artly of
Negroes, dug under a Confederate fort a trench a hundred and fifty yards
long. This was filled with explosives, and on July 30 the match was
applied and the famous crater formed. Just before the explosion the
Negroes had figured in a gallant charge on the Confederates. The plan
was to follow the eruption by a still more formidable assault, in which
Burnside wanted to give his Negro troops the lead. A dispute about this
and a settlement by lot resulted in the awarding of precedence to a New
Hampshire regiment. Said General Grant later of the whole unfortunate
episode: "General Burnside wanted to put his colored division in front;
I believe if he had done so it would have been a success." After the men
of a Negro regiment had charged and taken a battery at Decatur, Ala., in
October, 1864, and shown exceptional gallantry under fire, they received
an ovation from their white comrades "who by thousands sprang upon the
parapets and cheered the regiment as it reentered the lines."[1]

[Footnote 1: General Thomas J. Morgan: "The Negroes in the Civil War,"
in the _Baptist Home Mission Monthly_, quoted in _Liberia_, Bulletin 12,
February, 1898. General Morgan in October, 1863, became a major in the
Fourteenth United States Colored Infantry. He organized the regiment and
became its colonel. He also organized the Forty-second and Forty-fourth
regiments of colored infantry.]

When all was over there was in the North a spontaneous recognition of
the right of such men to honorable and generous treatment at the hands
of the nation, and in Congress there was the feeling that if the South
could come back to the Union with its autonomy unimpaired, certainly
the Negro soldier should have the rights of citizenship. Before the war
closed, however, there was held in Syracuse, N.Y., a convention of Negro
men that threw interesting light on the problems and the feeling of
the period.[1] At this gathering John Mercer Langston was temporary
chairman, Frederick Douglass, president, and Henry Highland Garnett, of
Washington; James W.C. Pennington, of New York; George L. Ruffin, of
Boston, and Ebenezer D. Bassett, of Philadelphia, were among the more
prominent delegates. There was at the meeting a fear that some of the
things that seemed to have been gained by the war might not actually be
realized; and as Congress had not yet altered the Constitution so as to
abolish slavery, grave question was raised by a recent speech in which
no less a