the permanent marks of their devotion to their country, from those hardships and indignities which are too great to permit me to believe that they have been intended by said order, but which must necessarily follow the rigid enforcement of all its provisions.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

Z. B. VANCE.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE,

Richmond, December 21, 1864.

FRED A. PORCHER, Esq.,

Charleston, S. C.:

MY DEAR SIR: I have your favor of the 16th instant,* and have read your views with the more interest from the fact that for a year past I have seen that the period was fast approaching when we should be compelled to use every resource at our command for the defense of our liberties. Without entering into any lengthened discussion of the considerations which should guide our policy on this point, it appears to me enough to say that the negroes will certainly be made to fight against us if not armed for our defense. The drain of that source of our strength is steady, fatal, and irreversible by any other expedite than that of arming the slaves as an auxiliary force. I further agree with you that if they are to fight for our freedom they are entitled to their own. Public opinion is fast ripening on the subject, and are the close of the winter the conviction on this point will become so widespread that the Government will have no difficulty in inaugurating the policy foreshadowed in the President's message. The effect of that message, followed up by that of Governor Smith, has been great, and if you could get your newspapers, or any one of them, to commence a discussion on this point the people would rapidly become educated to the lesson which experience is sternly teaching.

While agreeing with you thus far, I cannot concur in your opinion thate the Confederate Government should assume powers not vested by the Constitution, on the allegation that our safety depends on the exercise of such power. Without dilating on this point it is enougho not see the necessity for such assumption. Matters of this sort are always best settled by degrees, and it is enough for the moment that the Confederacy should become the owner of as many negroes as are required for the public service and should emancipate them as a reward for good services. The next step will then be that the States, each for itself, shall act upon the question of the proper status of the families of the men so manumitted. Cautious legislation providing for their ultimate emancipation after an intermediate stage of serfage or peonage would soon find advocates in different States. We might then be able, while vindicating our faith in the doctrine that the negro is an inferior race and unfitted for social or political equality with the white man, yet so modify and ameliorate the existing condition of that inferior race by providing for it certain rights of property, a certain degree of personal liberty, and legal protection for the marital and parental relations, as to relieve our institutions from much that is not only unjust and impolitic in itself, but calculated to drawn on us the odium and reprobation of civilized man. It is well known that General Lee, who commands so largely the

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* Not found.

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