y heard from
'Black David,' his old army name. Never was the General
seen, before or since, in such good spirits; he literally
was unable to speak from constant interruption of laughter;
and all his Adjutant-General could gather from him was:
'That he would not part with the document in his hand for
fifty thousand dollars.'

"At length he passed over the dispatch to his Chief of
Staff, who on reading it, and re-reading it, could find in
its texts but little apparent cause for merriment. It was a
grave demand from the War Department for information in
regard to our negro regiment--the demand being based on a
certain resolution introduced by the Hon. Mr. Wickliffe, of
Kentucky, asking for specific information on the point, in a
tone clearly not friendly. These resolutions had been
adopted by Congress; and as Hunter was without authority for
any of his actions in this case, it seemed to his then not
cheerful Adjutant-General that the documents in his hands
were the reverse of hilarious.

"Still Hunter was in extravagant spirits as he rode along,
his laughter startling the squirrels in the dense pine
woods, and every attempt that he made to explain himself
being again and again interrupted by renewed peals of
inextinguishable mirth. 'The fools!' he at length managed to
say; 'that old fool has just given me the very chance I was
growing sick for! The War Department has refused to notice
my black regiment; but now, in reply to this resolution, I
can lay the matter before the country, and force the
authorities either to adopt my negroes or to disband them.'
He then rapidly sketched out the kind of reply he wished to
have prepared; and, with the first ten words of his
explanation, the full force of the cause he had for laughter
became apparent. Never did a General and his Chief-of-Staff,
in a more unseemly state of cachinnation, ride along a
picket-line. At every new phase of the subject it presented
new features of the ludicrous; and though the reply at this
late date may have lost much of the drollery which then it
wore, it is a serio-comic document of as much vital
importance in the moral history of our late contest as any
that can be found in the archives under the care of Gen. E.
D. Townsend. It was received late Sunday e