Saturday, December 13, 2014

Samuel Gridley Howe to John M. Forbes, August 19, 1861

Boston, August 19,1861.

. . . The public need something, or somebody, some word, or some blow, to magnetize them, or else they will be fearfully demoralized in a month. The word must be emancipation, and war upon slaveholders as such — as a distinct class — as the authors of all the present ills.

Can you not confer with the governor about this? You cannot keep up public interest, much less public enthusiasm, about an abstraction (at least of a worldly and temporal nature), and Union is a mere abstraction now; it touches not, and cannot touch, the public heart.

As one blow, I suggest what I vainly suggested last spring, an expedition to land in or about Albemarle Sound, composed mainly of blacks, who would go into the Dismal and other swamps and raise the thousands of refugees there to go out and make sallies and onslaughts upon the enemy; and so make a diversion.

It would at least cause a worse than Bull Run panic. There are plenty of men in Canada, resolute and intelligent refugees, who would enlist in such an enterprise. It cannot, however, be done by private means. Can any other be had, think you?

I have mentioned the matter of expedition to the Dismal Swamp to the governor, but to him only. Please not speak of it to any one else.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 238

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