Army Life in a Black Regiment - Higginson

Army Life in a Black Regiment

By

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Originally published 1869

Illustrated edition

Susie King Taylor Center for Jubilee

2023

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment 4

Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), by Colonel Higginson. 42

Wartime Letters of Seth Rogers, 33d USCT.. 382

Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War 489

Appendix: Proposed Gold Medal for Colored Soldiers in the Civil War 519

Introduction

In 2023, the Susie King Taylor Center for Jubilee, led by Patt Gunn and Rosalyn Rouse, spearheaded an effort to change Calhoun Square in Savannah to Susie King Taylor Square.  Susie King Taylor Square is an important landmark honoring the first Black female nurse in the Union Army, civil rights activist, community leader, and education.

Susie King Taylor was a nurse in the First South Caroline Colored Infantry Regiment, later designated the 33rd US Colored Troop Infantry Regiment.  The regiment was founded and commanded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  It was one of the first Black regiments formed in the Civil War.

Its distinguished service was documented in a memoir by Colonel Higginson, first published in 1869.

In honor of the renaming of Calhoun Square to Susie King Taylor Square, we are producing illustrated editions of Susie King Taylor’s book, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33D United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, and Colonel Higginson’s book, Army Life in a Black Regiment.

More than 200,000 African Americans served in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War.  They helped not only to preserve the Union, but contributed mightily to the ending of slavery and forever proving the patriotism of African Americans.

These volumes are lovingly dedicated to their memory.

This document is also produced in support of an initiative to create a Congressional Gold Medal in honor of African American soldiers who served in the Civil War.  The legislative initiative in the Senate was introduced by Senator Cory Booker and in the House of Representatives by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.  Here is a link to the legislation: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/273/text?s=1&r=1&q=%7B%22search%22%3A%22colored+troops%22%7D

1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored) From Wikipedia, [edited]

The 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored) was a Union Army regiment during the American Civil War, formed by General Rufus Saxton. It was composed of escaped slaves from South Carolina and Florida. It was one of the first black regiments in the Union Army.[a]

History

Department of the South staff officer James D. Fessenden was heavily involved in efforts to recruit volunteers for the 1st South Carolina. Although it saw some combat, the regiment was not involved in any of the war's major battles. As would be true of all future regiments composed of black men, the officers of the 1st South Carolina were white. A proclamation by Confederate President Jefferson Davis had ordered that members of the regiment would not be treated as prisoners of war if taken in battle: The enlisted men were to be delivered to state authorities to be auctioned off or otherwise treated as runaway slaves, while the white officers were to be hanged.[2][3]

"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

Frederick Douglass

USCT Beaufort, South Carolina

The regiment was particularly effective at conducting raids along the coast of Florida and Georgia, due to the men’s familiarity with the terrain.[4] For example, as early as November 1862, men from Company A of the regiment under the command of Lt. Colonel Oliver T. Beard conducted raids on saltworks in northeast Florida.[5]

The regiment was a step in the evolution of Union thinking towards the escaped slaves who crossed their lines. Initially they were returned to their owners. Next, they were considered contraband and employed as laborers. Finally, the legal fiction that they were property was abandoned and they were allowed to enlist in the Army, although in segregated units commanded by white officers. Harriet Tubman served with these men as a cook, nurse, spy, and scout.

Susie King Taylor, whose husband and other relatives fought with the regiment, also served as a laundress and nurse for the men from August 1862 until mustering out on February 9, 1866.[6] As a holdover from the "contraband" days, black privates were paid $10 per month, the rate for laborers, rather than the $13 paid to white privates. The men served as the precedent for the over 170,000 "colored" troops who followed them into the Union Army.

Officers

The regiment’s first commander was Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister, author and abolitionist. He wrote of his men, “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.”

During the war Higginson documented the Gullah dialect spoken by some of the men and made a record of the spirituals that they sang. Higginson later wrote a book about his experiences titled Army Life in a Black Regiment.[1]

Major Seth Rogers was regimental surgeon and wrote extensive wartime letters. His nephew, Captain James Seth Rogers, previously of the 51st Massachusetts, was captain of Company B.[7]

33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment

Redesignation

The regiment was re-designated the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment on February 8, 1864.

Note

1.     The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, whose exploits are memorialized in the film Glory, was formed afterwards and drew from free Northern blacks.

References

1. "Army Life in a Black Regiment, By Thomas Wentworth Higginson".

2. Nicolay, John G.; Hay, John (1890). Abraham Lincoln: A History, Volume VI. New York: The Century Co. pp. 470-473.

3. "Jefferson Davis's Proclamation Regarding Captured Black Soldiers, December 23, 1862". Freedmen & Southern Society Project. 10 December 2017.

4. "The Color of Bravery". American Battlefield Trust. July 29, 2013.

5. Winsboro, Irvin D. S. (Summer 2007). "Give Them Their Due: A Reassessment of African Americans and Union Military Service in Florida during the Civil War". The Journal of African American History. 92 (3): 330.

6. Taylor, Susie King (1902). Reminiscences of my life in camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops late 1st S.C. Volunteers. Boston.

7. "War-Time Letters From Seth Rogers, M.D. Surgeon of the First South Carolina Afterwards the Thirty-third U.S.C.T. 1862-1863".

Other sources

·         Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (W. W. Norton & Company 2008).

·         Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1869.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

From Wikipedia [edited]

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 – May 9, 1911) was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, politician, and soldier. He was active in abolitionism in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864.[1] Following the war, he wrote about his experiences with African American soldiers and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised peoples. He is also remembered as a mentor to poet Emily Dickinson.

