6
shown. Colored children have never been admitted to our general public schools, and the Associated Friends of the Freedmen in this city, who have lately assumed, as one of their cardinal rules, the admission of children of both colors, indiscriminately, to their schools in the South, consider that any effort to introduce the same rule here would be vain.
Only three members—Generals Owen, Tyndale, and Collis—of the Military Committee of Arrangements of sixteen, for the late celebration of the Fourth of July in this city, favored inviting colored troops to join in it; and the officers of the "California Regiment" (71st P V.) gave notice, that if such troops did parade, their regiment must decline to do so, and would forward its colors to Harrisburg by express.
On the 30th of June last there were, distributed through sixteen counties of the State, and supported by State appropriations, amounting, in all, to $525,000, twenty-nine School-Homes, three being in this city, containing 1837 orphans of white soldiers; and, according to the estimate of the Superintendent, by the 1st of December next, the number is expected to reach 3000. But, after careful inquiry, it does not appear that an orphan child of one of the 1488 colored soldiers who lost their lives in the service, out of the 8681 who, according to official records, belonged to Pennsylvania, and were enlisted at Camp Wm. Penn, has yet found its way into any of these schools, or been provided for in any manner out of the above fund. You examine the Act, and find nothing there to exclude them from these privileges, you ask explanation of the school matrons, and are told that they never before heard the thing mentioned. And in reading the two annual reports of the Superintendent, Mr. Thomas H. Burrows, you find not a word which implies any knowledge of the fact that there was a single colored soldier enlisted in the State. Now on the 6th of July, 1863, at National Hall, the Hon. Wm. D. Kelley, a member of the late Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments, in presence of his colleagues and a large concourse of people, white and colored, asked, addressing his colored auditors: "Will you not spring to arms, and march to the higher destiny which awaits your race?" Then turning to his colleagues and their white friends, he asked: "Will you
