The policy of the nation, since the war began, has been eminently the
Anglo-Saxon policy. That is to say, we have not adapted our actions to
any preconceived theory, nor to any central idea. From the President
downward, every one has done as well as he could in every single day,
doubtful, and perhaps indifferent, as to what he should do the next day.
This is the method dear to the Anglo-Saxon mind. The English writers
acknowledge this; they call it the "practical system," and make an
especial boast that it is the method of their theology, their
philosophy, their physical science, their manufactures, and their trade.
In the language of philosophy, it directs us "to do the duty that comes
next us"; in a figure drawn from the card-table, it bids us "follow our
hand." The only branch of the Keltic race which adopts it expresses it
in the warlike direction, "When you see a head, hit it."
We have no objection to make to this so-called practical system in the
present case, if it only be broadly and generously adopted. If it reduce
us to a war of posts, to hand-to-mouth finance, and to that wretched
bureau-administration which thinks the day's work is done when the day's
letters have been opened, docketed, and answered, it becomes, it is
true, a very unpractical system, and soon reduces a great state to be a
very little one. But if the men who direct any country will, in good
faith, enlarge their view every day, from their impressions of yesterday
to the new realities of to-day,--if they will rise at once to the new
demands of to-day, and meet those demands under the new light of
to-day,--all the better is it, undoubtedly, if they are not hampered by
traditionary theories, if they are even indifferent as to the
consistency of their record, and are, thus, as able as they are willing
to work out God's present will with all their power. For it must be that
the present light of noonday will guide us better at noonday than any
prophecies which we could make at midnight or at dawn.
The country, at this moment, demands this broad and generous use of its
great present advantages. In three years of sacrifice we have won
extraordinary victories. We have driven back the beach-line of rebellion
so that its territory is now two islands, both together of not half the
size of the continent which it boasted when it began. We have seen such
demonstrations of loyalty and the love of liberty that we dare say that
this is to be one free nation, as we never dared say it before the war
began. We are on the edge, as we firmly believe, of yet greater
victories, both in the field and in the conscience of the nation. The
especial demand, then, made on our statesmen, and on that intelligent
people which, as it appears, leads the statesmen, instead of being led
by them, is, "How shall we use our victories?" We have no longer the
right to say that the difficult questions will settle themselves. We
must not say that Providence will take care of them. We must not say
that we are trying experiments. The time for all this has gone by. We
have won victories. We are going to win more. We must show we know how
to use them.
As our armies advance, for instance, very considerable regions of
territory come, for the time, under the military government of the
United States. If we painted a map of the country, giving to the Loyal
States each its individual chosen color, and to the Rebel States their
favorite Red or Black, we should find that the latter were surrounded by
a strip of that circumambient and eternal Blue which indicates the love
and the strength of the National Government. The strip is here broad,
and there narrow. It is broad in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It
stretches up in a narrow line along the Sea Islands and the Atlantic
coast. What do we mean to do with this strip, while it is in the special
charge of the nation? Do we mean to leave it to the chapter of
accidents, as we have done? A few charitable organizations have kept the
Sea Islands along, so that they are a range of flourishing plantations,
as they used to be. A masterly inactivity, on the other hand, leaves the
northern counties of Virginia, this summer, within the very sight of the
Capitol, to be the desert and disgrace which they were when they were
the scenes of actual war. A handful of banditti rides through them when
it chooses, and even insults the communications of our largest army. The
people of that State are permitted to point at this desolation, and to
say that such are the consequences of Federal victories. For another
instance, take the "Four-Million question." These four million negroes,
from whose position the war has sprung, are now almost all set free, in
law. A very large number of them--possibly a quarter part of them--are
free in fact. One hundred and thirty thousand of them are in the
national army. With regard to these men the question is not, "What are
you going to do with them when the war is done?" but, "What will you do
with them to-day and to-morrow?" Your duty is to use victory in the
moment of victory. You are not to wait for its last ramification before
you lead in peace and plenty, which ought to follow close in its first
footsteps.
To an observing and sensitive nation it seems as if all these questions,
and many others like them, were not yet fully regarded. Yet they are now
the questions of the hour, because they are a part of the great central
question, "How will you break down the armed power of the Rebel States?"
To maintain the conquered belt between us and our "wayward sisters" as a
land of plenty, and not as a desert,--to establish on system the blacks
whose masters desert them, or who take refuge within our lines,--and
also to maintain in that border-strip a resident peasantry, armed and
loyal,--these are not matters of sentiment, which may be postponed to a
more convenient season, but they are essential to the stiff, steady, and
successful prosecution of our campaigns. It is not, therefore, simply
for charity Boards of Education to discuss such subjects. It is for the
Government to determine its policy, and for the people, who make that
Government, to compel it so to determine. The Government may not shake
off questions of confiscated lands, pay of negro troops, superintendence
of fugitives, and the like, as if they were the unimportant details of a
halcyon future. Because this is the moment of impending victory, because
that victory should be used on the instant, the Government is bound to
attend to such provisions now. It is said, that, when General McClellan
landed below Yorktown, now two years ago, the Washington Post-Office had
made the complete arrangements for resuming the mail-service to
Richmond. Undoubtedly the Post-Office Department was right in such
foresight. At the present moment, it is equally right for the Government
to be prepared for the immediate use of the victories for which, as we
write, we are all hoping.
