Very respectfully your most obedient servant,
DAVID HUNTER, Maj.-Gen. Commanding."
"This missive was duly sent, with many misgivings that it would not get through the routine of the War Department in time to be laid before Congress previous to the adjournment of that honorable body which was then imminent. There were fears; too, that the Secretary of War might think it not sufficiently respectful, or serious in its tone; but such apprehensions proved unfounded. The moment it was received and read in the War Department, it was hurried down to the House, and delivered, ore retundo, from the clerk's desk.
"Here its effects were magical. The clerk could scarcely read it with decorum; nor could half his words be heard amidst the universal peals of laughter in which both Democrats and Republicans appeared to vie as to which should be the more noisy. Mr. Wickliffe, who only entered during the reading of the latter half of the document, rose to his feet in a frenzy of indignation, complaining that the reply, of which he had only heard some portion, was an insult to the dignity of the House, and should be severely noticed. The more he raved and gesticulated, the more irrepressibly did his colleagues, on both sides of the slavery question, scream and laugh; until finally, the merriment reached its climax on a motion made by some member—Schuyler Colfax, if we remember rightly—that 'as the document appeared to please the honorable gentleman from Kentucky so much, and as he had not heard the whole of it the Clerk be now requested to read the whole again'—a motion which was instantaneously carried amid such an uproar of universal merriment and applause as the frescoed walls of the chamber have seldom heard, either before or since. It was the great joke of the day, and coming at a moment of universal gloom in the public mind, was seized upon by the whole loyal press of the country as a kind of politico-military champaign cocktail.
"This set that question at rest forever; and not long after, the proper authorities saw fit to authorize the employment of 'fifty thousand able-bodied blacks for labor in the Quartermaster's Department,' and the arming and drilling as soldiers of five thousand of these, but for the sole purpose of 'protecting the women and children of their fellow-laborers who might be absent from home in the public service.'
"Here we have another instance of the reluctance with which the National Government took up this idea of employing negroes as soldiers; a resolution, we may add, to which they were only finally compelled by General Hunter's disbandment of his original regiment, and the storm of public indignation which followed that act.
"Nothing could have been happier in its effect upon the public mind than Gen. 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 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 cool-blooded abolition miscreant who, from his headquarters at Hilton Head, is engaged in executing the bloody and savage behest 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 feeling of the chivalry. They therefore sent a formal demand to our Government for information as to whether Gen. 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.
