A correspondent of one of the radical journals of this city writes from Cairo in a most lachrymose strain about the manner in which freed negroes are treated there. There are seventeen hundred of them crowded in the […..], and their quarters are in the midst of mud two feet deep, and cleanliness is as much out of the question as it would be in a pigsty. Hence disease of every kind, particularly pneumonia, is fast thinning their ranks. Last week over sixty died, and this is the usual average. The writer adds that they are rotting and dying “for want of exercise,” and he is loud in his denunciations of the State of Illinois, “destitute of […..], decency, civilization, Christianity and sense,” because, with her millions of acres of uncultivated prairie land, she does not offer the contrabands a home.
Why should the blacks starve in Illinois when they can be made useful at Vicksburg? General Rosecrans understands the question. He compels the negroes to labor in his trenches, and thus saves his troops. Why do not the other generals imitate his example? The cutting of the canal at Vicksburg is delayed for want of men and because the work is done by the soldiers, when fifty thousand negroes ought to be sent there, who would finish it before the rebels would have time to build fortifications opposite its mouth, below Vicksburg, and so defeat its purpose. Thus could the adult male negroes be made to earn subsistence for their families, instead of being a burthen upon the War Department, already bowed down with a load greater than it can bear. The anti-slavery fanatics will soon find out, if they have not already discovered, how fatal has been their agitation to the unfortunate blacks, as well as to the white race.