[Footnote 1-1: Gunnar Myrdal, _The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy_, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Row, 1962), p. lxi.] [Footnote 1-2: Benjamin Quarles, _The Negro in the American Revolution_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 182-85. The following brief summary of the Negro in the pre-World War II Army is based in part on the Quarles book and Roland C. McConnell, _Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of Color_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968); Dudley T. Cornish, _Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865_ (New York: Norton, 1966); William H. Leckie, _The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969); William Bruce White, "The Military and the Melting Pot: The American Army and Minority Groups, 1865-1924" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968); Marvin E. Fletcher, _The Black Soldier and Officer in the United States Army, 1891-1917_ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974); Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, _Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974). For a general survey of black soldiers in America's wars, see Jack Foner, _Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective_ (New York: Praeger, 1974).] Yet the fact that the British themselves were taking large numbers (p. 004) of Negroes into their ranks proved more important than revolutionary idealism in creating a place for Negroes in the American forces. Above all, the participation of both slaves and freedmen in the Continental Army and the Navy was a pragmatic response to a pressing need for fighting men and laborers. Despite the fear of slave insurrection shared by many colonists, some 5,000 Negroes, the majority from New England, served with the American forces in the Revolution, often in integrated units, some as artillerymen and musicians, the majority as infantrymen or as unarmed pioneers detailed to repair roads and bridges.