ergeant
Rivers, of the First South Carolina Volunteers, had to beat off a mob
on Broadway in New York city. In 1898 regiments and battalions of
colored troops, with colored colonels and majors in command, came out
of States where the most stringent black laws were formerly in force,
and were greeted with applause as they passed on their way to their
camps or to embark for Cuba.

In Baltimore, in 1863, the appearance of a Negro in the uniform of an
army surgeon started a riot, and the irate mob was not appeased until
it had stripped the patriotic colored doctor of his shoulder-straps.
In 1898, when the Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers passed
through the same city, the colored officers of Company L of that
regiment were welcomed with the same courtesies as their white
colleagues--courtesies extended as a memorial of the fateful progress
of the regiment through the city of Baltimore in 1861. One State which
went to war in 1861 to keep the Negro a slave, put in the field a
regiment of colored soldiers, officered by colored men from the
colonel down. To this extent has prejudice been made to yield either
to political necessity, or a generous change in sentiment. Thus were
found States both North and South willing to give the Negro the full
military recognition to which he is entitled.

With this wider recognition of colored officers the general
government has not kept pace. In the four regiments of colored
volunteers recruited by the general government for service in the war
with Spain, only the lieutenants were colored. Through the extreme
conservatism of the War Department, in these regiments no colored
officers, no matter how meritorious, could be appointed or advanced to
the grade of captain. Such was the announced policy of the department,
and it was strictly carried out. The commissioning of this large
number of colored men even to lieutenancies was, without doubt, a
distinct step in advance; it was an entering wedge. But it was also an
advance singularly inadequate and embarrassing. In one of these
colored volunteer, commonly called "immune" regiments, of the twelve
captains, but five had previous military training, while of the
twenty-four colored lieutenants, eighteen had previous military
experience, and three of the remaining six were promoted from the
ranks, so that at the time of their appointment twenty-one lieutenants
had previous military training. Of the five captains with previous
military expe