Undoubtedly substantial progress has been made respecting colored officers since 1863, when colored soldiers were first admitted in considerable numbers into the army of the Union.  At the period of the Civil War colored officers for colored soldiers was little more than thought of; the sole instance comprised the short-lived colored officers of the three regiments of Louisiana Native Guards, and the sporadic appointments made near the close of the war, when the fighting was over.

More than three hundred colored officers served in the volunteer army in the war with Spain.  Two Northern States, Illinois and Kansas, and one Southern State, North Carolina, put each in the field as part of its quota a regiment of colored troops officered throughout by colored men.  Ohio and Indiana contributed each a separate battalion of colored soldiers entirely under colored officers.

In 1863 a regiment of colored troops with colored officers was practically impossible.  In 1898 a regiment of colored volunteers without some colored officers was almost equally impossible.  In 1863 a regiment of colored soldiers commanded by colored officers would have been a violation of the sentiment of the period and an outrage upon popular feelings, the appearance of which in almost any Northern city would hardly fail to provoke an angry and resentful mob.  At that period, even black recruits in uniforms were frequently assaulted in the streets of Northern cities.  We have seen already how Sergeant Rivers, of the First South Carolina Volunteers, had to beat off a mob on Broadway in New York city.  In 1898 regiments and battalions of colored troops, with colored colonels and majors in command, came out of States where the most stringent black laws were formerly in force, and were greeted with applause as they passed on their way to their camps or to embark for Cuba.

In Baltimore, in 1863, the appearance of a Negro in the uniform of an army surgeon started a riot, and the irate mob was not appeased until it had stripped the patriotic colored doctor of his shoulder-straps.  In 1898, when the Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers passed through the same city, the colored officers of Company L of that regiment were welcomed with the same courtesies as their white colleagues—­courtesies extended as a memorial of the fateful progress of the regiment through the city of Baltimore in 1861.  One State which went to war in 1861 to keep the Negro a slave, put in the field a regiment of colored soldiers, officered by colored men from the colonel down.  To this extent has prejudice been made to yield either to political necessity, or a generous change in sentiment.  Thus were found States both North and South willing to give the Negro the full military recognition to which he is entitled.