destruction of slavery is not necessary to the restoration
of the Union. I will abide the issue."

But the change of policy did not change the opinion of the Southerners,
who, notwithstanding the use which the Confederate Government was making
of the negro, still regarded him, in the _United States_ uniform, as a
vicious brute, to be shot at sight. I prefer, in closing this chapter,
to give the Southern opinion of the negro, in the words of a
distinguished native of that section. Mr. George W. Cable, in his
"Silent South," thus gives it:

"He was brought to our shores a naked, brutish, unclean,
captive, pagan savage, to be and remain a kind of connecting
link between man and the beasts of burden. The great changes
to result from his contact with a superb race of masters
were not taken into account. As a social factor he was
intended to be as purely zero as the brute at the other end
of his plow line. The occasional mingling of his blood with
that of the white man worked no change in the sentiment;
one, two, four, eight, multiplied upon or divided in to
zero, still gave zero for the result. Generations of
American nativity made no difference; his children and
children's children were born in sight of our door, yet the
old notion held fast. He increased to vast numbers, but it
never wavered. He accepted our dress, language, religion,
all the fundamentals of our civilization, and became forever
expatriated from his own land; still he remained, to us, an
alien. Our sentiment went blind. It did not see that
gradually, here by force and there by choice, he was
fulfilling a host of conditions that earned at least a
solemn moral right to that naturalization which no one at
first had dreamed of giving him. Frequently he even bought
back the freedom of which he had been robbed, became a
tax-payer, and at times an educator of his children at his
own expense; but the old idea of alienism passed laws to
banish him, his wife, and children by thousands from the
State, and threw him into loathsome jails as a common felon
for returning to his native land. It will be wise to
remember that these were the acts of an enlightened, God
fearing people."

[Illustration: SCENE IN AND NEAR A RECRUITING OFFICE.]

FOOTNOTES:

[11] I arrived in New York in August, 1862, from Valparaiso, Chili