Equal Pay for Colored Troops

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

[APRIL 16, 1864.

242

THE SOLDIER'S REST.

AT the breaking of the morn

Fresh and fair,

When the brightness of the dawn Lit the air,

The clangor of a horn

To the drowsy ear was borne Of a soldier wan and worn

With toil and care.

Upspringing he arose

From the plain,

Where he sought a calm repose--

Sought in vain. Forgets the sleep he wooes,

And with dauntless heart he goes

To fight his country's foes

Once again.

For that bugle-call had thrilled Him before,

When the blackened air was filled With the roar

Of the ruthless guns that stilled Many a heart with ardor filled, And the hail that thousands killed

Fast did pour.

His weariness and all

Were forgot,

Through his veins that bugle-call A frenzy shot,

Where the blows do fastest fall He would conquer over all, Or a hero's funeral pall

Should be his lot.

With a purpose widely rash, And hot desire,

In the fiercest fight he'd dash; Ne'er retire.

He'd fight where sabres clash, Where leaden bullets crash, And belching cannons flash

Deadly fire.

When the day had almost gone,

And the night

Was kindly coming on

To hide the sight, At the setting of the sun A great victory was won,

But some precious blood had run

In the fight.

And where they closest press'd O'er the ground

As their numbers did attest, Strewn around

'Mid the bravest and the best Who had stood the fiery test, His last unbroken rest

He had found.

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1864.

To Advertisers.

THE Prices for Advertising in Harper's Weekly will hereafter be as follows:

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Harper's Weekly has a circulation of about ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND COPIES, which are scattered over the whole country. Every number is probably read by eight or ten persons, so that advertisements in its pages reach the eye of more individuals than advertisements in any other periodical. It is essentially a home paper, and is found in every country house whose inmates take an interest in the thrilling events of the day. It is not destroyed after being read, as daily papers are, but is kept, and in many cases bound, placed in a library, and referred to from time to time. Advertisers who wish to bring their business to the notice of the public at large, and especially of the householding class, can find no medium so suitable for their purpose as Harper's Weekly.

SHALL GENERAL McCLELLAN
BE CALLED INTO SERVICE?

To supply the excitement which the quiet tone of the daily news at present fails to secure, those indefatigable gentlemen, the newspaper reporters, inform us from time to time that some retired General is about to have an active command. General McCLELLAN is the favorite hero of such rumors, and it is not without a sly sarcasm that the post to which the reporters assign him is the defenses of Washington. The story is readily believed by many who ask why, if General McCLELLAN be a good soldier, he, should not be restored to some command ; and whether a purely military personage ought to be set aside for political reasons?

The war has taught us all not to prophesy, and we do not say that General MCLELLAN may not be called into active service ; but the reasons why he should not be are evident enough. One very conspicuous reason is that he has ceased to be exclusively a military personage, and has become the chief of a political party. Indeed he has been little else since he fell into the hands of political managers upon the Peninsula, who hoped by means of his popularity to restore themselves to power. The names of these managers are well known. They have controlled the General ever since, and had some difference among themselves as to the wis-

dom of the letter in favor of a Copperhead candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania. But the letter was written. The people of Pennsylvania rejected the advice and repudiated the candidate; while the military gentleman whose political sagacity and influence were to be revealed by that performance was left in a still more ludicrous position than when he sat down, with a magnificent army, to reduce MAGRUDER'S garrison at Yorktown. The managers of General McCLELLAN ought to be held to severe account by his admirers for the extremely bungling way in which he is brought before the public. The exhibition in Boston ; the copious and incessant praise of Copperheads; the Woodward letter; and at last the report, which is simply a special plea to prove that the General is a man who would have done extraordinary things if only circumstances had not been so perverse, and which omits many facts of which the omission might be serviceable, except that they were all previously printed in the report upon the conduct of the war—all these are such blunders of management that the control of the new chief of the party ought to be intrusted to other hands.

