had cried two years before, so cried they,

On the brightest pages of the history of the Civil War are written the accounts of their splendid deeds of valor. Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, Olustee and Fort Wagner are names that will always be inseparably connected with their glorious achievements in battle. The records tell us that 178,975 colored soldiers took part in 213 battles and skirmishes, and that 36,847 of them lost their lives. Among the men honored by the Congress of the United States with medals for distinguished service in action during the Civil War are seventeen Negroes.

The courage and the spirit of these men are shown in an occurrence which took place immediately after the desperate charge at Fort Wagner, where the sainted Shaw fell at the head of his black regiment. One of the officers went about among the wounded after the battle speaking to them words of encouragement. He finally came upon a large group of men and asked them: “If out of it and at home, how many of you would enlist again?” Every man replied, even the wounded, that he would, and that he would fight until the last brother should break his chains. “For if all our people get their freedom, we can afford to die”.

The good and just Abraham Lincoln speaking of the part Negro soldiers bore in the war, paid them this tribute: “There are some Negroes living who can remember, and the children of some who are dead, who will not forget that some black men with steady eye and well poised bayonet helped mankind to save liberty in America.”

The condition that faced the country at the close of the Civil War was a sad and serious illustration of the proverb that it is easier to destroy than to create, easier to pull down than to build up. To weld again the states into an harmonious union was a great task, made more difficult by the injection of a problem that was new, grave and without precedent. No nation had ever before been called upon to meet such a situation. Here were four millions of Negroes, recently emancipated, to be in some way absorbed in the body politic. How this could be done to the advantage of the freedmen, their former owners and the country, became a question of national proportions. The situation, too, presented a political phase, complicated by race antagonism, which made the work of the restoration and the reconstruction of the southern states not only difficult, but extremely uncertain. “It was most emphatically untrodden ground, an unexplored sea; and there were neither land-marks nor chart.” It was inevitable that whatever was done would be experimental and tentative. And, 

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