the Union cause. * He says: "But besides drafting, it is time for us to deprive the enemy of their extraneous engines of war. There is no more Southern man at heart than myself. I am so from education, association, and from being a purely unprejudiced lover of the Union. But this is now no longer time for hesitation. As the blacks are the rural military force of the South, so should they indiscriminately be received, if not seized and sent off. I would not arm them, but I would use them to spare our whites, needed with their colors; needed to drill, that first source of discipline that first utility in battle. But in furtherance of this, instead of the usual twenty pioneers per regiment, I would select fifty stalwart blacks; give them the ax, the pick and the spade. But give them high military organization. We want bands-give twenty blacks—again military organization. So, too, cooks for the companies, teamsters—even artillery drivers. Do not stop there- and always without arms-organize engineer regiments of blacks for the fortifications, pontoon regiments of blacks, black hospital corps of nurses. Put this in practice, and the day that, from European interference, we have to look bitterness nearly in the face, then, and not till then, awaken to the conviction that you have an army of over fifty thousand highly disciplined soldiery-superior to double the number of our ordinary run of badly disciplined, badly officered, unreliable regiments now intrusted with the fortunes of the North. I would seek French officers for them, from their peculiar gift over 'natives.' In their own service they easily beat the Arabs and then officer them and * EMPLOYING THE CONTRABANDS. - Brig.-General BIRNEY lately wrote to Maj.-General KEARNY for instructions as to the employment of blacks. The following is General KEARNY'S reply: HEADQUARTERS CAMP NEAR HARRISON'S LANDING, August 5, 1862. General-Your communication of this date relative to contrabands is received. The Southerners employ blacks as a military unarmed element, viz.: ruralists. I am of opinion that we should employ them, unarmed, in like manner, for any thing in which they can render service, and thus enable the whites to carry the musket. Therefore, I fully advise their being employed as teamsters, pioneers (unarmed), and as cooks in the regiments. Lieut. Col. INGALLS will furnish them. To Brig.-General BIRNEY. (Signed) Respectfully, P. KEARNY. In accordance with these instructions, it is understood that Gen. BIRNEY has ordered each regiment in his command, to obtain twenty cooks, ten teamsters and twenty pioneers, making three hundred contrabands employed in the brigade. surpass their own troops in desperate valor. Also, I should advise some Jamaica sergeants of the black regiments. As for the women, employ them in hospitals, and in making cartridges, etc. I know the Southern character intimately. It is not truly brave. It is at times desperate, invincible if successful — most dispirited if the reverse—is intimidated at a distant idea, which they would encounter, if suddenly brought to them, face to face. This idea of black adjuncts to the military awakens nothing inhuman. It but prevents the slave, run away or abandoned to us, from becoming a moneyed pressure upon us. It eventually would prepare them for freedom; for surely we do not intend to give them to their rebel masters. In fine, why have we even now many old soldiers on the frontier garrisons? Send there a black regiment on trial on trial—not at once, but gradually — by the process I named above. Do this, and besides acquiring a strong provisional army, you magnify your present one by over fifty thousand men."* * Again, on the 17th of July, he addressed his tried friend, O. S. HALSTEAD, Jr., of New Jersey, better known, in the political world, as PET HALSTEAD.” "Is it not strange, here is an army nearly strong enough to go to Richmond. It was quite so when it arrived, but has lost the half of its numbers by sickness and imbecile administration of a commonplace, unmilitary * * a weak-kneed General; and also its losses in useless, but terribly severe battles, are beyond all European previous experience. In honor to the Southerners I must say, that theirs has been even severer. THEY face grapeshot, as Napoleon laid it down as an axiom to be IMPOSSIBLE. They are noble fellows. But our men have displayed just as much courage, but have not yet been led against batteries. In their doing this, as a friend, though I say it, who should not, I beg you to make all remember, that it was by my personal influence going into the first line of fire, precisely as the French Generals have ever done, *The three preceding letters are from PARKER'S "KEARNY, Soldier and Patriot." KEARNY's idea of organizing, militarily, the blacks was ahead of any thing originating in the Army of the Potomac, but not in advance of the common friend of KEARNY and his cousin, Brig.-General J. W. PHELPS, U. S. V., of Vermont, nor of the writer, who, in the public prints, advocated in case of hostilities between the North and South-organizing colored regiments under white officers; and of arming the blacks in the ensuing year when a long war had become a mournful fixed fact, * * *that FIRST gave this impulse of fighting to the army of MCCLELLAN. In return there is silence to my powers of administration, my talents for high discipline, my perfect, businesslike management of all my quotas on a field of battle, and the stupid crowds take up the words prompted to them by the emissaries of the envious and others, my enemies, and say'Ah! there is a worthless General, he exposes himself." "He is rash." "He must be an ignoramus." Our poor Jersey brigade was cut up, to pieces, from mismanagement (I refer you to General TAYLOR) in PORTER'S fight. The only battle which we have yet lost-and this entirely owing to PORTER'S want of head. The country permitted an impregnable field, it was not developed. He used regiments and brigades with no concerted action, and lost all * and yet MCCLELLAN, in the face of the President, gives [him] * * a provisional corps and then the President gives him an advanced rank. Whilst I, the like unknown before in history-a successful division commander, am left * * without recognition. Be sure if this army was in the hands of a man likely to save it (it is in a bad fix), I would pitch my commission to the winds and serve my country otherwise.”