Higginson: Army Life In A Black Regiment - Part 4
CHAPTER XII
THE NEGRO AS A SOLDIER
There was in our regiment a very young recruit, named Sam Roberts, of whom Trowbridge used to tell this story. Early in the war Trowbridge had been once sent to Amelia Island with a squad of men, under direction of Commodore Goldsborough, to remove the negroes from the island. As the officers stood on the beach, talking to some of the older freedmen, they saw this urchin peeping at them from front and rear in a scrutinizing way, for which his father at last called him to account, as thus:—
"Hi! Sammy, what you's doin', chile?"
"Daddy," said the inquisitive youth, "don't you know mas'r tell us Yankee hab tail? I don't see no tail, daddy!"
There were many who went to Port Royal during the war, in civil or military positions, whose previous impressions of the colored race were about as intelligent as Sam's view of themselves. But, for once, I had always had so much to do with fugitive slaves, and had studied the whole subject with such interest, that I found not much to learn or unlearn as to this one point. Their courage I had before seen tested; their docile and lovable qualities I had known; and the only real surprise that experience brought me was in finding them so little demoralized. I had not allowed for the extreme remoteness and seclusion of their lives, especially among the Sea Islands. Many of them had literally spent their whole existence on some lonely island or remote plantation, where the master never came, and the overseer only once or twice a week. With these exceptions, such persons had never seen a white face, and of the excitements or sins of larger communities they had not a conception. My friend Colonel Hallo-well, of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, told me that he had among his men some of the worst reprobates of Northern cities. While I had some men who were unprincipled and troublesome, there was not one whom I could call a hardened villain. I was constantly expecting to find male Topsies, with no notions of good and plenty of evil. But I never found one. Among the most ignorant there was very often a childlike absence of vices, which was rather to be classed as inexperience than as innocence, but which had some of the advantages of both.
Apart from this, they were very much like other men. General Saxton, examining with some impatience a long list of questions from some philanthropic Commission at the North, respecting the traits and habits of the freedmen, bade some staff-officer answer them all in two words,—"Intensely human." We all admitted that it was a striking and comprehensive description.
For instance, as to courage. So far as I have seen, the mass of men are naturally courageous up to a certain point. A man seldom runs away from danger which he ought to face, unless others run; each is apt to keep with the mass, and colored soldiers have more than usual of this gregariousness. In almost every regiment, black or white, there are a score or two of men who are naturally daring, who really hunger after dangerous adventures, and are happiest when allowed to seek them. Every commander gradually finds out who these men are, and habitually uses them; certainly I had such, and I remember with delight their bearing, their coolness, and their dash. Some of them were negroes, some mulattoes. One of them would have passed for white, with brown hair and blue eyes, while others were so black you could hardly see their features. These picked men varied in other respects too; some were neat and well-drilled soldiers, while others were slovenly, heedless fellows,—the despair of their officers at inspection, their pride on a raid. They were the natural scouts and rangers of the regiment; they had the two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, which Napoleon thought so rare. The mass of the regiment rose to the same level under excitement, and were more excitable, I think, than whites, but neither more nor less courageous.
Perhaps the best proof of a good average of courage among them was in the readiness they always showed for any special enterprise. I do not remember ever to have had the slightest difficulty in obtaining volunteers, but rather in keeping down the number. The previous pages include many illustrations of this, as well as of then: endurance of pain and discomfort. For instance, one of my lieutenants, a very daring Irishman, who had served for eight years as a sergeant of regular artillery in Texas, Utah, and South Carolina, said he had never been engaged in anything so risky as our raid up the St. Mary's. But in truth it seems to me a mere absurdity to deliberately argue the question of courage, as applied to men among whom I waked and slept, day and night, for so many months together. As well might he who has been wandering for years upon the desert, with a Bedouin escort, discuss the courage of the men whose tents have been his shelter and whose spears his guard. We, their officers, did not go there to teach lessons, but to receive them. There were more than a hundred men in the ranks who had voluntarily met more dangers in their escape from slavery than any of my young captains had incurred in all their lives.
There was a family named Wilson, I remember, of which we had several representatives. Three or four brothers had planned an escape from the interior to our lines; they finally decided that the youngest should stay and take care of the old mother; the rest, with their sister and her children, came in a "dug-out" down one of the rivers. They were fired upon, again and again, by the pickets along the banks, until finally every man on board was wounded; and still they got safely through. When the bullets began to fly about them, the woman shed tears, and her little girl of nine said to her, "Don't cry, mother, Jesus will help you," and then the child began praying as the wounded men still urged the boat along. This the mother told me, but I had previously heard it from on officer who was on the gunboat that picked them up,—a big, rough man, whose voice fairly broke as he described their appearance. He said that the mother and child had been hid for nine months in the woods before attempting their escape, and the child would speak to no one,—indeed, she hardly would when she came to our camp. She was almost white, and this officer wished to adopt her, but the mother said, "I would do anything but that for oonah," this being a sort of Indian formation of the second-person-plural, such as they sometimes use. This same officer afterwards saw a reward offered for this family in a Savannah paper.
I used to think that I should not care to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in our camp; it would have seemed tame. Any group of men in a tent would have had more exciting tales to tell. I needed no fiction when I had Fanny Wright, for instance, daily passing to and fro before my tent, with her shy little girl clinging to her skirts. Fanny was a modest little mulatto woman, a soldier's wife, and a company laundress. She had escaped from the main-land in a boat, with that child and another. Her baby was shot dead in her arms, and she reached our lines with one child safe on earth and the other in heaven. I never found it needful to give any elementary instructions in courage to Fanny's husband, you may be sure.
There was another family of brothers in the regiment named Miller. Their grandmother, a fine-looking old woman, nearly seventy, I should think, but erect as a pine-tree, used sometimes to come and visit them. She and her husband had once tried to escape from a plantation near Savannah. They had failed, and had been brought back; the husband had received five hundred lashes, and while the white men on the plantation were viewing the punishment, she was collecting her children and grandchildren, to the number of twenty-two, in a neighboring marsh, preparatory to another attempt that night. They found a flat-boat which had been rejected as unseaworthy, got on board,—still under the old woman's orders,—and drifted forty miles down the river to our lines. Trowbridge happened to be on board the gunboat which picked them up, and he said that when the "flat" touched the side of the vessel, the grandmother rose to her full height, with her youngest grandchild in her arms, and said only, "My God! are we free?" By one of those coincidences of which life is full, her husband escaped also, after his punishment, and was taken up by the same gunboat.
I hardly need point out that my young lieutenants did not have to teach the principles of courage to this woman's grandchildren.
I often asked myself why it was that, with this capacity of daring and endurance, they had not kept the land in a perpetual flame of insurrection; why, especially since the opening of the war, they had kept so still. The answer was to be found in the peculiar temperament of the races, in their religious faith, and in the habit of patience that centuries had fortified. The shrewder men all said substantially the same thing. What was the use of insurrection, where everything was against them? They had no knowledge, no money, no arms, no drill, no organization,—above all, no mutual confidence. It was the tradition among them that all insurrections were always betrayed by somebody. They had no mountain passes to defend like the Maroons of Jamaica,—no unpenetrable swamps, like the Maroons of Surinam. Where they had these, even on a small scale, they had used them,—as in certain swamps round Savannah and in the everglades of Florida, where they united with the Indians, and would stand fire—so I was told by General Saxton, who had fought them there—when the Indians would retreat.
It always seemed to me that, had I been a slave, my life would have been one long scheme of insurrection. But I learned to respect the patient self-control of those who had waited till the course of events should open a better way. When it came they accepted it. Insurrection on their part would at once have divided the Northern sentiment; and a large part of our army would have joined with the Southern army to hunt them down. By their waiting till we needed them, their freedom was secured.
Two things chiefly surprised me in their feeling toward their former masters,—the absence of affection and the absence of revenge. I expected to find a good deal of the patriarchal feeling. It always seemed to me a very ill-applied emotion, as connected with the facts and laws of American slavery,—still I expected to find it. I suppose that my men and their families and visitors may have had as much of it as the mass of freed slaves; but certainly they had not a particle. I never could cajole one of them, in his most discontented moment, into regretting "ole mas'r time" for a single instant. I never heard one speak of the masters except as natural enemies. Yet they were perfectly discriminating as to individuals; many of them claimed to have had kind owners, and some expressed great gratitude to them for particular favors received. It was not the individuals, but the ownership, of which they complained. That they saw to be a wrong which no special kindnesses could right. On this, as on all points connected with slavery, they understood the matter as clearly as Garrison or Phillips; the wisest philosophy could teach them nothing as to that, nor could any false philosophy befog them. After all, personal experience is the best logician.
Certainly this indifference did not proceed from any want of personal affection, for they were the most affectionate people among whom I had ever lived. They attached themselves to every officer who deserved love, and to some who did not; and if they failed to show it to their masters, it proved the wrongfulness of the mastery. On the other hand, they rarely showed one gleam of revenge, and I shall never forget the self-control with which one of our best sergeants pointed out to me, at Jacksonville, the very place where one of his brothers had been hanged by the whites for leading a party of fugitive slaves. He spoke of it as a historic matter, without any bearing on the present issue.
But side by side with this faculty of patience, there was a certain tropical element in the men, a sort of fiery ecstasy when aroused, which seemed to link them by blood with the French Turcos, and made them really resemble their natural enemies, the Celts, far more than the Anglo-Saxon temperament. To balance this there were great individual resources when alone,—a sort of Indian wiliness and subtlety of resource. Their gregariousness and love of drill made them more easy to keep in hand than white American troops, who rather like to straggle or go in little squads, looking out for themselves, without being bothered with officers. The blacks prefer organization.
The point of inferiority that I always feared, though I never had occasion to prove it, was that they might show less fibre, less tough and dogged resistance, than whites, during a prolonged trial,—a long, disastrous march, for instance, or the hopeless defence of a besieged town. I should not be afraid of their mutinying or running away, but of their drooping and dying. It might not turn out so; but I mention it for the sake of fairness, and to avoid overstating the merits of these troops. As to the simple general fact of courage and reliability I think no officer in our camp ever thought of there being any difference between black and white. And certainly the opinions of these officers, who for years risked their lives every moment on the fidelity of their men, were worth more than those of all the world beside.
No doubt there were reasons why this particular war was an especially favorable test of the colored soldiers. They had more to fight for than the whites. Besides the flag and the Union, they had home and wife and child. They fought with ropes round their necks, and when orders were issued that the officers of colored troops should be put to death on capture, they took a grim satisfaction. It helped their esprit de corps immensely. With us, at least, there was to be no play-soldier. Though they had begun with a slight feeling of inferiority to the white troops, this compliment substituted a peculiar sense of self-respect. And even when the new colored regiments began to arrive from the North my men still pointed out this difference,—that in case of ultimate defeat, the Northern troops, black or white, would go home, while the First South Carolina must fight it out or be re-enslaved. This was one thing that made the St. John's River so attractive to them and even to me;—it was so much nearer the everglades. I used seriously to ponder, during the darker periods of the war, whether I might not end my days as an outlaw,—a leader of Maroons.
Meanwhile, I used to try to make some capital for the Northern troops, in their estimate, by pointing out that it was a disinterested thing in these men from the free States, to come down there and fight, that the slaves might be free. But they were apt keenly to reply, that many of the white soldiers disavowed this object, and said that that was not the object of the war, nor even likely to be its end. Some of them even repeated Mr. Seward's unfortunate words to Mr. Adams, which some general had been heard to quote. So, on the whole, I took nothing by the motion, as was apt to be the case with those who spoke a good word for our Government, in those vacillating and half proslavery days.
At any rate, this ungenerous discouragement had this good effect, that it touched their pride; they would deserve justice, even if they did not obtain it. This pride was afterwards severely tested during the disgraceful period when the party of repudiation in Congress temporarily deprived them of their promised pay. In my regiment the men never mutinied, nor even threatened mutiny; they seemed to make it a matter of honor to do then: part, even if the Government proved a defaulter; but one third of them, including the best men in the regiment, quietly refused to take a dollar's pay, at the reduced price. "We'se gib our sogerin' to de Guv'ment, Gunnel," they said, "but we won't 'spise ourselves so much for take de seben dollar." They even made a contemptuous ballad, of which I once caught a snatch.
"Ten dollar a month!
Tree ob dat for clothin'l
Go to Washington
Fight for Linkum's darter!"
This "Lincoln's daughter" stood for the Goddess of Liberty, it would seem. They would be true to her, but they would not take the half-pay. This was contrary to my advice, and to that of other officers; but I now think it was wise. Nothing less than this would have called the attention of the American people to this outrageous fraud.*
* See Appendix.
The same slow forecast had often marked their action in other ways. One of our ablest sergeants, Henry Mclntyre, who had earned two dollars and a half per day as a master-carpenter in Florida, and paid one dollar and a half to his master, told me that he had deliberately refrained from learning to read, because that knowledge exposed the slaves to so much more watching and suspicion. This man and a few others had built on contract the greater part of the town of Micanopy in Florida, and was a thriving man when his accustomed discretion failed for once, and he lost all. He named his child William Lincoln, and it brought upon him such suspicion that he had to make his escape.
I cannot conceive what people at the North mean by speaking of the negroes as a bestial or brutal race. Except in some insensibility to animal pain, I never knew of an act in my regiment which I should call brutal. In reading Kay's "Condition of the English Peasantry" I was constantly struck with the unlikeness of my men to those therein described. This could not proceed from my prejudices as an abolitionist, for they would have led me the other way, and indeed I had once written a little essay to show the brutalizing influences of slavery. I learned to think that we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced by slavery among the negroes, but had overrated the demoralization. Or rather, we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes had checked the demoralization. Yet again, it must be admitted that this temperament, born of sorrow and oppression, is far more marked in the slave than in the native African.
