Colonel Roosevelt is sufficiently answered in the following letter of
Sergeant Holliday, and the point especially made by many eye-witnesses
(white) who were engaged in that fight is, as related in Chapter V, of
this book, that the Negro troops made the charges both at San Juan and
El Caney after nearly all their officers had been killed or wounded.
Upon what facts, therefore, does Colonel Roosevelt base his
conclusions that Negro soldiers will not fight without commissioned
officers, when the only real test of this question happened around
Santiago and showed just the contrary of what he states? We prefer
to take the results at El Caney and San Juan as against Colonel
Roosevelt's imagination.
COLONEL ROOSEVELT'S ERROR.
TRUE STORY OF THE INCIDENT HE MAGNIFIED TO OUR HURT--THE WHITE
OFFICERS' HUMBUG SKINNED OF ITS HIDE BY SERGEANT HOLLIDAY--UNWRITTEN
HISTORY.
_To the Editor of the New York Age_:
Having read in _The Age_ of April 13 an editorial entitled "Our Troops
in Cuba," which brings to my notice for the first time a statement
made by Colonel Roosevelt, which, though in some parts true, if read
by those who do not know the exact facts and circumstances surrounding
the case, will certainly give rise to the wrong impression of colored
men as soldiers, and hurt them for many a day to come, and as I was
an eye-witness to the most important incidents mentioned in that
statement, I deem it a duty I owe, not only to the fathers, mothers,
sisters and brothers of those soldiers, and to the soldiers
themselves, but to their posterity and the race in general, to be
always ready to make an unprejudiced refutation of such charges, and
to do all in my power to place the colored soldier where he properly
belongs--among the bravest and most trustworthy of this land.
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