the West Indies and exchanged for rum, sugar, coffee, and fruit; and partly sent to New York, from whence they went, at the peace, either to Nova Scotia or to England.  From this last place, I believe, they have been lately sent to Africa. History will never relate the horrors committed by the British Army in the Southern States of America."[569]

Col.  Laurens was called from the South, and despatched to France on an important mission in 1780.  But the effort to raise Negro troops in the South was not abandoned.

On the 13th of March, 1780, Gen. Lincoln, in a letter to Gov.  Rutledge of South Carolina, dated at Charleston, urged the importance of raising a Negro regiment at once.  He wrote,—­

“Give me leave to add once more, that I think the measure of raising a black corps a necessary one; that I have great reason to believe, if permission is given for it, that many men would soon be obtained.  I have repeatedly urged this matter, not only because Congress have recommended it, and because it thereby becomes my duty to attempt to have it executed, but because my own mind suggests the utility and importance of the measure, as the safety of the town makes it necessary.”

James Madison saw in the emancipation and arming of the Negroes the only solution of the vexatious Southern problem.  On the 20th of November, 1780, he wrote Joseph Jones as follows:—­

“Yours of the 18th came yesterday.  I am glad to find the Legislature persist in their resolution to recruit their line of the army for the war; though, without deciding on the expediency of the mode under their consideration, would it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves, as to make them instruments for enlisting white soldiers?  It would certainly be more consonant with the principles of liberty, which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty:  and, with white officers and a majority of white soldiers, no imaginable danger could be feared from themselves, as there certainly could be none from the effect of the example on those who should remain in bondage; experience having shown that a freedman immediately loses all attachment and sympathy with his former fellow-slaves."[570]

The struggle went on between Tory and Whig, between traitor and patriot, between selfishness and the spirit of noble consecration to the righteous cause of the Americans.  Gen. Greene wrote from North Carolina on the 28th of February, 1781, to Gen. Washington as follows:—­

“The enemy have ordered two regiments of negroes to be immediately embodied, and are drafting a great proportion of the young men of that State [South Carolina], to serve during the war."[571]

Upon his return to America, Col.  Laurens again espoused his favorite and cherished plan of securing black levies for the South.  But surrounded and hindered by the enemies of the country he so dearly loved, and for the honor and preservation of which he gladly gave his young life, his plans were unsuccessful.  In two letters to Gen. Washington, a few months before he fell fighting for his country, he gave an account of the trials that beset his path, which he felt led to honorable duty.  The first bore date of May 19, 1782.