Theorize as we may, there was certainly in our camp an average tone of propriety which all visitors noticed, and which was not created, but only preserved by discipline. I was always struck, not merely by the courtesy of the men, but also by a certain sober decency of language. If a man had to report to me any disagreeable fact, for instance, he was sure to do it with gravity and decorum, and not blurt it out in an offensive way. And it certainly was a significant fact that the ladies of our camp, when we were so fortunate as to have such guests, the young wives, especially, of the adjutant and quartermaster, used to go among the tents when the men were off duty, in order to hear their big pupils read and spell, without the slightest fear of annoyance. I do not mean direct annoyance or insult, for no man who valued his life would have ventured that in presence of the others, but I mean the annoyance of accidentally seeing or hearing improprieties not intended for them. They both declared that they would not have moved about with anything like the same freedom in any white camp they had ever entered, and it always roused their indignation to hear the negro race called brutal or depraved.
This came partly from natural good manners, partly from the habit of deference, partly from ignorance of the refined and ingenious evil which is learned in large towns; but a large part came from their strongly religious temperament. Their comparative freedom from swearing, for instance,—an abstinence which I fear military life did not strengthen,—was partly a matter of principle. Once I heard one of them say to another, in a transport of indignation, "Ha-a-a, boy, s'pose I no be a Christian, I cuss you sol"—which was certainly drawing pretty hard upon the bridle. "Cuss," however, was a generic term for all manner of evil speaking; they would say, "He cuss me fool," or "He cuss me coward," as if the essence of propriety were in harsh and angry speech,—which I take to be good ethics. But certainly, if Uncle Toby could have recruited his army in Flanders from our ranks, their swearing would have ceased to be historic.
It used to seem to me that never, since Cromwell's time, had there been soldiers in whom the religious element held such a place. "A religious army," "a gospel army," were their frequent phrases. In their prayer-meetings there was always a mingling, often quaint enough, of the warlike and the pious. "If each one of us was a praying man," said Corporal Thomas Long in a sermon, "it appears to me that we could fight as well with prayers as with bullets,—for the Lord has said that if you have faith even as a grain of mustard-seed cut into four parts, you can say to the sycamore-tree, Arise, and it will come up." And though Corporal Long may have got a little perplexed in his botany, his faith proved itself by works, for he volunteered and went many miles on a solitary scouting expedition into the enemy's country in Florida, and got back safe, after I had given him up for lost.
The extremes of religious enthusiasm I did not venture to encourage, for I could not do it honestly; neither did I discourage them, but simply treated them with respect, and let them have their way, so long as they did not interfere with discipline. In general they promoted it. The mischievous little drummer-boys, whose scrapes and quarrels were the torment of my existence, might be seen kneeling together in their tents to say their prayers at night, and I could hope that their slumbers were blessed by some spirit of peace, such as certainly did not rule over their waking. The most reckless and daring fellows in the regiment were perfect fatalists in their confidence that God would watch over them, and that if they died, it would be because their time had come. This almost excessive faith, and the love of freedom and of their families, all co-operated with their pride as soldiers to make them do their duty. I could not have spared any of these incentives. Those of our officers who were personally the least influenced by such considerations, still saw the need of encouraging them among the men.
I am bound to say that this strongly devotional turn was not always accompanied by the practical virtues; but neither was it strikingly divorced from them. A few men, I remember, who belonged to the ancient order of hypocrites, but not many. Old Jim Cushman was our favorite representative scamp. He used to vex his righteous soul over the admission of the unregenerate to prayer-meetings, and went off once shaking his head and muttering, "Too much goat shout wid de sheep." But he who objected to this profane admixture used to get our mess-funds far more hopelessly mixed with his own, when he went out to buy chickens. And I remember that, on being asked by our Major, in that semi-Ethiopian dialect into which we sometimes slid, "How much wife you got, Jim?" the veteran replied, with a sort of penitence for lost opportunities, "On'y but four, Sah!"
Another man of somewhat similar quality went among us by the name of Henry Ward Beecher, from a remarkable resemblance in face and figure to that sturdy divine. I always felt a sort of admiration for this worthy, because of the thoroughness with which he outwitted me, and the sublime impudence in which he culminated. He got a series of passes from me, every week or two, to go and see his wife on a neighboring plantation, and finally, when this resource seemed exhausted, he came boldly for one more pass, that he might go and be married.
We used to quote him a good deal, also, as a sample of a certain Shakespearian boldness of personification in which the men sometimes indulged. Once, I remember, his captain had given him a fowling-piece to clean. Henry Ward had left it in the captain's tent, and the latter, finding it, had transferred the job to some one else.
Then came a confession, in this precise form, with many dignified gesticulations:—
"Cappen! I took dat gun, and I put bun in Cappen tent. Den I look, and de gun not dar! Den Conscience say, Cappen mus' hab gib dat gun to somebody else for clean. Den I say, Conscience, you reason correck."
Compare Lancelot Gobbo's soliloquy in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona"!
Still, I maintain that, as a whole, the men were remarkably free from inconvenient vices. There was no more lying and stealing than in average white regiments. The surgeon was not much troubled by shamming sickness, and there were not a great many complaints of theft. There was less quarrelling than among white soldiers, and scarcely ever an instance of drunkenness. Perhaps the influence of their officers had something to do with this; for not a ration of whiskey was ever issued to the men, nor did I ever touch it, while in the army, nor approve a requisition for any of the officers, without which it could not easily be obtained. In this respect our surgeons fortunately agreed with me, and we never had reason to regret it. I believe the use of ardent spirits to be as useless and injurious in the army as on board ship, and among the colored troops, especially, who had never been accustomed to it, I think that it did only harm.
The point of greatest laxity in their moral habits—the want of a high standard of chastity—was not one which affected their camp life to any great extent, and it therefore came less under my observation. But I found to my relief that, whatever their deficiency in this respect, it was modified by the general quality of their temperament, and indicated rather a softening and relaxation than a hardening and brutalizing of their moral natures. Any insult or violence in this direction was a thing unknown. I never heard of an instance. It was not uncommon for men to have two or three wives in different plantations,—the second, or remoter, partner being called a "'broad wife,"—i.e. wife abroad. But the whole tendency was toward marriage, and this state of things was only regarded as a bequest from "mas'r time."
I knew a great deal about their marriages, for they often consulted me, and took my counsel as lovers are wont to do,—that is, when it pleased their fancy. Sometimes they would consult their captains first, and then come to me in despairing appeal. "Cap'n Scroby [Trowbridge] he acvise me not for marry dis lady, 'cause she hab seben chil'en. What for use? Cap'n Scroby can't lub for me. I mus' lub for myself, and I lub he." I remember that on this occasion "he" stood by, a most unattractive woman, jet black, with an old pink muslin dress, torn white cotton gloves, and a very flowery bonnet, that must have descended through generations of tawdry mistresses.
I felt myself compelled to reaffirm the decision of the inferior court. The result was as usual. They were married the next day, and I believe that she proved an excellent wife, though she had seven children, whose father was also in the regiment. If she did not, I know many others who did, and certainly I have never seen more faithful or more happy marriages than among that people.
The question was often asked, whether the Southern slaves or the Northern free blacks made the best soldiers. It was a compliment to both classes that each officer usually preferred those whom he had personally commanded. I preferred those who had been slaves, for their greater docility and affectionateness, for the powerful stimulus which their new freedom gave, and for the fact that they were fighting, in a manner, for their own homes and firesides. Every one of these considerations afforded a special aid to discipline, and cemented a peculiar tie of sympathy between them and their officers. They seemed like clansmen, and had a more confiding and filial relation to us than seemed to me to exist in the Northern colored regiments.
So far as the mere habits of slavery went, they were a poor preparation for military duty. Inexperienced officers often assumed that, because these men had been slaves before enlistment, they would bear to be treated as such afterwards. Experience proved the contrary. The more strongly we marked the difference between the slave and the soldier, the better for the regiment. One half of military duty lies in obedience, the other half in self-respect. A soldier without self-respect is worthless. Consequently there were no regiments in which it was so important to observe the courtesies and proprieties of military life as in these. I had to caution the officers to be more than usually particular in returning the salutations of the men; to be very careful in their dealings with those on picket or guard-duty; and on no account to omit the titles of the non-commissioned officers. So, in dealing out punishments, we had carefully to avoid all that was brutal and arbitrary, all that savored of the overseer. Any such dealing found them as obstinate and contemptuous as was Topsy when Miss Ophelia undertook to chastise her. A system of light punishments, rigidly administered according to the prescribed military forms, had more weight with them than any amount of angry severity. To make them feel as remote as possible from the plantation, this was essential. By adhering to this, and constantly appealing to their pride as soldiers and their sense of duty, we were able to maintain a high standard of discipline,—so, at least, the inspecting officers said,—and to get rid, almost entirely, of the more degrading class of punishments,—standing on barrels, tying up by the thumbs, and the ball and chain.
In all ways we had to educate their self-respect. For instance, at first they disliked to obey their own non-commissioned officers. "I don't want him to play de white man ober me," was a sincere objection. They had been so impressed with a sense of inferiority that the distinction extended to the very principles of honor. "I ain't got colored-man principles," said Corporal London Simmons, indignantly defending himself from some charge before me. "I'se got white-gemman principles. I'se do my best. If Cap'n tell me to take a man, s'pose de man be as big as a house, I'll clam hold on him till I die, inception [excepting] I'm sick."
But it was plain that this feeling was a bequest of slavery, which military life would wear off. We impressed it upon them that they did not obey their officers because they were white, but because they were their officers, just as the Captain must obey me, and I the General; that we were all subject to military law, and protected by it in turn. Then we taught them to take pride in having good material for noncommissioned officers among themselves, and in obeying them. On my arrival there was one white first sergeant, and it was a question whether to appoint others. This I prevented, but left that one, hoping the men themselves would at last petition for his removal, which at length they did. He was at once detailed on other duty. The picturesqueness of the regiment suffered, for he was very tall and fair, and I liked to see him step forward in the centre when the line of first sergeants came together at dress-parade. But it was a help to discipline to eliminate the Saxon, for it recognized a principle.
Afterwards I had excellent battalion-drills without a single white officer, by way of experiment; putting each company under a sergeant, and going through the most difficult movements, such as division-columns and oblique-squares. And as to actual discipline, it is doing no injustice to the line-officers of the regiment to say that none of them received from the men more implicit obedience than Color-Sergeant Rivers. I should have tried to obtain commissions for him and several others before I left the regiment, had their literary education been sufficient; and such an attempt was finally made by Lieutenant-Colonel Trowbridge, my successor in immediate command, but it proved unsuccessful. It always seemed to me an insult to those brave men to have novices put over their heads, on the ground of color alone; and the men felt it the more keenly as they remained longer in service. There were more than seven hundred enlisted men in the regiment, when mustered out after more than three years' service. The ranks had been kept full by enlistment, but there were only fourteen line-officers instead of the full thirty. The men who should have filled those vacancies were doing duty as sergeants in the ranks.
In what respect were the colored troops a source of disappointment? To me in one respect only,—that of health. Their health improved, indeed, as they grew more familiar with military life; but I think that neither their physical nor moral temperament gave them that toughness, that obstinate purpose of living, which sustains the more materialistic Anglo-Saxon. They had not, to be sure, the same predominant diseases, suffering in the pulmonary, not in the digestive organs; but they suffered a good deal. They felt malaria less, but they were more easily choked by dust and made ill by dampness. On the other hand, they submitted more readily to sanitary measures than whites, and, with efficient officers, were more easily kept clean. They were injured throughout the army by an undue share of fatigue duty, which is not only exhausting but demoralizing to a soldier; by the un-suitableness of the rations, which gave them salt meat instead of rice and hominy; and by the lack of good medical attendance. Their childlike constitutions peculiarly needed prompt and efficient surgical care; but almost all the colored troops were enlisted late in the war, when it was hard to get good surgeons for any regiments, and especially for these. In this respect I had nothing to complain of, since there were no surgeons in the army for whom I would have exchanged my own.
And this late arrival on the scene affected not only the medical supervision of the colored troops, but their opportunity for a career. It is not my province to write their history, nor to vindicate them, nor to follow them upon those larger fields compared with which the adventures of my regiment appear but a partisan warfare. Yet this, at least, may be said.
The operations on the South Atlantic coast, which long seemed a merely subordinate and incidental part of the great contest, proved to be one of the final pivots on which it turned. All now admit that the fate of the Confederacy was decided by Sherman's march to the sea. Port Royal was the objective point to which he marched, and he found the Department of the South, when he reached it, held almost exclusively by colored troops. Next to the merit of those who made the march was that of those who held open the door. That service will always remain among the laurels of the black regiments.
CHAPTER XIII
CONCLUSION
My personal forebodings proved to be correct, and so were the threats of the surgeons. In May, 1864, I went home invalided, was compelled to resign in October from the same cause, and never saw the First South Carolina again. Nor did any one else see it under that appellation, for about that time its name was changed to the Thirty-Third United States Colored Troops, "a most vague and heartless baptism," as the man in the story says. It was one of those instances of injudicious sacrifice of esprit de corps which were so frequent in our army. All the pride of my men was centred in "de Fus' Souf"; the very words were a recognition of the loyal South as against the disloyal. To make the matter worse, it had been originally designed to apply the new numbering only to the new regiments, and so the early numbers were all taken up before the older regiments came in. The governors of States, by especial effort, saved their colored troops from this chagrin; but we found here, as more than once before, the disadvantage of having no governor to stand by us. "It's a far cry to Loch Awe," said the Highland proverb. We knew to our cost that it was a far cry to Washington in those days, unless an officer left his duty and stayed there all the time.
In June, 1864, the regiment was ordered to Folly Island, and remained there and on Cole's Island till the siege of Charleston was done. It took part in the battle of Honey Hill, and in the capture of a fort on James Island, of which Corporal Robert Vendross wrote triumphantly in a letter, "When we took the pieces we found that we recapt our own pieces back that we lost on Willtown Revear (River) and thank the Lord did not lose but seven men out of our regiment."
In February, 1865, the regiment was ordered to Charleston to do provost and guard duty, in March to Savannah, in June to Hamburg and Aiken, in September to Charleston and its neighborhood, and was finally mustered out of service—after being detained beyond its three years, so great was the scarcity of troops—on the 9th of February, 1866. With dramatic fitness this muster-out took place at Fort Wagner, above the graves of Shaw and his men. I give in the Appendix the farewell address of Lieutenant-Colonel Trowbridge, who commanded the regiment from the time I left it. Brevet Brigadier-General W. T. Bennett, of the One Hundred and Second United States Colored Troops, who was assigned to the command, never actually held it, being always in charge of a brigade.
