Lincoln’s Army of Slaves

Here are some interesting historical facts that you will never see in anything Harry Jaffa has ever written (not that there are many actual facts, period, in any of his writings). From North against South (p. 134)by Ludwell Johnson, who taught history at William and Mary for many years:

In 1864, “Faced with a shrinking labor supply and rising wages, Northeastern businessmen and politicians lobbied for a law permitting state draft quotas to be credited with blacks recruited in occupied parts of the South. With Lincoln’s help they succeeded, and about 1000 state agents set out for Dixie and eventually rounded up about 5000 recruits. Negro ‘volunteers’ were pressed into the army at the point of a gun, shot without trial for resisting or deserting, and hunted through the swamps by bounty-hungry recruiters. . . . [A] Massachusetts man on the South Carolina coast wrote, ‘I can conceive of nothing worse on the coast of Africa. These men have been hunted like wild beasts and ruthlessly dragged from their families. . . .’ Blacks could now be hired as substitutes, too. John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, avoided [military] service by doing so; his replacement eventually was killed in action.”

“First to last, about 180,000 blacks served in uniform [in Lincoln’s army], the great majority bing recruited in the slave states. They were segregated, paid less than whites, and commanded almost exclusively by white officers . . . some Northern soldiers, taking advantage of the confusion of battle, killed them out of sheer race hatred.”

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11:39 am on November 27, 2005