Early life and education

Higginson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 22, 1823. He was a descendant of Francis Higginson, a Puritan minister and immigrant to the colony of Massachusetts Bay.[2] His father, Stephen Higginson (born in Salem, Massachusetts, November 20, 1770; died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 20, 1834), was a merchant and philanthropist in Boston and steward of Harvard University from 1818 until 1834. His grandfather, also named Stephen Higginson, was a member of the Continental Congress. He was a distant cousin of Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a great grandson of his grandfather.[3] A third great grandfather was New Hampshire Lieutenant-Governor John Wentworth.[4]

Education and abolitionism

Higginson entered Harvard College at age thirteen and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at sixteen.[5] He graduated in 1841 at age 18 and taught at a private school for four months, but he detested it and became "a tutor of the three children of his Brookline cousin, Stephen Higginson Perkins".[6][2] After that, in 1843, he became "a nonmatriculated student at Harvard".[7] In 1842 he became engaged to Mary Elizabeth Channing.

He then studied theology at the Harvard Divinity School. In 1845, at the end of his first year of divinity training, he withdrew from the school to turn his attention to the abolitionist cause. He spent the subsequent year studying and, following the lead of Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, fighting against the expected war with Mexico. Believing that war was only an excuse to expand slavery and the Slave Power, Higginson wrote antiwar poems and went door to door to get signatures for antiwar petitions. With the split of the antislavery movement in the 1840s, Higginson subscribed to the Disunion Abolitionists, who believed that as long as slave states remained a part of the Union, the Constitution could never be amended to ban slavery.

Higginson and children

Marriage and family

Higginson re-entered divinity school, and after graduating in 1847 and being ordained as the minister of a Newburyport Unitarian church (see below), he married Mary Channing.[8] Mary was the daughter of Dr. Walter Channing, a pioneer in the field of obstetrics and gynecology who taught at Harvard University, the niece of Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, and the sister of Henry David Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing. Higginson and Mary Channing had no children but raised Margaret Fuller Channing, the eldest daughter of Ellen Fuller and Ellery Channing. Ellen was the sister of  the Transcendentalist and feminist author, Margaret Fuller.[9] Mary Channing died in 1877. Two years later Higginson married Mary Potter Thacher, with whom he had two daughters, one of whom survived into adulthood.[10][

Higginson was also related to Harriet Higginson, whose Wooddale, Illinois, home was the first commission of famed architect Bertrand Goldberg in 1934.

Career

Ministry

Having graduated from divinity school, Higginson was called as pastor at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a Unitarian church known for its liberal Christianity.[11][12] He supported the Essex County Antislavery Society and criticized the poor treatment of workers at Newburyport cotton factories. Additionally, the young minister invited Theodore Parker and fugitive slave William Wells Brown to speak at the church, and in sermons he condemned northern apathy towards slavery. In his role as board member of the Newburyport Lyceum and against the wishes of the majority of the board, Higginson brought Ralph Waldo Emerson to speak.[13] Higginson proved too radical for the congregation and resigned in 1849.[14][15] After that, he lectured on the Lyceum circuit, initially receiving about $15 for each talk (Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson could command $25).[16]

Politics and militant abolitionism

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The Compromise of 1850 brought new challenges and new ambitions for the unemployed minister. He ran as the Free Soil Party candidate for Massachusetts's 3rd congressional district in 1850 but lost. Higginson called upon citizens to uphold God's law and disobey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

He joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization whose purpose was to protect fugitive slaves from pursuit and capture.[15] His joining of the group was inspired by the arrest and trial of the free black Frederick Jenkins, known as Shadrach. Abolitionists helped him escape to Canada. He participated with Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker in the attempt at freeing Thomas Sims, a Georgia slave who had escaped to Boston. In 1854, when the escaped Anthony Burns was threatened with extradition under the Fugitive Slave Act, Higginson led a small group who stormed the federal courthouse in Boston with battering rams, axes, cleavers, and revolvers.[5] They could not prevent Burns from being taken back to the South. Higginson received a saber slash on his chin; he wore the scar proudly for the rest of his life.

In 1852, Higginson became pastor of the Free Church in Worcester. During his tenure, Higginson not only supported abolition, but also temperance, labor rights, and rights of women.

Returning from a voyage to Europe for the health of his wife, who had an unknown illness, Higginson organized a group of men on behalf of the New England Emigration Aid Company to use peaceful means as tensions rose after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The act divided the region into the Kansas and Nebraska territories, whose residents would separately vote on whether to allow slavery within each jurisdiction's borders. Both abolitionist and pro-slavery supporters began to migrate to the territories. After his return, Higginson worked to keep activism aroused in New England by speechmaking, fundraising, and helping to organize the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. He returned to the Kansas territory as an agent of the National Kansas Aid Committee, working to rebuild morale and distribute supplies to settlers. Higginson became convinced that abolition could not be attained by peaceful methods.[17][18]

As sectional conflict escalated, he continued to support disunion abolitionism, organizing the Worcester Disunion Convention in 1857. The convention asserted abolition as its primary goal, even if it would lead the country to war.

John Brown

Higginson was a fervent supporter of John Brown and is remembered as one of the "Secret Six" abolitionists who helped Brown raise money and procure supplies for his intended slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. When Brown was captured, Higginson tried to raise money for a trial defense and made plans to help the leader escape from prison, though he was ultimately unsuccessful. Other members of the Secret Six fled to Canada or elsewhere after Brown's capture, but Higginson never fled, despite his involvement being common knowledge. Higginson was never arrested or called to testify.[15]

In 1879, Higginson was elected to represent Cambridge's first and fifth wards in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.[19] He was re-elected in 1880.[20] He made another run for U.S. House of Representatives in 1888 as a Democrat, but was defeated by Nathaniel P. Banks.