The officers and men are scattered far and wide. One of our captains was a member of the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, and is now State Treasurer; three of our sergeants were in that Convention, including Sergeant Prince Rivers; and he and Sergeant Henry Hayne are still members of the State Legislature. Both in that State and hi Florida the former members of the regiment are generally prospering, so far as I can hear. The increased self-respect of army life fitted them to do the duties of civil life. It is not in nature that the jealousy of race should die out in this generation, but I trust they will not see the fulfilment of Corporal Simon Cram's prediction. Simon was one of the shrewdest old fellows in the regiment, and he said to me once, as he was jogging out of Beaufort behind me, on the Shell Road, "I'se goin' to leave de Souf, Cunnel, when de war is over. I'se made up my mind dat dese yere Secesh will neber be cibilized in my time."
The only member of the regiment whom I have seen since leaving it is a young man, Cyrus Wiggins, who was brought off from the main-land in a dug-out, in broad day, before the very eyes of the rebel pickets, by Captain James S. Rogers, of my regiment. It was one of the most daring acts I ever saw, and as it happened under my own observation I was glad when the Captain took home with him this "captive of his bow and spear" to be educated under his eye in Massachusetts. Cyrus has done credit to his friends, and will be satisfied with nothing short of a college-training at Howard University. I have letters from the men, very quaint in handwriting and spelling; but he is the only one whom I have seen. Some time I hope to revisit those scenes, and shall feel, no doubt, like a bewildered Rip Van Winkle who once wore uniform.
We who served with the black troops have this peculiar satisfaction, that, whatever dignity or sacredness the memories of the war may have to others, they have more to us. In that contest all the ordinary ties of patriotism were the same, of course, to us as to the rest; they had no motives which we had not, as they have now no memories which are not also ours. But the peculiar privilege of associating with an outcast race, of training it to defend its rights and to perform its duties, this was our especial need. The vacillating policy of the Government sometimes filled other officers with doubt and shame; until the negro had justice, they were but defending liberty with one hand and crushing it with the other. From this inconsistency we were free. Whatever the Government did, we at least were working in the right direction. If this was not recognized on our side of the lines, we knew that it was admitted on the other. Fighting with ropes round our necks, denied the ordinary courtesies of war till we ourselves compelled then: concession, we could at least turn this outlawry into a compliment. We had touched the pivot of the war. Whether this vast and dusky mass should prove the weakness of the nation or its strength, must depend in great measure, we knew, upon our efforts. Till the blacks were armed, there was no guaranty of their freedom. It was their demeanor under arms that shamed the nation into recognizing them as men.
CHAPTER XIV
FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER1
NOTHING in actual life can come so near the experience of Rip Van Winkle as to revisit war scenes after more than a dozen years of peace. Alice's adventures in Wonderland, when she finds herself dwarfed after eating the clover leaf, do not surpass the sense of insignificance that comes over anyone who once wore uniform when he reënters, as a temporary visitor, some city which he formerly ruled, or helped to rule, with absolute sway. An ex-officer of colored troops has, however, this advantage in any city of our Southern States, that the hackmen and 'longshoremen may remember him if nobody else does; and he thus possesses that immense practical convenience which comes only from a personal acquaintance with what are called the humbler classes. In a strange place, 1 This later study of the scene of war was printed in the Atlantic Monthly of July, 1878, and is here reproduced as a parallel picture of the same places and people fourteen years after if one can establish relations with a black waiter or a newspaper correspondent, all doors fly open. The patronage of the great is powerless in com parison.
When I had last left Jacksonville, Florida, in March 1864, the town was in flames; the streets were full of tongues of fire creeping from house to house; the air was dense with lurid smoke. Our steamers then dropped rapidly down the river, laden to the gunwale with the goods of escaping inhabitants. The black soldiers, guiltless of all share in the flames, were yet excited by the occasion, recalled their favorite imagery of the Judgment Day, and sang and shouted without ceasing. I never saw a wilder Fourteen years after (1878), the steam boat came up to the same wharf, and I stepped quietly ashore into what seemed a summer watering - place: the roses were in bloom, the hotel verandas were full of guests, there were gay shops in the street, the wharves were covered with merchandise and with people. The delicious air was the same, the trees were the same; all else was changed. The earthworks we had built were leveled and overgrown; there was a bridge at the ford we used to picket; the church in whose steeple we built a lookout was still there, but it had a new tower, planned for peaceful purposes only. The very railroad scene. along which we had skirmished almost daily was now torn up, and a new track entered the town at a different point. I could not find even the wall which one of our men had clambered over, loading and firing, with a captured goose between his legs. Only the blue sky and the soft air, the lovely atmosphere of Florida, remained; the distant line of woods had the same outlook; and when the noon guns began to be fired for Washington's Birthday, I could hardly convince myself that the roar was not that of our gun boats, still shelling the woods as they had done so many years before. Then the guns ceased; the past withdrew into yet deeper remoteness. It seemed as if I were the only man left on earth to recall it. An hour later, the warm hand-grasp of some of my old soldiers dispelled the dream of oblivion.
I had a less vivid sense of change at Beaufort, South Carolina, so familiar to many during the war. The large white houses still look peacefully down the placid river, but there are repairs and paint everywhere, and many new houses or cabins have been built. There is a new village, called Port Royal, at the railway terminus, about a mile from my first camp at Old Fort plantation; and there is also a station near Beaufort itself, approached by a fine shell road. The fortifications on the old shell-road more. have almost disappeared; the freedmen's village near them, named after the present writer, blew away one day in a tornado, and returned no A great national cemetery is established near its site. There are changes enough, and yet the general effect of the town is unaltered; there is Northern energy there, and the discovery of valuable phosphates has opened a new branch of industry; but, after all it is the same pleasant old sleepy Beaufort, and no military Rip Van Winkle need feel himself too rudely aroused.
However, I went South, not to see places, but people. On the way from Washington, I lingered for a day or two to visit some near kins folk in Virginia, formerly secessionists to a man, or to be more emphatic, to a woman. Then I spent a Sunday in Richmond, traversed rapidly part of North Carolina and Georgia, spent a day and two nights in Charleston, two days at Beaufort, and visited various points in Florida, going as far as St. Augustine. I had not set foot in the Southern States for nearly fourteen years, but I remembered them vividly across that gap of time, and also recalled very distinctly a winter visit to Virginia during my college days (in 1841). With these memories ever present, it was to me a matter of great interest to observe the apparent influence of freedom on the colored people, and the relation between them and the whites. And, first, as to the material condition of the former slaves. Sydney Smith, revisiting Edin burgh in 1821, after ten years' absence, was struck with the “wonderful increase of shoes and stockings, streets and houses.” The change as to these first items, in South Carolina, tells the story of social progress since emancipation. The very first of my old acquaintances whom I met in that region was the robust wife of one of my soldiers. I found her hoeing in a field, close beside our old camp- ground. I had seen that same woman hoeing in the same field fifteen years before. The same sky was above her, the same soil beneath her feet; but the war was over, slavery was gone. The soil that had been her master's was now her own by purchase; and the substantial limbs that trod it were no longer bare and visibly black, but were incased in red-striped stockings of the most conspicuous design. “Think of it!” I said to a clever Massachusetts damsel in Washington, “the whole world so changed, and yet that woman still hoes.” " In hose,"quoth the lively maiden; and I preserve for posterity the condensed epigram.
Besides the striped stockings, which are really so conspicuous that the St. Augustine light house is painted to match them, one sees a marked though moderate progress in all the comforts of life. Formerly the colored people of the Sea Islands, even in their first days of freedom, slept very generally on the floor; and when our regimental hospital was first fitted up the surgeon found with dismay that the patients had regarded the beds as merely beautiful ornaments, and had unanimously laid themselves down in the intervening spaces. Now I noticed bedstead and bedding in every cabin I visited in South Carolina and Florida. Formerly the cabins often had no tables, and families rarely ate together, each taking food as was convenient; but now they seemed to have family meals, a step toward decent living. This progress they themselves recognized. More over, I often saw pictures from the illustrated papers on the wall, and the children's school books on the shelf. I rarely met an ex soldier who did not own his house and ground, the in closures varying from five to two hundred acres; and I found one man on the St. John's who had been offered $3000 for his real estate. In many cases these homesteads had been bought within a few years, showing a steady progress in self-elevation.
I do not think the world could show finer sample of self - respecting peasant life than a colored woman, with whom I came down the St. John's River to Jacksonville, from one of the little settlements along that magnificent stream. She was a freed slave, the wife of a former soldier, and was going to market, basket in hand, with her little boy by her side. She had the tall, erect figure, clear black skin, thin features, fine teeth, and intelligent bearing that marked so many of my Florida soldiers. She was dressed very plainly, but with scrupulous cleanliness: a rather faded gingham dress, well worn tweed sack, shoes and stockings, straw hat with plain black ribbon, and neat white col lar and cuffs. She told me that she and her husband owned one hundred and sixty acres of land, bought and paid for by their own earnings, at $ 1.25 per acre; they had a log-house, and were going to build a frame - house; they raised for themselves all the food they needed, except meat and flour, which they bought in Jacksonville. They had a church within reach (Baptist); a schoolhouse of forty pupils, taught by a colored teacher; her husband belonged to the Good Templars, as did all the men in their neighborhood. For miles along the St. John's, a little back from the river, such settlements are scattered; the men cultivating their own plots of ground, or working on the steamboats, or fishing, or lumbering. What more could be expected of any race, after fifteen years of freedom? Are the Irish voters of New York their superiors in condition, or the factory operatives of Fall River?
I met perhaps a hundred men in different places, who had been under my command, and whose statements I could trust. Only one of these complained of poverty; and he, as I found, earned good wages, had neither wife nor child to support, and was given to whiskey. There were some singular instances of prosperity among these men. I was told in Jacksonville that I should find Corporal McGill “ de mos ' pop'lous man in Beaufort.” When I got there, I found him the proprietor of a livery stable populous with horses at any rate; he was worth $3000 or $4000, and was cordial and hospitable to the last degree. At parting, he drove me to the station with his best carriage and horses; and I regret to add that, while he was refusing all compensation, his young steeds ran away, and as the train whirled off I saw my “ populous” corporal double-quick down the shell-road to recapture his equipage. I found Sergeant Hodges a master carpenter at Jacksonville; Corporal Hicks was a minister there, highly respected; and I heard of Corporal Sut ton as a traveling preacher farther up the river. Sergeant Shemeltella, a fine - looking half - Spaniard from St. Augustine, now patrols, with gun in hand, the woods which we once picketed at Port Royal Ferry, and supplies game to the markets of Charleston and Savannah. And without extending the list, I may add that some of these men, before attaining prosperity, had to secure, by the severest experience, the necessary judgment in business affairs. It will hardly be believed that the men of my regiment alone sunk $30,000 in an impracticable building association, and in the purchase of a steamboat which was lost uninsured. One of the shrewdest among them, after taking his share of this, resolved to be prudent, put $750 in the Freedmen's Bank, and lost that, too. Their present prosperity must be judged in the light of such formidable calamities as these.
I did not hear a single charge of laziness made against the freed colored people in the States I visited. In Virginia it was admitted that they would work wherever they were paid, but that many were idle for want of employment. Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in a recent address before the Charleston Historical Society, declares that the negroes “do not refuse to work; all are planting;” and he only complains that they work unskillfully. A rice-planter in Georgia told me that he got his work done more efficiently than under the slave system. Men and women worked well for seventy -five cents a day; many worked under contract, which at first they did not understand or like. On the other hand, he admitted, the planters did not at once learn how to manage them as freedmen, but had acquired the knowledge by degrees; so even the strikes at harvest-time, which had at first embarrassed them, were now avoided. Another Georgia planter spoke with much interest of an effort now making by the colored people in Augusta to establish a cotton factory of their own, in emulation of the white factories which have there been so successful. He said that this proposed factory was to have a capital of fifty thousand dollars in fifty -dollar shares, and that twenty-eight thousand shares of it were already raised. The white business agent of one of the existing factories was employed, he said, as the adviser of those organizing this. He spoke of it with interest as a proper outlet for the industry of the better class of colored people, who were educated rather above field labor. He also spoke with pride of the normal school for colored people at Atlanta.
The chief of police in Beaufort, South Carolina, a colored man, told me that the colored population there required but little public assistance, though two thousand of them had removed from the upper parts of the State within a year and a half, thinking they could find better wages at Beaufort. This removal struck me as being of itself a favorable indication, showing that they were now willing to migrate, whereas they were once hopelessly fixed to the soil, and therefore too much in the power of the land. owners. The new industry of digging phosphates for exportation to England employs a good many in Beaufort County, and they earn by this from seventy-five cents to a dollar a day. Others are employed in loading vessels at the new settlement of Port Royal; but the work is precarious and insufficient, and I was told that if they made two dollars a week they did well. But it must be remembered that they have mostly little patches of land of their own, and can raise for themselves the corn and vegetables on which they chiefly live. I asked an old man if he could supply his family from his own piece of ground. “Oh, yes, mars'r," he said (the younger men do not say “ mars'r," but “boss”), and then he went on, with a curious accumulation of emphasis : “I raise plenty too much more dan I destroy,” — meaning simply "very much more."
The price of cotton is now very low, and the Sea Island cotton has lost forever, perhaps, its place in the English market. Yet Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in the address just quoted, while lamenting the ravages of war in the Sea Islands, admits that nearly half as much cotton was raised in them in 1875 as in 1860, and more than half as much corn, the population being about the same, and the area cultivated less than one third. To adopt his figures, the population in 1860 was 40,053; acres under cultivation, 274,015; corn, 618,959 bushels; cotton, 19,121 bales. In 1875 the population was 43,060; acres under cultivation, 86,449; corn, 314,271 bushels; cotton, 8199 bales.
