"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 the approbation of all the branches of your government, authorizing the Governor to accept the services of a corps of two thousand free people of color. Sir, these were times which tried men's souls. In these times it was no sporting matter to bear arms. 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 drafted. No, your pride had placed them beyond your compulsory power. But there was no necessity for its exercise; they were volunteers; yes, Sir, volunteers to defend that very country from the inroads and ravages of a ruthless and vindictive foe, which had treated them with insult, degradation and slavery.
"Volunteers are the best of soldiers. Give me the men, whatever be their complexion, that willingly volunteer, and not those who are compelled to turn out. Such men do not fight from necessity, nor from mercenary motives, but from principle."
Hon. Mr. Martindale, who represented a District of the State of New York, in Congress in 1828, thus speaks of the negro soldiers:
"Slaves, or negroes who have 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."
Up to this time the East had been the theatre of the war, with now and then a battle in some one of the Middle Colonies, but the British discovering that the people of the South acted indifferently in maintaining and recruiting the army, transferred their operations to that section. Maryland then stood as a middle State or Colony. Her statesmen, seeing the threatened danger of the invasion of Pennsylvania, endeavored to prepare to meet it, and taking council from her sister States at the East, accepted the negro as a soldier. In June, 1781, John Cadwater, writing from Annapolis, Md., to Gen. Washington, says:
"We have resolved to raise, immediately, seven hundred and fifty negroes, to be incorporated with the other troops; and a bill is now almost completed."
It does not appear that the negroes were formed into separate organizations in this State, but filled the depleted ranks of the Continental regiments, where their energy and daring was not less than that displayed by their white comrades, with whom they fought, shoulder to shoulder. The advocates of arming the negroes were not confined to the Eastern and Middle sections; some of the best men of the South favored and advocated the enlistment of free negroes, and made many, though for a long time unsuccessful, efforts to obtain legal sanction for such enlistment throughout the South. But their advice was not listened to, even in the face of certain invasion, and then the whites would not, and could not be induced to rally to the defence of their own particular section and homes.
For fear that I may be accused of too highly coloring the picture of the Southern laxity of fervor and patriotism, I quote from the valuable essay which accompanies the history of the American Loyalists:
"The whole number of regulars enlisted for the Continental service, from the beginning to the close of the struggle, was 231,959. Of these, I have once remarked, 67,907 were from Massachusetts; and I may now add, that every State south of Pennsylvania provided but 59,493, or 8,414 less than this single State."
The men of Massachusetts did not more firmly adhere to their policy of mixed troops as against separate organizations, based upon color, than did the men of the South to their peculiar institution, and against the arming of negroes, free or slave. The war having fairly set in upon Southern soil, and so urgent the necessity for recruiting the army, that Congress again took up the subject of enrolling negroes as soldiers. It was decided that the general Government had no control over the States in the matter, but a series of resolutions were adopted recommending to the States of Georgia and South Carolina, the arming of three thousand able-bodied negroes.