...d? Lee did not believe the white population could supply the necessities of a long war without overtaxing its capacity, and thought the time had come to enlist the negroes as soldiers, and so wrote Hon. E. Barksdale , a member of the Confederate States House of Representatives, on February 18, 1865. Six months before, he had advocated their employment as teamsters, laborers, and mechanics, in place of whites, who...