When we consider the immense waste of war, the destruction of capital, the abandonment of estates by those who yet refuse to sell them, and the partial introduction of industry other than agricultural, this seems to me a promising exhibit. And when we observe how much more equitable has become the distribution of the products between capitalist and laborer, the case is still better. Dr. Pinckney's utmost complaint in regard to South Carolina is, that the result of the war “has been injurious to the whites, and not beneficial to the blacks.” Even he, a former slaveholder, does not claim that it has injured the blacks; and this, from his point of view, is quite a concession. Twenty years hence he may admit that, whatever the result of war may have been, that of peace will be beneficial to both races.
In observing a lately emancipated race, it is always harder to judge as to the condition of the women than of the men, especially where the men alone have been enfranchised. My friend the judge, in Virginia, declared that the colored men and women were there so unlike that they seemed like different races: the men had behaved “admirably," he said; the women were almost hopelessly degraded. On the other hand, my white friends of both sexes at Beaufort took just the opposite view, and thought the women there quite superior to the men, especially in respect to whiskey. Perhaps the in fluences of the two regions may have made the difference, as the Sea Islands have had the presence, ever since the beginning of the war, of self-devoted and well-educated teachers, mostly women, while such teachers have been much rarer in Virginia. They have also been rare in Florida, but then the Florida negroes are a superior class.
Certainly it was pleasant to me to hear favorable accounts of this and that particular colored woman of whom I had known something in war times. Almost the first old acquaintance named to me on the Sea Islands, for instance, was one Venus, whose marriage to a soldier of my regiment I had chronicled in war times. “Now, Cunnel,” that soldier had said in confidence, “want for get me one good lady.” And when I asked one of his friends about the success of the effort, he said triumphantly, “John's gwine for marry Venus.” Now the record of Venus as a good lady was so very questionable in her earlier incarnations that the name was not encouraging; but I was delighted to hear of the goddess, fifteen years later, as a most virtuous wife and a very efficient teacher of sewing in Miss Botume's school. Her other sewing teacher, by the way, is Juno.
I went into schools here and there; the colored people seemed to value them very much, and to count upon their own votes as a means of securing these advantages, instead of depending, as formerly, on Northern aid. The schools I visited did not seem to me so good as those kept by Northern ladies during the war at Port Royal; but the present schools form a part of a public system, and are in that respect better, while enough of the Northern teachers still remain to exert a beneficial influence, at least on the Sea Islands. I was sorry to be in Charleston only on Saturday, when the Shaw Memorial School was not in session. This is a large wooden building, erected on land bought with part of a fund collected in the colored regiments for a monument to Colonel Shaw. This school has an average attendance of five hundred and twenty, with twelve teachers, white and black. The Morris Street School for colored children, in Charleston, has fourteen hundred pupils. These two schools occupy nearly half of the four columns given by the “Charleston News and Courier" of April 12, 1878, to the annual exhibition of public schools. The full programme of exercises is given, with the names of the pupils receiving prizes and honors; and it seems almost incredible that the children whose successes are thus proudly recorded can be the sons and daughters of freed slaves. And I hold it utterly ungenerous, in view of such facts, to declare that the white people of the South have learned nothing by experience, and are “incapable of change.
Public officials at Beaufort told me that in that place most of the men could now sign their names, -certainly a great proof of progress since war times. I found some of my friends anxious lest school should unfit the young people for the hard work of the field; but I saw no real proof of this, nor did the parents confirm it. Miss Botume, however, said that the younger women now thought that, after marriage, they ought to be excused from field labor, if they took care of their homes and children; a proposal so directly in the line of advancing civilization that one can hardly object to do it. The great solicitude of some of the teachers in that region relates to the passage of some congressional bill which shall set aside the tax sales under which much real estate is now held; but others think that there is no fear of this, even under a Democratic administration.
This leads naturally to the question, What is to be the relation between the two races in those Southern States of which I speak? I remember that Corporal Simon Crum, one of the oddities of my regiment, used to declare that, when the war was over, he should go “Libery;" and, when pressed for a reason, used to say, “Dese yere Secesh will neber be cibilized in my time." Yet Simon Crum's time is not ended, for I heard of him as peacefully dwelling near Charleston, and taking no part in that in significant colonization movement of which we hear so much more at the North than at the South. Taking civilization in his sense, — a fair enough sense,-we shall find Virginia,, South Carolina, and Florida holding an inter mediate position; being probably behind North Carolina, West Virginia, and the border States, but decidedly in advance of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
It is certain that there is, in the States I visited, a condition of outward peace with no conspicuous outrages, and that this has now been the case for many months. All will admit that this state of things must be a blessing, unless there lies beneath it some covert plan for crushing or reënslaving the colored race. I know that a few good men at the North honestly believe in the existence of some such plan; I can only say that I thoroughly disbelieve in it. Taking the nature of the Southern whites as these very men describe it, — impulsive and ungoverned, - it is utterly inconceivable that such a plan, if formed, should not show itself in some personal ill usage of the blacks, in the withdrawal of privileges, in legislation endangering their rights. I can assert that, carrying with me the eyes of a tolerably suspicious abolitionist, I saw none of these indications. During the war, I could hardly go anywhere within the Union lines for twenty - four hours without being annoyed by some sign of race hostility, or being obliged to interfere for the protection of some abused man or woman. During this trip, I had absolutely no occasion for any such attitude. The change certainly has not resulted from any cringing demeanor on the part of the blacks, for they show much more manhood than they once did. I am satisfied that it results from the changed feeling created towards a race of freedmen and voters. How can we ask more of the States formerly in rebellion than that they should be abreast of New England in granting rights and privileges to the colored race? Yet this is now the case in the three States I name; or at least, if they fall behind at some points, they lead at some points. Let us look at a few instances.
The Republican legislature of Connecticut has just refused to incorporate a colored military company, but the colored militia regiment of Charleston was reviewed by General Hampton and his staff just before my visit. One of the officers told me there was absolutely no difference in the treatment accorded this regiment and that shown toward the white militia who were reviewed the day before; and Messrs. Whipper and Jones, the only dissatisfied Republican leaders whom I saw, admitted that there was no opposition whatever to this arm ing of the blacks. I may add that, while I was in Virginia, a bill was reported favorably in the legislature for the creation of a colored militia company, called the State Guard, under control of their own officers, and reporting directly to the adjutant-general.
I do not know a Northern city which enrolls colored citizens in its police, though this may here and there have happened. I saw colored policemen in Charleston, Beaufort, and Jacksonville, though the former city is under Democratic control; and I was told by a leading colored man that the number had lately been increased in Charleston, and that one lieutenant of police was of that race. The Republican legislature of Rhode Island has just refused once more to repeal the bill prohibiting inter marriages, while the legislature of South Carolina has refused to pass such a bill. I can remember when Frederick Douglass was ejected from the railway cars in Massachusetts because of his complexion; and it is not many years since one of the most cultivated and lady-like colored teachers in the nation was ejected from a streetcar in Philadelphia, her birthplace, for the same reason. But I rode with colored people in first -class cars throughout Virginia and South Carolina, and in street cars in Richmond and Charleston. I am told that this last is the case also in Savannah and New Orleans, but can testify only to what I have seen. In Georgia, I was told, the colored people are not allowed in first-class cars; but. they have always a decent second-class car, opening from the smoking car, with the door usually closed between. All these things may be true, and still a great deal may remain to be done; but it is idle to declare that the sun has not risen because we 379 do not yet see it in the zenith. Even the most extreme Southern newspapers constantly contain paragraphs that amaze us, not only in contrast to slavery times, but in contrast to the times immediately following the war. While I was in South Carolina, the “ Charleston News and Courier ” published, with commendation, the report of a bill passed by the Maryland legislature admitting colored lawyers to practice, after the Court of Appeals had excluded them; and it copied with implied approval the remark of the “ Baltimore Gazette :” “Raise the educational test, the rigidity of the examinations for admission, or the moral test, as high as you please, but let us have done with the color test.”
It is certain that every Republican politician whom I saw in South Carolina, black or white, spoke well of Governor Hampton, with two exceptions, -Mr. W. J. Whipper, whom Governor Chamberlain refused to commission as judge; and Mr. Jones, who was clerk of the House of Delegates through its most corrupt period. I give their dissent for what it is worth, but the opinion of others was as I have said. “We have no complaint to make of Governor Hampton; he has kept his pledges,” was the general remark. For instance, a bill passed both houses by a party vote, requiring able bodied male prisoners under sentence in county jails to work on the public roads and streets. The colored people remonstrated strongly, regarding it as aimed at them. Governor Hamp ton vetoed the bill, and the House, on reflection, sustained the veto by a vote of one hundred and two to ten. But he is not always so strong in influence: there is a minority of “fire-eaters” who resist him; he is denounced by the "up-country people" as an aristocrat; and I was told that he might yet need the colored vote to sustain him against his own party. Grant that this assumes him to be governed by self-interest, that strengthens the value of this evidence. We do not expect that saints will have the monopoly of government at South or North; what we need is to know that the colored vote in South Carolina makes itself felt as a power, and secures its rightful ends.
The facts here stated are plain and unquestionable. When we come to consider the political condition of the former slaves, we find greater difficulties in taking in the precise position. First, it must be remembered that even at the North the practical antagonism towards colored voters lasted long after their actual enfranchisement, and has worn out only by degrees. Samuel Breck, in his very entertaining reminiscences, tells us that in Philadelphia, in the early part of this century, the colored voters seldom dared to come to the polls, for fear of ill usage. Then we must remember that in South Carolina, the State which has been most under discussion in this essay, the colored voters were practically massed, for years, under the banner of spoliation, and the antagonism created was hardly less intense than that created by the Tweed dynasty in New York. As far as I can judge, neither the “carpet-bag ' frauds nor the “Ku-Klux” persecutions have been exaggerated, and they certainly kept each other alive, and have, at least temporarily, ceased together. No doubt the atrocities committed by the whites were the worst, inasmuch as murder is worse than robbery, yet few in South Carolina will now deny that the provocation was simply enormous.
And it is moreover, true that this state of things left bad blood behind it, which will long last. It has left jealousies which confound the innocent with the guilty. Judging the future by the past, the white South Carolinian finds it almost impossible to believe that a Republican State administration can be decently honest. This is a feeling quite apart from any national attitude, and quite consistent with a fair degree of loyalty. Nor does it take the form of resistance to colored voters as such. The Southern whites accept them precisely as Northern men in cities accept the ignorant foreign vote, — not cheerfully, but with acquiescence in the inevitable; and when the strict color-line is once broken, they are just as ready to conciliate the negro as the Northern politician to flatter the Irishman. Any powerful body of voters may be cajoled to -day and intimidated tomorrow and hated always, but it can never be left out of sight. At the South, politics are an absorbing interest: people are impetuous; they divide and subdivide on all local issues, and each faction needs votes. Two men are up for mayor or sheriff, or what not: each conciliates every voter he can reach, and each finds it for his interest to stand by those who help him. This has been long predicted by shrewd observers, and is beginning to happen all over the South. I heard of a dozen instances of it. Indeed, the vote of thanks passed by the Mississippi legislature to its colored senator, Mr. Bruce, for his vote on the silver bill, was only the same thing on a larger scale. To praise him was to censure Mr. Lamar, his white associate.
It may be said, “Ah, but the real test is Will the black voters be allowed to vote for the Republican party?” To assert this crowning right will undoubtedly demand a good deal of these voters; it will require courage, organization, intelligence, honesty, and leaders. Without these, any party, in any State, will sooner or later go to the wall. As to South Carolina, I can only say that one of the ablest Republican lawyers in the State, a white man, unsuspected of corruption, said to me, “This is a Republican State, and to prove it such we need only to bring out our voters. For this we do not need troops, but that half a dozen well -known North ern Republicans should canvass the State, just as if it were a Northern State. The colored voters need to know that the party at the North has not, as they have been told, deserted them. With this and a perfectly clean list of nominees, we can carry the legislature, making no nominations against Hampton.” “But," I asked, “would not these meetings be broken up “Not one of them,” he said. “They will break up our local meetings, but not those held by speakers from other States. It would ruin them with the nation.” And this remark was afterwards indorsed by others, white and black. When I asked one of the few educated colored leaders in the State, “Do you regret the withdrawal of the troops by President Hayes?” “No,” he said; "the only misfortune was that they were not withdrawn two years earlier. That would have put us on our good behavior, obliged us to command respect, and made it easier to save the Republican party. But it can still be saved."
There is no teacher so wholesome as personal necessity. In South Carolina, a few men and many women cling absolutely to the past, learn ing nothing, forgetting nothing. But the bulk of thinking men see that the old Southern society is as absolutely annihilated as the feudal system, and that there is no other form of society now possible except such as prevails at the North and West. “The purse-proud Southerner,” said Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in his address at Charleston, “is an institution which no longer exists. The race has passed away as completely as the saurian tribes, whose bones we are now digging from the fossil beds of the Ashley.” “The Yankees ought to be satisfied,” said one gentleman to me; man at the South is trying with all his might to be a Yankee.” Business, money, financial prosperity,—these now form the absorbing Southern question. At the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, where I spent a Sunday, the members of the Assembly were talking all day about the State debt-, how to escape bankruptcy. I did not overhear the slightest allusion to the negro or the North. It is likely enough that this may lead to claims on the national treasury, but it tends to nothing worse. The dream of every live reënslaving the negro, if it ever existed, is like the negro's dream, if he ever had it, of five acres and a mule from the government. Both races have long since come down to the stern reality of self-support. No sane Southerner would now take back as slaves, were they offered, a race of men who have now been for so many years freemen and voters.
