“I shall never forget the benignant expression of his face, the tearful look of his eye, and the quiver in his voice when he deprecated a resort to retaliatory measures.  ‘Once begun,’ said he, ’I do not know where such a measure would stop.’  He said he could not take men out and kill them in cold blood for what was done by others.  If he could get hold of the persons who were guilty of killing the colored prisoners in cold blood, the case would be different, but he could not kill the innocent for the guilty.”

Amid the sanguinary reports and crowding events that held public attention for a year, from the Wilderness to Appomattox, the Fort Pillow affair was forgotten, not only by the cabinet, but by the country.

The related subjects of emancipation and negro soldiers would doubtless have been discussed with much more passion and friction, had not public thought been largely occupied during the year 1863 by the enactment of the conscription law and the enforcement of the draft.  In the hard stress of politics and war during the years 1861 and 1862, the popular enthusiasm with which the free States responded to the President’s call to put down the rebellion by force of arms had become measurably exhausted.  The heavy military reverses which attended the failure of McClellan’s campaign against Richmond, Pope’s defeat at the second Bull Run, McClellan’s neglect to follow up the drawn battle of Antietam with energetic operations, the gradual change of early Western victories to a cessation of all effort to open the Mississippi, and the scattering of the Western forces to the spiritless routine of repairing and guarding long railroad lines, all operated together practically to stop volunteering and enlistment by the end of 1862.

Thus far, the patriotic record was a glorious one.  Almost one hundred thousand three months’ militia had shouldered muskets to redress the fall of Fort Sumter; over half a million three years’ volunteers promptly enlisted to form the first national army under the laws of Congress passed in August, 1861; nearly half a million more volunteers came forward under the tender of the governors of free States and the President’s call of July, 1862, to repair the failure of McClellan’s Peninsula campaign.  Several minor calls for shorter terms of enlistment, aggregating more than forty thousand, are here omitted for brevity’s sake.  Had the Western victories continued, had the Mississippi been opened, had the Army of the Potomac been more fortunate, volunteering would doubtless have continued at quite or nearly the same rate.  But with success delayed, with campaigns thwarted, with public sentiment despondent, armies ceased to fill.  An emergency call for three hundred thousand nine months’ men, issued on August 4, 1862, produced a total of only eighty-six thousand eight hundred and sixty; and an attempt to supply these in some of the States by a draft under State laws demonstrated that mere local statutes and machinery for that form of military recruitment were defective and totally inadequate.