Prejudice of Color and Race
“In a letter written to Secretary of War Stanton Dec. 30, 1864, by Brig-Gen. Rufus Saxton, from Beaufort, South Carolina., In it he informs Stanton about to way in which Negroes were treated by those who were “saving the life of the nation.” I quote:
“Comparatively few of the Negroes are fit for soldiers; but Gen. [John G.] Foster [of New Hampshire] ordered an indiscriminate conscription of every able-bodied colored man in the department, which was an “apparent violation of the faith pledged to the freedmen.”
The order spread universal confusion and terror. The Negroes fled to the woods and swamps, visiting their cabins only by stealth and in darkness.” Also, “three boys, only fourteen years of age, were seized in a field where they were at work and sent to a regiment serving in a distant part of the department without the knowledge or consent of their parents.”
“I found the prejudice of color and race here in full force and the general feeling of the army of occupation was unfriendly to the blacks. It was manifested in various forms of personal insult and abuse, in depredations on their plantations – those taken from their owners and rented to the Negroes – stealing and destroying their crops and domestic animals, and robbing them of their money. The [colored] women were held as the legitimate prey of lust . . . there was a general disposition among [Northern] soldiers and civilian speculators here to defraud the Negroes in their private traffic, to take the commodities which they offered for sale by force, or to pay them with worthless money.”
(The South’s Burden- The Curse of Sectionalism in the United States. Benjamin Franklin Grady, Nash Brothers, 1906, pp. 64-65)