Every secessionist risked his all upon secession, and has received, as the penalty of defeat, only poverty. It is the mildest punishment ever inflicted after an unsuccessful civil war, and it proves in this case a blessing in disguise. Among Southern young men, it has made energy and industry fashionable. Formerly, if a Southern planter wished to travel, he borrowed money on his coming crop, or sold a slave or two. Now he must learn, what John Randolph of Roanoke once announced as the philosopher's stone, to “pay as you go "The Northern traveler asks himself, Where are the white people of the South? You meet few in public conveyances; you see no crowd in the streets. In the hotels of Washington you rarely hear the Southern accent, and, indeed, my Virginia friends declared that some of its more marked intonations were growing unfashionable. Out of one hundred and three Southern representatives in Congress, only twenty-three have their families with them. On one of the few day-trains from Washington to Richmond, there was but one first-class car, and there were less than twenty passengers, these being mostly from the Northern States. Among some fifty people on the steamboat from Savannah to Jacksonville, there were not six Southerners. Everywhere you hear immigration de sired, and emigration recognized as a fact. My friend the judge talked to me eloquently about the need of more Northern settlers, and the willingness of all to receive them; the plantations would readily be broken up to accommodate any purchaser who had money. But within an hour his son, a young law student, told me that as soon as he was admitted to the bar he should go West.
The first essential to social progress at the South is that each State should possess local self-government. The States have been read mitted as States, and can no more be treated as Territories than you can replace a bird in the egg. They must now work out their own salvation, just as much as Connecticut and New Jersey. If any abuses exist, the remedy is not to be found in federal interference, except in case of actual insurrection, but in the voting power of the blacks, so far as they have strength or skill to assert it and, where that fails, in their power of locomotion. They must leave those counties or States which -ill use them for others which treat them better. If a man is dissatisfied with the laws of Massachusetts, and cannot get them mended, he can at least remove into Rhode Island or Connecticut, and the loss of valuable citizens will soon make itself felt. This is the precise remedy possessed by the colored people at the South, with the great advantage that they have the monopoly of all the leading industries, and do not need the whites more, on the whole, than the whites need them. They have reached the point where civilized methods begin to prevail. When they have once enlisted the laws of political economy on their side, this silent ally will be worth more than an army with banners
APPENDIX
APPENDIX A.
FIRST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS,
Afterwards Thirty-Third United States Colored Troops.
Colonels
T. W. HIGGINSON, 51st Mass. Vols., Nov. 10, 1862; Resigned, Oct. 27, 1864.
WM. T. BENNETT, 102d U. S. C. T., Dec. 18, 1864; Mustered out with regiment
Lieutenant-Colonels
LIBERTY BILLINGS, Civil Life, Nov. 1, 1862; Dismissed by Examining Board, July 28, 1863.
OHN D. STRONG, Promotion, July 28, 1863; Resigned, Aug. 15, 1864.
CHAS. T. TROWBRIDGE, Promotion, Dec. 9, 1864; Mustered out, &c.
Majors
JOHN D. STRONG, Civil Life, Oct. 21, 1862; Lt-Col., July 28, 1863. CHAS.
T. TROWBRIDGE, Promotion, Aug. 11, 1863; Lt.-Col., Dec. 9, 1864.
H. A. WHTTNEY, Promotion, Dec. 9, 1864; Mustered out, &c.
Surgeons
SETH ROGERS, Civil Life, Dec. 2, 1862; Resigned, Dec. 21, 1863.
WM. B. CRANDALL, 29th Ct, June 8, 1864; Mustered out, &c.
Assistant Surgeons
J. M. HAWKS, Civil Life, Oct 20, 1862; Surgeon 3d S. C. Vols., Oct. 29, 1863.
THOS. T. MINOR, 7th Ct., Jan. 8, 1863; Resigned, Nov. 21, 1864.
E. S. STUARD, Civil Life, Sept. 4, 1865; Mustered out, &c.
Chaplain
JAS. H. FOWLER, Civil Life, Oct. 24, 1862; Mustered out, &c.
Captains
CHAS. T. TROWBRIDGE, N. Y. Vol. Eng., Oct. 13, 1862; Major, Aug. 11, 1863.
WM. JAMES, 100th Pa., Oct. 13, 1862; Mustered out, &c.
W. J. RANDOLPH, 100th Pa., Oct. 13, 1862; Resigned, Jan. 29, 1864.
H. A. WHITNEY, 8th Me., Oct. 13, 1862; Major, Dec. 9, 1864.
ALEX. HEASLEY, 100th Pa., Oct 13, 1862; Killed at Augusta, Ga., Sept. 6, 1865.
GEORGE DOLLY, 8th Me., Nov. 1, 1862; Resigned, Oct. 30, 1863.
L. W. METCALF, 8th Me., Nov. 11, 1862; Mustered out, &c.
JAS. H. TONKING, N. Y. Vol. Eng., Nov. 17, 1862; Resigned, July 28, 1863.
JAS. S. ROGERS, 51st Mass., Dec. 6, 1862; Resigned, Oct. 20, 1863.
J. H. THIBADEAU, Promotion, Jan. 10, 1863; Mustered out, &c.
GEORGE D. WALKER, Promotion, July 28, 1863; Resigned, Sept 1, 1864.
WM. H. DANILSON, Promotion, July 28, 1863; Major 128th U. S. C. T., May, 1865 [now 1st Lt 40th U. S. Infantry].
WM. W. SAMPSON, Promotion, Nov. 5, 1863; Mustered out, &c.
JOHN M. THOMPSON, Promotion, Nov. 7, 1863; Mustered out, &c. [Now 1st Lt. and Bvt Capt. 38th U. S. Infy.]
ABR. W. JACKSON, Promotion, April 30, 1864; Resigned, Aug. 15, 1865.
NILES G. PARKER, Promotion, Feb., 1865; Mustered out, &c.
CHAS. W. HOOPER, Promotion, Sept, 1865; Mustered out, &c.
E. C. MERMAM, Promotion, Sept., 1865; Resigned, Dec. 4, 1865.
E. W. ROBBINS, Promotion, Nov. 1, 1865; Mustered out, &c.
N. S. WHITE, Promotion, Nov. 18, 1865; Mustered out, &c.
First Lieutenants
G. W. DEWHURST (Adjutant), Civil Life, Oct 20, 1862; Resigned, Aug. 31, 1865.
J. M. BINOHAM (Quartermaster), Civil Life, Oct. 20, 1862; Died from effect of exhaustion on a military expedition, July 20, 1863.
G. M. CHAMBERUN (Quartermaster), llth Mass. Battery, Aug. 29, 1863; Mustered out, &c.
GEO. D. WALKER, N. Y. VoL Eng., Oct 13, 1862; Captain, Aug. 11, 1863.
W. H. DANILSON, 48th N. Y., Oct 13, 1862; Captain, July 26, 1863.
J. H. THTBADEAU, 8th Me., Oct 13, 1862; Captain, Jan. 10, 1863.
EPHRAIM P. WHITE, 8th Me., Nov. 14, 1862; Resigned, March 9, 1864.
JAS. POMEROY, 100th Pa., Oct 13,1862; Resigned, Feb. 9, 1863.
JAS. F. JOHNSTON, 100th Pa., Oct 13, 1862; Resigned, March 26, 1863.
JESSE FISHER, 48th N. Y., Oct 13, 1862; Resigned, Jan. 26, 1863.
CHAS. I. DAVIS, 8th Me., Oct 13, 1862; Resigned, Feb. 28, 1863.
WM. STOCKDALE, 8th Me., Oct 13, 1862; Resigned, May 2, 1863.
JAS. B. O'NEIL, Promotion, Jan. 10, 1863; Resigned, May 2, 1863.
W. W. SAMPSON, Promotion, Jan. 10, 1863; Captain, Oct 30,
1863. J. M. THOMPSON, Promotion, Jan. 27, 1863; Captain, Oct. 30, 1863.
R. M. GASTON, Promotion, April 15, 1863; Killed at Coosaw Ferry, S. C., May 27, 1863.
JAS. B. WEST, Promotion, Feb. 28, 1863; Resigned, June 14, 1865.
N. G. PARKER, Promotion, May 5, 1863; Captain, Feb., 1865.
W. H. HYDE, Promotion, May 5, 1863; Resigned, April 3, 1865.
HENRY A. STONE, 8th Me., June 26, 1863; Resigned, Dec. 16, 1864.
J. A. TROWBRIDGE, Promotion, Aug. 11, 1863; Resigned, Nov. 29, 1864.
A. W. JACKSON, Promotion, Aug. 26, 1863; Captain, April 30, 1864.
CHAS. E. PARKER, Promotion, Aug. 26, 1863; Resigned, Nov. 29, 1864.
CHAS. W. HOOPER, Promotion, Nov. 8, 1863; Captain, Sept., 1865.
E. C. MERRIAM, Promotion, Nov. 19, 1863; Captain, Sept., 1865.
HENRY A. BEACH, Promotion, April 30, 1864; Resigned, Sept 23, 1864.
E. W. ROBBINS, Promotion, April 30, 1864; Captain, Nov. 1, 1865.
ASA CHILD, Promotion, Sept, 1865; Mastered out, &c.
N. S. WHITE, Promotion, Sept, 1865; Captain, Nov. 18, 1865.
F. S. GOODRICH, Promotion, Oct., 1865; Mustered out, &c.
E. W. HYDE, Promotion, Oct 27, 1865; Mustered out, &c.
HENRY WOOD, Promotion, Nov., 1865; Mustered out, &c.
Second Lieutenants
J. A. TROWBMDGE, N. Y. Vol. Eng., Oct 13, 1862; First Lt, Aug. 11, 1863.
JAS. B. O-NBIL, 1st U. S. Art'y, Oct 13, 1862; First Lt, Jan. 10, 1863.
W. W. SAMPSON, 8th Me., Oct 13, 1862; First Lt, Jan 10, 1863.
J. M. THOMPSON, 7th N. H., Oct 13, 1862; First Lt, Jan. 27, 1863.
R. M. GASTON, 100th Pa., Oct. 13, 1862; First Lt, April 15, 1863.
W. H. HYDE, 6th Ct, Oct 13, 1862; First Lt, May 5, 1863.
JAS. B. WEST, 100th Pa., Oct. 13. 1862; First Lt, Feb. 28, 1863.
HARRY C. WEST, 100th Pa., Oct 13, 1862; Resigned, Nov. 4, 1864.
E. C. MERRIAM, 8th Me., Nov. 17, 1862; First Lt., Nov. 19, 1863.
CHAS. E. PARKER, 8th Me., Nov. 17, 1862; First Lt, Aug. 26, 1863.
C. W. HOOPER, N. Y. Vol. Eng., Feb. 17, 1863; First Lt, April 15, 1863.
N. G. PARKER, 1st Mass. Cavalry, March, 1863; First Lt, May 5, 1863.
A. H. TIRRELL, 1st Mass. Cav., March 6, 1863; Resigned, July 22, 1863.
A. W. JACKSON, 8th Me., March 6, 1863; First Lt, Aug. 26, 1863.
HENRY A. BEACH, 48th N. Y., April 5, 1863; First Lt, April 30, 1864.
E. W. ROBBINS, 8th Me., April 5, 1863; First Lt, April 30, 1864.
A. B. BROWN, Civil Life, April 17, 1863; Resigned, Nov. 27, 1863.
F. M. GOULD, 3d R. I. Battery, June 1, 1863; Resigned, June 8, 1864.
ASA CHILD, 8th Me., Aug. 7, 1863; First Lt, Sept., 1865.
JEROME T. FURMAN, 52d Pa., Aug. 30, 1863; Killed at Walhalla, S. C., Aug. 26, 1865.
JOHN W. SELVAGE, 48th N. Y., Sept 10, 1863; First Lt. 36th U. S. C. T., March, 1865.
MIRAND W. SAXTON, Civil Life, Nov. 19, 1863; Captain 128th U. S. C. T., June 25, 1864 [now Second Lt 38th U. S. Infantry].
NELSON S. WHITE, Dec. 22, 1863; First Lt, Sept., 1865.
EDW. W. HYDE, Civil Life, May 4, 1864; First Lt, Oct. 27, 1865.
F. S. GOODRICH, 115th N. Y., May, 1864; First Lt., Oct., 1865.
B. H. MANNING, Aug. 11, 1864; Capt 128th U. S. C. T., March 17, 1865.
R. M. DAVIS, 4th Mass. Cavalry, Nov. 19, 1864; Capt. 104th U. S. C. T., May 11, 1865.
HENRY WOOD, N. Y. Vol. Eng., Aug., 1865; First Lt, Nov., 1865.
JOHN M. SEAKLES, 1st N. Y. Mounted Rifles, June 15, 1865; Mustered out, &c.
APPENDIX B
THE FIRST BLACK SOLDIERS
It is well known that the first systematic attempt to organize colored troops during the war of the rebellion was the so-called "Hunter Regiment." The officer originally detailed to recruit for this purpose was Sergeant C. T. Trowbridge, of the New York Volunteer Engineers (Col. Serrell). His detail was dated May 7, 1862, S. O. 84 Dept. South.
Enlistments came in very slowly, and no wonder. The white officers and soldiers were generally opposed to the experiment, and filled the ears of the negroes with the same tales which had been told them by their masters,—that the Yankees really meant to sell them to Cuba, and the like. The mildest threats were that they would be made to work without pay (which turned out to be the case), and that they would be put in the front rank in every battle. Nobody could assure them that they and their families would be freed by the Government, if they fought for it, since no such policy had been adopted. Nevertheless, they gradually enlisted, the most efficient recruiting officer being Sergeant William Bronson, of Company A, in my regiment, who always prided himself on this service, and used to sign himself by the very original title, "No. 1, African Foundations" in commemoration of his deeds.
By patience and tact these obstacles would in time have been overcome. But before long, unfortunately, some of General Hunter's staff became impatient, and induced him to take the position that the blacks must enlist. Accordingly, squads of soldiers were sent to seize all the able-bodied men on certain plantations, and bring them to the camp. The immediate consequence was a renewal of the old suspicion, ending in a widespread belief that they were to be sent to Cuba, as their masters had predicted. The ultimate result was a habit of distrust, discontent, and desertion, that it was almost impossible to surmount. All the men who knew anything about General Hunter believed in him; but they all knew that there were bad influences around him, and that the Government had repudiated his promises. They had been kept four months in service, and then had been dismissed without pay. That having been the case, why should not the Government equally repudiate General Saxton's promises or mine? As a matter of fact, the Government did repudiate these pledges for years, though we had its own written authority to give them. But that matter needs an appendix by itself.