The experiments which we have had to try, in the care and treatment of
liberated blacks, have been tried under very different conditions. When
the masters on the Sea Islands escaped from their slaves, leaving but
one white man behind them, in the midst of fifteen thousand negroes,
those negroes were, in general, in their old familiar homes. They had,
indeed, trusted themselves to the tender mercies of the "Yankees"
because they would not abandon home. The islands on which they lived
were easily protected, and, thanks to the generous foresight of those
who early had the charge of them, a body of humane and intelligent
superintendents soon appeared, to watch over all their interests. In the
District of Columbia, on the other hand, the blacks whom the war first
liberated had themselves fled from their masters. They found themselves
in cities where every condition of life was different from their old
home. It was hardly to be expected that in one of these cases the
results should be as cheerful or as favorable as in the other. Nor was
it to be supposed that the policy to be pursued, in two such cases,
should be in outward form the same.
But the country has, on the whole, in the various different conditions
of these questions, had the advantage of great administrative ability.
General Butler, General Banks, and General Saxton are three men who may
well be satisfied with their military record, if it shall bear the test
of time as well as their administrative successes in this department bid
fair to do. We can be reconciled, in a measure, to gross failure and
want of system in other places, when we observe the successes which have
been wrought out for the blacks, in different ways, under the policy of
these three statesmen. For we believe that in that policy the principles
are to be found by which the Government ought at once to direct all its
policy in the use of its victories. We believe those principles are most
adequately stated in General Butler's General Order No. 46, issued at
Fort Monroe on the fifth of December last. For General Banks has had his
hands tied, from the beginning, by the unfortunate exemption from the
Emancipation Proclamation of the first two districts in Louisiana.
Considering the difficulties by which he was thus entangled, we have
never seen but he used to the best his opportunities. General Saxton's
island-district has been so small, and in a measure so peculiar, that it
may be urged that the result learned there would not be applicable on
the mainland, on a large scale. But General Butler has had all the
negroes of the sea-board of Virginia and North Carolina to look after.
He has given us a census of them,--and we have already official returns
of their _status_. There seems no reason why what has been done there
may not be done anywhere.
In General Butler's department, there were, in the beginning of April,
sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and forty-seven negroes. Of these,
eight thousand three hundred and forty-four were soldiers, who had
voluntarily enlisted into the service of the United States. These men
enlisted with no bounty but what the General so well named as the "great
boon awarded to each of them, the result of the war,--Freedom for
himself and his race forever." They enlisted, knowing that at that time
the Government promised them but ten dollars a month. In view of these
facts, we consider the proportion of soldiers, nearly one in eight,
extraordinary,--though we are aware that the number includes many who
had not lived in those counties, who came into our lines with the
purpose of enlisting. These simple figures involve the first feature of
the true policy in the "Four-Million question." The war offers the
negroes this priceless bounty. Let them fight for it. Let us enlist
them, to the last man we can persuade to serve.
"If you do that," says Brazen-Face, "you have left on your hands a horde
of starving imbeciles, women, and orphans, to support, from whom you
have cruelly separated their able-bodied men." No, Brazen-Face, we have
no such thing. In the month of March the Government had to supply
rations in the district we have named to only seven thousand eight
hundred and fifty persons who were members of the families of these
soldiers,--the cost being about one dollar a month for each of them. Now
the State of Massachusetts, dear Brazen-Face, supplies "State-aid" to
the families of its soldiers; and for this support, in this very city of
yours, it pays on the average five times as much in proportion as the
United States has to pay for the families of these colored soldiers.
Nay, you may even take all the persons relieved by Government in General
Butler's district,--the number is sixteen thousand seven hundred and
sixteen,--count them all as the families of soldiers, which not one-half
of them are, and the whole support which they all receive from
Government is not half as much as the families of the same number of
soldiers are costing the State of Massachusetts. So much for the expense
of this system. There is no money-bounty, and the "family-aid" is but
one-fifth of that we pay in the case of our own brothers. The figures in
General Saxton's district are as gratifying. We have not the Louisiana
statistics at hand. And we have not learned that anybody has attempted
any statistics in the District of Columbia, or on the Mississippi River.
But this illustration, in two districts where the enlistment of colored
troops has been pushed to the very edge of its development, is enough to
make out another point in the policy of victory, which is, that the
colored soldier is the cheapest soldier whom we have in our lines,
though we pay him, as of course we should do, full pay.