But the decisive reason which should continue General McCLELLAN in retirement is the fact that he does not comprehend the war; and that although while in the field he professes to fight for the Union, yet his sympathies are with the system and the policy which are trying to destroy it. Consequently he does not approve the policy adopted by the Government for the overthrow of the rebellion, and in a very feeble and foolish letter, written to the President, he urged him not to take exactly the course which has been fully approved by the country. A civil war is not and never can be a mere question of fighting. Foreign wars, which involve merely questions of territory, or succession, or special Insult or injury, may be waged exclusively by technical military means, by ships, armies, and guns. But a civil war, which involves a conflict of political principles or social systems, or the defense of natural rights, is not to be disposed of so readily. The contest in such cases is between the principles quite as much as the brute force. Your policy must aim not only at over coming the form but the spirit of resistance. Thus South Carolina muttered rebellion in 1833. She was silenced by the thunder of Jackson's voice; but she was only silenced. Mere force could not make peace in such a case, any more than knocking off the fruit kills the tree. While the roots live the danger is untouched. So Romanist might conquer Huguenot in the field in the French wars. But the victory was no peace, it was only a truce. Today we may beat the rebels in the field and hang JEFFERSON DAVIS. But DAVIS and rebellion are only blossoms upon the tree of Slavery. So long as you leave that you will have an endless crop of DAVISES and rebellions.

These are the elemental truths of this war, and General McCLELLAN has not yet seen them. Many of our generals who began fighting without believing that slavery had any thing to do with the war have long since accepted the logic of facts, and now heartily embrace the only possible policy for a Government in earnest. But General McCLELLAN is the chosen representative of those who believe that slavery is compatible with a free democratic republic, and that in this fierce struggle which it is making to ruin the country it ought not to be touched. How can a soldier be victorious who does not believe in his cause, or who can not understand it? Suppose he says that he is fighting for the Union. If, after the experience of seventy years of peace and three years of war, he still believes the Union possible with slavery, how can he effectively or heartily serve a Government which does not believe it? In the civil war between CHARLES STUART and the Parliament Sir THOMAS FAIR-FAX was the first Parliamentary General. He was an honest man, but he believed in the monarchy ; and of course the war languished until OLIVER CROMWELL took command. He did not believe in monarchy, and he ended the war. There was a reaction, indeed, and CHARLES SECOND returned. But then came a counter-reaction, and the supreme royal prerogative which CHARLES FIRST fought for, and which OLIVER CROMWELL destroyed, from that time has disappeared. FAIRFAX may have been a better technical soldier than CROMWELL. What then? CROMWELL understood the cause, and believed in it. FAIRFAX did not. So, at the beginning of our Revolution, there were two candidates for the command of our army, GEORGE WASHINGTON and CHARLES LEE. WASHINGTON was a country gentleman, who had seen military service in his youth ; LEE was an accomplished and approved soldier. It was the business of his life. If it had been a purely military question, LEE had the advantage. But his foreign birth, and the universal confidence in WASHINGTON'S entire comprehension of the cause and devotion to it, decided the question. LEE afterward served in the army ; but he was of little real use ; for he had little faith in the cause or care for it. He was a soldier seeking his own advancement. WASHINGTON believed in the cause of America, and he won it. Suppose LEE had been put in command solely on the ground that he was a good soldier, what would have been the result?

General McCLELLAN may be the best soldier in the country. But unluckily for his claim,

with the best opportunities in the world to prove it, he has not succeeded. On the other hand, the one thing he has proved beyond question is his sympathy with slavery and slaveholders and their friends, and his total want of faith in the policy of the war. Unless that policy is changed he could not honestly support it. Why then should he be asked to devote his military abilities to a cause which he does not approve? Until it is changed, therefore, his friends ought not to wish him to be recalled to the field. But when it is changed, when it becomes the policy of the American people to overthrow the rebellion of slaveholders by saving slavery, then General McCLELLAN will undoubtedly be made Commander-in-Chief. The hands that now manage him will then manage the country—and the Lord have mercy upon us !

