sachusetts Regiment stormed Fort Wagner July
18, 1863, only to be driven back with the loss of its colonel, Robert
Gould Shaw, and many of its rank and file, it established for all time
the fact that the colored soldier would fight and fight well. This had
already been demonstrated in Louisiana by colored regiments under the
command of General Godfrey Weitzel in the attack upon Port Hudson on May
27 of the same year. On that occasion regiments composed for the greater
part of raw recruits, plantation hands with centuries of servitude under
the lash behind them, stormed trenches and dashed upon cold steel in the
hands of their former masters and oppressors. After that there was no
more talk in the portion of the country of the "natural cowardice"
of the negro. But the heroic qualities of Colonel Shaw, his social
prominence and that of his officers, and the comparative nearness of
their battlefield to the North, attracted greater and more lasting
attention to the daring and bravery of their exploit, until it finally
became fixed in many minds as the first real baptism of fire of colored
American soldiers.

After Wagner the recruiting of colored regiments, originally opposed
by both North and South, went on apace, particularly under the Federal
government, which organized no less than one hundred and fifty-four,
designated as "United States Colored Troops." Colonel Shaw's raising of
a colored regiment aroused quite as much comment in the North because
of the race prejudice it defied, as because of the novelty of the new
organization. General Weitzel tendered his resignation the instant
General B. F. Butler assigned black soldiers to his brigade, and was
with difficulty induced to serve on. His change of mind was a wise one,
and not only because these colored soldiers covered him with glory at
Port Hudson. It was his good fortune to be the central figure in one
of the dramatic incidents of a war that must ever rank among the most
thrilling and tragic the world has seen. The black cavalrymen who rode
into Richmond, the first of the Northern troops to enter the Southern
capital, went in waving their sabres and crying to the negroes on the
sidewalks, "We have come to set you free!" They were from the division
of Godfrey Weitzel, and American history has no more stirring moment.

In the South, notwithstanding the raising in 1861 of a colored
Confederate regiment by Governor Moore of Louisiana (a magnificent body
of educated co