Sherman had been employing fugitive slaves and Black refugees streaming into his lines, as laborers at a rate of $10 per month, but when recruiting agents began luring his laborers away with the offer of $14 per month to enlist in the Army, Sherman had the agents arrested. General Lorenzo Thomas, who was in charge of recruiting Blacks in the West, complained to Secretary of War Stanton that the arrests of the agents had just about shut down the enlistment program in the areas under Sherman's control. Sherman wrote the following letter to General L. Thomas, criticizing the recruitment of Blacks into the military as an injustice to them and their families :
HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION or THE MISSISSIPPI,
Near Kenesaw Mountain, June 26, 1864.
General LORENZO THOMAS,
Louisville, Ky.:
I was gratified at the receipt of your dispatch from Chattanooga. I would have answered sooner if our telegraph had not been broken so often of late. As I wrote you, I know all the people have left North Georgia for the regions of the Flint and Appalachicola with their negroes.
The regiments of blacks now in Chattanooga and Tennessee will absorb all the recruits we can get, but if you raise new regiments they could be well employed about Clarksville, Bowling Green, and on the Tennessee River, say at the terminus of the Northwestern Railroad. My preference is to make this radical change with natural slowness. If negroes are taken as soldiers by undue influence or force and compelled to leave their women in the uncertainty of their new condition, they cannot be relied on; but if they can put their families in some safe place and then earn money as soldiers or laborers, the transition will be more easy and the effect more permanent.
What my order contemplated was the eagerness of recruiting captains and lieutenants to make up their quota in order to be commissioned.
They would use a species of force or undue influence and break up our gangs of laborers as necessary as soldiers. We find gangs of negro laborers well organized on the Mississippi at Nashville and along the railroads most useful, and I have used them with great success as pioneer companies attached to divisions, and I think it would be well if a law would sanction such an organization—say of 100 to each division of 4,000 men.
The first step in the liberation of the negro from bondage will be to get him and family to a place of safety, then to afford him the means of providing for his family, for their instincts are very strong, then gradually use a proportion—greater and greater each year—as sailors and soldiers. There will be no great difficulty in our absorbing the four million of slaves in this great industrious country of ours, and being lost to their masters the cause of war is gone, for this great money interest then ceases to be an element in our politics and civil economy. If you divert too large a proportion of the able-bodied into the ranks, you will leave too large a. class of black paupers on our hands; the great mass of our soldiery must be of the white race, and the black troops should for some years be used with caution and with due regard to the prejudice of the races. As was to be expected, in some instances they have done well, in others badly, but on the whole the experiment is worthy a fair trial, and all I ask is that it be not forced beyond the laws of natural development.
In Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky it may be wisely used to secure their freedom with the consent of owners.
W. T. SHERMAN,
Major-General, Commanding.