In our own Revolutionary War, the Negro, then but partially civilized, and classed with "vagabonds," held everywhere as a slave, and everywhere distrusted, against protest and enactment, made his way into the patriot army, fighting side by side with his white compatriots from Lexington to Yorktown. On the morning of April 19th, 1775, when the British re-enforcements were preparing to leave Boston for Lexington, a Negro soldier who had served in the French war, commanded a small body of West Cambridge "exempts" and captured Lord Percy's supply train with its military escort and the officer in command. As a rule the Negro soldiers were distributed among the regiments, thirty or forty to a regiment, and did not serve in separate organizations. Bishop J.P. Campbell, of the African Methodist Church, was accustomed to say "both of my grandfathers served in the Revolutionary War." In Varnum's Brigade, however, there was a Negro regiment and of it Scribner's history, 1897, says, speaking of the battle of Rhode Island: "None behaved better than Greene's colored regiment, which three times repulsed the furious charges of veteran Hessians." Williams says: "The black regiment was one of three that prevented the enemy from turning the flank of the American army. These black troops were doubtless regarded as the weak spot of the line, but they were not." The colony of Massachusetts alone furnished 67,907 men for the Revolutionary War, while all the colonies together south of Pennsylvania furnished but 50,493, hence the sentiment prevailing in Massachusetts would naturally be very powerful in determining any question pertaining to the army. When the country sprang to arms in response to that shot fired at Lexington, the echoes of which, poetically speaking, were heard around the world, the free Negroes of every Northern colony rallied with their white neighbors. They were in the fight at Lexington and at Bunker Hill, but when Washington came to take command of the army he soon gave orders that no Negroes should be enlisted. He was sustained in this position by a council of war and by a committee of conference in which were representatives from Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts, and it was agreed that Negroes be rejected altogether. The American Negro's persistency in pressing himself where he is not _wanted_ but where he is _eminently needed_ began right there. Within six weeks so many colored men applied for enlistment, and those that had been put out of the army raised such a clamor that Washington changed his policy, and the Negro, who of all America's population contended for the privilege of shouldering a gun to fight for American liberty, was allowed a place in the Continental Army, the first national army organized on this soil, ante-dating the national flag. The Negro soldier helped to evolve the national standard and was in the ranks of the fighting men over whom it first unfolded its broad stripes and glittering stars.