Nothing could have been happier in its effect
upon the public mind than General Hunter's reply
to Mr. Wickliffe of Kentucky, given in our last.
It produced a general broad grin throughout the
country, and the advocate who can set his jury
laughing rarely loses his cause. It also strengthened
the spinal column of the Government in a
very marked degree; although not yet up to the
point of fully endorsing and accepting this daring
experiment.

Meantime the civil authorities of course got
wind of what was going on—Mr. Henry J. Windsor,
special correspondent of the New York Times
in the Department of the South, having devoted
several very graphic and widely-copied letters to
a picture of that new thing under the sun—
“Hunter's negro regiment.”

Of course the chivalry of the rebellion were

[figure description] Page 190.[end figure description]

incensed beyond measure at this last Yankee outrage
upon Southern rights. Their papers teemed
with vindictive articles against the commanding
general who had dared to initiate such a novelty—
the Savannah Republican, in particular, denouncing
Hunter as “The cold-blooded abolition
miscreant who, from his headquarters at Hilton
Head, is engaged in executing the bloody and
savage behests of the imperial gorilla who, from
his throne of human bones at Washington, rules,
reigns, and riots over the destinies of the brutish
and degraded North.”

Mere newspaper abuse, however, by no means
gave content to the outraged feelings of the chivalry.
They therefore sent a formal demand to
our Government for information as to whether
General Hunter, in organizing his regiment of
emancipated slaves, had acted under the authority
of our War Department; or whether the villany
was of his own conception? If he had acted
under orders, why then terrible measures of fierce
retaliation against the whole Yankee nation were
to be adopted; but if, per contra, the iniquity
were of his own motion and without the sanction
of our Government, then the foreshadowed retribution
should be made to fall only on Hunter and
his officers.

To this demand, with its alternative of threats,
President Lincoln was in no mood to make any

[figure description] Page 191.[end figure description]

definitive reply. In fact no reply at all was sent—
for, as yet, the most far-seeing political augurs
could not determine whether the bird seen in the
sky of the Southern Department would prove an
eagle or a buzzard. Public opinion was not
formed upon the subject, though rapidly forming.
There were millions who agreed with Hunter in
believing that “the black man should be made
fight for the freedom which could not but be the
issue of our war;” and then there were other millions
whose conservative notions were outraged at
the prospect of allowing black men to be killed
or maimed in company with our nobler
whites.

Failing to obtain any reply, therefore, from the
authorities of Washington, the Richmond people
determined to pour out all their vengeance on the
immediate perpetrators of this last Yankee atrocity;
and forthwith there was issued from the
rebel War Department a General Order—number
60, we believe, of the Series of 1862—reciting
that “as the government of the United States had
refused to answer whether it authorized the raising
of a black regiment by General Hunter or
not,” said General, his staff, and all officers under
his command who had directly or indirectly participated
in the unclean thing, should hereafter be
maranatha—outlaws not covered by the laws
of war; but to be executed as felons for the

[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]

crime of “inciting negro insurrections wherever
caught.”

This order reached the ears of the parties
mainly interested just as General Hunter was
called to Washington—ostensibly for consultation
on public business; but really on the motion of
certain prominent speculators in marine transportation,
with whose “big things” in Port Royal
harbor—and they were enormous—the General
had seen fit to interfere. These frauds, however,
will form a very fruitful and pregnant theme for
some future chapters. At present our business is
with the slow but certain growth in the public
mind of this idea of allowing some black men to
be killed in the late war, and not continuing to
arrogate death and mutilation by projectiles and
bayonets as an exclusive privilege for our own
beloved white race.

No sooner had Hunter been relieved from this
special duty at Washington, than he was ordered
back to the South—our Government still taking
no notice of the order of outlawry against him
issued by the rebel Secretary of War. He and
his officers were thus sent back to engage, with
extremely insufficient forces, in an enterprise of
no common difficulty, and with an agreeable sentence
of sus. per col., if captured, hanging over
their devoted heads!

“Why not suggest to Mr. Stanton, General, that

[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]

he should either demand the special revocation
of that order, or announce to the rebel War Department
that our Government has adopted your
negro-regiment policy as its own—which would
be the same thing?”

It was partly on this hint that Hunter wrote
the following letter to Jefferson Davis—a letter
subsequently suppressed and never sent, owing to
influences which the writer of this article does not
feel himself as yet at liberty to reveal—further
than to say that Mr. Stanton knew nothing of the
matter. Davis and Hunter, we may add, had
been very old and intimate friends, until divided,
some years previous to our late war, by differences
on the slavery question. Davis had for many
years been adjutant of the 1st U. S. Dragoons, of
which Hunter had been Captain Commanding;
and a relationship of very close friendship had
existed between their respective families. It was
this thorough knowledge of his man, perhaps,
which gave peculiar bitterness to Hunter's pen;
and the letter is otherwise remarkable as a prophecy,
or preördainment of that precise policy
which President Johnson has so frequently announced
and reiterated since Mr. Lincoln's death.
It ran—with some few omissions, no longer pertinent
or of public interest—as follows:

[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]

“To Jefferson Davis, Titular President of the
so-called Confederate States.
“Washington, 20th Sept., 1862.

