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 circumstances 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 endorsement 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