Woman's rights activism

Higginson was one of leading male advocates of women's rights during the decade before the Civil War. In 1853, he addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in support of a petition asking that women be allowed to vote on ratification of the new constitution. Published as "Woman and Her Wishes,"[21] the address was used for many years in a women's rights tract,[22] as was an 1859 article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly,[23] "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"[24] A close friend and supporter of women's rights leader Lucy Stone, he performed the marriage ceremony of Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell in 1855 and, by sending their protest of unjust marriage laws to the press, was responsible for their "Marriage Protest" becoming a famous document.[25] Together with Stone, he compiled and published[26] The Woman's Rights Almanac for 1858,[27] which provided data such as income disparity between the sexes as well as a summary of gains made by the national movement during its first seven years.

Fellow abolitionists Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Thompson, 1851

He also compiled and published, in 1858, "Consistent Democracy. The Elective Franchise for Women. Twenty-five Testimonies of Prominent Men," brief excerpts favoring woman suffrage from the speeches or writing of such men as Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, William Henry Channing, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, and various governors, legislators, and legislative reports.[28] A member of the National Woman's Rights Central Committee since 1853 or 1854, he was one of nine activists retained in that post when that large body of state representatives was reduced in 1858.[29]

After the Civil War, Higginson was an organizer of the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868,[30] and of the American Woman Suffrage Association the following year. He was one of the original editors of the suffrage newspaper Woman's Journal, founded in 1870, and contributed a front-page column to it for fourteen years. As a two-year member of the Massachusetts legislature, 1880–82, he was a valuable link between suffragists and the legislature.[31]

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Civil War years

During the early part of the Civil War, Higginson was a captain in the 51st Massachusetts Infantry from November 1862 to October 1864, when he was retired because of a wound received in the preceding August.

He was colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first authorized regiment recruited from freedmen for Union military service.[2] Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton required that black regiments be commanded by white officers. "We, their officers, did not go there to teach lessons, but to receive them," Higginson wrote. "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."

The regiment was particularly effective at conducting raids along the coast of Florida and Georgia, due to the men’s familiarity with the terrain.[4] For example, as early as November 1862, men from Company A of the regiment under the command of Lt. Colonel Oliver T. Beard conducted raids on saltworks in north east Florida.[5]

Higginson described his Civil War experiences in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870),[33] He contributed to the preservation of Negro spirituals by copying dialect verses and music he heard sung around the regiment's campfires. In his book, Drawn With the Sword, historian James M. McPherson cited Higginson as an example of a white officer in a black regiment who did not share the "[p]owerful racial prejudices" of others during the time period.[34]

Religious activism

After the Civil War, Higginson became active in the Free Religious Association (FRA) and in 1870 delivered the speech The Sympathy of Religions, which was later published and circulated. The address argued that all religions shared essential truths and a common exhortation toward benevolence. Division among the faiths was ultimately artificial, he said: "Every step in the progress of each brings it nearer to all the rest. For us, the door out of superstition and sin may be called Christianity; that is an historical name only, the accident of a birthplace. But other nations find other outlets; they must pass through their own doors."[35] He pushed the FRA to tolerate even those who did not accept the liberal principles the Association espoused, asking, "Are we as large as our theory? ... Are we as ready to tolerate ... the Evangelical man as the Mohammedan?" Although his own relationship to evangelical Protestants remained strained, he saw the exclusion of any religious mindset as fundamentally dangerous to the organization.[36] Higginson spoke at the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893 and praised the great strides that had been made in the mutual understanding of the world's great religions, describing the Parliament as the culmination of the FRA's greatest ambitions.[36]

Later years and death

After the Civil War, he devoted most of his time to literature.[37] His writings show a deep love of nature, art and humanity. In his Common Sense About Women (1881) and his Women and Men (1888), he advocated equality of opportunity and equality of rights for men and women.[2]

In 1874, Higginson was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.[38]

In 1891, Higginson became one of the founders of the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (SAFRF). He edited its public appeal "To the Friends of Russian Freedom". Later, in 1907 Higginson was the vice-president of the SAFRF.

In 1905, he joined with Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.[39] Higginson was an Advisory Editor for the second attempt at the Massachusetts Magazine.

Grave of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson died May 9, 1911. Although his death record states that he was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is actually buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the intersection of Riverview, Lawn, and Prospect paths.[40][41]

Beliefs

Higginson's deep conviction in the evils of slavery stemmed in part from his mother's influence. He greatly admired abolitionists, who, despite persecution, showed courage and commitment to the worthy cause.

William Lloyd Garrison

The writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child were particularly influential to Higginson's abolitionist enthusiasm during the early 1840s. Higginson claimed that Child's book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, first convinced him to speak against slavery.[42]

Homeopathy

Higginson was a strong advocate of homeopathy. In 1863, he wrote to his wife Mary Channing Higginson: "and also Ms. Laura Towne, the homeopathic physician of the department, chief teacher and probably the most energetic person this side of civilisation [sic]: a person of splendid health and astonishing capacity.... I think she has done more for me than anyone else by prescribing homeopathic arsenic as a tonic, one powder every day on rising, and it has already, I think (3 doses) affected me."[43]

Free-Soil Party poster

Political parties and ideology

In 1850, Higginson was the Free-Soil Party candidate for Congress and lost.[44] Subsequently, he was successively a Republican, an Independent and a Democrat.[2] He described having had an interest in his early youth in Brook Farm and Fourierism.[45]

Emily Dickinson

Relationship with Emily Dickinson

Letter from Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson is remembered as a correspondent and literary mentor to the poet Emily Dickinson.

