The opposite point of view was expressed by the group of southerners led by General Pat Cleburne who in a petition presented to General Joseph E. Johnson by several Confederate Officers wrote: "Will the slaves fight?--the experience of this war has been so far, that half-trained Negroes have fought as bravely as many half-trained Yankees."[32] J. P. Benjamin, Secretary of State, urged that the slave would be certainly made to fight against them, if southerners failed to arm them for southern defense. He advocated also the emancipation of those who would fight; if they should fight for southern freedom. According to Benjamin, they were entitled to their own. In keeping with the necessity of increasing the army, the editor of a popular newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, was besought to commence a discussion on this point in his paper so that "the people might learn the lesson which experience was sternly teaching."[33] In a letter to President Davis, another argued that since the Negro had been used from the outset of the war to defend the South by raising provisions for the army, that the sword and musket be put in his hands, and concluding the correspondent added: "I would not make a soldier of the Negro if it could be helped, but we are reduced to this last resort."[34] Sam Clayton of Georgia wrote: "The recruits should come from our Negroes, nowhere else. We should away with pride of opinion, away with false pride, and promptly take hold of all the means God has placed within our reach to help us through this struggle--a war for the right of self-government. Some people say that Negroes will not fight. I say they will fight. They fought at Ocean Pond (Olustee, Fla.), Honey Hill and other places. The enemy fights us with Negroes, and they will do very well to fight the Yankees."[35] The pressure to fill the depleted ranks of the Confederate forces became greater as the war continued. It was noted above that Congress and the State legislatures had called into service all able-bodied whites between the ages of seventeen and fifty years; later the ages were extended both ways to sixteen and sixty years. Grant remarked that the Confederates had robbed "the cradle and the grave" in order to fill the armies[36]. Jefferson Davis began to see the futility of a hypothetical discussion as to the advisability or values in the use of Negroes as soldiers and in a letter to John Forsythe, February, 1865, stated "that all arguments as to the positive advantage or disadvantage of employing them are beside the question, which is simply one of relative advantage between having their fighting element in our ranks or in those of the enemy."[37]