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 W