CONGRESSIONAL LETHARGY.

THERE, are two bills before Congress of the utmost importance, the passage of which should not be delayed, but which have been put aside for matters of much less moment. They are the bill regulating the payment of colored troops and the bill establishing a Freedmen's Bureau. Both of them relate to the negro question, but considering that shirking the negro question has brought us into the war, it is tolerably clear that continued shirking will not get us out. The three most vital points to which public and legislative attention should be constantly directed are the financial question, the military question, and the negro question. They may be very disagreeable subjects, all of them, but they are unavoidable. And if the Union men in Congress would let the Copperhead twaddle about the eternal negro dribble itself away at its own sweet will, the great and necessary legislative steps would be taken.

There is no more pressing practical issue than the payment of the colored troops. There can be no doubt that if it is right to enlist such soldiers it is wrong not to pay them exactly as all other soldiers are paid. And if the wages of an apprentice enrolled under a draft or otherwise are not paid to his employer, there is still less reason to pay the wages of a slave so taken to his master. Again, if the children of a poor non-slaveholder are liable to a draft without compensation to the parent, there is surely no reason why the slaves of a rich slaveholder should not be regarded and treated exactly in the same way. It is intolerable that in a republic any class whatever should be privileged, but it is inhuman that a class based upon the meanest injustice should be preferred. Nobody insists, not even those friends of man, the New York city Copperhead delegation in Congress, that the poor laborer at the North should be paid for his children who are taken into the army ; but these gentry insist that it is very tyrannical and unconstitutional if a rich man on the border is not well paid for the slaves whose wages and work he has always appropriated to himself. The truth is that the Government should summon every man it wishes, black or white, and pay them all equally for an equal service. Until it is ready to do that the policy of colored enlistments is premature. But Congress may be perfectly well assured that the people of this country are fully prepared for that policy, and heartily approve it. Let Messrs. GARRETT DAVIS, POWELL, SAULSBURY, & Co., in the Senate, and Messrs. Cox, PENDLETON, WOOD, & Co., in the House, therefore, talk about the eternal negro until they are tired, and then let the bill be promptly passed which shall wipe out the class distinction among citizens in the army of the United States, which, by not being wiped out hitherto wherever it appeared, has produced its inevitable consequence, civil war.

Nor is the other point of the Freedmen's Bureau less pressing or less practical. Statesmen and sensible men are to deal with facts, and the fact is that the overthrow of slavery, a natural and inevitable result of the war, has cast almost a race upon our hands. Under the circumstances we can not abandon them. We are bound to give them the same chance that all other people have, and to leave them alone is to deprive them of that chance. Our policy, therefore, should be universal and uniform. The freedmen are to be protected in their equal rights with other men and nothing more. They are not to be made serfs attached to the land; they are to be defended against the consequences of slavery as shown in their servile fear of the white race and against the contempt bred by slavery in the whites themselves, which holds that they have no rights to be respected. The effects of slavery and the condition of the emancipated slaves are every where effectively the same, and there is consequently not to be one policy in Louisiana, and another in South Carolina, and another in Alabama. The late slave holders in all those regions are to be made to understand clearly that the colored people are free, and have exactly the same rights of respect and protection under this Government that they have. They are to make fair bargains with them and keep them fairly, or suffer the consequences, as we are all suffering the direful consequences of departure from this simple and equitable rule hitherto.

Mr. ELIOT's bill, already passed by the House, is good ; but Mr. SUMNER'S, which will be intro

duced in the Senate, is simpler and more comprehensive. There should be no delay in its ample consideration and prompt passage. The grave questions imperatively thrust upon the country by so wide and radical a social convulsion as the present war are not to be settled by scoffing and sneering and jeering on the one hand, or by shirking and drifting on the other. The Union men in Congress have the work to do, and they must do it without the least sympathy or help from the Copperheads. We have no reason to suppose that the Union men seriously differ in their convictions upon the necessities and duties of the times. But all legislative bodies have a dangerous habit of delay. Let us urge our friends to be active, firm, and careful.

