“Of those who were slaves at the beginning of the rebellion,” Raymond's History of Lincoln's Administration, p. 427. recorded Mr. Lincoln in his December message, ‘full one hundred thousand are now in the United States military service, about half of which number actually bear arms in the ranks—thus giving the double advantage of taking so much labor from the insurgent cause, and supplying the places which otherwise must be filled with so many white men. So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any. No servile insurrection or tendency to violence or cruelty has marked the measures of emancipation and arming the blacks.’
The editor of the Liberator had never expected to have war correspondence a feature of his paper, but he printed the letters which now came to him from the1 officers and soldiers of colored regiments, with infinitely more pleasure than he inserted the communications of two or three non-resistant friends who deemed it more2 than ever the time for them to bear their testimony. To the latter he yielded space now and then, with his usual fairness and generosity, but he steadily declined to be dragged into any extended discussion of the peace and non-resistance doctrine, for reasons which he had3 already fully set forth.
Pursuant to adjournment from its annual meeting in May, the American Anti-Slavery Society met in Philadelphia on the 3d and 4th of December, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of its formation, to rejoice over the emancipation, by the fiat of the American Government, of three million three hundred thousand slaves, and, in the words of the official invitation which Mr. Garrison, as President of the Society, extended to various friends of the cause, ‘not only to revive the remembrance of the long thirty years warfare with the terrible forces of Slavery, and to acknowledge the hand of a wonderworking Providence in guiding the way of the little Anti-Slavery army through great moral darkness and many perils, . . . but also to renew, in the name of humanity, of conscience, and of pure and undefiled ’
