The Colored Regulars in the United States Army Part 3

4. The number of colored children attending private schools in the city of New York, 125.

a. The number of white children attending private schools in 1850, census gave 10,560, which number has since been increased by the establishment of Catholic parochial schools, estimated in 1856, 17,560.

b. The proportion of colored children attending private schools to white children attending same, is as 1 to 140.

c. But the average attendance of colored children in all schools is about the same as that of the white in proportion, that is to say, as many colored children attend the public schools as do whites attend both public and private schools, in proportion to the whole number of each cla.s.s of children.

Locality, capability, etc., of colored schools.

1. The Board of Education, since its organization, has expended in sites and buildings for white schools $1,600,000.

b. The Board of Education has expended for sites and buildings for colored schools (addition to building leased 19 Thomas), $1,000.

c. The two schoolhouses in possession of the Board now used for colored children were a.s.signed to same by the Old Public School Society.

2. The proportion of colored children to white children attending public schools is as 1 to 40.

a. The sum expended on school buildings and sites of colored and white schools by the Board of Education is as 1 to 1,600.

3. a. Schoolhouse No. 1, for colored children, is an old building, erected in 1820 by the New York Manumission Society as a school for colored children, in Mulberry street, in a poor but decent locality. It has two departments, one male and one female; it consists of two stories only, and has two small recitation rooms on each floor, but as primary as well as grammar children attend each department, much difficulty and confusion arises from the want of cla.s.s room for the respective studies.

The building covers only part of the lot, and as it is, the best attended and among the best taught of the colored schools, a new and ample school building, erected in this place, would prove a great attraction, and could be amply filled by children.

b. Schoolhouse No. 2, erected in Laurens street more than twenty years ago for colored children by the Public School Society, is in one of the lowest and filthiest neighborhoods, and hence, although it has competent teachers in the male and female departments, and a separate primary department, the attendance has always been slender, and will be until the school is removed to a neighborhood where children may be sent without danger to their morals.

c. School No. 3, for colored children, in Yorkville, is an old building, is well attended, and deserves, in connection with Schoolhouse No. 4, in Harlem, a new building midway between the present localities.

d. Schoolhouse No. 5, for colored children, is an old building, leased at No. 19 Thomas street, a most degraded neighborhood, full of filth and vice; yet the attendance on this school, and the excellence of its teachers, earn for it the need of a new site and new building.

e. Schoolhouse No. 6, for colored children, is in Broadway, near 37th street, in a dwelling house leased and fitted up for a school, in which there is always four feet of water in the cellar. The attendance good. Some of the school officers have repeatedly promised a new building.

f. Primary school for colored children, No. 1, is in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a church on 15th street, near 7th avenue, in a good location, but premises too small for the attendance; no recitation rooms, and is perforce both primary and grammar school, to the injury of the progress of all.

g. Primary schools for colored children, No. 2 and 3, are in the rear of church, in 2d street, near 6th avenue; the rooms are dark and cheerless, and without the needful facilities of sufficient recitation rooms, etc.

From a comparison of the schoolhouses with the splendid, almost palatial edifices, with manifold comforts, conveniences and elegancies which make up the schoolhouses for white children in the city of New York, it is evident that the colored children are painfully neglected and positively degraded. Pent up in filthy neighborhoods, in old and dilapidated buildings, they are held down to low a.s.sociations and gloomy surroundings.

Yet Mr. Superintendent Kiddle, at a general examination of colored schools held in July last (for silver medals awarded by the society now addressing your honorable body) declared the reading and spelling equal to that of any schools in the city.

The undersigned enter their solemn protest against this unjust treatment of colored children. They believe with the experience of Ma.s.sachusetts, and especially the recent experience of Boston before them, there is no sound reason why colored children shall be excluded from any of the common schools supported by taxes levied alike on whites and blacks, and governed by officers elected by the vote of colored as well as white voters.

But if in the judgment of your honorable body common schools are not thus common to all, then we earnestly pray you to recommend to the Legislature such action as shall cause the Board of Education of this city to erect at least two well-appointed modern grammar schools for colored children on suitable sites, in respectable localities, so that the attendance of colored children may be increased and their minds be elevated in like manner as the happy experience of the honorable Board of Education has been in the matter of white children.