In April 1862, Higginson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, titled "Letter to a Young Contributor," in which he advised budding young writers to step up. Emily Dickinson, a 32-year-old woman from Amherst, Massachusetts, sent a letter to Higginson, enclosing four poems and asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" (Letter 260) He was not – his reply included gentle "surgery" (that is, criticism) of Dickinson's raw, odd verse, questions about Dickinson's personal and literary background, and a request for more poems.

Higginson's next reply contained high praise, causing Dickinson to reply that it "gave no drunkenness" only because she had "tasted rum before"; she still, though, had "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue" (Letter 265). In the same letter, Higginson warned her against publishing her poetry because of its unconventional form and style.

Gradually, Higginson became Dickinson's mentor and "preceptor," and he visited her twice, in 1870 and 1873, at her home in Amherst. Higginson never felt that he fully understood Dickinson. "The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me," he wrote, "and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy." ("Emily Dickinson's Letters," Atlantic Monthly, October 1891) After Dickinson's death, Higginson collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd in publishing volumes of her poetry – heavily edited in favor of conventional punctuation, diction, and rhyme. In White Heat (Knopf, 2008), an account of Higginson's friendship with Dickinson, author Brenda Wineapple credits Higginson with more editorial sensitivity than literary historians have previously noted. Higginson's prominence within intellectual circles helped to promote Dickinson's poetry, which remained strange and startling even in its altered form.

Selected list of works

                   His works included:[2]

·         "A Ride Through Kanzas" (1856)

·         "Going to Mount Katahdin", Putnam's Monthly (September 1856), vol. VIII, pp. 242–256.[46]

·         "The Story of Denmark Vesey," The Atlantic Monthly (June 1861) Denmark Vesey was a free Black pastor who was hanged in 1822 after being convicted of planning a major slave revolt that was discovered before it could be realized.

·         Outdoor Papers (1863)

·         The Works of Epictetus (1866), a translation based on that by Elizabeth Carter

·         Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation (1868) (Twelve biographies of women, of which Higginson wrote two: Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller Ossoli)

·         Malbone: an Oldport Romance (1869)

·         Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870)[5]

·         Atlantic Essays (1871)

·         Oldport Days (1873)

·         A Book of American Explorers (1877)

·         Common Sense About Women (1881)

·         Margaret Fuller Ossoli[5] (in American Men of Letters series, 1884)

·         A Larger History of the United States of America to the Close of President Jackson's Administration (1885)

·         The Monarch of Dreams (1886)

·         Travellers and Outlaws (1889)

·         The Afternoon Landscape (1889), poems and translations

·         Life of Francis Higginson (in Makers of America, 1891)

·         Concerning All of Us (1892)

·         The Procession of the Flowers and Kindred Papers (1897)

·         Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic (1898)

·         Cheerful Yesterdays (1898)[5]

·         Old Cambridge (1899)

·         Contemporaries (1899). This book includes a revised version of the chapter on Lydia Maria Child in Eminent Women of the Age.

·         Henry Wadsworth Longfellow[5] (in American Men of Letters series, 1902)

·         John Greenleaf Whittier[5] (in "English Men of Letters" series, 1902)

·         A Readers History of American Literature (1903), the Lowell Institute lectures for 1903, edited by Henry W. Boynton

·         "Books Unread," in The Atlantic Monthly (March 1904), reprinted in Rabinowitz, Harold, and Kaplan, Rob, eds., A Passion for Books, New York: Times Books, 1999, pp. 89–93.

·         Part of a Man's Life (1905)

·         Life and Times of Stephen Higginson (1907)

·         Carlyle's Laugh and Other Surprises (1909)

Notes

1.     Ash, Stephen V., Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

2.     Chisholm 1911.

3.     Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1892). "Higginson, Stephen". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.

4.     Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson – The Story of His Life (Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914) pp.2–3

5.     Wilson, Susan. Literary Trail of Greater Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000: 119.

6.     Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 38.

7.     Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 45.

8.     Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 77–78.

9.     Frederick T. McGill, Jr., Channing of Concord: A Life of William Ellery Channing II, Rutgers University Press, 1967.

10. The family tree of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

11. Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1999: 70.

12. Owen, Barbara. "History of the First Religious Society"  First Religious Society (Unitarian Universalist), Newburyport, MA. Accessed on August 14, 2010.

13. Beck, Janet Kemper. Creating the John Brown Legend: Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harpers Ferry. McFarland, April 7, 2009, p85-87

14. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 93–94.

15. Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1999: 70–71. ISBN 1-57003-244-0.

16. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 97.

17. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, "A Ride Through Kanzas". Letters to the New York Tribune, 1856 (via archive.org)

18. Sanborn, F.B. "Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Tributes)" The Massachusetts Magazine, Vol. IV (1911), No. 3, p. 142 (via archive.org)

19. Manual for the Use of the General Court. Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1880. p. 362.

20. Manual for the Use of the General Court. Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1881. p. 378. hdl:2452/40659.

21. Million, Joelle, Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement. Praeger, 2003.  pp. 136–37, 173.

22. Wendell Phillips, Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Clarina I. Howard Nichols, Theodore Parker (1854). "Woman's Rights Tracts". Boston: Robert F. Wallcut – via Internet Archive.

23. "Women and the Alphabet, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson". www1.assumption.edu.

24. Meyer, 2000, pp. 266–82.

25. Million, 2003, p. 195.

26. Stone, Lucy; Susan B. Anthony Collection (Library of Congress) DLC; National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress) DLC (March 6, 2019). "The Woman's Right's Almanac for 1858. Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of it". Worcester, Mass.: Z. Baker & Co. – via Internet Archive.

27. The Woman's Rights Almanac for 1858, Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of It. Worcester, Mass: Z. Baker & Co.; Boston: R. F. Walcutt. [1857]

28. "The Elective Franchise for Woman," National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 27, 1858, p. 3.

