There are those who will ask,—why make a parade of the military services of Colored Americans, instead of recording their attention to and progress in the various other departments of civil, social, and political elevation? To this let me answer, that I yield to no one in appreciating the propriety and pertinency of every effort on the part of Colored Americans, in all pursuits, which, as members of the human family, it becomes them to share in; and, among these, my predilections are least and last for what constitutes the pomp and circumstances of War.
Did the limits of this work permit, I could furnish an elaborate list of those who have distinguished themselves as Teachers, Editors, Orators, Mechanics, Clergymen, Artists, Farmers, Poets, Lawyers, Physicians, Merchants, etc., to whose perennial fame be it recorded that most of their attainments were reached through difficulties unknown to any but those whose sin is the curl of the hair and the hue of the skin.
There is now an institution of learning in the State of New York, Central College, which recently employed, as Professor of Belles Lettres, a young Colored man, Charles L. Reason, and who, on resigning his chair, dropped his mantle gracefully upon the shoulders of William G. Allen, another Colored young man as worthy for scholastic abilities and gentlemanly deportment.
These men, as Teachers, especially in Colleges open to all, irrespective of accidental differences, are doing a mighty work in uprooting prejudice. The influences thus gathered are already felt. Many a young white man or woman who, in early life has imbibed wrong notions of the Colored man's inferiority, is taught a new lesson by the Colored Professors at McGrawville; and they leave its honored walls with thanksgiving in their hearts for the conversion from Pro-Slavery Heathenism to the Gospel of Christian Freedom; and are thus prepared to go forth as Pioneers in the cause of Human Brotherhood.
But the Orator's voice and Author's pen have both been eloquent in detailing the merits of Colored Americans in these various ramifications of society, while a combination of circumstances have veiled from the public eye a narration of those military services which are generally conceded as passports to the honorable and lasting notice of Americans.
Boston, May, 1851.
Services of Colored Americans.
MASSACHUSETTS.
On the fifth of March, 1851, a petition was presented to the Massachusetts Legislature, asking an appropriation of $1,500 for erecting a monument to the memory of Crispus Attucks, the first martyr in the Boston Massacre of March 5th, 1770. The matter was referred to the Committee on Military Affairs, who granted a hearing of the petitioners, in whose behalf appeared Wendell Phillips, Esq., and Wm. C. Nell, but finally submitted an adverse report, on the ground that a boy, Christopher Snyder, was previously killed. Admitting this fact (which was the result of a very different sense from that in which Attucks fell), does not offset the claims of Attucks, and those who made the fifth of March famous in our annals—the day which history selects as the dawn of the American Revolution.