CHAP. XXXIX.] RAISING TROOPS. 257 



Indians, which, say they, will deteriorate the general standard of 

 the white population ; they deplore the development of a love 

 for military glory, a passion inconsistent with all true republican 

 principles ; and one friend observed to me, &quot; You will soon see 

 a successful soldier, wholly unknown to all of us at this moment, 

 a man unversed in civil affairs, raised to the Presidentship.&quot; I 

 asked whether, in a country where nearly all are industriously 

 employed, it will be possible to find recruits for foreign service. 

 Nothing, they reply, is more easy. &quot; Our broad Indian frontier 

 has nurtured a daring and restless population, which loves ex 

 citement and adventure, and in the southern states there are 

 numbers of whites to whom military service would be a boon, 

 because slavery has degraded labor.&quot; A week later I received a 

 letter from a correspondent in the south, who said, &quot; Such is the 

 military fever in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, 

 that these states alone would furnish 50,000 men, if required ; 

 and in many districts we are in fear of such an enlistment of the 

 white population, that there will be too few left at home to serve 

 as a police for the negroes. Married men are going, as well as 

 bachelors, lawyers, medical men, and schoolmasters, many of 

 whom have no taste whatever for fighting or foreign service, but 

 they know that to have served a year in a campaign, to have 

 been in a battle, or have been wounded, would advance them 

 more in an election, or even in their several professions, than any 

 amount of study or acquired knowledge.&quot; 



The Sunday following we heard a sermon by the Rev. Orville 

 Dewey, in which this spirit of territorial aggrandizement, this 

 passion for war, these false notions of national honor and glory, 

 were characterized as unchristian, and indicating a low standard 

 of private as well as public morality. I remarked to a New 

 England acquaintance, who was one of the large congregation, 

 that whatever might be said against the voluntary system, the 

 pulpit in America seemed to me more independent than the press. 

 &quot; Because every newspaper,&quot; he replied, &quot; is supported by half 

 yearly or annual subscribers, and no editor dares write against 

 the popular sentiment. He knows that a dagger is always sus 

 pended over him by a thread, and if he presumed to run counter 



