[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 man than Seward, Secretary of State, had said:  “When the insurgents shall have abandoned their armies and laid down their arms, the war will instantly cease; and all the war measures then existing, including those which affect slavery, will cease also.”  The convention thanked the President and the Thirty-Seventh Congress for revoking a prohibitory law in regard to the carrying of mails by Negroes, for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, for recognizing Hayti and Liberia, and for the military order retaliating for the unmilitary treatment accorded Negro soldiers by the Confederate officers; and especially it thanked Senator Sumner “for his noble efforts to cleanse the statute-books of the nation from every stain of inequality against colored men,” and General Butler for the stand he had taken early in the war.  At the same time it resolved to send a petition to Congress to ask that the rights of the country’s Negro patriots in the field be respected, and that the Government cease to set an example to those in arms against it by making invidious distinctions, based upon color, as to pay, labor, and promotion.  It begged especially to be saved from supposed friends:  “When the Anti-Slavery Standard, representing the American Anti-Slavery Society, denies that the society asks for the enfranchisement of colored men, and the Liberator apologizes for excluding the colored men of Louisiana from the ballot-box, they injure us more vitally than all the ribald jests of