Then what a Providential solution of the question is offered in the employment of the negro as a soldier! There cannot surely be any well-founded objection to it. Such opposition as the plan has encountered seems to spring from the same unreasoning prejudice that keeps the black man out of all decent industries in our free North. It is that very prejudice which this plan will overcome. For the first thing to be done is to raise the negro from his degradation; and to do this we must obviously begin with teaching him a proper self-respect. This will bear its fruit in making him respected by others. No one will say that it is well to foster a feeling which outlaws any single class in the community from the respect of all. This would be to glorify the slave system of the South, and lay a basis for possible revolutions. Thus the employment of the negro as a soldier, while it must inspire the bondman of the South with a truer sense of his worth and capacity, and thus tend to weaken the foundation of the whole rebel fabric, will also correct the unquestioned evil of a growing class of outlaws in the midst of our society. And if we clothe the negro in the uniform of a soldier of the United States, the respect of the nation for its brave defenders will teach him self-respect; at the same time that it will teach the nation to put a new value upon its idea of loyalty.
The epitaph commemorative of the Spartan valor that has made Thermopylæ a name forever, serves to show the conclusion of our whole discussion:
'Go, stranger, and at Lacedæmon tell,
That here, obedient to her laws, we fell.'
For the man who is loyal to his flag will not quarrel with the color of a comrade in arms who has shed blood, red like his own, in defending that flag from dishonor; just as the man who is loyal to the altar feels a fellowship for every one, however humble, who bears the name of their common Master, and is made in the image of their common Father.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] Late Southern newspapers speak of the obstinacy of the garrison at Fort Pillow, and assert that Forrest would have stopped the massacre at any time after the capture, if our soldiers had manifested any disposition to yield.
[E] The writer's father saw these skulls hanging in the cars on a railway in Georgia, after first Bull Run, and saw them handed through the cars amid the jeers of passengers.
COLORS AND THEIR MEANING.
In order to a due understanding of the signification of colors, it is necessary we should commence at the foundation. Accordingly I shall begin by saying that colors are primary, secondary, and tertiary.