Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Lincoln

A blunt logistical demand dressed in moral language, Benjamin Lincoln's line lands like a field order that accidentally exposes a revolution's unfinished business. "We must have" is not rhetoric for the ages; it's the grammar of shortage. The urgency is military: bodies, endurance, a war that has outgrown white manpower and patience. Then comes the fuse: "a limitless number of them too". Limitless is less a literal policy than a pressure tactic, arguing that Black enlistment isn't a symbolic add-on but a scale solution.

The subtext is where the sentence bites. Lincoln doesn't say Black troops will prove equality; he says the cause requires them, and the requirement forces a reckoning with how the army treats them. "Paid and treated like their white brothers" frames parity as discipline and cohesion, not sentiment. In other words: you cannot build an effective fighting force while running a caste system inside it. Equality becomes a weapon of war - demanded because discrimination is inefficient.

Contextually, this echoes the late-1770s reality that pushed Continental leaders toward Black enlistment even as slavery remained entrenched. The Revolution preached liberty while rationing it; commanders confronted a choice between ideological purity and battlefield survival. Lincoln's phrasing tries to make that contradiction operationally intolerable. It's a pragmatic argument that still carries an indictment: if the army can recognize "brothers" in uniform, the nation will have a harder time defending permanent bondage once the shooting stops.