Need for fighting men.
Apart from all other aspects of the question, the necessity for more fighting men is upon us. We can only get a sufficiency by making the negro share the dangers and hardships of the war. If we arm and train him and make him fight for the country in her hour of dire distress, every consideration of principle and policy demand that we should set him and his whole race who side with us, free.
It is a first principle with mankind that he who offers his life in defense of the
State should receive from her in return his freedom and his happiness, and we believe in acknowledgment of this principle the constitutions of the
Southern States have reserved to their respective governments the power to free slaves for meritorious services to the
State.
It is politic besides.
For many years—ever since the agitation of the subject of slavery commenced—the negro has been dreaming of freedom, and his vivid imagination has surrounded that condition with so many gratifications that it has become the paradise of his hopes.
To attain it he will tempt dangers and difficulties not exceeded by the bravest in the field.
The hope of freedom is, perhaps, the only moral incentive that can be applied to him in his present condition.
It would be preposterous, then, to expect him to fight against it with any degree of enthusiasm; therefore, we must bind him to our cause by no doubtful bonds; we must leave no possible loophole for treachery to creep in. The slaves are dangerous now, but armed, trained, and collected in an army they would be a thousandfold more dangerous.
Therefore, when we make soldiers of them we must make freemen of them beyond all question, and thus enlist their sympathies also.
We can do this more effectually than the
North can now do, for we can give the negro not only his own freedom, but that of his wife and child, and can secure it to him in his old home.
To do this we must immediately make his marriage and parental relations sacred in the eyes of the law and forbid their sale.
The past legislation of the
South concedes that a large
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free middle class of negro blood, between the master and slave, must sooner or later destroy the institution.
If, then, we touch the institution at all, we would do best to make the most of it, and by emancipating the whole race upon reasonable terms, and within such reasonable time as will prepare both races for the change, secure to ourselves all the advantages, and to our enemies all the disadvantages that can arise, both at home and abroad, from such a sacrifice.
Satisfy the negro that if he faithfully adheres to our standard during the war he shall receive his freedom and that of his race; give him as an earnest of our intentions such immediate immunities as will impress him with our sincerity and be in keeping with his new condition; enroll a portion of his class as soldiers of the
Confederacy, and we change the race from a dread weakness to a position of strength.
