negroes of
the colony had their representatives. For the right of free
negroes to bear arms in the public defense was, at that day,
as little disputed in New England as other rights. They took
their place, not in a separate corps, but in the ranks with
the white men; and their names may be seen on the
pension-rolls of the country, side by side with those of
other soldiers of the Revolution."

It was not the free only who took up arms in defence of America's
independence; not alone those who, in preceding wars,--Indian and
French,--had gained their liberty, that swelled the ranks of the
colonial militia; but slaves, inspired by the hope of freedom, went to
the front, as Attucks had done when he cut the Gordian knot that held
the colonies to Great Britain. "From that moment we may date the
severance of the British Empire," said Daniel Webster, in his Bunker
Hill oration, referring to the massacre on the 5th of March, 1770. The
thirst for freedom was universal among the people of New England. With
them liberty was not circumscribed by condition and now, since the slave
Attucks had struck the first blow for America's independence, thereby
electrifying the colonies and putting quite a different phase upon their
grievances, the people were called upon to witness a real slave
struggling with his oppressors for his freedom. It touched the people of
the colonies as they had never been touched before, and they arrayed
themselves for true freedom.

Dr. Joseph Warren thus heralds the sentiment of the colonist, in his
oration delivered at Boston, March 5th, 1775:

"That personal freedom is the natural right of every man,
and that property, or an exclusive right to dispose of what
he has honestly acquired by his own labor, necessarily
arises therefrom, are truths which common sense has placed
beyond the reach of contradiction. And no man, or body of
men, can, without being guilty of flagrant injustice, claim
a right to dispose of the persons or acquisitions of any
other man or body of men, unless it can be proved that such
a right has arisen from some compact between the parties, in
which it has been explicitly and freely granted."

The year previous, John Hancock was the orator on the occasion of the
4th anniversary of the shedding of the first blood for the Independence
of America, and he thus presents the case to a Boston audience yet
smart