en. As Lieutenant Grote Hutcheson has stated it, "The men knew
nothing, and the non-commissioned officers but little more. From the
very circumstances of their preceding life it could not be otherwise.
They had no independence, no self-reliance, not a thought except for
the present, and were filled with superstition." Yet the officers were
determined to prove the wisdom of the experiment. To do this they were
forced to give their own attention to the minutest details of military
administration, and to act as non-commissioned officers. The total lack
of education among the men necessitated an enormous amount of writing by
the officers. In the Ninth Cavalry only one man was found able to write
well enough to be sergeant-major, and not for several years was it
possible to obtain troop clerks. When the Tenth Cavalry was being
recruited an officer was sent to Philadelphia with the express purpose
of picking up educated colored men for the non-commissioned positions.
Difficult as the tasks of the officers thus were, most of them felt well
repaid for their unusual labors by the affectionate regard in which they
were held by their soldiers, and by the never-failing good humor with
which the latter went about their duties.

As the years passed the character of the colored soldiers naturally
changed. In place of the war veterans, and of the men whose chains of
servitude had just been struck off, came young men from the North and
East with more education and more self-reliance. They depended less
upon their officers, both in the barracks and in the field, yet they
reverenced and cared for them as much as did their predecessors. Their
greatest faults then as now were gambling and quarreling. On the other
hand, the negro regiments speedily became favorably known because of
greater sobriety and of fewer desertions than among the white soldiers.
It was the Ninth Cavalry which a few years ago astonished the army by
reporting not a single desertion in twelve months, an unheard-of and
perhaps undreamed-of record. In all that goes to make a good soldier,
in drill, fidelity, and smartness, the negro regular from the first took
front rank.

Nor was there ever any lack of the fighting quality which had gratified
the nation at Fort Wagner, or at Fort Blakely, Ala., where the
Seventy-third Colored Infantry, under Colonel Henry C. Merriam, stormed
the enemy's works, in advance of orders, in one of the last actions of
the war. It soon fell to t