ng a vast retinue of
camp-followers, would be always at hand. Of course, negro battalions
could never be employed in cold latitudes, for the negro suffers from
cold in a manner which is incomprehensible even to Europeans who have
passed the best part of their lives in the tropics. Instead of being
braced by and deriving activity from the cold, he becomes languid and
inert; and nothing but the rays of the sun can arouse him to any
exertion. Even in West Africa, during the Harmattan season, natives may
be observed in the early morning, hugging their scanty clothing around
them and shivering with cold; while the ill-fated expedition to New
Orleans showed what deadly havoc an inclement climate will play with
negro troops.

Next, as to the men of whom these negro regiments would be composed. It
is too much the custom in Great Britain, in describing a man of colour,
to consider that all has been said that is necessary when he is called a
negro; yet there are as many nationalities, and as many types of the
African race, as there are of the Caucasian. No one would imagine that a
European was sufficiently described by the title of "white man." It
would be asked if the individual in question were an Englishman,
German, Frenchman, and so on; and the same kind of classification is
necessary for the negro. On the western coast of Africa, the portion of
the African continent from which North and South America and the West
Indies obtained their negro population, there are at least twenty
different varieties of the African race, distinct from each other in
features and even in colour; and these are again subdivided into several
hundred nations or tribes, each of which possesses a language, manners,
and customs of its own.

In the days of the slave-trade, the slave-dealers adopted certain
arbitrary designations to denote from what portion of the coast their
wares were obtained. For instance, slaves shipped from Sierra Leone and
the rivers to the north and east of that peninsula, and who were
principally Timmanees, Kossus, Acoos, Mendis, Foulahs, and Jolloffs,
were called Mandingoes, from the dominant tribe of that name which
supplied the slave-market. Negroes from the Gold Coast kingdoms of
Ashanti, Fanti, Assin, Akim, Wassaw, Aquapim, Ahanta, and Accra were
denominated Koromantyns, or Coromantees, a corruption of Cormantine, the
name of a fort some sixteen miles to the east of Cape Coast Castle, and
which was the earliest British sla