The Dismissal of Those Negro Troops.
What else could the President have done?
He is Commander-in-Chief of the Army: certain members of a certain battalion “shoot up” a certain town destroying property, terrorizing a peaceful community and committing murder.
The Commander-in-Chief endeavors to discover the identity of the guilty parties. He fails. He then appeals to the honor of the battalion, asking that the innocent point out the guilty. By no other method can the red-handed rioters and murderers be identified and brought to Justice.
The battalion is deaf to the appeal.
The innocent refuse to point out the guilty.
The innocent elect to make a common cause with the guilty.
Therefore, THEY, THEMSELVES, BECOME GUILTY of the highest crimes, as Accessories after the Fact.
In law and morals, there is not an innocent man left in that battalion, whose every member deliberately conceals the murderers, aids and abets them after full knowledge of the crime.
Considering them all as guilty, the President ordered their dishonorable discharge.
Why not?
They had committed crimes involving turpitude, degrading the uniform.
They had sullenly defied the President’s appeal to their honor, and hence his notice to disband them.
The innocent had elected to share the guilt of the guilty, and thus the whole battalion was guilty.
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Fanatical friends of the blacks say that the President should not have punished the innocent.
Nor did he.
He who conceals a murderer giving him aid and comfort, is himself a party to the crime.
What legal principle is older and sounder than that?
The fanatics overlook it.
The President did not.
Nor will those who consider the facts without passion and seek to judge the case without prejudice.
Apparently, the fanatics intend to convulse the Congress and the country over this matter of the Negro Troops.
Let it not be forgotten that even now the fanatics do not propose that the originally innocent negroes shall be required to point out those originally guilty.
The fanatics demand that the President back down, and that the order for the dismissal of the negroes be countermanded.
Thus, the originally guilty will be forever screened, and the crimes they committed will forever go unwhipt of Justice.
The President has been right and should be sustained.
To allow these fanatics and these negroes to triumph over the President, would be to exalt the criminal and to degrade the Just Judge.
If that had been a battalion of white men, nothing would have been said about it.
But it was a lot of negroes—consequently the fanatics got busy.