The Colored Regulars in the United States Army eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 389 pages of information about The Colored Regulars in the United States Army.

The Colored Regulars in the United States Army eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 389 pages of information about The Colored Regulars in the United States Army.

Considerably more than one-half of this population was located within the States along the Atlantic Coast, viz.; Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Here were to be found 154,883 free colored people.  Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey took the lead in this population, with Massachusetts and Connecticut coming next, while Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had but few.  The cities, Boston, New York and Philadelphia, were the largest cities of free colored people then in the North.  In Boston there were 2,261; New York City, 12,574, while in Philadelphia there were 22,185

As early as 1787 the free colored people of Philadelphia, through two distinguished representatives, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, “two men of the African race,” as the chroniclers say, “saw the irreligious and uncivilized state” of the “people of their complexion,” and finally concluded “that a society should be formed without regard to religious tenets, provided the persons lived an orderly and sober life,” the purpose of the society being “to support one another in sickness and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.”  Accordingly a society was established, known as the Free African Society of Philadelphia, and on the 17th, 5th-mo., 1787, articles were published, including the following, which is inserted to show the breadth of the society’s purpose: 

“And we apprehend it to be necessary that the children of our deceased members be under the care of the Society, so far as to pay for the education of their children, if they cannot attend free school; also to put them out apprentices to suitable trades or places, if required."[2]

Shortly after this we read of “the African School for the free instruction of the black people,” and in 1796, “The Evening Free School, held at the African Methodist Meeting House in Philadelphia” was reported as being “kept very orderly, the scholars behaving in a becoming manner, and their improvement beyond the teachers’ expectations, their intellects appearing in every branch of learning to be equal to those of the fairest complexion.”  The name African, as the reader will notice, is used with reference to school, church, and individuals; although not to the complete exclusion of “colored people” and “people of color.”  These phrases seem to have been coined in the West Indies, and were there applied only to persons of mixed European and African descent.  In the United States they never obtained such restricted use except in a very few localities.  The practice of using African as a descriptive title of the free colored people of the North became very extensive and so continued up to the middle of the century.  There were African societies, churches and schools in all the prominent centres of this population.

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The Colored Regulars in the United States Army from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.