‘ THE FREEDMEN’S SAVINGS BANK
works. As compensation they were given sub-
sistence only.
The next step toward freedom and experience
was the admission of Negroes to military service.
The Washington government rather reluctantly
at first armed a few black regiments for garrison
duty, but allowed them no pay. The individual
northern states then began to send small num-
bers into the army as substitutes who were paid
as state troops. After much effort on the part of
the friends of the race the United States govern-
ment in 1863 enrolled Negro regiments, which
were regularly armed, uniformed, and officered.
But the pay, fixed at $10 a month only, was still
unequal to that of white soldiers, and no bounties
were given. Not until toward the close of the
war were Negro troops placed upon an equal
footing with the white forces. The Negro sol-
diers, numbering more than 200,000 in all, were
recruited partly in the northern states but
mainly in those districts of the South which were
reached in 1863-1864 by the invading Federal
armies. These Negro soldiers and the laborers in
the camps, with their families, probably num-
bered more than a million persons who, slaves
in 1861, were free and to a certain extent trained
and experienced before the downfall of the
Confederacy.
Slavery as a labor system was early destroyed
by the mere friction of war in the border states
of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Mary-
land, and Delaware, and in large sections of
Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Where the
Federal forces came into a community it was