re than three years' service. The ranks had been kept full
by enlistment, but there were only fourteen line-officers instead of the
full thirty. The men who should have filled those vacancies were doing
duty as sergeants in the ranks.

In what respect were the colored troops a source of disappointment? To
me in one respect only,--that of health. Their health improved, indeed,
as they grew more familiar with military life; but I think that neither
their physical nor moral temperament gave them that toughness, that
obstinate purpose of living, which sustains the more materialistic
Anglo-Saxon. They had not, to be sure, the same predominant diseases,
suffering in the pulmonary, not in the digestive organs; but they
suffered a good deal. They felt malaria less, but they were more
easily choked by dust and made ill by dampness. On the other hand,
they submitted more readily to sanitary measures than whites, and,
with efficient officers, were more easily kept clean. They were injured
throughout the army by an undue share of fatigue duty, which is not only
exhausting but demoralizing to a soldier; by the un-suitableness of the
rations, which gave them salt meat instead of rice and hominy; and
by the lack of good medical attendance. Their childlike constitutions
peculiarly needed prompt and efficient surgical care; but almost all the
colored troops were enlisted late in the war, when it was hard to get
good surgeons for any regiments, and especially for these. In this
respect I had nothing to complain of, since there were no surgeons in
the army for whom I would have exchanged my own.

And this late arrival on the scene affected not only the medical
supervision of the colored troops, but their opportunity for a career.
It is not my province to write their history, nor to vindicate them,
nor to follow them upon those larger fields compared with which the
adventures of my regiment appear but a partisan warfare. Yet this, at
least, may be said. The operations on the South Atlantic coast, which
long seemed a merely subordinate and incidental part of the great
contest, proved to be one of the final pivots on which it turned. All
now admit that the fate of the Confederacy was decided by Sherman's
march to the sea. Port Royal was the objective point to which he
marched, and he found the Department of the South, when he reached it,
held almost exclusively by colored troops. Next to the merit of those
who made the march was that of tho