Letter from a Belgian citizen soldier to Abraham Lincoln, September 20, 1861
Brussels 20 September 1861
Citizen President,
In the press of Europe I have read that your thoughts turn to conscription. Do you know what conscription is? Conscription is the advanced guard of standing armies and standing armies the instruments of tyranny. Whether for the form of dictatorship, of royalty, or of empire. May Providence preserve you from commiting such a mistake. Your ancestors without conscription, without standing armies have chased the stranger from your soil and freed the country, and you are not able without this conscription and without these standing armies to drive out slavery. To serve the native land and to die for it is the duty of every citizen. Organize yourselves as do the Swiss either as I have the honor to propose to you or in some other like manner; but don't fall into conscription and to standing armies, if you do not wish to relinquish your rights and your liberties. You have no need to lose them in order to tear out from among the glittering stars of your banners the ignoble stain which covers them, the slavery of the blacks. To put an end to that you have only to proclaim
Letter from a Belgian citizen soldier to Abraham Lincoln, September 20, 1861
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energetically and clearly from the heights of your Capitol its abolition. It is with that that you should have begun. Because if from this conflict between the north and the south there does not come forth the complete emancipation of the negro race, your war has not had reason to be. You have to open and to receive as brothers in your arms the blacks, and place them in everything your equal. Democracy and egoism do not travel by the same road.
Accept, Mr. President, the brotherly salutations of a citizen soldier
[There is a translation appended to the text, which can be consulted to determine what those reading the translation at the time will have read, but I have corrected the translation. B.F.]
[The letter is followed by a Project of Military Organization of a Free People, which proposes a national guard, mobile and stationary. To the mobile all citizens between the ages of 21 and 31 belong. To the stationary belong those between the ages of 32 - 50. Their varying duties. Colleges of Artillery and Engineering. ..]