THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION...TAPS...

"And thus are Afric's injured sons The oppressor's scorn abating, And to the world's admiring gaze Their manhood vindicating." The above couplets were written by William Wells Brown, a former slave from St. Louis, Missouri, who was taught to read and write, largely, by martyred abolitionist Rev. Elijah Parish Lovejoy, for whom he had worked as a copy boy, according to THE NARRATIVE OF WILLIAM WELLS BROWN. Rev. Lovejoy is famously remembered as the publisher of The Alton Observer, and Presbyterian preacher in Alton, Illinois, who was shot in the back in 1837, while attempting to defend his fourth press from destruction by a Missouri mob of slaveholders that objected to his newspaper's antislavery content. Tonight, I finished William Wells Brown's THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION (1867). I was delighted to learn that William Still, Esq of Philadelphia, author and organizer of THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD was Brown's "friend." Still's. two young daughters were light-skinned, and dark-skinned. Brown recounts an amusing anecdote of them in his chapter on "caste." I am currently reading Still's classic, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (1877) now, so their friendship affirms and reinforces my reading. Having finished Alexander Pope's epic poem AN ESSAY ON MAN (1848), last week, I was doubly surprised to read that "I had a copy of Pope's poems, and was trying to read 'The Essay on Man,' but almost failed on account of the severity of the sun' in the same chapter on "caste" in Wells Brown's wonderful book. The couplets quoted above are from Wells Brown's final chapter, "Sixth Regiment United States Volunteers." It is the final poem in this great book, which is chock-full of interesting newspaper, eyewitness, military record, and literary accounts of the gallantry and heroism of black soldiers in the American Civil War, the first such to be written. I cannot commend this exquisitely written, 380-page work strongly enough to your reading!