Sometime in 1860 Mr. Albert Storm requested me to aid him in getting his mother from the South. She was a slave. Millie, Sally, Ann and John Caraway were brought from the South, by the permission of the owner, by one Dolly Babb, to Brooklyn. Dolly said to my mother, “Now I am delivered from the devil out of hell. I am bound to serve my Heavenly Master and I shall serve Him well.” J. R. V. Thomas, William Isaacs, Rev. William Dixon, Paul Drayton, James Anderson, Dr. Peter W. Ray, Joe Bowen, Chas. H. Lansing, William Still, Rev. George W. Leveer and others, were a few of the men who were engaged in bringing slaves from the South and giving them their freedom. Men of grander qualities, morally, socially and religiously, I have never met.
In 1859 I was married, on June 16th, to Miss Olivia A. Hamilton, a daughter of Mr. Robert Hamilton, editor of an Anglo-African paper. Ada A. William Alexander and Mary Hamilton were born to us.
ALEXANDER H. NEWTON In Military Uniform
Commissary Sergeant 29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
My War Record and Sketch of the Twenty-ninth Regiment
In 1861 when President Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops I engaged myself for the great Civil War, the War of the Rebellion. I went into the company of the Thirteenth Regiment, of Brooklyn. I went to the front, as the United States was not taking Negro troops. In 1862 there was a riot in New York City. The colored people were being dreadfully treated, being stoned, killed, and shown how despised they were even in the North. An orphan asylum (colored) was burned, having at that time three hundred children in it. I returned to Brooklyn under the command of General B. F. Butler, who had been ordered to put down the riot. While engaged in this mission I got into the very midst of the rioters. Soon they were after me. I ran through the streets of New York like a wild steer, while the rioters cried out, “Head the Nigger Off!” At length, I reached the New Haven boat which brought us safely to New Haven, Conn. While there I engaged at my trade with Mr. W. Clark. On the 18th of December, 1863, I enlisted in the Twenty-ninth Regiment, of the Connecticut Volunteers, as a private. On March 8, 1864, the regiment broke camp and left New Haven for Annapolis, Md., with Colonel W. B. Wooster in command. On the next Sabbath after we reached Annapolis, I attended the Methodist Church and listened to a powerful sermon by Rev. I. J. Hill, he being an orderly to Colonel Wooster.
While in the camp at New Haven, Conn., we employed our idle time in discussing the great problems that confronted the country at that time. Lieutenant Seymour, Uncle Fred Moore, Horace Louden, Rev. I. J. Hill and myself were the participants in these discussions. The new party, the Republican, was then formed, the prime purpose of which was the freedom of the slaves. We were most frequently surmising and prophesying as to what would be the final outcome and the ultimate benefits to the Negro race. There were vital questions at stake then. The spirit of patriotism and the desire to lift oppression, were afire in every breast of every true American. It would be well for the many young Afro-Americans of today to remember that the supreme purpose of the Republican party when it was organized, was not only to prohibit the further extension of slavery, but to exterminate it as a system of barter and traffic. On the other hand, the Democratic party at that time was in favor of the infernal system of slavery, and in our day, it is in sympathy with any movement that looks to keeping the Negro race in some kind of shackles. They are still in favor of keeping the Afro-American in slavery in some form. And they are succeeding reasonably well. For at last, we are forced to conclude that no man is really free unless he holds in his bosom the right of franchise and has received the liberty to exercise that right. Have the ten millions of Afro-Americans in the United States that right to-day? The answer comes from many States, NO!
COL. W. P. WOOSTER
Colonel of the 29th Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers
Inspired with the thought of Shakespeare, who said, “He who would be free, let him first strike the blow himself,” my bosom burned with the fire of patriotism for the salvation of my country and the freedom of my people. I was rejoiced when the Hon. Abraham Lincoln was elected President of these United States, and when it was my fortune to see him emancipate the millions of members of the downtrodden race. I shall never forget when I saw him riding through the streets of New York, with throngs of humanity on either side of him. He was on his way then to the inauguration at Washington, D. C. to assume control of the terror-stricken country and to take the reigns of government in his own hands. While it became necessary that blood should flow freely, I was reminded, that no sin is ever wiped out without the spilling of blood. This seems to be a decree of High Heaven, even among the affairs of men. And God has made no exception to this decree, in the salvation of men from their personal sins. I was indeed willing to unite with the party, the Republican party and the abolition movement for their high and holy purposes, and to be associated with such men as Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, Theodore Tilton, Lewis Tapen, William Still, of Philadelphia; Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens and many other such men, whose platform was justice and right and freedom extended to all without regard to color or previous condition of servitude, and to enforce these rights and privileges even at the point of the bayonet.