excluded, and the President simply authorized to accept from their masters such slaves as they might choose to dedicate to the military service of the Confederacy.

Such paltry legislation indeed, may be taken as an indication of that vague desperation in the Confederacy which grasped at shadows; which conceived great measures, the actual results of which were yet insignificant; which showed its sense of insecurity-and yet, after all, had not nerve enough to make a practical and persistent effort at safety.