, and committed
him and his officers and black soldiers to the mercy of a chivalry which
affected to regard them as mercenaries. With this spirit infused in the
confederate army, what else than barbarity could be expected?

[Illustration: PHALANX REGIMENT RECEIVING ITS FLAGS.

Presentation of colors to the 20th United States Colored Infantry, Col.
Bertram, in N. Y., March 5th, 1864.]

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Among the captured rebel flags now in the War Department,
Washington, D. C., are several Black Flags. No. 205 was captured near
North Mountain, Md., Aug. 1st, 1864. Another Captured from General
Pillow's men at Fort Donelson, is also among the rebel archives in that
Department. Several of them were destroyed by the troops capturing them,
as at Pascagoula, Miss., and near Grand Gulf on the Mississippi.

[29] General Brisbin, in his account of the expedition which, in the
Winter of 1864, left Bean Station, Tenn., under command of General
Stoneman, for the purpose of destroying the confederate Salt Works in
West Virginia, says the confederates after capturing some of the
soldiers of the Sixth Phalanx Cavalry Regiment, butchered them. His
statement is as follows:

"For the last two days a force of Confederate cavalry, under Witcher,
had been following our command picking up stragglers and worn-out horses
in our rear. Part of our troops were composed of negroes and these the
Confederates killed as fast as they caught them, laying the dead bodies
by the roadside with pieces of paper pinned to their clothing, on which
were written such warnings as the following: 'This is the way we treat
all nigger soldiers,' and, 'This is the fate of nigger soldiers who
fight against the South.' We did not know what had been going on in our
rear until we turned about to go back from Wytheville, when we found the
dead colored soldiers along the road as above described. General
Burbridge was very angry and wanted to shoot a Confederate prisoner for
every one of his colored soldiers he found murdered, and would
undoubtedly have done so had he not been restrained. As it was, the
whole corps was terribly excited by the atrocious murders committed by
Witcher's men, and if Witcher had been caught he would have been shot."

This gallant soldier,(?) twenty years after the close of the war, writes
about the incidents and happenings during the march of the army to
Saltville, and says:

"Before we reached Marion we encountered Breckenridge's advanc