The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United StatesDelany, Martin Robison
History
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
Delany, Martin Robison
African Americans
"When Major Montgomery, one of the leaders in the expedition against the
colonists, was lifted upon the walls of the fort by his soldiers,
flourishing his sword and calling on them to follow him, Jordan Freeman
received him on the point of a pike and pinned him dead to the earth."
"NEW HAMPSHIRE gives her testimony to the deposit of colored interest.
There was a regiment of blacks in the same situation, a regiment of
negroes fighting for our liberty and independence, not a white man among
them but the officers, in the same dangerous and responsible position.
Had they been unfaithful, or given way before the enemy all would have
been lost. Three times in succession were they attacked with most
desperate fury by well disciplined and veteran troops, and three times
did they successfully repel the assault, and thus preserve the army.
They fought thus through the war. They were brave and hearty troops."
_Nell_, pp. 11, 13.
NEW YORK comes bravely to the call, and sends her investments by land
and sea. In the convention of 1821, for revising the constitution of the
State, the question of equal rights having been introduced, Doctor
Clarke among other things said, "In the war of the Revolution, these
people helped to fight our battles by land and by sea. Some of your
states were glad to turn out corps of colored men, and to stand
'shoulder to shoulder' with them. In your late war, they contributed
largely towards some of your most splendid victories. On lakes Erie and
Champlain, where your fleets triumphed over a foe superior in numbers
and engines of death, they were manned in a large proportion with men of
color. And in this very house, in the fall of 1814, a bill passed
receiving all the branches of your government, authorising the governor
to accept the services of a corps of two thousand free people of color.
These were times when a man who shouldered his musket did not know but
he bared his bosom to receive a death wound from the enemy ere he laid
it aside; and in these times these people were found as ready and as
willing to volunteer in your service as any other. They were not
compelled to go; they were not draughted.... They were volunteers...."
Said Martindale of New York in congress 22 of first month 1828: "Slaves,
or negroes who had been slaves, were enlisted as soldiers in the War of
the Revolution; and I myself saw a battalion of them, as fine martial
looking men as I ever saw, attached to the northern army in the last
war, on its march from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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