SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (07/29/2011)(readMedia)-- Early in the Civil War, less than a century after black soldiers helped defeat the British to found America; New York, other states and the federal government refused to enlist black volunteers to fight in the bloody conflict which eventually decided their future as Americans.
But the country and its leaders had been openly discouraging black volunteers from the war’s beginning, as did the cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln - the "rail-splitter" who could be better described as a fence-sitter on the issue of slavery and Negro citizenship.
"One black regiment alone would be, in such a war, the equal of two white ones," said Douglass, who was a New York State resident for a good part of his life.
On April 23, Jacob Dobson, an African-American man who worked in the capital, wrote to Secretary of War Simon Cameron that he knew of "some 300 reliable colored free citizens of this city, who desire to enter the service for defense of the city."
Motivated by a mixture of patriotism, fear and a yearning to be on more of an equal footing with whites citizens, free blacks in New Orleans met, offered their services to the state and formed the "Native Guards," and paraded, 1,400 strong, with white troops in the city that November.
