The Generals vs. the Politicians

It is a significant fact that all the volunteer Generals of our armies who have spoken on the [missing text] regard slavery as the vital point of [missing text]on, and insist on directing all our blows against it.  We have already published the views of a number of the Democratic Generals in the field to this effect.  We now give an extract from a recent speech of General Sickles, a thorough-going pro-slavery Democrat in the days of peace, to the same purport:

Now, I have a word or two to say to my fellow citizens, and especially to those who have hitherto done me the honor to concur with me in my views of public affairs. In the event of the result of the war terminating in emancipation I wish to say that men’s minds should at once be disabused of any false notions they may have conceived. The laboring men of the North need not suppose that the freed men of the South will ever interfere with or become competitors with them in the labor market of the North. It must be borne in mind that since this great convulsion of the country the South has not been able to produce enough of rice, cotton, tobacco, corn, sugar, and the other staples for which she is so famed. The demand of the world has been great, but she could not meet them. For more than a year not more than one-half of their usual crops have been produced. And remember the demand is always increasing for all the staples of the South produced by negro labor. Remember that there is more cotton land, and rice and sugar land now uncultivated in the South than there has been hitherto cultivated by all the planters who flourished there but a single year ago. Remember that [this demand must go on continually increasing, and the supply be greatly diminished for years to come, before capital can resume its former channels. Cannot every man see that when peace shall be restored, the demand for negro labor in the South will be so increased that all the blacks throughout the country will be drawn by attraction towards the South, and there be entirely absorbed? So that, so far from the labor of the blacks ceasing to be in demand on the cessation of war and the restoration of peace, the demand for the great staples of rice, tobacco, sugar and cotton — which will and must be scarce — will call the service of every black laborer into instantaneous and continuous requisition, and a new impulse will be given to every branch of productive industry. The prosperity of the North, meanwhile, is not to cease. Capital, enterprise, thrift are still here among us, and will be then as now; and we will not only have the same demand for labor with liberal wages, and the same reward for enterprise and industry, but, in my humble judgment, every branch of trade and commerce and domestic industry .will rise into new life when the Union and the constitution shall be vindicated and peace restored.]

– Published in The Union Sentinel, Osceola, Iowa, Saturday, October 17, 1862, p. 1.  The bottom of this page of the newspaper was torn diagonally from the lower left to the middle of the right.  I have used Friends’ Review: A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal, Volume 16, No. 1, September 6, 1862, p. 9-10, contained within the brackets, to complete this article.