ich has been very carefully kept out of sight by
orators and toast-drinkers. We allude to the participation of colored
men in the great struggle for American freedom. It is not in accordance
with our taste or our principles to eulogize the shedders of blood even
in a cause of acknowledged justice; but when we see a whole nation doing
honor to the memories of one class of its defenders to the total neglect
of another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion, we
cannot forego the satisfaction of inviting notice to certain historical
facts which for the last half century have been quietly elbowed aside,
as no more deserving of a place in patriotic recollection than the
descendants of the men to whom the facts in question relate have to a
place in a Fourth of July procession.

Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution
no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. They
have had no historian. With here and there an exception, they have all
passed away; and only some faint tradition of their campaigns under
Washington and Greene and Lafayette, and of their cruisings under Decatur
and Barry, lingers among their, descendants. Yet enough is known to show
that the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportion
of the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War.

The late Governor Eustis, of Massachusetts,--the pride and boast of the
democracy of the East, himself an active participant in the war, and
therefore a most competent witness,--Governor Morrill, of New Hampshire,
Judge Hemphill, of Pennsylvania, and other members of Congress, in the
debate on the question of admitting Missouri as a slave State into the
Union, bore emphatic testimony to the efficiency and heroism of the black
troops. Hon. Calvin Goddard, of Connecticut, states that in the little
circle of his residence he was instrumental in securing, under the act of
1818, the pensions of nineteen colored soldiers. "I cannot," he says,
"refrain from mentioning one aged black man, Primus Babcock, who proudly
presented to me an honorable discharge from service during the war, dated
at the close of it, wholly in the handwriting of George Washington; nor
can I forget the expression of his feelings when informed, after his
discharge had been sent to the War Department, that it could not be
returned. At his request it was written for, as he seemed inclined to
spurn the pension and re