The "Hunter Regiment" remained in camp on Hilton Head Island until the beginning of August, 1862, kept constantly under drill, but much demoralized by desertion. It was then disbanded, except one company. That company, under command of Sergeant Trowbridge, then acting as Captain, but not commissioned, was kept in service, and was sent (August 5, 1862) to garrison St. Simon's Island, on the coast of Georgia. On this island (made famous by Mrs. Kemble's description) there were then five hundred colored people, and not a single white man.
The black soldiers were sent down on the Ben De Ford, Captain Hallett. On arriving, Trowbridge was at once informed by Commodore Goldsborough, naval commander at that station, that there was a party of rebel guerillas on the island, and was asked whether he would trust his soldiers in pursuit of them. Trowbridge gladly assented; and the Commodore added, "If you should capture them, it will be a great thing for you."
They accordingly went on shore, and found that the colored men of the island had already undertaken the enterprise. Twenty-five of them had armed themselves, under the command of one of their own number, whose name was John Brown. The second in command was Edward Gould, who was afterwards a corporal in my own regiment The rebel party retreated before these men, and drew them into a swamp. There was but one path, and the negroes entered single file. The rebels lay behind a great log, and fired upon them. John Brown, the leader, fell dead within six feet of the log,—probably the first black man who fell under arms in the war,—several other were wounded, and the band of raw recruits retreated; as did also the rebels, in the opposite direction. This was the first armed encounter, so far as I know, between the rebels and their former slaves; and it is worth noticing that the attempt was a spontaneous thing and not accompanied by any white man. The men were not soldiers, nor in uniform, though some of them afterwards enlisted in Trowbridge's company.
The father of this John Brown was afterwards a soldier in my regiment; and, after his discharge for old age, was, for a time, my servant. "Uncle York," as we called him, was as good a specimen of a saint as I have ever met, and was quite the equal of Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom." He was a fine-looking old man, with dignified and courtly manners, and his gray head was a perfect benediction, as he sat with us on the platform at our Sunday meetings. He fully believed, to his dying day, that the "John Brown Song" related to his son, and to him only.
Trowbridge, after landing on the island, hunted the rebels all day with his colored soldiers, and a posse of sailors. In one place, he found by a creek a canoe, with a tar-kettle, and a fire burning; and it was afterwards discovered that, at that very moment, the guerillas were hid in a dense palmetto thicket, near by, and so eluded pursuit The rebel leader was one Miles Hazard, who had a plantation on the island, and the party escaped at last through the aid of his old slave, Henry, who found them a boat One of my sergeants, Clarence Kennon, who had not then escaped from slavery, was present when they reached the main-land; and he described them as being tattered and dirty from head to foot, after their efforts to escape their pursuers.
When the troops under my command occupied Jacksonville, Fla., in March of the following year, we found at the railroad station, packed for departure, a box of papers, some of them valuable. Among them was a letter from this very Hazard to some friend, describing the perils of that adventure, and saying, "If you wish to know hell before your time, go to St Simon's and be hunted ten days by niggers."
I have heard Trowbridge say that not one of his men flinched; and they seemed to take delight in the pursuit, though the weather was very hot, and it was fearfully exhausting.
This was early in August; and the company remained two months at St Simon's, doing picket duty within hearing of the rebel drums, though not another scout ever ventured on the island, to their knowledge. Every Saturday Trowbridge summoned the island people to drill with his soldiers; and they came in hordes, men, women, and children, in every imaginable garb, to the number of one hundred and fifty or two hundred.
His own men were poorly clothed and hardly shod at all; and, as no new supply of uniform was provided, they grew more and more ragged. They got poor rations, and no pay; but they kept up their spirits. Every week or so some of them would go on scouting excursions to the main-land; one scout used to go regularly to his old mother's hut, and keep himself hid under her bed, while she collected for him all the latest news of rebel movements. This man never came back without bringing recruits with him.
At last the news came that Major-General Mitchell had come to relieve General Hunter, and that Brigadier-General Saxton had gone North; and Trowbridge went to Hilton Head in some anxiety to see if he and his men were utterly forgotten. He prepared a report, showing the services and claims of his men, and took it with him. This was early in October, 1862. The first person he met was Brigadier-General Saxton, who informed him that he had authority to organize five thousand colored troops, and that he (Trowbridge) should be senior captain of the first regiment
This was accordingly done; and Company A of the First South Carolina could honestly claim to date its enlistment back to May, 1862, although they never got pay for that period of their service, and their date of muster was November, IS, 1862.
The above facts were written down from the narration of Lieutenant-Colonel Trowbridge, who may justly claim to have been the first white officer to recruit and command colored troops in this war. He was constantly in command of them from May 9, 1862, to February 9, 1866.
Except the Louisiana soldiers mentioned in the Introduction,—of whom no detailed reports have, I think, been published,—my regiment was unquestionably the first mustered into the service of the United States; the first company muster bearing date, November 7, 1862, and the others following in quick succession.
The second regiment in order of muster was the "First Kansas Colored," dating from January 13, 1863. The first enlistment in the Kansas regiment goes back to August 6, 1862; while the earliest technical date of enlistment in my regiment was October 19, 1862, although, as was stated above, one company really dated its organization back to May, 1862. My muster as colonel dates back to November 10, 1862, several months earlier than any other of which I am aware, among colored regiments, except that of Colonel Stafford (First Louisiana Native Guards), September 27, 1862. Colonel Williams, of the "First Kansas Colored," was mustered as lieutenant-colonel on January 13, 1863; as colonel, March 8, 1863. These dates I have (with the other facts relating to the regiment) from Colonel R. J. Hinton, the first officer detailed to recruit it.
To sum up the above facts: my late regiment had unquestioned priority in muster over all but the Louisiana regiments. It had priority over those in the actual organization and term of service of one company. On the other hand, the Kansas regiment had the priority in average date of enlistment, according to the muster-rolls.
The first detachment of the Second South Carolina Volunteers (Colonel Montgomery) went into camp at Port Royal Island, February 23, 1863, numbering one hundred and twenty men. I do not know the date of his muster; it was somewhat delayed, but was probably dated back to about that time.
Recruiting for the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts (colored) began on February 9, 1863, and the first squad went into camp at Readville, Massachusetts, on February 21, 1863, numbering twenty-five men. Colonel Shaw's commission (and probably his muster) was dated April 17, 1863. (Report of Adjutant-General of Massachusetts for 1863, pp. 896-899.)
These were the earliest colored regiments, so far as I know.
APPENDIX C
GENERAL SAXTON’S INSTRUCTIONS
[The following are the instructions under which my regiment was raised. It will be seen how unequivocal were the provisions in respect to pay, upon which so long and weary a contest was waged by our friends in Congress, before the fulfilment of the contract could be secured.]
WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON CITY, D. C.,
August 25, 1862.
GENERAL, Your despatch of the 16th has this moment been received. It is considered by the Department that the instructions given at the time of your appointment were sufficient to enable you to do what you have now requested authority for doing. But in order to place your authority beyond all doubt, you are hereby authorized and instructed,
1st, To organize in any convenient organization, by squads, companies, battalions, regiments, and brigades, or otherwise, colored persons of African descent for volunteer laborers, to a number not exceeding fifty thousand, and muster them into the service of the United States for the term of the war, at a rate of compensation not exceeding five dollars per month for common laborers, and eight dollars per month for mechanical or skilled laborers, and assign them to the Quartermaster's Department, to do and perform such laborer's duty as may be required during the present war, and to be subject to the rules and articles of war.
2d. The laboring forces herein authorized shall, under the order of the General-in-Chief, or of this Department, be detailed by the Quartermaster-General for laboring service with the armies of the United States; and they shall be clothed and subsisted, after enrolment, in the same manner as other persons in the Quartermaster's service.
3d. In view of the small force under your command, and the inability of the Government at the present time to increase it, in order to guard the plantations and settlements occupied by the United States from invasion, and protect the inhabitants thereof from captivity and murder by the enemy, you are also authorized to arm, uniform, equip, and receive into the service of the United States, such number of volunteers of African descent as you may deem expedient, not exceeding five thousand, and may detail officers to instruct them in military drill, discipline, and duty, and to command them. The persons so received into service, and their officers, to be entitled to, and receive, the same pay and rations as are allowed, by law, to volunteers in the service.
4th. You will occupy, if possible, all the islands and plantations heretofore occupied by the Government, and secure and harvest the crops, and cultivate and improve the plantations.
5th. The population of African descent that cultivate the lands and perform the labor of the rebels constitute a large share of their military strength, and enable the white masters to fill the rebel armies, and wage a cruel and murderous war against the people of the Northern States. By reducing the laboring strength of the rebels, their military power will be reduced. You are therefore authorized by every means in your power, to withdraw from the enemy their laboring force and population, and to spare no effort, consistent with civilized warfare, to weaken, harass, and annoy them, and to establish the authority of the Government of the United States within your Department.
6th. You may turn over to the navy any number of colored volunteers that may be required for the naval service.
7th. By recent act of Congress, all men and boys received into the service of the United States, who may have been the slaves of rebel masters, are, with their wives, mothers, and children, declared to be forever free. You and all in your command will so treat and regard them.
Yours truly,
EDWIN M. STANTON,
Secretary of War.
BRIGADIER-GENERAL SAXTON.
APPENDIX
The story of the attempt to cut down the pay of the colored troops is too long, too complicated, and too humiliating, to be here narrated. In the case of my regiment there stood on record the direct pledge of the War Department to General Saxton that their pay should be the same as that of whites. So clear was this that our kind paymaster, Major W. J. Wood, of New Jersey, took upon himself the responsibility of paying the price agreed upon, for five months, till he was compelled by express orders to reduce it from thirteen dollars per month to ten dollars, and from that to seven dollars,—the pay of quartermaster's men and day-laborers. At the same time the "stoppages" from the pay-rolls for the loss of all equipments and articles of clothing remained the same as for all other soldiers, so that it placed the men in the most painful and humiliating condition. Many of them had families to provide for, and between the actual distress, the sense of wrong, the taunts of those who had refused to enlist from the fear of being cheated, and the doubt how much farther the cheat might be carried, the poor fellows were goaded to the utmost. In the Third South Carolina regiment, Sergeant William Walker was shot, by order of court-marital, for leading his company to stack arms before their captain's tent, on the avowed ground that they were released from duty by the refusal of the Government to fulfill its share of the contract. The fear of such tragedies spread a cloud of solicitude over every camp of colored soldiers for more than a year, and the following series of letters will show through what wearisome labors the final triumph of justice was secured. In these labors the chief credit must be given to my admirable Adjutant, Lieutenant G. W. Dewhurst In the matter of bounty justice is not yet obtained; there is a discrimination against those colored soldiers who were slaves on April 19, 1861. Every officer, who through indolence or benevolent design claimed on his muster-rolls that all his men had been free on that day, secured for them the bounty; while every officer who, like myself, obeyed orders and told the truth in each case, saw his men and their families suffer for it, as I have done. A bill to abolish this distinction was introduced by Mr. Wilson at the last session, but failed to pass the House. It is hoped that next winter may remove this last vestige of the weary contest
To show how persistently and for how long a period these claims had to be urged on Congress, I reprint such of my own printed letters on the subject as are now in my possession. There are one or two of which I have no copies. It was especially in the Senate that it was so difficult to get justice done; and our thanks will always be especially due to Hon. Charles Sumner and Hon. Henry Wilson for their advocacy of our simple rights. The records of those sessions will show who advocated the fraud.
To the Editor of the New York Tribune:
SIR,—No one can overstate the intense anxiety with which the officers of colored regiments in this Department are awaiting action from Congress in regard to arrears of pay of their men.
It is not a matter of dollars and cents only; it is a question of common honesty,—whether the United States Government has sufficient integrity for the fulfillment of an explicit business contract.
The public seems to suppose that all required justice will be done by the passage of a bill equalizing the pay of all soldiers for the future. But, so far as my own regiment is concerned, this is but half the question. My men have been nearly sixteen months in the service, and for them the immediate issue is the question of arrears.
They understand the matter thoroughly, if the public do not Every one of them knows that he volunteered under an explicit written assurance from the War Department that he should have the pay of a white soldier. He knows that for five months the regiment received that pay, after which it was cut down from the promised thirteen dollars per month to ten dollars, for some reason to him inscrutable.
He does not know for I have not yet dared to tell the men—that the Paymaster has been already reproved by the Pay Department for fulfilling even in part the pledges of the War Department; that at the next payment the ten dollars are to be further reduced to seven; and that, to crown the whole, all the previous overpay is to be again deducted or "stopped" from the future wages, thus leaving them a little more than a dollar a month for six months to come, unless Congress interfere!
Yet so clear were the terms of the contract that Mr. Solicitor Whiting, having examined the original instructions from the War Department issued to Brigadier-General Saxton, Military Governor, admits to me (under date of December 4, 1863,) that "the faith of the Government was thereby pledged to every officer and soldier enlisted under that call."
He goes on to express the generous confidence that "the pledge will be honorably fulfilled." I observe that every one at the North seems to feel the same confidence, but that, meanwhile, the pledge is unfulfilled. Nothing is said in Congress about fulfilling it. I have not seen even a proposition in Congress to pay the colored soldiers, from date of enlistment, the same pay with white soldiers; and yet anything short of that is an unequivocal breach of contract, so far as this regiment is concerned.
Meanwhile, the land sales are beginning, and there is danger of every foot of land being sold from beneath my soldiers' feet, because they have not the petty sum which Government first promised, and then refused to pay.
The officers' pay comes promptly and fully enough, and this makes the position more embarrassing. For how are we to explain to the men the mystery that Government can afford us a hundred or two dollars a month, and yet must keep back six of the poor thirteen which it promised them? Does it not naturally suggest the most cruel suspicions in regard to us? And yet nothing but their childlike faith in their officers, and in that incarnate soul of honor, General Saxton, has sustained their faith, or kept them patient, thus far.
