‘ 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