served in our records.
The total result in the 62nd Regiment was $1,034.60,
contributed by the officers, and $3,966.50 by the colored
soldiers. The soldiers of the 65th Regiment afterwards added
$1,379.50. One of them, Samuel Sexton, gave $100 from his
earnings as a private soldier at $13 per month, an example
of liberality that may well challenge comparison with the
acts of those rich men who, from their surplus, give
thousands to found colleges."

Colonel David Branson, late of the 62nd Regiment, in his dedicatory
speech, said:

"MY FRIENDS:--This, with one exception, has been the
happiest 4th of July in my life. That exception was in 1863,
when I saw the rebel flag go down at Vicksburg. I felt the
exultation of victory then, and I feel it to-day as I look
upon this splendid building. Looking in the faces of my old
comrades of the 62nd Regiment here to-day, memory goes back
to the past, when hundreds of you came to me at Benton
Barracks, ragged, starving, and freezing--some did freeze to
death--and emotions fill me that no language can express. I
cannot sit down and think of those scenes of suffering
without almost shedding tears. But happily those days are
passed. No more marching with sluggish step and plantation
gait through the streets of St. Louis, Mo., amid the jeers
of your enemies; no more crossing the Mississippi on ice; no
more sinking steamers, and consequent exposure on the cold,
muddy banks of the river; no more killing labor on
fortifications at Port Hudson, Baton Rouge and Morganza; no
more voyages over the Gulf of Mexico, packed like cattle in
the hold of a vessel; no mere weary marches in the burning
climate of Texas; no more death by the bullet, and no more
afternoons on the banks of the Rio Grande, deliberating on
the future education of yourselves when discharged from the
army; but peace and prosperity here with the result of those
deliberations before us. Our enemies predicted, that upon
the disbanding of our volunteer army--particularly the
colored portion of it--it would turn to bands of marauding
murderers and idle vagabonds, and this Institute was our
answer."

When Colonel Shaw, of the 54th Regiment, fell at Fort Wagner, the brave
soldiers of that regiment gladly contributed to a fund for a monument to
his me