justification. The vote of the neighboring county of Washington, a few days since, for its delegate to the legislature, wherein 4,000 out of 5,000 votes were thrown for a delegate favorable to the Union, is among the many happy fruits of firmness of purpose, efficiency of action, and integrity of mission. I believe, indeed, that it will not require a personal interchange of views, as suggested in your dispatch, to bring our minds in accordance; a simple statement of the facts will suffice.

But I am to act hereafter, it may be, in an enemy's country, among a servile population, when the question may arise, as it has not yet arisen, as well in a moral and Christian, as in a political and military point of view, What shall I do? Will your excellency bear with me a moment while this question is discussed?

I appreciate fully your excellency's suggestion as to the inherent weakness of the rebels, arising from the preponderance of their servile population. The question, then, is, In what manner shall we take advantage of that weakness? By allowing, and, of course, arming, that population to rise upon the defenseless women and children of the country, carrying rapine, arson and murder-all the horrors of San Domingo, a million times magnified-among those whom we hope to reunite with us as brethren, many of whom are already so, and all who are worth preserving, will be, when this horrible madness shall have passed away or be threshed out of them? Would your excellency advise the troops under my command to make war in person upon the defenseless women and children of any part of the Union, accompanied with brutalities too horrible to be named? You will say, "God forbid!" If we may not do so in person, shall we arm others so to do, over whom we can have no restraint, exercise no control, and who, when once they have tasted blood, may turn the very arms we put in their hands against ourselves, as a part of the oppressing white race? The reading of history so familiar to your excellency, will tell you the bitterest cause of complaint which our fathers had against Great Britain in the war of the Revolution, was the arming by the British ministry of the red man with the tomahawk and the scalping-knife against the women and children of the colonies, so that the phrase, "May we not use all the means which God and nature have put in our power to subjugate the colonies?" has passed into a legend of infamy against the leader of that ministry who used it in parliament. Shall history teach us in vain? Could we justify ourselves to ourselves, although with arms in our hands, amid the savage wildness of camp and field, we may have blunted many of the finer moral sensibilities, in letting loose four millions of worse than savages upon the homes and hearths of the South? Can we be justified to the Christian community of Massachusetts? Would such a course be consonant with the teachings of our holy religion? I have a very decided opinion upon the subject, and if any one desires, as I know your excellency does not, this

unhappy contest to be prosecuted in that manner, some instrument other than myself must be found to carry it on. I may not discuss the political bearings of this topic. When I went from under the shadow of my rooftree, I left all politics behind me, to be resumed only when every part of the Union is loyal to the flag, and the potency of the government through the ballot-box is established.

Passing the moral and Christian view, let us examine the subject as a military question. Is not that state already subjugated which requires the bayonets of those armed in opposition to its rulers, to preserve it from the horrors of a servile war? As the least experienced of military men, I would have no doubt of the entire subjugation of a state brought to that condition. When, therefore-unless I am better advised-any community in the United States, who have met me in honorable warfare, or even in the prosecution of a rebellious war in an honorable manner, shall call upon me for protection against the nameless horrors of a servile insurrection, they shall have it, and from the moment that call is obeyed, I have no doubt we shall be friends and not enemies.

The possibility that dishonorable means of defense are to be taken by the rebels against the government, I do not now contemplate. If, as has been done in a single instance, my men are to be attacked by poison, or as in another, stricken down by the assassin's knife, and thus murdered, the community using such weapons may be required to be taught that it holds within its own border a more potent means for deadly purposes and indiscriminate slaughter than any which it can administer to us.

Trusting that these views may meet your excellency's approval, I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

BENJ. F. BUTLER.

We all remember how universal the expectation was, at the beginning of the war, that the negroes would everywhere embrace the opportunity to rise upon their masters, and commit frightful outrages. That expectation grew out of our general ignorance of the character and feelings of the southern negro; and none of us were so ignorant upon these points as hunker democrats. If they had some acquaintance with slaveholders, they knew nothing about slavery, because they would know nothing. It is a propensity of the human mind, to put away from itself unwelcome truths. American democrats, I repeat, know nothing of American slavery. It was pleasant and convenient for them to think, that Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr. Garrison, Mrs. Stowe, and Mr. Sumner, were persons of a fanatical cast of character, whose calm and very moderate

exhibitions of slavery were totally beneath consideration-distorted, exaggerated, incredible. It was with the most sincere astonishment, that General Butler and his hunker staff discovered, when they stood face to face with slavery, and were obliged to administer the law of it, and tried to do justice to the black man as well as to the white, that the worst delineations of slavery ever presented to the public fell far short of the unimaginable truth.* They were ready to confess their ignorance of that of which they had been hearing and reading all their lives, and that this 'patriarchal institution,' for which some of them had pleaded or apologized, was simply the most hellish thing that ever was in this world.

