very slowly.  At first actual authority to enlist negroes was only extorted from the administration with much effort.  On August 25 obstinate importunity elicited an order permitting General Saxton, at Hilton Head, to raise 5,000 black troops; but this was somewhat strangely accompanied, according to Mr. Wilson, with the suggestive remark, that it “must never see daylight, because it was so much in advance of public sentiment.”  After the process had been on trial for a year, however, Mr. Lincoln said that there was apparent “no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force,—­no loss by it anyhow or anywhere.”  On the other hand, it had brought a reinforcement of 130,000 soldiers, seamen, and laborers.  “And now,” he said, “let any Union man who complains of this measure test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms, and in the next that he is for taking these 130,000 men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be best for the measure he condemns.”  Yet so ineradicable was the race prejudice that it was not until the spring of 1864, after all efforts for action by Congress had failed, that the attorney-general declared black soldiers to be entitled to the same pay as white soldiers.  Regarding a soldier merely as a marketable commodity, doubtless the white was worth more money; yet life was about the same to each, and it was hard to see why one should be expected to sell his life for fewer dollars than satisfied the other.

Besides these measures, Congress gave evidence of its sentiments by passing an act for appointing diplomatic representatives to Hayti and Liberia; also further evidence by passing certain legislation against the slave trade.

The recital of all these doings of the legislators sufficiently indicates the hostility of Congress towards slavery.  In fact, a large majority both in the Senate and in the House had moved out against it upon nearly every practicable line to the extremity of the constitutional tether.  Neither arguments, nor the entreaties of the border-state men, nor any considerations of policy, had exercised the slightest restraining influence.  It is observable that this legislation did not embody that policy which Mr. Lincoln had suggested, and to which he had become strongly attached.  On the contrary, Congress had done everything to irritate, where the President wished to do everything to conciliate; Congress made that compulsory which the President hoped to make voluntary.  Mr. Lincoln remained in 1862, as he had been in 1858, tolerant towards the Southern men who by inheritance, tradition, and the necessity of the situation, constituted a slaveholding community.  To treat slave-ownership as a crime, punishable by confiscation and ruin, seemed to him unreasonable and merciless.  Neither does he seem ever to have accepted the opinion of many Abolitionists, that the negro was the equal of the white man in natural endowment.