There is nothing mean or mercenary about these men in general. Convince them that the Government actually needs their money, and they would serve it barefooted and on half-rations, and without a dollar—for a time. But, unfortunately, they see white soldiers beside them, whom they know to be in no way their superiors for any military service, receiving hundreds of dollars for re-enlisting for this impoverished Government, which can only pay seven dollars out of thirteen to its black regiments. And they see, on the other hand, those colored men who refused to volunteer as soldiers, and who have found more honest paymasters than the United States Government, now exulting in well-filled pockets, and able to buy the little homesteads the soldiers need, and to turn the soldiers' families into the streets. Is this a school for self-sacrificing patriotism?
I should not speak thus urgently were it not becoming manifest that there is to be no promptness of action in Congress, even as regards the future pay of colored soldiers,—and that there is especial danger of the whole matter of arrears going by default Should it be so, it will be a repudiation more ungenerous than any which Jefferson Davis advocated or Sydney Smith denounced. It will sully with dishonor all the nobleness of this opening page of history, and fix upon the North a brand of meanness worse than either Southerner or Englishman has yet dared to impute. The mere delay in the fulfillment of this contract has already inflicted untold suffering, has impaired discipline, has relaxed loyalty, and has begun to implant a feeling of sullen distrust in the very regiments whose early career solved the problem of the nation, created a new army, and made peaceful emancipation possible.
T. W. HIGGINSON, Colonel commanding 1st S. C. Vols.
BEAUFORT, S. C., January 22, 1864.
HEADQUARTERS FIRST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS, BEAUFORT, S. C., Sunday, February 14, 1864.
To the Editor of the New York Times:
May I venture to call your attention to the great and cruel injustice which is impending over the brave men of this regiment?
They have been in military service for over a year, having volunteered, every man, without a cent of bounty, on the written pledge of the War Department that they should receive the same pay and rations with white soldiers.
This pledge is contained in the written instructions of Brigadier-General Saxton, Military Governor, dated August 25, 1862. Mr. Solicitor Whiting, having examined those instructions, admits to me that "the faith of the Government was thereby pledged to every officer and soldier under that call."
Surely, if this fact were understood, every man in the nation would see that the Government is degraded by using for a year the services of the brave soldiers, and then repudiating the contract under which they were enlisted. This is what will be done, should Mr. Wilson's bill, legalizing the back pay of the army, be defeated.
We presume too much on the supposed ignorance of these men. I have never yet found a man in my regiment so stupid as not to know when he was cheated. If fraud proceeds from Government itself, so much the worse, for this strikes at the foundation of all rectitude, all honor, all obligation.
Mr. Senator Fessenden said, in the debate on Mr. Wilson's bill, January 4, that the Government was not bound by the unauthorized promises of irresponsible recruiting officers. But is the Government itself an irresponsible recruiting officer? and if men have volunteered in good faith on the written assurances of the Secretary of War, is not Congress bound, in all decency, either to fulfill those pledges or to disband the regiments?
Mr. Senator Doolittle argued in the same debate that white soldiers should receive higher pay than black ones, because the families of the latter were often supported by Government What an astounding statement of fact is this! In the white regiment in which I was formerly an officer (the Massachusetts Fifty-First) nine tenths of the soldiers' families, in addition to the pay and bounties, drew regularly their "State aid." Among my black soldiers, with half-pay and no bounty, not a family receives any aid. Is there to be no limit, no end to the injustice we heap upon this unfortunate people? Cannot even the fact of their being in arms for the nation, liable to die any day in its defence, secure them ordinary justice? Is the nation so poor, and so utterly demoralized by its pauperism, that after it has had the lives of these men, it must turn round to filch six dollars of the monthly pay which the Secretary of War promised to their widows? It is even so, if the excuses of Mr. Fressenden and Mr. Doolittle are to be accepted by Congress and by the people.
Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
T, W. HIGGINSON, Colonel commanding 1st S. C. Volunteers.
NEW VICTORIES AND OLD WRONGS To the Editors of the Evening Post:
On the 2d of July, at James Island, S. C., a battery was taken by three regiments, under the following circumstances:
The regiments were the One Hundred and Third New York (white), the Thirty-Third United States (formerly First South Carolina Volunteers), and the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts, the two last being colored. They marched at one A. M., by the flank, in the above order, hoping to surprise the battery. As usual the rebels were prepared for them, and opened upon them as they were deep in one of those almost impassable Southern marshes. The One Hundred and Third New York, which had previously been in twenty battles, was thrown into confusion; the Thirty-Third United States did better, being behind; the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts being in the rear, did better still. All three formed in line, when Colonel Hartwell, commanding the brigade, gave the order to retreat. The officer commanding the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts, either misunderstanding the order, or hearing it countermanded, ordered his regiment to charge. This order was at once repeated by Major Trowbridge, commanding the Thirty-Third United States, and by the commander of the One Hundred and Third New York, so that the three regiments reached the fort in reversed order. The color-bearers of the Thirty-Third United States and of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts had a race to be first in, the latter winning. The One Hundred and Third New York entered the battery immediately after.
These colored regiments are two of the five which were enlisted in South Carolina and Massachusetts, under the written pledge of the War Department that they should have the same pay and allowances as white soldiers. That pledge has been deliberately broken by the War Department, or by Congress, or by both, except as to the short period, since last New-Year's Day. Every one of those killed in this action from these two colored regiments under a fire before which the veterans of twenty battles recoiled died defrauded by the Government of nearly one half his petty pay.
Mr. Fessenden, who defeated in the Senate the bill for the fulfillment of the contract with these soldiers, is now Secretary of the Treasury. Was the economy of saving six dollars per man worth to the Treasury the ignominy of the repudiation?
Mr. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, on his triumphal return to his constituents, used to them this language: "He had no doubt whatever as to the final result of the present contest between liberty and slavery. The only doubt he had was whether the nation had yet been satisfactorily chastised for their cruel oppression of a harmless and long-suffering race." Inasmuch as it was Mr. Stevens himself who induced the House of Representatives, most unexpectedly to all, to defeat the Senate bill for the fulfillment of the national contract with these soldiers, I should think he had excellent reasons for the doubt.
Very respectfully,
T. W. HIGGINSON, Colonel 1st S. C. Vols (now 33d U. S.) July 10, 1864.
To the Editor of the New York Tribune:
No one can possibly be so weary of reading of the wrongs done by Government toward the colored soldiers as am I of writing about them. This is my only excuse for intruding on your columns again.
By an order of the War Department, dated August 1, 1864, it is at length ruled that colored soldiers shall be paid the full pay of soldiers from date of enlistment, provided they were free on April 19, 1861,—not otherwise; and this distinction is to be noted on the pay-rolls. In other words, if one half of a company escaped from slavery on April 18, 1861, they are to be paid thirteen dollars per month and allowed three dollars and a half per month for clothing. If the other half were delayed two days, they receive seven dollars per month and are allowed three dollars per month for precisely the same articles of clothing. If one of the former class is made first sergeant, Us pay is put up to twenty-one dollars per month; but if he escaped two days later, his pay is still estimated at seven dollars.
It had not occurred to me that anything could make the payrolls of these regiments more complicated than at present, or the men more rationally discontented. I had not the ingenuity to imagine such an order. Yet it is no doubt in accordance with the spirit, if not with the letter, of the final bill which was adopted by Congress under the lead of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens.
The ground taken by Mr. Stevens apparently was that the country might honorably save a few dollars by docking the promised pay of those colored soldiers whom the war had made free. But the Government should have thought of this before it made the contract with these men and received their services. When the War Department instructed Brigadier-General Saxton, August 25, 1862, to raise five regiments of negroes in South Carolina, it was known very well that the men so enlisted had only recently gained their freedom. But the instructions said: "The persons so received into service, and their officers, to be entitled to and receive the same pay and rations as are allowed by law to volunteers in the service." Of this passage Mr. Solicitor Whiting wrote to me: "I have no hesitation in saying that the faith of the Government was thereby pledged to every officer and soldier enlisted under that call." Where is that faith of the Government now?
The men who enlisted under the pledge were volunteers, every one; they did not get their freedom by enlisting; they had it already. They enlisted to serve the Government, trusting in its honor. Now the nation turns upon them and says: Your part of the contract is fulfilled; we have had your services. If you can show that you had previously been free for a certain length of time, we will fulfil the other side of the contract. If not, we repudiate it Help yourselves, if you can.
In other words, a freedman (since April 19, 1861) has no rights which a white man is bound to respect. He is incapable of making a contract No man is bound by a contract made with him. Any employer, following the example of the United States Government, may make with him a written agreement receive his services, and then withhold the wages. He has no motive to honest industry, or to honesty of any kind. He is virtually a slave, and nothing else, to the end of time.
Under this order, the greater part of the Massachusetts colored regiments will get their pay at last and be able to take their wives and children out of the almshouses, to which, as Governor Andrew informs us, the gracious charity of the nation has consigned so many. For so much I am grateful. But toward my regiment, which had been in service and under fire, months before a Northern colored soldier was recruited, the policy of repudiation has at last been officially adopted. There is no alternative for the officers of South Carolina regiments but to wait for another session of Congress, and meanwhile, if necessary, act as executioners for those soldiers who, like Sergeant Walker, refuse to fulfil their share of a contract where the Government has openly repudiated the other share. If a year's discussion, however, has at length secured the arrears of pay for the Northern colored regiments, possibly two years may secure it for the Southern.
T. W. HIGGINSON, Colonel 1st S. C. Vols. (now 33d V. S.)
August 12, 1864.
To the Editor of the New York Tribune:
SIR,—An impression seems to prevail in the newspapers that the lately published "opinion" of Attorney-General Bates (dated in July last) at length secures justice to the colored soldiers in respect to arrears of pay. This impression is a mistake.
That "opinion" does indeed show that there never was any excuse for refusing them justice; but it does not, of itself, secure justice to them.
It logically covers the whole ground, and was doubtless intended to do so; but technically it can only apply to those soldiers who were free at the commencement of the war. For it was only about these that the Attorney-General was officially consulted.
Under this decision the Northern colored regiments have already got their arrears of pay,—and those few members of the Southern regiments who were free on April 19, 1861. But in the South Carolina regiments this only increases the dissatisfaction among the remainder, who volunteered under the same pledge of full pay from the War Department, and who do not see how the question of their status at some antecedent period can affect an express contract If, in 1862, they were free enough to make a bargain with, they were certainly free enough to claim its fulfilment.
The unfortunate decision of Mr. Solicitor Whiting, under which all our troubles arose, is indeed superseded by the reasoning of the Attorney-General. But unhappily that does not remedy the evil, which is already embodied in an Act of Congress, making the distinction between those who were and those who were not free on April 19, 1861.
The question is, whether those who were not free at the breaking out of the war are still to be defrauded, after the Attorney-General has shown that there is no excuse for defrauding them?
I call it defrauding, because it is not a question of abstract justice, but of the fulfilment of an express contract
I have never met with a man, whatever might be his opinions as to the enlistment of colored soldiers, who did not admit that if they had volunteered under the direct pledge of full pay from the War Department, they were entitled to every cent of it. That these South Carolina regiments had such direct pledge is undoubted, for it still exists in writing, signed by the Secretary of War, and has never been disputed.
It is therefore the plain duty of Congress to repeal the law which discriminates between different classes of colored soldiers, or at least so to modify it as to secure the fulfilment of actual contracts. Until this is done the nation is still disgraced. The few thousand dollars in question are nothing compared with the absolute wrong done and the discredit it has brought, both here and in Europe, upon the national name.
T. W. HIGGINSON,
Late Col. 1st S. C. Vols. (now 33d U. S. C. T.) NEWPORT, R. I, December 8, 1864.
PETITION
"To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled:
"The undersigned respectfully petitions for the repeal of so much of Section IV. of the Act of Congress making appropriations for the army and approved July 4, 1864, as makes a distinction, in respect to pay due, between those colored soldiers who were free on or before April 19, 1861, and those who were not free until a later date;
"Or at least that there may be such legislation as to secure the fulfillment of pledges of full pay from date of enlistment, made by direct authority of the War Department to the colored soldiers of South Carolina, on the faith of which pledges they enlisted.
"THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, Late Colonel 1st S. C. Vols. (now 33d U. S. C. Vols.)
"NEWPORT, R. L, December 9, 1864."
APPENDIX
HEADQUARTERS 33d UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS, LATE 1ST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS,
MORRIS ISLAND, S. C.,
February 9, 1866. GENERAL ORDERS, No. 1.
COMRADES,—The hour is at hand when we must separate forever, and nothing can ever take from us the pride we feel, when we look back upon the history of the First South Carolina Volunteers,—the first black regiment that ever bore arms in defence of freedom on the continent of America.
On the ninth day of May, 1862, at which time there were nearly four millions of your race in a bondage sanctioned by the laws of the land, and protected by our flag,—on that day, in the face of floods of prejudice, that wellnigh deluged every avenue to manhood and true liberty, you came forth to do battle for your country and your kindred. For long and weary months without pay, or even the privilege of being recognized as soldiers, you labored on, only to be disbanded and sent to your homes, without even a hope of reward. And when our country, necessitated by the deadly struggle with armed traitors, finally granted you the opportunity again to come forth in defence of the nation's life, the alacrity with which you responded to the call gave abundant evidence of your readiness to strike a manly blow for the liberty of your race. And from that little band of hopeful, trusting, and brave men, who gathered at Camp Saxton, on Port Royal Island, in the fall of 1862, amidst the terrible prejudices that then surrounded us, has grown an army of a hundred and forty thousand black soldiers, whose valor and heroism has won for your race a name which will live as long as the undying pages of history shall endure; and by whose efforts, united with those of the white man, armed rebellion has been conquered, the millions of bondmen have been emancipated, and the fundamental law of the land has been so altered as to remove forever the possibility of human slavery being re-established within the borders of redeemed America. The flag of our fathers, restored to its rightful significance, now floats over every foot of our territory, from Maine to California, and beholds only freemen! The prejudices which formerly existed against you are wellnigh rooted out
Soldiers, you have done your duty, and acquitted yourselves like men, who, actuated by such ennobling motives, could not fail; and as the result of your fidelity and obedience, you have won your freedom. And O, how great the reward!
