Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

North Carolina and Virginia, 1861–1864 311
The 20th U.S. Colored Infantry receives its regimental colors, 5 March 1864.
black membership, the club’s three hundred-dollar entry fee and sixty-dollar annual
dues had that effect. 28
Leaders of the city’s black community, some of whom had begun urging
enlistment in 1861, joined in enthusiastically. Fifty-four of them lent their names
to a recruiting poster that urged “Men of Color, To Arms! To Arms!” They organized
a mass meeting on 24 June, and another one twelve days later at which
Frederick Douglass appeared among the speakers who urged enlistment. The
chief federal official present was Maj. George L. Stearns, who had been recently
appointed recruiting commissioner for U.S. Colored Troops after several months
spent working closely with Governor Andrew to raise the two black infantry
regiments from Massachusetts. Companies of recruits formed in Philadelphia
as the men arrived there; when each company reached the required strength, it
reported to Camp William Penn, eight miles outside the city. There, a Regular
Army officer who represented the Provost Marshal General’s Office mustered
it into federal service and the company became part of a regiment. Between
recruits’ arrival and muster-in, the committee of civilian philanthropists took
28 OR, ser. 3: 376, 404–05; Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, p. 410;
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (New York: Schocken Books, 1967
[1899]), pp. 17–24, 27–30; Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 16–20; Chronicle of the Union League of
Philadelphia, 1862–1902 (Philadelphia: Union League, 1902), p. 445.