importance of
raising a Negro regiment at once. He wrote,--

"Give me leave to add once more, that I think the measure of
raising a black corps a necessary one; that I have great
reason to believe, if permission is given for it, that many
men would soon be obtained. I have repeatedly urged this
matter, not only because Congress have recommended it, and
because it thereby becomes my duty to attempt to have it
executed, but because my own mind suggests the utility and
importance of the measure, as the safety of the town makes
it necessary."

James Madison saw in the emancipation and arming of the Negroes the
only solution of the vexatious Southern problem. On the 20th of
November, 1780, he wrote Joseph Jones as follows:--

"Yours of the 18th came yesterday. I am glad to find the
Legislature persist in their resolution to recruit their
line of the army for the war; though, without deciding on
the expediency of the mode under their consideration, would
it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of
the blacks themselves, as to make them instruments for
enlisting white soldiers? It would certainly be more
consonant with the principles of liberty, which ought never
to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty: and, with
white officers and a majority of white soldiers, no
imaginable danger could be feared from themselves, as there
certainly could be none from the effect of the example on
those who should remain in bondage; experience having shown
that a freedman immediately loses all attachment and
sympathy with his former fellow-slaves."[570]

The struggle went on between Tory and Whig, between traitor and
patriot, between selfishness and the spirit of noble consecration to
the righteous cause of the Americans. Gen. Greene wrote from North
Carolina on the 28th of February, 1781, to Gen. Washington as
follows:--

"The enemy have ordered two regiments of negroes to be
immediately embodied, and are drafting a great proportion of
the young men of that State [South Carolina], to serve
during the war."[571]

Upon his return to America, Col. Laurens again espoused his favorite
and cherished plan of securing black levies for the South. But
surrounded and hindered by the enemies of the country he so dearly
loved, and for the honor and preservation of which he gladly gave his