“Sir:—While recently in command of the
Department of the South, in accordance with
the laws of war and the dictates of common sense,
I organized and caused to be drilled, armed, and
equipped a regiment of enfranchised bondmen,
known as the 1st South Carolina Volunteers.

“For this action, as I have ascertained, the pretended
government of which you are the chief
officer, has issued against me and all of my officers
who were engaged in organizing the regiment in
question, a General Order of Outlawry, which
announces that, if captured, we shall not even be
allowed the usual miserable treatment extended
to such captives as fall into your hands; but that
we are to be regarded as felons, and to receive the
death by hanging due to such, irrespective of the
laws of war.

“Mr. Davis, we have been acquainted intimately
in the past. We have campaigned together, and
our social relations have been such as to make
each understand the other thoroughly. That you
mean, if it be ever in your power, to execute the
full rigor of your threat, I am well assured; and
you will believe my assertion, that I thank you
for having raised in connection with me and my
acts, this sharp and decisive issue. I shall proudly

[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]

accept, if such be the chance of war, the martyrdom
you menace; and hereby give you notice
that unless your General Order against me and my
officers be formally revoked within thirty days
from the date of the transmission of this letter,
sent under a flag of truce, I shall take your action
in the matter as final; and will reciprocate it by
hanging every rebel officer who now is, or may
hereafter be taken, prisoner by the troops of the
command to which I am about returning.

“Believe me that I rejoice at the aspect now
being given to the war by the course you have
adopted. In my judgment, if the undoubted
felony of treason had been treated from the outset
as it deserves to be—as the sum of all felonies
and crimes—this rebellion would never have
attained its present menacing proportions. The
war you and your fellow-conspirators have been
waging against the United States must be regarded
either as a war of justifiable defence, carried on
for the integrity of the boundaries of a sovereign
Confederation of States against foreign aggression,
or as the most wicked, enormous, and deliberatelyplanned
conspiracy against human liberty and
for the triumph of treason and slavery, of which
the records of the world's history contain any
note.

“If our Government should adopt the first view
of the case, you and your fellow-rebels may justly

[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]

claim to be considered a most unjustly-treated
body of disinterested patriots—although, perhaps,
a little mistaken in your connivance with the
thefts by which your agent, John B. Floyd, succeeded
in arming the South and partially disarming
the North, as a preparative to the commencement
of the struggle.

“But if on the other hand—as is the theory of
our Government—the war you have levied against
the United States be a rebellion the most causeless,
crafty, cruel, and bloody ever known—a
conspiracy having the rule-or-ruin policy for its
basis, the plunder of the black race and the reopening
of the African slave-trade for its object,
the continued and further degradation of ninety
per cent. of the white population of the South in
favor of a slave-driving ten per cent. aristocracy,
and the exclusion of all foreign-born immigrants
from participation in the generous and equal hospitality
foreshadowed to them in the Declaration
of Independence,—if this, as I believe, be a fair
statement of the origin and motives of the rebellion
of which you are the titular head, then it
would have been better had our Government
adhered to the constitutional view of treason from
the start, and hung every man taken in arms
against the United States, from the first butchery
in the streets of Baltimore, down to the last resultless
battle fought in the vicinity of Sharpsburg.

[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]

“If treason, in other words, be any crime, it is
the essence of all crimes; a vast machinery of
guilt, multiplying assassinations into wholesale
slaughters, and organizing plunder as the basis
for supporting a system of National Brigandage.
Your action, and that of those with whom you
are in league, has its best comment in the sympathy
extended to your cause by the despots and
aristocracies of Europe. You have succeeded
in throwing back civilization for many years;
and have made of the country that was the freest,
happiest, proudest, richest, and most progressive
but two short years ago, a vast temple of mourning,
doubt, anxiety, and privation—our manufactures
of all but war-material nearly paralysed,
the inventive spirit which was for ever developing
new resources destroyed, and our flag, that carried
respect everywhere, now mocked by enemies
who think its glory tarnished, and that its
power is soon to become a mere tradition of the
past.

“For all these results, Mr. Davis, and for the
three hundred thousand lives already sacrificed
on both sides in the war—some pouring out their
blood on the battle-field, and others, feverstricken,
wasting away to death in over-crowded
hospitals—you and the fellow-miscreants who
have been your associates in this conspiracy are
responsible. Of you and them it may with truth

[figure description] Page 198.[end figure description]

be said, that if all the innocent blood which you
have spilled could be collected in one pool, the
whole government of your Confederacy might
swim in it.