It seems fitting to me that the last hours of our existence as a regiment should be passed amidst the unmarked graves of your comrades,—at Fort Wagner. Near you rest the bones of Colonel Shaw, buried by an enemy's hand, in the same grave with his black soldiers, who fell at his side; where, in future, your children's children will come on pilgrimages to do homage to the ashes of those that fell in this glorious struggle.
The flag which was presented to us by the Rev. George B. Cheever and his congregation, of New York City, on the first of January, 1863,—the day when Lincoln's immortal proclamation of freedom was given to the world,—and which you have borne so nobly through the war, is now to be rolled up forever, and deposited in our nation's capital. And while there it shall rest, with the battles in which you have participated inscribed upon its folds, it will be a source of pride to us all to remember that it has never been disgraced by a cowardly faltering in the hour of danger or polluted by a traitor's touch.
Now that you are to lay aside your arms, and return to the peaceful avocations of life, I adjure you, by the associations and history of the past, and the love you bear for your liberties, to harbor no feelings of hatred toward your former masters, but to seek in the paths of honesty, virtue, sobriety, and industry, and by a willing obedience to the laws of the land, to grow up to the full stature of American citizens. The church, the school-house, and the right forever to be free are now secured to you, and every prospect before you is full of hope and encouragement. The nation guarantees to you full protection and justice, and will require from you in return the respect for the laws and orderly deportment which will prove to every one your right to all the privileges of freemen.
To the officers of the regiment I would say, your toils are ended, your mission is fulfilled, and we separate forever. The fidelity, patience, and patriotism with which you have discharged your duties, to your men and to your country, entitle you to a far higher tribute than any words of thankfulness which I can give you from the bottom of my heart You will find your reward in the proud conviction that the cause for which you have battled so nobly has been crowned with abundant success.
Officers and soldiers of the Thirty-Third United States Colored Troops, once the First South Carolina Volunteers, I bid you all farewell!
By order of Lt.-Col. C. T. TROWBRIDGE, commanding Regiment
E. W. HYDE, Lieutenant and Acting Adjutant.
INDEX
Index
Aiken, William, GOT., 166
Aiken, South Carolina, 249
Allston, Adam, Corp., 103
Andrew, J. A., Gov., 29, 215, 216, sends Emancipation
Proclamation to Higginson, 85
Bates, Edward, 275
Battle of the Hundred Pines, 95, 104
Beach, H. A., Lt, 257, 258
Beaufort, South Carolina, 33, 34, 38, 106, 142, 215 Higginson visits, 64 Negro troops march through, 74 picket station near, 134 residents visit camp, 147 Negro troops patrol, 219
Beauregard, P. G.T., Gen., 45, 73
Beecher, H. R., Rev., 241
Bell, Louis, Col., 225
Bennett, W. T., Gen., 249, 255
Bezzard, James, 95
Bigelow, L. F., Lt, 28
Billings, L., Lt.-Col., 255
Bingham, J. M., Lt, 170, 257
Brannan, J. M, Gen., 107
Brisbane, W. H., 60
Bronson, William, Sgt, 260
Brown, A. B., Lt, 258
Brown, John, 29, 45, 61, 76
Brown, John (Negro), 262
Brown, York, 262 Bryant, J. E., Capt, 220
Budd, Lt, 83
Burnside, A. E., Gen., 54, 55
Butler, B. F., Gen., 27
Calhoun, J. C., Capt., 150 Camplife, 30 evening activities, 36-39, 44-49 Casualties, 89
Chamberlin, G. B., Lt., 177, 257 Chamberlin, Mrs., 229
Charleston, South Carolina, attacked, 137, 143, 150 Negro troops in, 249 Charleston and Savannah Railway, 163
Cheever, G. B., Rev., 278
Child, A. Lt, 258
Christmas, 55, 56
Clark, Capt, 84, 89, 102
Clifton, Capt, 100, 101
Clinton, J. B., Lt, 165
Colors, Stands of, 56, 60
Confederates, 35 use spies, 91, 93 attack Negro troops, 86-87, 100-102 threaten to burn Jacksonville, 110 civilians fear Negro troops, 116 retreat, 126-127,142
Connecticut Regiment, Sixth, 122, 124, 126 Seventh, 93
Corwin, B. R., MaJ., 120, 126
Crandall, W. B., Surg., 255
Crum, Simon, Corp., 249
Cushman, James, 241
Danilson, W. H., Maj., 93, 256,
Davis, C. I., Lt., 257
Davis., R. M., Lt., 259
Davis, W. W. H., Gen., 164
Department of the South, 15, 80 quiet, 106 colored troops in, 137
Desertions, 62
Dewhurst, G. W., Adjt, 256
Dewhurst, Mrs., 229
Discipline, need for, 29 Negroes accept, 39
Dolly, George, Capt., 172, 256
Doolittle, J. R., 271
Drill, of Negroes, 46, 51, 245 whites, 64-65
Drinking, absence of, 58
Duncan, Lt. Com., 109, 111
Dupont, S. F., Admiral, 15, 82, 91, 99, 108, 137
Dutch, Capt., 166
Edisto expedition, 163-176, 214
Education, desire for, 48
Emancipation Proclamation, 65 read, 60 sent to Higginson, 85
Fernandina, Florida, 84, 91, 104
Fessenden, W. P., 271, 272
Finnegan, Gen., 115
Fisher, J., Lt., 257
Florida, 221 men under Higginson, 35 slaves know about Lincoln, 46 refugees from, 49 Foraging, 99, 104, 117, 120 restraint in, 96-97 in Florida, 221
Fowler, J. H., Chap., 59, 119, 221,
Fremont, J. C., Gen., 46, 61
French, J., Rev., 60, 123
Furman, J. T., Lt, 258
Gage, F. D., Mrs., 61
Garrison, W. L., 236
Gaston, William, Lt., 257
Gilmore, Q. A., Gen., 176, 224, 226, 228 writes on Charleston, 163 approves Edisto expedition, 164
Goldsborough, Commodore, 231,
Goodell, J. B., Lt., 28
Goodrich, F. S., Lt., 258, 259
Gould, E. Corp., 261
Gould, F. M., Lt, 258
Greeley, Horace, 164
Greene, Sgt, 125
Hallett, Capt, 80, 81, 261
Hallowell, E. N., Gen., 216, 230,
Hamburg, South Carolina, 249
Hartwell, A. S., Gen., 272
Hawks, J. M., Surg., 256
Hawley, J. R., Gen., 93,102,114
Hayne, H. E., Sgt., 249
Hazard, Miles, 262
Heasley, A, Capt., 220, 256
Heron, Charles, 126
Hilton Head, 32 Higginson visits, 106 troops on duty at, 214
Hinton, R. J., Col., 264
Holden, Lt, 126
Hooper, C. W., Capt., 154, 226, 256, 257, 258
Hospital, camp, 56, 63
Howard University, 250
Hughes, Lt. Com., 91, 93, 94
Hunter, David., Gen.-28, 35, 40, 62, 80, 124, 130, 131, 138, 164, 260, 261, 263 takes Negro sgt to N.Y., 73 visits camp, 76 speaks to Negro troops, 76 Higginson confers with, 106 orders evacuation of Jacksonville, 107 attacks Charleston, 137 goes North, 150
Hyde, E. W., Lt, 258, 259, 279
Hyde, W. H., Lt, 89, 257
Jackson, A. W., Capt, 87, 89, 256, 257, 258
Jacksonville, Florida Confederates threaten to burn, 110 Higginson's men reach, 112-113 description of, 114-115 order to evacuate, 130 attempts to bum, 130-131
James, William, Capt., 96,165,256
Jekyll Island, 83
Johnston, J. F., Lt, 257
Jones, Lt., 89
Kansas, 29, 43, 64
Kemble, Fanny, 82, 261
Kennon, Clarence, Cpl., 262
King, T. B., 82
Lambkin, Prince, Cpl., 45, 116
Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, 56
Lincoln, Abraham, 46, 238
London Spectator, 76
Long, Thomas, CpL, 240
Mclntyre, H., Sgt., 85, 86, 239
Maine, 43
Maine Regiment, Eighth, 75, 123, 124, 126
Manning, B. H., Lt, 259
Maroons, 235, 237
Massachusetts Regiment, First, 139 Fifty-Fourth, 27, 215, 232
Meeker, L., Maj., 122, 126
Merriam, E. C., Capt, 256, 257
Metcalf, L. W., Capt, 85, 87, 96, 220, 256
Miller family, 234
Minor, T. T, Surg., 87, 256
Mitchell, O. M., Gen., 263
Montgomery, James, Col., 114, 120, 130, 264 enters Jacksonville, 112 river raid led by, 120, 129, 164
Moses, Acting Master, 83
Mulattoes, 33, 42, 234 pass for white, 49-50
Music, troops play, 47, 187-213
Negro soldiers visited, 30 work at night, 38-39 as sentinels, 42, 66-69 honor and fidelity, 66 march to Beaufort, 74-75 conduct under fire, 86-87, 100-101, 128-129 treatment of whites by, 116 on picket duty, 133 on raid up Edisto, 167-176 appraisal of, 231-247 from North and South compared,
Negro spirituals, 187-213
Negroes, traits of, 66, 69-71 physical condition of, 72, 246 set free by Higginson's men, 166-169
New Hampshire Regiment, Fourth, 139, 225
New Year's celebration, 55, 56, 57-61
New York, 34 Officers, white, 51
O'Neil, J. B., Lt., 257
Osborne, Lt., 220
Parker, C. E., Lt., 257
Parker, N. B., Capt., 256, 257, 258
Parsons, William, 89
Phillips, Wendell, 118, 236
Pomeroy, J., Lt, 257
Port Royal, 82, 83, 124 capture of, 164 as winter camp, 177 new camp at, 215 objective of Sherman, 247
Ramsay, Allan, 209
Randolph, W. J., Capt, 120, 256
Rebels. See Confederates Religious activities, 47, 48, 240-241
Rivers, Prince, Sgt., 61,75,245,249 qualities of, 73, 78 plants colors, 99
Robbins, E. W., Capt, 256, 257,
Roberts, Samuel, 231
Rogers, J. S., Capt, 103, 173, 250, 256
Rogers, Seth, Surg., 89, 103, 255
Rust, J. D., Col., 124, 125,126,131
Sammis, Col., 49
St. Simon's Island, 83, 84
Sampson, W. W., Capt, 170, 256,
Savannah, Georgia, 115, 249
Saxton, M. W., Lt., 258
Saxton, Rufus, Gen., 29, 55, 58, 59, 61,70,76,80,88,102,108, 143, 164, 216, 224, 225, 229, 232, 235, 261, 263, 267, 269, 270, 273 offers command to Higginson, 78 Higginson reports to, 33 issues proclamation, 34 receives recruits, 40 speaks on New Year's program, Negroes idolize, 66 speaks to troops, 76 initiates plans for Shaw monument, 217 Christmas party, 219
Searles, J. M., Lt., 259
Sears, Capt., 94
Selvage, J. M., Lt, 258
Serrell, E. W., Col., 260
Seward, W. H., 238
Seymour, T., Gen., 132, 228
Shaw, R. G., Col., 170, 264, 278 camp named for, 215 Higginson meets, 216 killed, 217
Sherman, W. T., Gen., 170, 247
Showalter, Lt.-Col, 128
"Siege of Charleston," 163
Simmons, London, Cpl., 245
Slavery, effect of, 38, 244
Smalls, Robert, Capt, 33, 80
Songs, Negro, 136, 187-213
South Carolina, 29 men under Higginson, 35, 40 man reads Emancipation Proclamation, 59-60
South Carolina Volunteers, First, 27, 237 order to Florida countermanded, 225 becomes Thirty-third U.S. Colored Troops, 248South Carolina Volunteers, Second, 27, 126, 264
Sprague, A. B. R., Col., 28
Stafford, Col., 264
Stanton, E. M., 266
Steedman, Capt, 130
Stevens, Capt, 83
Stevens, Thaddeus, 272, 273
Stickney, Judge, 61, 106, 114
Stockdale, W, Lt, 257
Stone, H. A., Lt, 257
Strong, J. D., Lt.-Col., 80, 121, 126, 172, 174, 175, 255
Stuard, E. S., Surg., 256
Sumner, Charles, 268
Sunderland, Col., 113
Sutton, Robert, Sgt, 61, 88, 94, 95, 188 character of, 78-79 leads men, 85-86 wounded, 90 exhibits slave jail, 97-98 court-martialed, 104
Thibadeau, J. H., Capt, 257
Thompson, J. M., Capt, 256, 257
Tirrell, A. H., Lt, 258
Tobacco, use of, 58
Tonking, J. H., Capt, 256
Trowbridge, C. T., Lt-Col., 164, 167, 169, 175, 226, 231, 235, 243, 245, 249, 255, 256, 260, 262, 263, 272, 277-279 commands "Planter," 80,103 and men construct Ft Montgomery, 121 on river raid, 165
Trowbridge, J. A., Lt, 257, 258
Tubman, Harriet 37 Twichell, J. F., Lt-CoL, 123, 126 Virginia
Vendross, Robert, Cpl., 249
Walker, G. D., Capt, 257
Walker, William, Sgt., 267, 274
War Department, 40, 93
Washington, William, 44
Watson, Lt., 109
Webster, Daniel, 27
Weld, S. M., 216
West, H. C., Lt, 258
West, J. B., Lt, 257, 258
White, E. P., Lt, 257
White, N. S, Capt, 256, 258, 259
Whiting, William, 269, 270, 274, 275
Whitney, H. A., Maj, 170, 220, 255, 256
Wiggins, Cyrus, 250
Williams, Harry, Sgt., 220
Williams, Col., 264
Wilson, Henry, 268, 271
Wilson family, 233
Wood, H., Lt, 258, 25?
Wood, W. J., Maj., 267
Woodstock, Georgia, 95
Wright, Gen., 107, 112
Wright, Fanny, 234
Yellow Fever, fear of, 74
Zachos, Dr., 41