In battles wild commotion I shouldn’t at all object, If Sambo’s body should stop a ball that was coming for me direct, An’ the prod of a southern bayonet, so liberal are we here, I’ll resign and let Sambo take it, on every day in the year, On every day in the year, boys, an’ wid none of your nasty pride, All right in a southern bagnet prod, wid Sambo I’ll divide. The men who object to Sambo, should take his place and fight, An’ it is betther to have a Naygur’s hue, than a liver that’s weak an’ white, Though Sambo’s black as the ace of spades, his finger a thryger can pull, An’ his eye runs straight on the barrel sight from under its thatch of wool, So hear me all, boys, darlin, don’t think I’m tipping you chaff, The right to be kilt, I’ll divide with him, an’ give him the largest half. It took three years of war to place the enlisted Negro upon the same ground as the enlisted white man as to pay and emoluments; _perhaps_ six years of war might have given him shoulder-straps, but the war ended without authorization of law for that step. At first they were received, under an act of Congress that allowed each one, without regard to rank, ten dollars per month, three dollars thereof to be retained for clothing and equipments. I think it was in May, ’64, when the act was passed equalizing the pay, but not opening the doors to promotion. Under an act of the Confederate Congress, making it a crime punishable with death for any white person to train any Negro or mulatto to arms, or aid them in any military enterprise, and devoting the Negro caught under arms to the tender mercies of the “present or future laws of the State” in which caught, a large number of _promotions_ were made by the way of a rope and a tree along the first year of the Negro’s service (I can even recall one instance as late as April 1865, though it had been long before then generally discontinued). What the Negro did, how he did it, and where, it would take volumes to properly record, I can however give but briefest mention to a few of the many evidences of his fitness for the duties of the war, and his aid to the cause of the Union. The first fighting done by organized Negro troops appears to have been done by Company A, First South Carolina Negro Regiment, at St. Helena Island, November 3-10, 1862, while participating in an expedition along the coast of Georgia and Florida under Lt.-Col. O. T. Beard, of the Forty-eighth New York Infantry, who says in his report:— “The colored men fought with astonishing coolness and bravery. I found them all I could desire, more than I had hoped. They behaved gloriously, and deserve all praise.” The testimony thus inaugurated runs like a cord of gold through the web and woof of the history of the Negro as a soldier from that date to their final charge, the last made at Clover Hill, Va., April 9, 1865.