[History of the American Negro in the Great World War by W. Allison Sweeney]@TWC D-Link book
History of the American Negro in the Great World War

CHAPTER X
23/24

One, General Benjamin F.Butler, a conspicuous military leader on the Union side in the Civil War, and Wendell Phillips, considered by many the greatest orator America ever produced, and who devoted his life to the abolition movement looking to the freedom of the slave in the United States.

Said General Butler on the occasion of the debate in the National House of Representatives on the Civil Rights bill; ten years after the bloody battle of New Market Heights; speaking to the bill, and referring to the gallantry of the black soldiers on that field of strife: "It became my painful duty to follow in the track of that charging column, and there, in a space not wider than the clerk's desk and three hundred yards long, lay the dead bodies of 543 of my colored comrades, fallen in defense of their country, who had offered their lives to uphold its flag and its honor, as a willing sacrifice; and as I rode along among them, guiding my horse this way and that way, lest he should profane with his hoofs what seemed to me the sacred dead, and as I looked on their bronzed faces upturned in the shining sun, as if in mute appeal against the wrongs of the country whose flag had only been to them a flag of stripes, on which no star of glory had ever shone for them--feeling I had wronged them in the past and believing what was the future of my country to them--among my dead comrades there I swore to myself a solemn oath, 'May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I ever fail to defend the rights of those men who have given their blood for me and my country this day, and for their race forever,' and, God helping me, I will keep that oath." Mr.Phillips in his great oration on Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Black of St.Domingo; statesman, warrior and LIBEEATOR,--delivered in New York City, March 11, 1863, said among other things, a constellation of linguistic brilliants not surpassed since the impassioned appeals of Cicero swept the Roman Senate to its feet, or Demosthenes fired his listeners with the flame of his matchless eloquence; "You remember that Macaulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military schools in Europe.
Cromwell manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-seven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw.

They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disadvantages, the Englishman showed the greater genius.

Whether you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is a fair mode of measurement.
"Apply it to Toussaint.

Cromwell never saw an army until he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books