About half of the American force was wiped out and most of the others were taken prisoners.  They inflicted a much heavier loss on the Mexicans.  Among the killed was the Mexican commander who had ordered the treacherous attack.

It may be that “someone had blundered.”  This was not the concern of the black troopers; in the face of odds they fought by the cactus and lay dead under the Mexican stars.

In closing this outline of the Negro’s participation in former wars, it is highly appropriate to quote the tributes of two eminent men.  One, General Benjamin F. Butler, a conspicuous military leader on the Union side in the Civil War, and Wendell Phillips, considered by many the greatest orator America ever produced, and who devoted his life to the abolition movement looking to the freedom of the slave in the United States.  Said General Butler on the occasion of the debate in the National House of Representatives on the Civil Rights bill; ten years after the bloody battle of New Market Heights; speaking to the bill, and referring to the gallantry of the black soldiers on that field of strife: 

“It became my painful duty to follow in the track of that charging column, and there, in a space not wider than the clerk’s desk and three hundred yards long, lay the dead bodies of 543 of my colored comrades, fallen in defense of their country, who had offered their lives to uphold its flag and its honor, as a willing sacrifice; and as I rode along among them, guiding my horse this way and that way, lest he should profane with his hoofs what seemed to me the sacred dead, and as I looked on their bronzed faces upturned in the shining sun, as if in mute appeal against the wrongs of the country whose flag had only been to them a flag of stripes, on which no star of glory had ever shone for them—­feeling I had wronged them in the past and believing what was the future of my country to them—­among my dead comrades there I swore to myself a solemn oath, ’May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I ever fail to defend the rights of those men who have given their blood for me and my country this day, and for their race forever,’ and, God helping me, I will keep that oath.”

Mr. Phillips in his great oration on Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Black of St. Domingo; statesman, warrior and LIBEEATOR,—­delivered in New York City, March 11, 1863, said among other things, a constellation of linguistic brilliants not surpassed since the impassioned appeals of Cicero swept the Roman Senate to its feet, or Demosthenes fired his listeners with the flame of his matchless eloquence;