PROPOSITION TO ARM THE SLAVES.

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Virginia. To the presiding officer of her Legislature, he wrote: "Your assurance is to me a source of the highest gratification; and while conveying to you my thanks for the expression of the confidence of the General As sembly in my sincere devotion to my country and sacred cause, I must beg permission, in return, to bear witness to the uncalculating, unhesitating spirit with which Virginia has, from the moment when she first drew the sword, consecrated the blood of her children and all her material resources to the achievement of the object of our struggle."

If the spirit of Virginia had animated the entire Confederacy, a cause now prostrate might have been still erect and in arms, and perhaps triumphant. For after all, the main condition of the success of the Confederacy was simply resolution, the quality that endures; and as long as the people were resolved to be free, there was no military power that could have been summoned by the enemy, to bring under subjection a country occupying so many square miles, and so wild and difficult as that of the South. The mind may easily discover many causes that concurred in the decline and downfall of the Southern Confederacy, and contributed something to the catastrophe; but one rises uppermost, and, for the purposes of the expla nation, is sufficient and conclusive-the general demoralization of the people, and that demoralization consequent upon such a want of confidence in the administration of President Davis, as was never before exhibited between a people and its rulers in a time of revolution. He who takes broad and enlightened views of great historical results, and is not satisfied to let his mind rest on secondary causes and partial explanations, will ascribe the downfall of the Southern Confederacy to a general breakng down of the public virtue, and the debasement of a people who, having utterly lost hope in their rulers, and having no heart for a new experiment, descend to tame and infamous submission to what they consider fortune.

We may properly add here some considerations of an extraordinary measure to restore the fortunes of the Confederacy, indicative, indeed, of the desperate condition of the country, and of the disposition of the government to catch at straws. Throughout the entire session of the last Congress in Richmond there was an ill-natured debate of a proposition to arm the slaves, and thus repair the strength and organization of the armies. The circumstances in which this proposition was discussed showed plainly enough that the yield of the conscription law had been practically exhausted, and were the occasion of prejudicial dissensions, which contributed to the overthrow of the Confederacy. It may easily be calculated that out of three million slaves, two hundred thousand might have been spared, and brought into the field. This addition, if made some time ago, might have turned the scale in favour of the South, considering how evenly the balance hung in the early campaigns of the war. But the time for this measure was past; soldiers could not be impro

vised; there was no time to drill and perfect negro recruits before the re sumption of the active and decisive campaign; and it is a striking evidence of the shiftlessness of the Confederate Government and the impracticability of the Congress, that there should have been debated a bill to put two hundred thousand negroes in the Confederate armies at a time when there were not five thousand spare arms in the Confederacy and our returned prisoners could not actually find muskets with which to resume their places in the field.

Whatever may have been the general merits of the question of enlisting the negro and competing with the enemy in this branch of the recruit ing service, the time and circumstances in which the measure was actually discussed in Richmond rendered it impracticable and absurd, and gave occasion to a controversy which, however barren of proper results, created parties and drew lines of exasperated prejudice through different classes of the people. The country, in its exhausted state, could not half feed and clothe the few soldiers left in the ranks. Hence, under all possible circumstances, the negroes could but add to the painful embarrassments already existing. The policy of the government in this, as well as nearly all its measures, was lamentably weak and short-sighted. To suppose that it could accomplish with negro soldiers what it had totally failed to do with the white, who had a much greater interest in the issue, was supremely absurd. The actual results of the legislation of Congress on the subject were ridiculously small, and after the pattern of all its other productions in its last session-a pretence of doing something, yet so far below the necessities of the case, as to be to the last degree puerile, absurd, and contemptible. The proposition to arm negroes was made in November, 1864; it was debated until March, 1865; and the result was a weak compromise on the heel of the session by which the question of emancipation as a reward for the negroes' services was studiously excluded, and the President simply authorized to accept from their masters such slaves as they might choose to dedicate to the military service of the Confederacy.

Such paltry legislation indeed, may be taken as an indication of that vague desperation in the Confederacy which grasped at shadows; which conceived great measures, the actual results of which were yet insignifi cant; which showed its sense of insecurity-and yet, after all, had not nerve enough to make a practical and persistent effort at safety.