No. 2 PALACE GREEN, KENSINGTON.

THE late sale of THACKERAY'S furniture, books, pictures, and collections of every kind occupied four days, and excited great attention. The prices were very high; nor is it surprising, because the peculiar character of the man gives its own geniality to every object associated with him. There was much plate and china for which he had a great liking, and the decorations of his house illustrated the taste which built it, and which is the pervading tone of so many of his writings—the fashion of Queen Anne. It is impossible to read the description of the busy scene without a painful feeling, for it is precisely one of his own texts.

It is the more striking because of a passage describing his presence at a similar scene at Gore House, the residence of Lady BLESSINGTON. It had been a merry house. WILLIS, in his earlier letters from Europe, describes it well. The wits, the beauties, the gay world of London—all met there. BULWER, DISRAELI, MOORE, and the later set—they all came and sat at the feasts of the blithe Irish lady, when suddenly Debt gave such a thundering double-knock at the door that the revel ended in a twinkling, and Lady BLESSINGTON, with her exemplary son-in-law, Count D'ORSAY, crossed the channel to Paris. The sale at Gore House followed. The old habitues came to look their last. THACKERAY came with the rest, and one can imagine with what feelings. His heart ached, we may be sure, as he saw for the last time the cari luoghi. His eyes shone kindly as his heart whispered, Vanitas vanitatum. But we need not imagine it only ; we have the record. The French valet wrote about the sale to milady in Paris. He describes the crowd, the eagerness, the confusion ; and he adds : " Mr. THACKERAY came also, and there were tears in his eyes as he went away. He is, perhaps, the only person whom I have seen really affected at your departure."

It was very characteristic. It is a very touching scene to remember. THACKERAY did not stand there censorious. He did not think the soft hearted Irish woman the greatest or the best of beings, but he was just to his own memories. He owed many a pleasant hour to the gay rooms, and he was not ashamed to pay the tribute of regret. She was not Aspasia ; no. But as he moves through the rooms, with moist eyes, can you not hear him humming,

"Had I Homer's fire

Or that of Sergeant Taddy,

Meetly I'd admire

Peg of Limavaddy.

And till I expire,

Or till I grow mad, I

Will sing unto my lyre

Peg of Limavaddy."

It is of his Gore House that we read now, and of those who come to look upon his cari luoghi. How many as they moved sadly about the rooms must have murmured his own words : " We moralize upon his life when he is gone, and yesterday's preacher becomes the text for today's sermon."

EQUALITY.

IT was very amusing to read the report of the debate between Mr. PENDLETON of Ohio, and Mr. BROOMALL of Pennsylvania, upon the Montana Territorial bill. The Senate made the very natural provision in that bill that only male citizens of the United States should vote. Now the pro-slavery gentlemen repose in great comfort upon what they call a decision of the Supreme Court that negroes are not citizens; so that if they really believe that the question is settled, they ought not to be troubled by a bill in which the word " white" would be sheer tautology.

So when Mr. PENDLETON called attention to the fact that the word white had been stricken out, Mr. BROOMALL asked him why he was troubled, since the court had decided that negroes were not citizens? Mr. PENDLETON replied that his anxiety was to know whether Mr. BROOMALL and his friends agreed with the court. Mr. BROOMALL asked him if he were not satisfied with the decision. Mr. PENDLETON asked him in return whether he thought that it had been so decided. Mr. B. said that he had read so. Mr. P. still wished to know if Mr. B. thought so. Mr. B., according to the summary, replied that he was not called upon to review the decision. Whereupon Mr. PENDLETON an- (Next Page)