The Colored Regulars in the United States Army | Page 4

grown, within less
than three hundred years, an organic people. Grandfathers, and
great-grandfathers are among them; and personal acquaintance is
exceedingly wide. In the face of slavery and against its teaching and its
power, overcoming the seduction of the master class, and the coarse
and brutal corruptions of the baser overseer class, the African slave
persistently strove to clothe himself with the habiliments of civilization,
and so prepared himself for social organization that as soon as the
hindrances were removed, this vast people almost immediately set
themselves in families; and for over thirty years they have been busily
engaged hunting up the lost roots of their family trees. We know the pit
whence the Afro-American race was dug, the rock whence he was
hewn; he was born here on this soil, from a people who in the classic
language of the Hebrew prophet, could be described as, No People.
That there has been a majestic evolution quietly but rapidly going on in
this mass, growing as it was both by natural development and by
accretion, is plainly evident. Heterogeneous as were the fragments, by
the aid of a common language and a common lot, and cruel yet partially
civilizing control, the whole people were forced into a common
outward form, and to a remarkable extent, into the same ways of
thinking. The affinities within were really aided by the repulsions
without, and when finally freed from slavery, for an ignorant and
inexperienced people, they presented an astonishing spectacle of unity.
Socially, politically and religiously, their power to work together
showed itself little less than marvellous. The Afro-American,

developing from this slave base, now directs great organizations of a
religious character, and in comprehensive sweep invites to his
co-operation the inhabitants of the isles of the sea and of far-off Africa.
He is joining with the primitive, strong, hopeful and expanding races of
Southern Africa, and is evidently preparing for a day that has not yet
come.
The progress made thus far by the people is somewhat like that made
by the young, man who hires himself to a farmer and takes his pay in
farming stock and utensils. He is thus acquiring the means to stock a
farm, and the skill and experience necessary to its successful
management at the same time. His career will not appear important,
however, until the day shall arrive when he will set up for himself. The
time spent on the farm of another was passed in comparative obscurity;
but without it the more conspicuous period could never have followed.
So, now, the American colored people are making history, but it is not
of that kind that gains the attention of writers. Having no political
organizations, governments or armies they are not performing those
deeds of splendor in statesmanship and war over which the pen of the
historian usually delights to linger. The people, living, growing,
reading, thinking, working, suffering, advancing and dying--these are
all common-place occurrences, neither warming the heart of the
observer, nor capable of brightening the page of the chronicler. This,
however, is, with the insignificant exception of Liberia, all that is yet to
be found in the brief history of the Afro-American race.
The period for him to set up for himself has not yet come, and he is still
acquiring means and training within a realm controlled in all respects
by a people who maintain toward him an attitude of absolute social
exclusion. His is the history of a people marching from nowhere to
somewhere, but with no well-defined Canaan before them and no
Moses to lead. It is indeed, on their part, a walk by faith, for as yet the
wisest among the race cannot tell even the direction of the journey.
Before us lie surely three possible destinies, if not four; yet it is not
clear toward which one of these we are marching. Are we destined to
see the African element of America's population blend with the
Euro-American element and be lost in a common people? Will the

colored American leave this home in which as a race he has been born
and reared to manhood, and find his stage of action somewhere else on
God's earth? Will he remain here as a separate and subordinate people
perpetuating the conditions of to-day only that they may become more
humiliating and exasperating? Or is there to arise a war of races in
which the blacks are to be exterminated? Who knows? Fortunately the
historian is not called upon to perform the duties of prophet. His work
is to tell what has been; and if others, building upon his presentation of
facts can deduce what is to be, it is no small tribute to the correctness of
his interpretations; for all events are parts of one vast system ever
moving toward