In addition to the excellent impulse to colored youth which these new grammar schools would give, they will have the additional argument of actual economy; the children will be taught with far less expense in two such schoolhouses than in the half dozen hovels into which they are now driven. It is a costly piece of injustice which educates the white scholar in a palace at $10 per year and the colored pupil in a hovel at $17 or $18 per annum.

Taxes, etc., of colored population of the city.

No proposition can be more reasonable than that they who pay taxes for schools and schoolhouses should be provided with schools and schoolhouses. The colored population of this city, in proportion to their numbers, pay their full share of the general and therefore of the school taxes. There are about nine thousand adults of both s.e.xes; of these over three thousand are householders, rent-payers, and therefore tax-payers, in that sense of the word in which owners make tax-payers of their poor tenants. The colored laboring man, with an income of $200 a year, who pays $72 per year for a room and bedroom, is really in proportion to his means a larger tax-payer than the millionaire whose tax rate is thousands of dollars. But directly, also, do the colored people pay taxes. From examinations carefully made, the undersigned affirm that there are in the city at least 1,000 colored persons who own and pay taxes on real estate.

Taxed real estate in the city of New York owned by colored persons $1,400,000 Untaxed by colored persons (churches) 250,000 Personal estate 710,000 Money in savings banks 1,121,000 ----------- $3,481,000

These figures indicate that in proportion to their numbers, the colored population of this city pay a fair share of the school taxes, and that they have been most unjustly dealt with. Their money has been used to purchase sites and erect and fit up schoolhouses for white children, whilst their own children are driven into miserable edifices in disgraceful localities. Surely, the white population of the city are too able, too generous, too just, any longer to suffer this miserable robbing of their colored fellow-citizens for the benefit of white children.

Praying that your honorable commission will take due notice of these facts, and recommend such remedy as shall seem to you best,

We have the honor to be, in behalf of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education among Colored Citizens,

Most respectfully yours,

CHARLES B. RAY, President.

PHILIP A. WHITE, Secretary.

New York City, December 28, 1857.

CHAPTER II.

AMERICAN NEGRO AND THE MILITARY SPIRIT.

Early Literature of Negro Soldiers--Negro Soldiers in the War of the Revolution--The War of 1812--Negro Insurrections--Negro Troops in the Civil War--Notes.

"Do you think I'll make a soldier?" is the opening line of one of those delightful spirituals, originating among the slaves in the far South. I first heard it sung in the Saint James Methodist Church, corner of Spring and Coming Streets, Charleston, South Carolina, immediately after the close of the war. It was sung by a vast congregation to a gentle, swinging air, with nothing of the martial about it, and was accompanied by a swaying of the body to the time of the music. Occasionally there would be the "curtesys" peculiar to the South Carolina slave of the low country, which consists in a stooping of the body by bending the knees only, the head remaining erect, a movement which takes the place of the bow among equals. The older ladies, with heads adorned with the ever-present Madras kerchief, often tied in the most becoming and tasteful manner, and faces aglow with an enthusiasm that bespoke a life within sustained by visions of spiritual things, would often be seen to shake hands and add a word of greeting and hope which would impart a charm and meaning to the singing far above what the humble words of the song without these accessories could convey. As the rich chorus of matchless voices poured out in perfect time and tune, "Rise, shine, and give G.o.d the glory," the thoughts of earthly freedom, of freedom from sin, and finally of freedom from the toils, cares and sorrows of earth to be baptized into the joys of heaven, all seemed to blend into the many colored but harmonious strain. The singing of the simple hearted trustful, emanc.i.p.ated slave! Shall we ever hear the like again on earth? Alas, that the high hopes and glowing prophecies of that auspicious hour have been so deferred that the hearts of millions have been made sick!

Of the songs that came out of slavery with these long suffering people, Colonel Higginson, who perhaps got nearer to them in sentiment than any other literary man not really, of them, says: "Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, however quaint their expression, and were in a minor key both as to words and music.

The att.i.tude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life--nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination is always implied."

