This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
Chapter
47
: freedmen's aid societies and an act of congress creating a Bureau of refugees, freedmen and abandoned lands
Chapter
55
:
first
appropriation by congress for the bureau; the reconstruction Act,
March
2
,
1867
; increase of educational work
Chapter
60
: opposition to Bureau and reconstruction work became personal; the
Congregational Church of
Washington
Chapter
62
: life in
Washington, D. C.
,
1866
to
1874
; assigned to duty in regular army as commander,
Department of the Columbia
Chapter
63
: in the
Northwest
, among the
Indians
; trip to
Alaska
; life in
Portland, Ore.
;
1874
to
1881
Chapter
64
: superintendent of the
United States military Academy
; commanding
Department of the Platte
,
Omaha, Neb.
Chapter
68
:
French
army maneuvers,
1884
; promotion to
Major General
,
United States army
,
San Francisco
1886
-
88
[169] “The question is simply whether they shall be used for or against the Government of the United States. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war.” After that action the slaves northward bound who crossed our lines, were denominated “contrabands.” They were in many places organized into camps and the able-bodied employed in army work. Our armies, made up mostly of volunteers, could not help at any time being participants, more or less pronounced, in the controversies that appeared in the press and the country. Some proslavery officers on various occasions denounced Mr. Lincoln, applying to him all sorts of epithets as, “mountebank,” “old ape,” and “a consummate tyrant.” Extreme abolitionists also impugned his conduct with equal violence on account df his apparent hesitation and slowness. While General Geo. B. McClellan annoyed him by public promises “to suppress all servile insurrection by force,” and General Don Carlos Buel, in Kentucky, continued to allow slave holders to come within his lines and recover their property, and General Halleck, in Missouri, forbade slaves to enter the lines; other commanders, especially in the West, grew wiser, and before long maintained a sounder war doctrine, viz.; “God means us to free all the slaves. We will not succeed in putting down the rebellion till we set every slave free.” It was not a brazen attempt to interpret the divine will, but, somehow, a settled conviction of such men's souls. Touching slaves and slave property, before long the Eastern, the Middle and the Western armies with little reasoning or open discussion caught the fire of vigorous and unsparing war measures. True, under
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.