ineteen rebels
were prisoners in our hands. Lee's losses must have been
very heavy; the proof thereof was left on the ground.
Twenty-five rebel bodies lay in the woods unburied, and
pools of blood unmistakably told of other victims taken
away. The estimate, from all the evidence carefully
considered, puts the enemy's casualties at two hundred.
Among the corpses Lee left on the field, was that of Major
Breckenridge, of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry. There is no
hesitation here in acknowledging the soldierly qualities
which the colored men engaged in the fight have exhibited.
Even the officers who have hitherto felt no confidence in
them are compelled to express themselves mistaken. General
Wilde, commanding the Post, says that the troops stood up to
their work like veterans."

Newspaper correspondents were not apt to overstate the facts, nor to
give too much favorable coloring to the Phalanx in those days. Very much
of the sentiment in the army--East and West--was manufactured by them.
The Democratic partizan press at the North, especially in New York and
Ohio, still engaged in throwing paper bullets at the negro soldiers, who
were shooting lead bullets at the country's foes.

The gallantry and heroic courage of the Phalanx in the Departments of
the Gulf and South, and their bloody sacrifices, had not been sufficient
to stop the violent clamor and assertions of those journals, that the
"niggers won't fight!"

Many papers favorable to the Emancipation; opposed putting negro troops
in battle in Virginia. But to all these bomb-proof opinions Grant turned
a deaf ear, and when and where necessity required it, he hurled his
Phalanx brigades against the enemy as readily as he did the white
troops. The conduct of the former was, nevertheless, watched eagerly by
the correspondents of the press who were with the army, and when they
began to chronicle the achievements of the Phalanx, the prejudice began
to give way, and praises were substituted in the place of their
well-worn denunciations. A correspondent of the New York _Herald_ thus
wrote in May:

"The conduct of the colored troops, by the way, in the
actions of the last few days, is described as superb. An
Ohio soldier said to me to-day, 'I never saw men fight with
such desperate gallantry as those negroes did. They advanced
as grim and stern as death, and when within reach of the