February 9, 1863, The New York Herald
It is evident from the recent reports that the canal which is designed to cut off Vicksburg from the river bank can only be hastened to completion by the employment of a large force. Nature, it seems, will accomplish nothing towards changing the channel of the Mississippi. The water is not washing away the banks of the canal, as was anticipated. Consequently it will have to be cut to its entire width. To do this in time for any practical end will require a much larger force than is now occupied upon the work. The best thing that can be done under the circumstances is to employ as large a number of the contrabands as possible who are now living idle at the expense of the government. There are about a hundred thousand contraband negroes now under the care of the government, supported at an immense cost. It takes a hundred millions a year to maintain an army of a hundred thousand soldiers. Say that it costs half that sum to support a hundred thousand contrabands; why not get fifty millions, or as much as can be obtained in labor, from those contrabands who are able to work? The old and infirm, the women and children, of course must remain a burthen on the government: but no better disposition could be made of the able bodied than to set as many of them to work on the Vicksburg cut-off as could be employed there with effect, so as to hurry it up before the rebels fortify themselves too strongly on the opposite bank, as they are trying to do. The new canal would be cheap at fifty millions.
The balance of the contrabands should be drafted into the army of Generals Horace Greeley and Thaddeus Stevens. They would make every respectable show when drilled by those eminent officers. Any deficiency in military knowledge could be supplied to Generals Greeley and Stevens by the generous publishers of military books. With a little reading up in “The School of the Soldier” and a fair amount of cramming in “HardeeTactics” they might soon be able to put the contraband army through its facings, teach the men the goose step, and make them hold up their heads in good military style, like men and brothers.
This would be an excellent disposition to make of say fifty thousand contrabands, and no doubt would exactly suit General Greeley’s idea; while those employed on the Vicksburg canal would become experts in digging ditches, and would thus be ready at a moment’s notice to dig that last ditch in which Greeley and his party are to be buried.