the higher qualities of statesmanship.  With Napoleon, Cromwell and Washington, the three great commanders of modern times who have joined to high military talent eminent ability in the art of civil government, we must also class Toussaint L’Ouverteur, the black soldier of the Antilles.  Thiers, the prejudiced attorney of Napoleon, declares nevertheless that Toussaint possessed wonderful talent for government, and the fact ever remains that under his benign rule all classes were pacified and San Domingo was made to blossom as the rose.  In the armies of Menelek, in the armies of France, in the armies of England, as well as in the organization of the Zulu and Kaffir tribes the Negro has shown himself a soldier.  If the Afro-American should fail in this particular it will not be because of any lack of the military element in the African side of his character, or for any lack of “remorseless military audacity” in the original Negro, as the historian, Williams, expresses it.

In our own Revolutionary War, the Negro, then but partially civilized, and classed with “vagabonds,” held everywhere as a slave, and everywhere distrusted, against protest and enactment, made his way into the patriot army, fighting side by side with his white compatriots from Lexington to Yorktown.  On the morning of April 19th, 1775, when the British re-enforcements were preparing to leave Boston for Lexington, a Negro soldier who had served in the French war, commanded a small body of West Cambridge “exempts” and captured Lord Percy’s supply train with its military escort and the officer in command.  As a rule the Negro soldiers were distributed among the regiments, thirty or forty to a regiment, and did not serve in separate organizations.  Bishop J.P.  Campbell, of the African Methodist Church, was accustomed to say “both of my grandfathers served in the Revolutionary War.”  In Varnum’s Brigade, however, there was a Negro regiment and of it Scribner’s history, 1897, says, speaking of the battle of Rhode Island:  “None behaved better than Greene’s colored regiment, which three times repulsed the furious charges of veteran Hessians.”  Williams says:  “The black regiment was one of three that prevented the enemy from turning the flank of the American army.  These black troops were doubtless regarded as the weak spot of the line, but they were not.”

The colony of Massachusetts alone furnished 67,907 men for the Revolutionary War, while all the colonies together south of Pennsylvania furnished but 50,493, hence the sentiment prevailing in Massachusetts would naturally be very powerful in determining any question pertaining to the army.  When the country sprang to arms in response to that shot fired at Lexington, the echoes of which, poetically speaking, were heard around the world, the free Negroes of every Northern colony rallied with their white neighbors.  They were in the fight at Lexington and at Bunker Hill, but when Washington came to take command of the army