29. New York Times, May 15, 1858, p. 4.

30. Dubois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869, Cornell University Press, (1978), p. 168.

31. Merk, Lois Bannister, "Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1958, Revised, 1961, pp. 16–17.

32. "The Color of Bravery: United States Colored Troops in the Civil War." Battlefields.org.

33. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1900). Army Life in a Black Regiment. A new edition with notes and a supplementary chapter. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

34. McPherson, James M. (April 18, 1996). Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. Oxford University Press. p. 91.

35. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (June 2, 1870). The Sympathy of Religions. First printed in The Radical (Boston, 1871).

36. Schmidt, Leigh Eric (2005). Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 134–135.

37. Alexander K. McClure, ed. (1902). Famous American Statesmen & Orators. Vol. VI. New York: F. F. Lovell Publishing Company. p. 222.

38. "MemberListH". American Antiquarian Society.

39. Nichols, Richard E. (August 20, 2000). "THE MAGNIFICENT ACTIVIST The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson". The New York Times. His radicalism never dimmed; in 1906, at the age of 83, he joined with Jack London and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

40. Wilson, Susan. Literary Trail of Greater Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000: 117.

41. "Massachusetts, Deaths, 1841–1915," Vol.1911/26 Death: Pg.402. State Archives, Boston.

42. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 51.

43. Christopher Looby, ed. (2000). The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. University of Chicago Press. 

44. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 106–107.

45. Higginson, Thomas W. "Views on Socialism". p. 9. I grew up in the Brook Farm and Fourierite period and have always been interested in all tendencies in that direction.

46. Geller, William W., "Mount Katahdin — March 1853: the Mysteries of an Ascent" (2016). Maine History Documents. 119. Page 10 identifies Higginson as the anonymous author of "Going to Katahdin", omitting "Mount", but endnote 13 on page 19 makes clear that it is the same article as "Going to Mount Katahdin".

References

·          This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Higginson, Thomas Wentworth". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 455.

Higginson and daughter, 1882

Further reading

·         Bauch, Marc A. Extending the Canon: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and African-American Spirituals. Munich, Germany: Grin, 2013.

·         Edelstein, Tilden G. Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

·         Kytle, Ethan J. "An American Romantic Goes to War," The New York Times, April 15, 2011.

·         Meyer, Howard N. Colonel of the Black Regiment: The Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1967.

·         Meyer, Howard N., ed. The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823–1911. DaCapo Press, 2000.

·         Wells, Anna Mary. Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

·         Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, New York, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 247–256.

·         Wineapple, Brenda, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Historiography

·         Muccigrosso, Robert, ed. Research Guide to American Historical Biography (1988) 5:2543-46

Primary sources

·         Meyer, Howard N. (ed.) The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2000.

·         Masur, Louis P. (ed.) "... the real war will never get in the books": Selections from Writers During the Civil War. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.  Pages 181–195 include four of Higginson's writings: (1) Letter to Louisa Higginson; (2) "The Ordeal by Battle," in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1861); (3) "Regular and Volunteer Officers," in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1864); (4) "Leaves from an Officer’s Journal," in The Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1864, Dec. 1864, Jan. 1865).

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

·         The Works of Epictetus by Higginson at the Internet Archive

·         Negro Spirituals text with biography, images and sound files from American Studies at the University of Virginia.

·         American National Biography Online:Thomas Wentworth Higginson

·         Works by Thomas Wentworth Higginson at Project Gutenberg

·         Works by or about Thomas Wentworth Higginson at Internet Archive

·         Works by Thomas Wentworth Higginson at LibriVox

·         Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Correspondence from the Carlton and Territa Lowenberg Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries' Archives & Special Collections.

·         A Ride Through Kanzas from the Antislavery Literature Project

·         Biography, Works and Photos at the Worcester Writers' Project Archived September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine

·         Thomas Wentworth Higginson Correspondence (MS Am 1162.10), Houghton Library, Harvard University

·         Higginson House

·         Thomas Wentworth Higginson Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

·         Articles by Higginson in The Atlantic

·         "Views on Socialism"

Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), by Colonel Higginson

ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK
REGIMENT

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson

(1823-1911)

1869

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

CONTENTS

Chapter 1.   Introductory

Chapter 2.   Camp Diary

Chapter 3.   Up the St. Mary's

Chapter 4.   Up the St. John's

Chapter 5.   Out on Picket

Chapter 6.   A Night in the Water

Chapter 7.   Up the Edisto

Chapter 8.   The Baby of the Regiment

Chapter 9.   Negro Spirituals

Chapter 10.   Life at Camp Shaw

Chapter 11.   Florida Again?

Chapter 12.     The Negro as a Soldier

Chapter 13.   Conclusion

APPENDIX

Appendix A

Appendix B The First Black Soldiers

Appendix C General Saxton's Instructions

Appendix D The Struggle for Pay

Appendix E Farewell Address of Lt. Col. Trowbridge

United States Colored Troops (USCT) Fort Lincoln

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

These pages record some of the adventures of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the United States during the late civil war. It was, indeed, the first colored regiment of any kind so mustered, except a portion of the troops raised by Major-General Butler at New Orleans. These scarcely belonged to the same class, however, being recruited from the free colored population of that city, a comparatively self-reliant and educated race. "The darkest of them," said General Butler, "were about the complexion of the late Mr. Webster."

The First South Carolina, on the other hand, contained scarcely a freeman, had not one mulatto in ten, and a far smaller proportion who could read or write when enlisted. The only contemporary regiment of a similar character was the "First Kansas Colored," which began recruiting a little earlier, though it was not mustered in the usual basis of military seniority till later. [See Appendix] These were the only colored regiments recruited during the year 1862. The Second South Carolina and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts followed early in 1863.

