At Fort Pillow, after the surrender of the
federal troops, the colored regiment was indiscriminately butchered and
some of them were buried alive.

Abraham Lincoln said, "The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to
any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with Democratic
strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the North to do it.
There are now in the service of the United States near two hundred
thousand able-bodied colored men, most of them under arms, defending and
acquiring Union territory.... Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by
black men; take two hundred thousand men from our side and put them in the
battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon
the war in three weeks."[97] Emancipation thus came as a war measure to
break the power of the Confederacy, preserve the Union, and gain the
sympathy of the civilized world.

However, two hundred and forty-four years of slavery could not be stopped
by edict. There were legal difficulties, the whole slow problem of
economic readjustment, and the subtle and far-reaching questions of future
race relations.

The peculiar circumstances of emancipation forced the legal and political
difficulties to the front, and these were so striking that they have since
obscured the others in the eyes of students. Quite unexpectedly and
without forethought the nation had emancipated four million slaves. Once
the deed was done, the majority of the nation was glad and recognized that
this was, after all, the only result of a fearful four years' war which in
any degree justified it. But how was the result to be secured for all
time? There were three possibilities: (1) to declare the slave free and
leave him at the mercy of his former masters; (2) to establish a careful
government guardianship designed to guide the slave from legal to real
economic freedom; (3) to give the Negro the political power to guard
himself as well as he could during this development. It is very easy to
forget that the United States government tried each one of these in
succession and was literally forced to adopt the third, because the first
had utterly failed and the second was thought too "paternal" and
especially too costly. To leave the Negroes helpless after a paper edict
of emancipation was manifestly impossible. It would have meant that the
war had been fought in vain.

Carl Schurz, who traversed the South just after the war, said, "A
veritable reign o