New York (NY) Weekly Anglo-African, August 12, 1865

. . . I was born in Nelson County, Kentucky, and lived there until I was eighteen years of age, at which time I went to Louisville, and was in that city when the late horrid rebellion broke out. I enlisted in the 12th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery in the Fall of 1864, and my only sorrow is that I did not enlist sooner. I left a home such as would have made a slave happy, as long as there was a grain of happiness to be found in slavery. While living in Nelson county I indeed thought that it was right that all colored people should be slaves, and I was far from being the only one having the same opinion; but oh, how different now! There were five or six colored people in the county who could read, and they were disliked very much by the white people on that account; so you see, although we were capable of being taught, the fear of our masters and mistresses kept us bound in the frontiers of ignorance. A man could not visit his wife, living a mile from him, scarcely once a week, and the infringement of any rule was followed by at least a hundred lashes; but, thanks be to God, those terrible days have passed away forever. At that time those cruel practices were not strange to me, neither did I think the masters cruel until I was, by the providence of God, partly released from ignorance by learning to read; then I saw that slavery was contrary to the laws of God and debasing to man. Things like this caused me to look forward, hoping and praying for the time at which these things must end - and behold, the time has come, and I see, as it were, a nation born in a day - men and women coming forth from slavery's dark dungeons to the noonday sunshine of the greatest of God's gifts - Liberty.

Our wives are now cared for by our government, homes for them being already prepared at Camp Nelson, and we feel like men, and are determined to be men, and do our duty to our government honestly and faithfully, as good soldiers ought to do Our regiment now numbers nearly seventeen hundred men, and is stationed all along the Louisville and Nashville railroad, from Louisville to this place. The first battalion is stationed here doing garrison duty; almost too easy for soldiers, me thinks. We have dress parade downtown in the public square, and as we are drilled very well, the former slaveholders open their eyes, astonished that their former Kentucky working stock are capable of being on an equal footing with them at last.