Sumner then took his argument even farther. “You need more men, not only at the North, but at the South, in the rear of the Rebels: you need the slaves,” he told Lincoln. He believed that if the North recruited ex-slaves as soldiers, the Civil War could be ended. Lincoln retorted that he would do it at once if he didn’t fear that “half the officers would fling down their arms and three more States would rise.” While Sumner kept pushing, Lincoln demurred. “It would do no good to go ahead any faster than the country would follow,” he once told a group of Sumner’s abolitionist allies. “I think
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