Camp Brightwood, June 18, 1863.
Sumner talked a great deal about the black troops, — about
the President's views and Stanton's intention of having 200,000 in the field by
the end of summer, which I thought rather wild, considering the total number of
arms-bearing blacks in the South to be 360,000; Fremont wrote in the same way.
Sumner had some excellent ideas on the probable duration of the war, — he
thinks it ought to be a very long war yet. He does not find in history any
record of such great changes as we expect to see, having been brought about
except with long wars and great suffering. I think his ideas excellent because
they agree with mine. What should we do with a peace, until events have shaped
out a policy which a majority of people at the North will recognize as the
necessary one for a successful reorganization of the Southern territory and
Southern institutions? What two men agree about such a policy now? What one man
has any clear, practical ideas on the subject at all? — not Charles Sumner
certainly. If black armies can be organized on a large scale and made to fight,
the question of slavery and the disposition of the slaves becomes comparatively
easy of solution: but our whole Constitution, and perhaps our whole form of
government, has, it seems to me, to be remodelled, — and that cannot be done
until a new generation, better educated in such things than the present, takes
hold of it. How many years it took to form our present Constitution.
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 260-1
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