I do not know when this "soldier" song had its birth, but it may have sprung out of the perplexity of the slave's mind as he contemplated the raging conflict and saw himself drawn nearer and nearer to the field of strife. Whether in this song the "present predominates," and the query, therefore, has a strong primary reference to carnal weapons and to garments dyed in blood; whether the singer invites an opinion as to his fitness to engage in the war for Freedom--it may not be possible to determine. The "year of Jubilee," coming in the same song in connection with the purpose for which the singer is to be made a soldier, gives clearer ill.u.s.tration of that combination of the present and future which Mr. Higginson says was always present in the spirituals of that period, if it shows no more. When it is remembered that at that time Charleston was literally trodden under foot by black soldiers in bright uniforms, whose coming seemed to the colored people of that city like a dream too good to be true, it is not hard to believe that this song had much of the present in it, and owed its birth to the circ.u.mstances of war.

Singularly enough the song makes the Negro ask the exact question which had been asked about him from the earliest days of our history as a nation, a question which in some form confronts him still. The question, as the song has it, is not one of fact, but one of opinion.

It is not: Will I make a soldier? but: Do you think I will make a soldier? It is one thing to "make a soldier," another thing to have men think so. The question of fact was settled a century ago; the question of opinion is still unsettled. The Negro soldier, hero of five hundred battlefields, with medals and honors resting upon his breast, with the endors.e.m.e.nt of the highest military authority of the nation, with Port Hudson, El Caney and San Juan behind him, is still expected by too many to stand and await the verdict of thought, from persons who never did "think" he would make a soldier, and who never will think so. As well expect the excited animal of the ring to _think_ in the presence of the red rag of the toreador as to expect _them_ to think on the subject of the Negro soldier. They can curse, and rant, when they see the stalwart Negro in uniform, but it is too much to ask them to think. To them the Negro can be a fiend, a brute, but never a soldier.

To John G. Whittier and to William C. Nell are we indebted for the earliest recital of the heroic deeds of the colored American in the Wars of the Revolution and 1812. Whittier contributed an article on this subject to the "National Era" in 1847, and five or six years later Nell published his pamphlet on "Colored Patriots," a booklet recently reprinted by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is a useful contribution, showing as it does the rising and spreading abroad of that spirit which appreciates military effort and valor; and while recognizing the glory that came to American arms in the period described, honestly seeks to place some of that glory upon the deserving brow of a race then enslaved and despised. The book is unpretentious and aims to relate the facts in a straight-forward way, unaccompanied by any of the charms of tasteful presentation. Its author, however, is deserving our thanks, and the book marks an important stage in the development of the colored American. His mind was turning toward the creation of the soldier--the formation of armies.

There are other evidences that the mind of the colored man was at this time turning towards arms. In 1852 Doctor Pennington, one of the most learned colored men of his times, having received his Degree in Divinity from Heidelberg, delivered an address before a ma.s.s convention of colored citizens of Ohio, held in Cleveland, in which he spoke princ.i.p.ally of the colored soldier. During the convention the "Cleveland Light Artillery" fired a salute, and on the platform were seated several veteran colored men, some of them, particularly Mr.

John Julius, of Pittsburg, Pa., taking part in the speech-making. Mr.

Nell says: "Within recent period several companies of colored men in New York city have enrolled themselves a la militaire," and quotes from the New York Tribune of August, 1852, as follows:

"COLORED SOLDIERS.--Among the many parades within a few days we noticed yesterday a soldierly-looking company of colored men, on their way homeward from a target or parade drill.

They looked like men, handled their arms like men, and should occasion demand, we presume they would fight like men."

In Boston, New Haven, New Bedford and other places efforts were made during the decade from 1850 to 1860 to manifest this rising military spirit by appropriate organization, but the efforts were not always successful. In some cases the prejudices of the whites put every possible obstacle in the way of the colored young men who attempted to array themselves as soldiers.

The martial spirit is not foreign to the Negro character, as has been abundantly proved in both ancient and modern times. Williams, in his admirable history of the Negro as well as in his "Negro Troops in the Rebellion," has shown at considerable length that the Negro has been a soldier from earliest times, serving in large numbers in the Egyptian army long before the beginning of the Christian era. We know that without any great modification in character, runaway slaves developed excellent fighting qualities as Maroons, in Trinidad, British Guiana, St. Domingo and in Florida. But it was in Hayti that the unmixed Negro rose to the full dignity of a modern soldier, creating and leading armies, conducting and carrying on war, treating with enemies and receiving surrenders, complying fully with the rules of civilized warfare, and evolving finally a Toussaint, whose military genius his most bitter enemies were compelled to recognize--Toussaint, who to the high qualities of the soldier added also 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.sed 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."