s in particular, but
against the people in general, which, in the sight of the
law, is an ingredient in the composition of murder. You will
hear further from us hereafter. Crispus Attucks."[527]

This was the declaration of war. It was fulfilled. The world has heard
from him; and, more, the English-speaking world will never forget the
noble daring and excusable rashness of Attucks in the holy cause of
liberty! Eighteen centuries before he was saluted by death and kissed
by immortality, another Negro bore the cross of Christ to Calvary for
him. And when the colonists were staggering wearily under their cross
of woe, a Negro came to the front, and bore that cross to the victory
of glorious martyrdom!

And the people did not agree with John Adams that Attucks led "a
motley rabble," but a band of patriots. Their evidence of the belief
they entertained was to be found in the annual commemoration of the
"5th of March," when orators, in measured sentences and impassioned
eloquence, praised the hero-dead. In March, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren,
who a few months later, as Gen. Warren, made Bunker Hill the shrine of
New-England patriotism, was the orator. On the question of human
liberty, he said,--

"That personal freedom is the natural right of every man,
and that property, or an exclusive right to dispose of what
he has honestly acquired by his own labor, necessarily
arises therefrom, are truths which common sense has placed
beyond the reach of contradiction. And no man, or body of
men, can, without being guilty of flagrant injustice, claim
a right to dispose of the persons or acquisitions of any
other man, or body of men, unless it can be proved that such
a right has arisen from some compact between the parties, in
which it has been explicitly and freely granted."

These noble sentiments were sealed by his blood at Bunker Hill, on the
17th of June, 1775, and are the amulet that will protect his fame from
the corroding touch of centuries of time

The free Negroes of the Northern colonies responded to the call "_to
arms_" that rang from the placid waters of Massachusetts Bay to the
verdant hills of Berkshire, and from Lake Champlain to the upper
waters of the Hudson. Every Northern colony had its Negro troops, not
as separate organizations,--save the black regiment of Rhode
Island,--but scattered throughout all of the white organizations of
the army. At the firs