Nevertheless, there has never been the slightest danger of an insurrection of the slaves. The real victim of slavery is the white man, not the black. Whatever little good there is in the system, the black man has had; while most of the evil has fallen to the white man's share. Under slavery, the black man has deeply suf fered and slowly improved; the white man has ignobly enjoyed and rapidly degenerated. Three or four, or five generations of servitude have extirpated whatever of warlike and rebellious energy the negro may have once possessed; and, of late years, the Christian religion, in a rude and tropical form-much feeling and little knowledge has exerted a still more subduing influence upon them. Some more or less correct version of the story of the Cross has become familiar to them all, as well as the sentiments of the Sermon on the Mount. To no people, of all the suffering sons of men, has that wondrous tale come home with such power as to these sad and docile children of Africa. Are not they, too, men of sorrow? Are not they, too, acquainted with grief? Have not they, too, to suffer and be silent?-revenge impossible, forgiveness divinely commanded?

Insurrection! If a Springfield musket and a Sheffield bowieknife were this day placed in every negro hut in the South, and every master gone to the war, the negroes might use those weapons, but it would be to defend, not to molest, their masters' wives

"On reading Mrs. Stowe's book, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' I thought it to be an overdrawn, highlywrought picture of southern life; but I have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, many things which go beyond her book, as much as her book does beyond an ordinary school-girl's novel."-Speech of General Butler at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, on his return from New Orleans, Januay 8, 1863.

and children. There is many a negro in the southern states who does actually stand in the same kind of moral relation to his master as that which Jesus Christ bore to the Jews, when he said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." And not moral relation only; for the negro often has a clear mental perception of the fact stated. He sometimes stands above his master, at a hight which the master can neither see nor believe in.

CHAPTER V.

BALTIMORE.

WHEN war breaks out in a country after a long peace, it is natural that the people should look for guidance first to men who won distinction in the wars of the past. The history of wars shows us that this is generally an error, fruitful of disaster. It gave us Washington, it is true; but Washington was but forty-four years of age when he left Philadelphia to take command of the armies of the revolution; and he had passed the twenty years which had elapsed since Braddock's defeat, not in the routine of a military office, but in hunting the fox, and in managing a great estate, which involved the control of some hundreds of human beings. The almost sovereign lord of a little principality, he spent half his days in the saddle, and was constantly engaged in pursuits somewhat akin to those of a commander of armies. Neither his mind nor his blood could stagnate, roaming those extensive fields and forests, foreseeing, calculating, providing, governing. But the rule usually holds good, that a war develops its own hero; the heroes of the past not proving adequate to the new emergency.

At the beginning of this rebellion, there was an officer at the seat of government who had been a general in the service of the United States for forty-nine years. Two generations had been accustomed to regard him as the ablest of American soldiers; and for a long series of years, he had been highest in place, as well as highest in the confidence of the public. The reputation of a living person has

in it a principle of growth. If a man has done something which so enters into the history of his nation, that children necessarily become familiar with his name at school, he may sit still for thirty years, and yet find his reputation growing; until, by the death of cotemporaries, it becomes, perhaps, unique and overshadowing. The haze of antiquity gathers round it, veiling and yet magnifying the basis of fact upon which it rests. And if, perchance, the ancient hero, emerging from the vast, dim halo of his name, presents himself to view, in his old age, at the head of a conquering army, thundering at the gates of an enemy's capital, vague reverence is changed to conscious enthusiasm, and no one doubts that here, indeed, is the "first captain of the age.” When the war began, therefore, and rumors of an impending attack upon the capital alarmed the country, the name of Winfield Scott appeared sufficient to allay apprehension. It seemed of itself a tower of strength; it was a rallying point for the gathering forces of the country; it gave assurance to millions of minds that the resources of the nation, so lavishly offered, would be employed with intelligence and success. If there was

a moment when some men feared that the mania of secession might seize even him, the fear was quickly dispelled, when he was seen renewing his oath of allegiance, and responding in unequivocal language to the cheers of arriving regiments. There he was, the center of attraction, conspicuous among the conspicuous, apparently rolling up the whirlwind, and elaborating the storm that was supposed to be about to sweep over the rebellious states resistless. Fatal delusion!

General Scott was seventy-five years of age. An old wound partly disabled him. A recent accident had shaken him severely. He could not mount a horse. He could not walk a mile. The motion of a carriage soon fatigued him. His vast form was itself a heavy burden. He required a great deal of sleep. He moved, thought, and acted slowly. Accustomed for fifty years to the pettiest details of a small, widely scattered army, he was now suddenly called upon to organize many armies, and direct their movements against enemies in the field. A task more difficult than ever Napoleon or Wellington performed, was laid upon a man who, in his best days, would have been signally unequal to it; for he had not been gifted by nature with that genius for command which alone could have formed invincible armies out of masses of loosely organ