“I am aware that this is not the language in
which the prevailing etiquette of our army is in
the habit of considering your conspiracy. It has
come to pass—through what instrumentalities
you are best able to decide—that the greatest and
worst crime ever attempted against the human
family, has been treated in certain quarters as
though it were a mere error of judgment on the
part of some gifted friends; a thing to be regretted,
of course, as causing more or less disturbance
to the relations of amity and esteem heretofore
existing between those charged with the repression
of such eccentricities and the eccentric actors:
in fact, as a slight political miscalculation or peccadillo,
rather than as an outrage involving the
desolation of a continent, and demanding the
promptest and severest retribution within the
power of human law.

“For myself, I have never been able to take
this view of the matter. During a lifetime of
active service, I have seen the seeds of this conspiracy
planted in the rank soil of slavery, and
the Upas-growth watered by just such tricklings
of a courtesy alike false to justice, expediency,
and our eternal future. Had we at an earlier day

[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]

commenced to call things by their right names,
and to look at the hideous features of slavery
with our ordinary common eyesight and common
sense, instead of through the rose-colored glasses
of supposed political expediency, there would be
three hundred thousand more men alive to-day on
American soil; and our country would never for
a moment have forfeited her proud position as the
highest exemplar of the blessings—moral, intellectual,
and material—to be derived from a free
form of government.

“Whether your intention of hanging me and
those of my staff and other officers who were
engaged in organizing the 1st South Carolina Volunteers,
in case we are taken prisoners in battle,
will be likely to benefit your cause or not, is a
matter mainly for your own consideration. For
us, our profession makes the sacrifice of life a
contingency ever present and always to be accepted;
and although such a form of death as your
order proposes, is not that to the contemplation
of which soldiers have trained themselves—I feel
well assured, both for myself and those included
in my sentence, that we could die in no manner
more damaging to your abominable rebellion
and the abominable institution which is its
origin.

“The South has already tried one hanging
experiment, but not with a success—one would

[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]

think—to encourage its repetition. John Brown,
who was well known to me in Kansas, and who
will be known in appreciative history through
centuries which will only recall your name to load
it with curses—once entered Virginia with seventeen
men and an idea. The terror caused by the
presence of his idea, and the dauntless courage
which prompted the assertion of his faith against
all odds, I need not now recall. The history is
too familiar and too painful. `Old Ossawatomie'
was caught and hung; his seventeen men were
killed, captured, or dispersed, and several of them
shared his fate. Portions of his skin were tanned,
I am told, and circulated as relics dear to the barbarity
of the slaveholding heart. But more than
a million of armed white men, Mr. Davis, are to-day
marching South, in practical acknowledgment
that they regard the hanging of three years ago
as the murder of a martyr; and as they march to
a battle which has the emancipation of all slaves
as one of its most glorious results, his name is on
their lips; to the music of his memory their
marching feet keep time; and as they sling knapsacks,
each one becomes aware that he is an armed
apostle of the faith preached by him

“I am content, if such be the will of

[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]

Providence, to ascend the scaffold made sacred by the
blood of this martyr; and I rejoice at every prospect
of making our struggle more earnest and
inexorable on both sides; for the sharper the
conflict the sooner ended—the more vigorous and
remorseless the strife, the less blood must be shed
in it eventually.

“In conclusion, let me assure you, that I rejoice
with my whole heart that your order in my case,
and that of my officers, if unrevoked, will untie
our hands for the future; and that we shall be
able to treat rebellion as it deserves, and give to
the felony of treason a felon's death.

Not long after General Hunter's return to the
Department of the South, the first step towards
organizing and recognising negro troops was
taken by our Government, in a letter of instructions
directing Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton,—
then Military Governor of South Carolina, Georgia,
and Florida, within the limits of General Hunter's
command—to forthwith raise and organize fifty
thousand able-bodied blacks, for service as laborers
in the quartermaster's department; of whom
five thousand—only five thousand, mark you!—
might be armed and drilled as soldiers for the
purpose of “protecting the women and children

[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]

of their fellow-laborers who might be absent from
home in the public service.”

Here was authority given to General Saxton,
over Hunter's head, to pursue some steps farther
the experiment which Hunter—soon followed by
General Phelps, also included in the rebel order
of “outlawry”—had been the first to initiate.
The rebel order still remained in full force, and
with no protest against it on the part of our
Government; nor, to our knowledge, was any
demand from Washington ever made for its revocation
during the existence of the Confederacy.
If Hunter, therefore, or any of his officers, had
been captured in any of the campaigns of the
past two and a half years, they had the pleasant
knowledge for their comfort that every rebel
officer into whose hands they might fall, was
strictly enjoined to—not “shoot them on the
spot,” as was the order of General Dix—but to
hang them on the first tree, and hang them
quickly.