How is this cheapness of administration gained? The answer is in the
second great principle which belongs to the policy of using our
victories. Change the homes of the people as little as possible. The
families of negroes in the Virginia district are put upon separate farms
as far as possible,--on land, and for crops, as nearly as possible, the
same as they were used to. These people are conservative. They are fond
of home. They are used to work; and they can take care of themselves.
Every inducement is given them, therefore, to establish themselves.
Farms of eight or ten acres each from abandoned property are allotted
them. Where the Government employs any of them, it employs them only at
the same rate as the soldier is paid,--so that, if the negro can earn
more than that, he does so, and is urged, as well as permitted to do
so. He is not bound to the soil, except by merely temporary agreement.
What follows is that he uses the gift of freedom to his own best
advantage. "Political freedom," says the philosophical General, "rightly
defined, is liberty to work." The negroes in his command show that they
understand the definition. And this is the reason why, as we have
explained, the "family-relief" costs but one-fifth what it does here in
Boston.
"But," says Grunnio, at this point, "how will you protect your ten-acre
farms from invidious neighbors, from wandering guerrillas?" We will
advise them, dear grumbler, to protect themselves. That is one of the
responsibilities which freemen have to take as the price of freedom. In
the department of Norfolk, where seventeen thousand blacks are
supporting themselves on scattered farms, we believe not a pig has been
stolen nor a fence broken down on their little plantations by semi-loyal
neighbors, who had, perhaps, none too much sympathy, at the first, with
their prosperity. These amiable neighbors were taught, from the first,
that the rights of the colored farmers were just the same as their own,
and that they would be very apt to retaliate in kind for injuries. Of
such a system one result is that no guerrilla-warfare has yet been known
in the counties of Virginia where such a peasantry is establishing
itself. It is near our posts, it is true,--not nearer, however, than
some of the regions where Mosby has won his laurels. We believe that
this system deserves to be pressed much farther. We can see that the
farmers on such farms may have to be supplied in part with arms for
their defence. They may have to be taught to use them. Without providing
depots of supplies for an enemy, however, we believe there might be a
regular system of establishing the negro in his own home, on or near the
plantation where he was born, which would give us from the beginning the
advantages of a settled country, instead of a desert in the regions in
the rear of our lines.
These three suggestions are enough to determine a general policy which
shall give us, in all instances, the immediate use of our victories. Let
us enlist all the able-bodied men we can from the negroes. Let us
establish the rest as near their old homes as we can,--not in
poor-houses or phalansteries, but on their own farms. Let us appoint for
each proper district a small staff of officers sufficient to see that
their rights are respected by their neighbors, and that they have means
to defend themselves against reckless or unorganized aggression. There
seems to be no need of sending them as fugitives to our rear. There
seems to be no need of leaving the country we pass a desert. There seems
to be no need of waiting a year or two before we find for them their
places. God has found for them their places. Let them stay where they
were born. We have made them freemen. Let them understand that they must
maintain their freedom.
More simply stated, such a policy amounts merely to this: "Treat them as
you would treat white people."
"What would you do with the blacks?" said a Commission of Inquiry to an
intelligent jurist who had made some very brilliant decisions at New
Orleans.
"I would not do anything with them," was his very happy and suggestive
reply.
He would let them alone. If we could free ourselves of the notion that
we must huddle them together, or that we must carry them to some strange
land,--in short, that they have no rights of home and fireside,--we
should find that we had a much smaller problem to deal with. Keep them
where you find them, unless they will go on and fight with you. Whether
they go or stay, let them understand that they are your friends and you
are theirs, and that they must defend themselves, if they expect you to
defend them.
The education and the civilization will follow. "The church and the
school," as John Adams says, "belong with the town and the militia." The
statistics of General Butler's department begin to show that a larger
proportion of blacks are at school there than of whites. As we write
these words, we receive General Banks's Order No. 38, issued March 22,
providing for a board of education, and a tax upon property to establish
schools for black and for white children. We have no fears that such
results will be slow, if the enfranchised peasantry, one million or four
million, have the right to work on their own land, or to accept the
highest wage that offers,--if they find they are not arbitrarily removed
from their old homes,--and if the protection of those homes is, in the
first instance, intrusted to themselves.
These are the first-fruits of freedom for them. For us they are the
legitimate use of victory. It only remains that we shall mildly, but
firmly, instruct all officers of the Government that it is time for some
policy to be adopted which shall involve such uses of victory. The
country will be encouraged, the moment it sees that the freedmen are
finding their proper places in the new civilization. The country expects
its rulers not to wait for chapters of accidents or for volunteer boards
to work out such policy, but themselves to provide the system of
administration, and the intelligent men who shall promptly and skilfully
avail themselves of every victory.