* * * * Ten days afterward he addressed the following characteristic epistle to a young cousin, a New Yorker by birth, who had just been appointed a Captain in the Eleventh New Jersey Volunteers. This gallant young man was mortally wounded at Gettysburg and died, aged only twenty-one years, on the 9th of August, 1863, in St. Luke's Hospital, New York city, in consequence of the amputation of his leg, too long deferred for his fragile constitution: “I am glad to find you in arms. I am truly sensible to the kindness of Gen. STOCKTON and Col. SCRANTON, as well as to his Excellency the Governor. I must confess, that I would have preferred you to have commenced as a Lieutenant, for a Captaincy involves fearful responsibility—and I have *Other letters of KEARNY, very interesting and able productions they are, might have been added in this chapter, but it is not just to the dead to publish what he would not have desired or suffered to be made public had he lived. As remarked in a previous chapter, many of his ebullitions were the result of pain acting on a nervous temperament. KEARNY was a magnanimous man, and such men do not utter injustices in their cool moments, or desire to have them remembered if spoken or uttered under irritation or suffering, mental or physical. · the weight of our military name on my shoulders. But I do not say this to discourage you. I am proud that you are in the service. If you display courage it will gracefully cover a multitude of short-comings. You must have learned something of the nature of men, as to controlling them with decision but little harshness; with discipline but justice; but above all with a careful watchfulness of their rights and comforts — they are very grateful, far more so than the little one may do for them deserves. As to perfecting yourself in your new position, never let it pass from your mind in what a false position a gentleman is, who assumes to be that which he is not. That you necessarily must be so for a while is not your fault but that of the volunteer system, that takes new (men) instead of doing justice to those who have served. In telling you all this, my dear cousin, it is only to stimulate you to a high energy. Adopt a military carriage, and perfect yourself in the tactics and in army regulations. Study them constantly. Add to this an investigation of military law, and your course will be right, and a battle or so dashingly carried through, will secure to you my warm sympathies and any assistance I can render you. We are still (within) about five and a half miles of Richmond. Continued alarms, now a shell booming in the air, now a brisk picket fight, now a foray by the enemy, and then again some greycoats brought in from the other side. In our two battles of Willamsburg and Fair Oaks, my division is the only one that has been engaged (here some words apparently were omitted) in the two battles. These two battles looked more like the picture books than any thing I had ever before seen, except one small point in the battle field of Solferino. The slain were actually piled up in heaps. My Michigan Marksmen are fearful with their rifles. I have also some Pennsylvania Mountain Men who are brave fellows, and some Maine Woodmen, who seem at home anywhere in the woods, whether balls are whizzing by them or not. My New York regiments include the celebrated HOBART WARD Thirty-eighth and the MOZART. On the whole it is a very exciting life, but I never get over the feeling that after every battle I am as fearful of hearing of friends being killed in the opposite army as in our own." If his detention at Harrison's Landing was a short period of comparative rest and recuperation to General KEARNY, it was destined to be but a short interval of repose. Within two weeks he was again in motion and on his march to join Pope. He left the banks of the James with alacrity, for to take the field again was to him a renewal of life. It is true, that he was no longer buoyed up with those brilliant hopes of success which animated him when he first took the field, still, his spirit was nevertheless elate with the prospect of once more participating in an active campaign, which promised, even if it held forth no other incentives, a certainty of again meeting the enemies of his country and the traitorous foes to right and progress; a certainty of fair stricken fields, where brilliant examples, stern intrepidity, and able generalship might undo, by hard fighting to the purpose, what had already been ill done by the sheerest incompetency—an inability to harvest by decision what had already been reaped in blood. Here the reader must leave KEARNY for a few pages in order to consider what had occurred in the "Army of Virginia" between the date when the "Army of the Potomac" was com pelled by its commander, not by the rebel foe, to commence its rapid retreat to the James, and the date when KEARNY was enabled to bring up his division to the assistance of POPE. While KEARNY lay in enforced inaction at Harrison's Landing, stirring events had been occurring in another quarter, whither the rebels had been permitted to direct those forces which should have been fully occupied, if not destroyed by McCLELLAN. Then, if ever, was justified that indignant outburst which Shakespeare places in the mouth of the hunchbacked but lionhearted RICHARD III. LINCOLN, when he learned of the breaking forth of LEE, might have addressed to MCCLELLAN the very words which the indomitable PLANTAGANET addressed to STAN LEY: KING RICHARD "Where is thy power, then, to beat him back? Are they not now upon the western shore, Safe-conducting the rebels from their ships?" STANLEY- No, my good lord, my friends are in the north." KING RICHARD - "Cold friends to me; what do they in the north, 49 |