Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[256] officers in the regiment. He had previously been the most conspicuous private coachman in Charleston; there had been a reward of one thousand dollars offered for him when he escaped from slavery; and once, when visiting New York as General Hunter's orderly, he had been mobbed in the street for wearing the United States uniform, and had defended himself successfully against half a dozen men, taking his position in a doorway. After the war he was appointed a justice of the peace in South Carolina.

It was a fortunate thing for both General Saxton and myself that each of us had been satisfied in advance of the essential courage of the blacks. In my case this was the result of a little experience, previously related, at the Bums riot,--when a negro stepped into the Court-House door before me; in Saxton's case it came from his participation in the war between the United States troops and the Florida Seminoles, when he had observed, having both blacks and Indians to fight against, that the negroes would often stand fire when the Indians would run away. We were thus saved from all solicitude such as beset for a time the mind of that young hero, Colonel Robert Shaw, when he took the field, six months later, with his Massachusetts colored regiment. When I