d; but recruits
were scarce, and the question of arming negroes became again prominent
in the colonies and the army.

In April, 1778, Thomas Kench, then serving in an artillery regiment,
addressed letters to the Massachusetts Legislature urging the enlistment
of negroes. He wrote:

"A re-enforcement can quickly be raised of two or three
hundred men. Will your honors grant the liberty, and give me
the command of the party? And what I refer to is negroes.
We have divers of them in our service, mixed with white men.
But I think it would be more proper to raise a body by
themselves, than to have them intermixed with the white men;
and their ambition would entirely be to outdo the white men
in every measure that the fortunes of war calls a soldier to
endure. And I could rely with dependence upon them in the
field of battle or to any post that I was sent to defend
with them; and they would think themselves happy could they
gain their freedom by bearing a part of subduing the enemy
that is invading our land, and clear a peaceful inheritance
for their masters, and posterity yet to come, that they are
now slaves to."

The letter from which this extract was made was duly referred to a joint
committee "to consider the same and report." Some days later "a
resolution of the General Assembly of Rhode Island for enlisting negroes
in the public service" was referred to the same committee. They duly
reported the draft of a law, differing little from the Rhode Island
Resolution. A separate organization of negro companies, by Kench, does
not appear to have been deemed advisable at that time. The usage was
continued of "taking," in the words of Kench, "negroes in our service,
intermixed with the white men."

The negroes of Boston and their abolition friends, rather insisted upon
the intermingling of the races in the army, believing that this course
had a greater tendency to destroy slavery, and the inequality of rights
among the blacks and whites; though it deprived the negroes, as we now
see, of receiving due credit for their valor, save in a few individual
cases. It was not in Massachusetts alone, but in many other States that
the same idea prevailed; and now the facts connected with the services
of the negroes are to be gathered only in fragments, from the histories
of villages and towns, or among the archives of the State, in a
disconnected and unsatisfact