Truly yours,

A. Lincoln.

TELEGRAM TO COLONEL ROUGH AND OTHERS.

War department,
Washington, D. C., March 17, 1865.

Col.  R. M. Rough and others, Chicago, Ill.: 

Yours received.  The best I can do with it is, to refer it to the War Department.  The Rock Island case referred to, was my individual enterprise; and it caused so much difficulty in so many ways that I promised to never undertake another.

A. Lincoln.

ADDRESS TO AN INDIANA REGIMENT,

March 17, 1865.

Fellow-citizens:—­It will be but a very few words that I shall undertake to say.  I was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and lived in Illinois; and now I am here, where it is my business to care equally for the good people of all the States.  I am glad to see an Indiana regiment on this day able to present the captured flag to the Governor of Indiana.  I am not disposed, in saying this, to make a distinction between the States, for all have done equally well.

There are but few views or aspects of this great war upon which I have not said or written something whereby my own opinions might be known.  But there is one—­the recent attempt of our erring brethren, as they are sometimes called, to employ the negro to fight for them.  I have neither written nor made a speech on that subject, because that was their business, not mine, and if I had a wish on the subject, I had not the power to introduce it, or make it effective.  The great question with them was whether the negro, being put into the army, will fight for them.  I do not know, and therefore cannot decide.  They ought to know better than me.  I have in my lifetime heard many arguments why the negroes ought to be slaves; but if they fight for those who would keep them in slavery, it will be a better argument than any I have yet heard.  He who will fight for that, ought to be a slave.  They have concluded, at last, to take one out of four of the slaves and put them in the army, and that one out of the four who will fight to keep the others in slavery, ought to be a slave himself, unless he is killed in a fight.  While I have often said that all men ought to be free, yet would I allow those colored persons to be slaves who want to be, and next to them those white people who argue in favor of making other people slaves.  I am in favor of giving an appointment to such white men to try it on for these slaves.  I will say one thing in regard to the negroes being employed to fight for them.  I do know he cannot fight and stay at home and make bread too.  And as one is about as important as the other to them, I don’t care which they do.  I am rather in favor of having them try them as soldiers.  They lack one vote of doing that, and I wish I could send my vote over