Some of your
states were glad to turn out corps of colored men, and to stand
'shoulder to shoulder' with them. In your late war, they contributed
largely towards some of your most splendid victories. On lakes Erie and
Champlain, where your fleets triumphed over a foe superior in numbers
and engines of death, they were manned in a large proportion with men of
color. And in this very house, in the fall of 1814, a bill passed
receiving all the branches of your government, authorising the governor
to accept the services of a corps of two thousand free people of color.
These were times when a man who shouldered his musket did not know but
he bared his bosom to receive a death wound from the enemy ere he laid
it aside; and in these times these people were found as ready and as
willing to volunteer in your service as any other. They were not
compelled to go; they were not draughted.... They were volunteers...."
Said Martindale of New York in congress 22 of first month 1828: "Slaves,
or negroes who had been slaves, were enlisted as soldiers in the War of
the Revolution; and I myself saw a battalion of them, as fine martial
looking men as I ever saw, attached to the northern army in the last
war, on its march from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor.
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