History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as CitizensWilliams, George Washington
History
History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens
Williams, George Washington
African Americans -- History; Liberia; Sierra Leone
On the 28th of March, 1863, Mr. Greeley sent forth the following able
and sensible editorial on the Negro as a soldier:
"NEGRO TROOPS.
"Facts are beginning to dispel prejudices. Enemies of the negro
race, who have persistently denied the capacity and doubted the
courage of the Blacks, are unanswerably confuted by the good
conduct and gallant deeds of the men whom they persecute and
slander. From many quarters come evidence of the swiftly
approaching success which is to crown what is still by some
persons deemed to be the experiment of arming whom the
Proclamation of Freedom liberates.
"The 1st and 2d South Carolina Volunteers, under Colonels
Higginson and Montgomery, have ascended the St. John's River in
Florida as far as Jacksonville, and have re-occupied that
important town which was once before taken and afterward
abandoned by the Union forces. Many of the negroes composing
these regiments had been slaves in this very place. Their memory
of old wrongs, of the privations, outrages and tortures of
Slavery, must here, if anywhere, have been fresh and vivid, and
the passions which opportunity for just revenges stimulates even
in white breasts, ought to have been roused more than in all
other places on the spot where they had suffered.
"If, then, Jacksonville were to-day in ashes, and the ghastly
spirit visions of '_The World_' materialized into terrible
realities, the negro haters would have no, cause to be
disappointed. '_The World_' hailed the alleged repulse and
massacre of the negroes and white officers--a report which it
invented outright, in sheer malignity, in order to forestall
public opinion by creating a belief in the failure of the
expedition--would have changed into agonized shrieks over the
outrages on its Southern brethren. The experiment of subjecting
negroes to military rules and accustoming them to those amenities
of civilized warfare which the rebels so uniformly practice would
again have been declared to be a hopeless failure; and for the
hundredth time the Proclamation and the radicals who advised it
would have been pilloried for public execration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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