This is the way in which I came to the command of this regiment. One day in November, 1862, I was sitting at dinner with my lieutenants, John Goodell and Luther Bigelow, in the barracks of the Fifty-First Massachusetts, Colonel Sprague, when the following letter was put into my hands:

USCT Standard

BEAUFORT, S. C., November 5, 1862.

MY DEAR SIR. - I am organizing the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, with every prospect of success. Your name has been spoken of, in connection with the command of this regiment, by some friends in whose judgment I have confidence. I take great pleasure in offering you the position of Colonel in it, and hope that you may be induced to accept. I shall not fill the place until I hear from you, or sufficient time shall have passed for me to receive your reply. Should you accept, I enclose a pass for Port Royal, of which I trust you will feel disposed to avail yourself at once.

I am, with sincere regard, yours truly,

R. SAXTON, Brig.-Genl, Mil. Gov.

Brigadier General Rufus Saxton

Had an invitation reached me to take command of a regiment of Kalmuck Tartars, it could hardly have been more unexpected. I had always looked for the arming of the blacks, and had always felt a wish to be associated with them; had read the scanty accounts of General Hunter's abortive regiment, and had heard rumors of General Saxton's renewed efforts. But the prevalent tone of public sentiment was still opposed to any such attempts; the government kept very shy of the experiment, and it did not seem possible that the time had come when it could be fairly tried.

For myself, I was at the head of a fine company of my own raising, and in a regiment to which I was already much attached. It did not seem desirable to exchange a certainty for an uncertainty; for who knew but General Saxton might yet be thwarted in his efforts by the pro-slavery influence that had still so much weight at head-quarters? It would be intolerable to go out to South Carolina, and find myself, after all, at the head of a mere plantation-guard or a day-school in uniform.

I therefore obtained from the War Department, through Governor Andrew, permission to go and report to General Saxton, without at once resigning my captaincy. Fortunately it took but a few days in South Carolina to make it clear that all was right, and the return steamer took back a resignation of a Massachusetts commission. Thenceforth my lot was cast altogether with the black troops, except when regiments or detachments of white soldiers were also under my command, during the two years following.

These details would not be worth mentioning except as they show this fact: that I did not seek the command of colored troops, but it sought me. And this fact again is only important to my story for this reason, that under these circumstances I naturally viewed the new recruits rather as subjects for discipline than for philanthropy. I had been expecting a war for six years, ever since the Kansas troubles, and my mind had dwelt on military matters more or less during all that time. The best Massachusetts regiments already exhibited a high standard of drill and discipline, and unless these men could be brought tolerably near that standard, the fact of their extreme blackness would afford me, even as a philanthropist, no satisfaction. Fortunately, I felt perfect confidence that they could be so trained, having happily known, by experience, the qualities of their race, and knowing also that they had home and household and freedom to fight for, besides that abstraction of "the Union." Trouble might perhaps be expected from white officials, though this turned out far less than might have been feared; but there was no trouble to come from the men, I thought, and none ever came. On the other hand, it was a vast experiment of indirect philanthropy, and one on which the result of the war and the destiny of the negro race might rest; and this was enough to tax all one's powers. I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well, not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.

USCT Field artillery battery

In view of all this, it was clear that good discipline must come first; after that, of course, the men must be helped and elevated in all ways as much as possible.

Of discipline there was great need, that is, of order and regular instruction. Some of the men had already been under fire, but they were very ignorant of drill and camp duty. The officers, being appointed from a dozen different States, and more than as many regiments, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, had all that diversity of methods which so confused our army in those early days. The first need, therefore, was of an unbroken interval of training. During this period, which fortunately lasted nearly two months, I rarely left the camp, and got occasional leisure moments for a fragmentary journal, to send home, recording the many odd or novel aspects of the new experience.

Camp-life was a wonderfully strange sensation to almost all volunteer officers, and mine lay among eight hundred men suddenly transformed from slaves into soldiers, and representing a race affectionate, enthusiastic, grotesque, and dramatic beyond all others. Being such, they naturally gave material for description. There is nothing like a diary for freshness, at least so I think, and I shall keep to the diary through the days of camp-life, and throw the later experience into another form. Indeed, that matter takes care of itself; diaries and letter-writing stop when field-service begins.

USCT Regimental band

I am under pretty heavy bonds to tell the truth, and only the truth; for those who look back to the newspaper correspondence of that period will see that this particular regiment lived for months in a glare of publicity, such as tests any regiment severely, and certainly prevents all subsequent romancing in its historian. As the scene of the only effort on the Atlantic coast to arm the negro, our camp attracted a continuous stream of visitors, military and civil. A battalion of black soldiers, a spectacle since so common, seemed then the most daring of innovations, and the whole demeanor of this particular regiment was watched with microscopic scrutiny by friends and foes. I felt sometimes as if we were a plant trying to take root, but constantly pulled up to see if we were growing.

Engravings Harper’s Weekly

The slightest camp incidents sometimes came back to us, magnified and distorted, in letters of anxious inquiry from remote parts of the Union. It was no pleasant thing to live under such constant surveillance; but it guaranteed the honesty of any success, while fearfully multiplying the penalties had there been a failure. A single mutiny, such as has happened in the infancy of a hundred regiments, a single miniature Bull Run, a stampede of desertions, and it would have been all over with us; the party of distrust would have got the upper hand, and there might not have been, during the whole contest, another effort to arm the negro.

I may now proceed, without farther preparation to the Diary.

Company dress formation Beaufort S.C.

CHAPTER II

CAMP DIARY

CAMP SAXTON, near Beaufort, S. C., November 24, 1862.

