Worcester Daily Spy

Worcester Daily Spy

Payment of Colored Troops—Cruel Negligence of the Authorities.

To the Editor of the New York Tribune: —

Sir: No one can overstate the intense anxiety with which the officers of colored regiments in this department are awaiting action from congress in regard to the arrears of pay of their men. It is not a matter of dollars and cents only; it is a question of common honesty—whether the United States government has sufficient integrity for the fulfillment of an explicit business contract. The public seems to suppose that all required justice will be done by the passage of a bill equalizing the pay of all soldiers for the future. But, so far as my own regiment is concerned, this is but half the question. My men have been nearly sixteen months in the service, and for them the immediate issue is the question of arrears. They understand the matter thoroughly, if the public does not. Every one of them knows that he volunteered under an explicit written assurance from the war department that he should have the pay of a white soldier. He knows that for five months the regiment received that pay, after which it was cut down from the promised $13 per month to $10, for some reason to him inscrutable. He does not know—for I have not yet dared to tell the men—that the paymaster has been already reproved by the pay department for fulfilling even in part the pledges of the war department; that at the next payment the ten dollars are to be further reduced to seven; and that, to crown the whole, all the previous overpay is to be again deducted or "stopped" from the future wages, thus leaving them little more than a dollar a month for six months to come, unless congress interfere!

Yet so clear were the terms of the contract that Mr. Solicitor Whiting, having examined the original instructions from the war department issued to Brig. Gen. Saxton, military governor, admits to me (under date of Dec. 4, 1863) that the faith of the government was thereby pledged to every officer and soldier enlisted under this call. He goes on to express the generous confidence that "the pledge will be honorably fulfilled." I observe that every one at the north seems to feel the same confidence, but that, meanwhile, the pledge is unfulfilled. Nothing is said in congress about fulfilling it. I have not seen even a proposition in congress to pay the colored soldiers, from date of enlistment, the same pay with white soldiers; and yet anything short of that is an unequivocal breach of contract, so far as this regiment is concerned.

Meanwhile the land sales are beginning, and there is danger of every foot of land being sold from beneath my soldiers' feet, because they have not the petty sum which government first promised and then refused to pay. The officers' pay comes promptly and fully enough, and this makes the position more embarrassing. For how are we to explain to the men the mystery that government can afford us a hundred or two dollars a month, and yet must keep back six of the poor thirteen which it promised them? Does it not naturally suggest the most cruel suspicions in regard to us? And yet nothing but their childlike faith in their officers, and in that incarnate soul of honor, Gen. Saxton, has sustained their faith, or kept them patient, thus far.

There is nothing mean or mercenary about these men in general. Convince them that the government actually needs their money, and they would serve it barefooted and on half rations, and without a dollar—for a time. But, unfortunately, they see white soldiers beside them, whom they know to be in no way their superiors for any military service, receiving hundreds of dollars for re-enlisting from this impoverished government, which can only pay seven dollars out of thirteen to its black regiments. And they see, on the other hand, those colored men who refused to volunteer as soldiers, and who have found more honest paymasters than the United States government, now exulting in well-filled pockets, and able to buy the little homesteads they need, and to turn the soldiers' families into the streets. Is this a school for self-sacrificing patriotism?

I should not speak thus urgently were it not becoming manifest there is to be no promptness of action in congress, even as regards the future pay of the colored soldiers—and that there is especial danger of the whole matter of arrears going by default. Should it be so it will be a repudiation more ungenerous than Jefferson Davis advocated or Sidney Smith denounced. It will sully with dishonor all the nobleness of this opening page of history, and fix upon the north a brand of meanness worse than either southerner or Englishman has yet dared to impute. The mere delay in the fulfillment of this contract has already inflicted untold suffering, has impaired discipline, has relaxed loyalty, and has begun to implant a feeling of sullen distrust in the very regiments whose early career solved the problem of the nation, created a new army, and made peaceful emancipation possible.

Hilton Head, Jan. 22, 1864.