With the subsequent history of our black
troops the public is already familiar. General
Lorenzo Thomas, titular Adjutant-General of our
army, not being regarded as a very efficient
officer for that place, was permanently detailed
on various services—now exchanging prisoners,
now discussing points of military law, now organizing
black brigades down the Mississippi and

[figure description] Page 203.[end figure description]

elsewhere. In fact, the main object seemed to be
to keep this General Thomas—who must not be
confounded with General George H. Thomas, one
of the true heroes of our army—away from the
Adjutant-General's office at Washington, in order
that Brigadier General E. D. Townsend—only a
Colonel until quite recently—might perform all
the laborious and crushing duties of Adjutant-General
of our army, while only signing himself
and ranking as First Assistant Adjutant-General.
If there be an officer who has done noble service
in the late war while receiving no public credit
for the same—no newspaper puffs nor public
ovations—that man is Brigadier-General E. D.
Townsend, who should long since have been made
a major-general, to rank from the first day of the
rebellion.

And now let us only add, as practical proof
that the rebels, even in their most rabid state,
were not insensible to the force of proper “reasons”—
the following anecdote:

Some officers of one of our black regiments—
Colonel Higginson's, we believe—indiscreetly rode
beyond our lines around St. Augustine in pursuit
of game—but whether feathered or female this
deponent sayeth not. Their guide proved to be
a spy, who had given notice of the intended expedition
to the enemy; and the whole party were
soon surprised and captured. The next we heard

[figure description] Page 204.[end figure description]

of them, they were confined in the condemned
cells of one of the Florida State-prisons and were
to be “tried”—i.e. sentenced and executed—as
“having been engaged in inciting negro insurrections.”

We had then some wealthy young slaveholders
belonging to the first families of South Carolina
in the custody of Lieutenant-Colonel J. F.
Hall—now Brigadier-General—of this city, who
was our Provost-Marshal; and it was on this basis
General Hunter resolved to operate. “Release
my officers of black troops from your condemned
cells at once, and notify me of the fact. Until
so notified, your first family prisoners in my
hands”—the names then given—“will receive
precisely similar treatment. For each of my officers
hung, I will hang three of my prisoners who
are slaveholders.” This dose operated with
instantaneous effect, and the next letter received
from our captured officers set forth that they were
at large on parole, and treated as well as they
could wish to be in that miserable country.

We cannot better conclude this sketch, perhaps,
than by giving the brief but pregnant verses in
which our ex-orderly, Private Miles O'Reilly, late
of the Old Tenth Army Corps, gave his opinion
on this subject. They were first published in
connection with the banquet given by General
T. F. Meagher and the officers of the Irish

[figure description] Page 205.[end figure description]

Brigade to the returned veterans of that organization
on the 13th of January, 1864, at Irving Hall.
Of this song it may, perhaps, be said, in verity
and without vanity, that—as General Hunter's
letter to Mr. Wickliffe had settled the negro-soldier
controversy in its official and Congressional
form—so did the publication and immediate popular
adoption of these verses conclude all argument
upon this matter in the mind of the general public.
Its common sense, with a dash of drollery,
at once won over the Irish, who had been the
bitterest opponents of the measure, to become its
friends; and from that hour to this, the attacks
upon the experiment of our negro soldiery have
been so few and far between that, indeed, they
may be said to have ceased altogether. It ran as
follows, and appeared in the Herald the morning
after the banquet, as portion of the report of the
speeches and festivities:

[figure description] Page 206.[end figure description]

In regard to Hunter's reply to Mr. Wickliffe,
we shall only add this anecdote, told us one day

[figure description] Page 207.[end figure description]

by that brilliant gentleman and scholar, the Hon.
Sun-Set Cox of Ohio:

“I tell you, that letter from Hunter spoiled the
prettiest speech I had ever thought of making. I
had been delighted with Wickliffe's motion, and
thought the reply to it would furnish us first-rate
Democratic thunder for the next election. I
made up my mind to sail in against Hunter's
answer—no matter what it was—the moment it
came; and to be even more humorously successful
in its delivery and reception than I was in my
speech against War-Horse Gurley, of Ohio, which
you have just been complimenting. Well, you
see, man proposes, but Providence orders otherwise.
When the Clerk announced the receipt of
the answer, and that he was about to read it, I
caught the Speaker's eye and was booked for the
first speech against your negro experiment. The
first sentence, being formal and official, was very
well; but at the second, the House began to grin;
and at the third, not a man on the floor—except
Father Wickliffe, of Kentucky, perhaps—who
was not convulsed with laughter. Even my own
risibles, I found to be affected; and before the
document was concluded, I motioned the Speaker
that he might give the floor to whom he pleased,
as my desire to distinguish myself in that particular
tilt was over.”

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