Yesterday afternoon we were steaming over a summer sea, the deck level as a parlor-floor, no land in sight, no sail, until at last appeared one light-house, said to be Cape Romaine, and then a line of trees and two distant vessels and nothing more. The sun set, a great illuminated bubble, submerged in one vast bank of rosy suffusion; it grew dark; after tea all were on deck, the people sang hymns; then the moon set, a moon two days old, a curved pencil of light, reclining backwards on a radiant couch which seemed to rise from the waves to receive it; it sank slowly, and the last tip wavered and went down like the mast of a vessel of the skies. Towards morning the boat stopped, and when I came on deck, before six,

"The watch-lights glittered on the land,  

        The ship-lights on the sea."

Hilton Head lay on one side, the gunboats on the other; all that was raw and bare in the low buildings of the new settlement was softened into picturesqueness by the early light. Stars were still overhead, gulls wheeled and shrieked, and the broad river rippled duskily towards Beaufort.

The shores were low and wooded, like any New England shore; there were a few gunboats, twenty schooners, and some steamers, among them the famous "Planter," which Robert Small, the slave, presented to the nation. The river-banks were soft and graceful, though low, and as we steamed up to Beaufort on the flood-tide this morning, it seemed almost as fair as the smooth and lovely canals which Stedman traversed to meet his negro soldiers in Surinam. The air was cool as at home, yet the foliage seemed green, glimpses of stiff tropical vegetation appeared along the banks, with great clumps of shrubs, whose pale seed-vessels looked like tardy blossoms. Then we saw on a picturesque point an old plantation, with stately magnolia avenue, decaying house, and tiny church amid the woods, reminding me of Virginia; behind it stood a neat encampment of white tents, "and there," said my companion, "is your future regiment."

USCT formation Beaufort, South Carolina

Three miles farther brought us to the pretty town of Beaufort, with its stately houses amid Southern foliage. Reporting to General Saxton, I had the luck to encounter a company of my destined command, marched in to be mustered into the United States service. They were unarmed, and all looked as thoroughly black as the most faithful philanthropist could desire; there did not seem to be so much as a mulatto among them. Their coloring suited me, all but the legs, which were clad in a lively scarlet, as intolerable to my eyes as if I had been a turkey. I saw them mustered; General Saxton talked to them a little, in his direct, manly way; they gave close attention, though their faces looked impenetrable. Then I conversed with some of them. The first to whom I spoke had been wounded in a small expedition after lumber, from which a party had just returned, and in which they had been under fire and had done very well. I said, pointing to his lame arm,

"Did you think that was more than you bargained for, my man?"

His answer came promptly and stoutly,

"I been a-tinking, Mas'r, dot's jess what I went for."

I thought this did well enough for my very first interchange of dialogue with my recruits.

November 27, 1862.

Thanksgiving-Day; it is the first moment I have had for writing during these three days, which have installed me into a new mode of life so thoroughly that they seem three years. Scarcely pausing in New York or in Beaufort, there seems to have been for me but one step from the camp of a Massachusetts regiment to this, and that step over leagues of waves.

It is a holiday wherever General Saxton's proclamation reaches. The chilly sunshine and the pale blue river seems like New England, but those alone. The air is full of noisy drumming, and of gunshots; for the prize-shooting is our great celebration of the day, and the drumming is chronic. My young barbarians are all at play. I look out from the broken windows of this forlorn plantation-house, through avenues of great live-oaks, with their hard, shining leaves, and their branches hung with a universal drapery of soft, long moss, like fringe-trees struck with grayness. Below, the sandy soil, scantly covered with coarse grass, bristles with sharp palmettoes and aloes; all the vegetation is stiff, shining, semi-tropical, with nothing soft or delicate in its texture. Numerous plantation-buildings totter around, all slovenly and unattractive, while the interspaces are filled with all manner of wreck and refuse, pigs, fowls, dogs, and omnipresent Ethiopian infancy. All this is the universal Southern panorama; but five minutes' walk beyond the hovels and the live-oaks will bring one to something so un-Southern that the whole Southern coast at this moment trembles at the suggestion of such a thing, the camp of a regiment of freed slaves.

One adapts one's self so readily to new surroundings that already the full zest of the novelty seems passing away from my perceptions, and I write these lines in an eager effort to retain all I can. Already I am growing used to the experience, at first so novel, of living among five hundred men, and scarce a white face to be seen, of seeing them go through all their daily processes, eating, frolicking, talking, just as if they were white.

Each day at dress-parade I stand with the customary folding of the arms before a regimental line of countenances so black that I can hardly tell whether the men stand steadily or not; black is every hand which moves in ready cadence as I vociferate, "Battalion! Shoulder arms!" nor is it till the line of white officers moves forward, as parade is dismissed, that I am reminded that my own face is not the color of coal.

White officers USCT

The first few days on duty with a new regiment must be devoted almost wholly to tightening reins; in this process one deals chiefly with the officers, and I have as yet had but little personal intercourse with the men. They concern me chiefly in bulk, as so many consumers of rations, wearers of uniforms, bearers of muskets. But as the machine comes into shape, I am beginning to decipher the individual parts. At first, of course, they all looked just alike; the variety comes afterwards, and they are just as distinguishable, the officers say, as so many whites. Most of them are wholly raw, but there are many who have already been for months in camp in the abortive "Hunter Regiment," yet in that loose kind of way which, like average militia training, is a doubtful advantage. I notice that some companies, too, look darker than others, though all are purer African than I expected. This is said to be partly a geographical difference between the South Carolina and Florida men. When the Rebels evacuated this region they probably took with them the house-servants, including most of the mixed blood, so that the residuum seems very black. But the men brought from Fernandina the other day average lighter in complexion, and look more intelligent, and they certainly take wonderfully to the drill.

