“In the first place,” the irate letter began, “a U.S. Army uniform to a colored man makes him about as free as a man in the Georgia chain gang and you know that's hell.” Over the course of a two-day “troop movement from Camp Lee, Virginia, during the long run which would carry us deeper into the black-hearted South,” it continued, “we had one (1) meal to last us.” Writing from his hospital ward in Mississippi, Private Norman Brittingham was having an equally miserable time of it. “The doctors treat us as if we were dogs,” he complained, and “the whites beat and curse the colored soldiers [and] at times they have put them in the Camp Stockade for no reason at all.” “We have come out Like Men,” another soldier wrote, “& we Expected to be Treeated as men but we have bin Treeated more like Dogs then men.” “We feel as though our Country spurned us,” observed James Henry Gooding, “now that we are sworn to serve her. Please,” he pleaded with the president, “give this a moment's attention.”