It has been usual to speak of this enlistment in its bearings on the progress of the war. General Grant set a high estimate upon his Negro troops, as some of his dispatches show, and President Lincoln said: “By arming them we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers, and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion as they strengthen us.” But there is another point of view, the influence of this military life on the men who enlisted. Taken as they were at that time, especially those who were in the camps or floating about the country, without settled abodes or regular occupation, what could have happened more to their advantage than to be summoned to the orderly habits and rigid discipline of a soldier’s life. It put the Freedmen into a far more effective school than it was possible to provide for them in the former way. In some of the regiments there were commanding officers of so fine a mold that is was an inspiration to noble manhood to be under their orders. When Governor Andrews of Massachusetts was choosing officers for the two colored regiments that went from that State, he set it before him to find men “of acknowledged military ability and experience, of the highest social position if possible, and who believed in the capacity of colored men to make good soldiers.” Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of the first colored regiment mustered into service, was a man of this order, as his illustrious life has amply shown. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, not only proved his own greatness, but his aptitude in making heroes of the men who charged with him to their death in the storming of Fort Wagner. Another of these commanders of Negro soldiers was General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who went from his honorable military service to the still larger civil service of building up the famous industrial school at Hampton. And yet another was Major Horace Bumstead, who was afterward president of Atlanta University. The colonels, majors, captains and lieutenants of the colored troops as a whole were men of no ordinary character. They were of the sort who do not flinch from taking their stand on the side of an unpopular cause, so it be right, and they put their best endeavor into the training of the troops over whom they were in command. It was an educational opportunity of no trifling significance. Two years or more of daily drill in such a school had in it the making of manhood.