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The black men in the Revolution and the war of 1812.
The return of the festival of our national independence has called our attention to a matter which 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