It needs but a few days to show the absurdity of distrusting the military availability of these people. They have quite as much average comprehension as whites of the need of the thing, as much courage (I doubt not), as much previous knowledge of the gun, and, above all, a readiness of ear and of imitation, which, for purposes of drill, counterbalances any defect of mental training. To learn the drill, one does not want a set of college professors; one wants a squad of eager, active, pliant school-boys; and the more childlike these pupils are the better. There is no trouble about the drill; they will surpass whites in that. As to camp-life, they have little to sacrifice; they are better fed, housed, and clothed than ever in their lives before, and they appear to have few inconvenient vices. They are simple, docile, and affectionate almost to the point of absurdity. The same men who stood fire in open field with perfect coolness, on the late expedition, have come to me blubbering in the most irresistibly ludicrous manner on being transferred from one company in the regiment to another.

In noticing the squad-drills I perceive that the men learn less laboriously than whites that "double, double, toil and trouble," which is the elementary vexation of the drill-master, that they more rarely mistake their left for their right, and are more grave and sedate while under instruction. The extremes of jollity and sobriety, being greater with them, are less liable to be intermingled; these companies can be driven with a looser rein than my former one, for they restrain themselves; but the moment they are dismissed from drill every tongue is relaxed and every ivory tooth visible. This morning I wandered about where the different companies were target-shooting, and their glee was contagious. Such exulting shouts of "Ki! ole man," when some steady old turkey-shooter brought his gun down for an instant's aim, and then unerringly hit the mark; and then, when some unwary youth fired his piece into the ground at half-cock such guffawing and delight, such rolling over and over on the grass, such dances of ecstasy, as made the "Ethiopian minstrelsy" of the stage appear a feeble imitation.

Evening. Better still was a scene on which I stumbled to-night. Strolling in the cool moonlight, I was attracted by a brilliant light beneath the trees, and cautiously approached it. A circle of thirty or forty soldiers sat around a roaring fire, while one old uncle, Cato by name, was narrating an interminable tale, to the insatiable delight of his audience. I came up into the dusky background, perceived only by a few, and he still continued. It was a narrative, dramatized to the last degree, of his adventures in escaping from his master to the Union vessels; and even I, who have heard the stories of Harriet Tubman, and such wonderful slave-comedians, never witnessed such a piece of acting. When I came upon the scene he had just come unexpectedly upon a plantation-house, and, putting a bold face upon it, had walked up to the door.

"Den I go up to de white man, berry humble, and say, would he please gib ole man a mouthful for eat?

"He say he must hab de valeration ob half a dollar.

"Den I look berry sorry, and turn for go away.

"Den he say I might gib him dat hatchet I had.

"Den I say" (this in a tragic vein) "dat I must hab dat hatchet for defend myself from de dogs!"

[Immense applause, and one appreciating auditor says, chuckling, "Dat was your arms, ole man," which brings down the house again.]

"Den he say de Yankee pickets was near by, and I must be very keerful.

"Den I say, 'Good Lord, Mas'r, am dey?'"

Words cannot express the complete dissimulation with which these accents of terror were uttered, this being precisely the piece of information he wished to obtain.

Then he narrated his devices to get into the house at night and obtain some food, how a dog flew at him, how the whole household, black and white, rose in pursuit, how he scrambled under a hedge and over a high fence, etc., all in a style of which Gough alone among orators can give the faintest impression, so thoroughly dramatized was every syllable.

Then he described his reaching the river-side at last, and trying to decide whether certain vessels held friends or foes.

"Den I see guns on board, and sure sartin he Union boat, and I pop my head up. Den I been-a-tink [think] Seceshkey hab guns too, and my head go down again. Den I hide in de bush till morning. Den I open my bundle, and take ole white shut and tie him on ole pole and wave him, and ebry time de wind blow, I been-a-tremble, and drap down in de bushes," because, being between two fires, he doubted whether friend or foe would see his signal first. And so on, with a succession of tricks beyond Moliere, of acts of caution, foresight, patient cunning, which were listened to with infinite gusto and perfect comprehension by every listener.

And all this to a bivouac of negro soldiers, with the brilliant fire lighting up their red trousers and gleaming from their shining black faces, eyes and teeth all white with tumultuous glee. Overhead, the mighty limbs of a great live-oak, with the weird moss swaying in the smoke, and the high moon gleaming faintly through.

Yet to-morrow strangers will remark on the hopeless, impenetrable stupidity in the daylight faces of many of these very men, the solid mask under which Nature has concealed all this wealth of mother-wit. This very comedian is one to whom one might point, as he hoed lazily in a cotton-field, as a being the light of whose brain had utterly gone out; and this scene seems like coming by night upon some conclave of black beetles, and finding them engaged, with green-room and foot-lights, in enacting "Poor Pillicoddy." This is their university; every young Sambo before me, as he turned over the sweet potatoes and peanuts which were roasting in the ashes, listened with reverence to the wiles of the ancient Ulysses, and meditated the same. It is Nature's compensation; oppression simply crushes the upper faculties of the head, and crowds everything into the perceptive organs. Cato, thou reasonest well! When I get into any serious scrape, in an enemy's country, may I be lucky enough to have you at my elbow, to pull me out of it!

The men seem to have enjoyed the novel event of Thanksgiving-Day; they have had company and regimental prize-shootings, a minimum of speeches and a maximum of dinner. Bill of fare: two beef-cattle and a thousand oranges. The oranges cost a cent apiece, and the cattle were Secesh, bestowed by General Saxby, as they all call him.

Unloading supplies

                                                       December 1, 1862.

How absurd is the impression bequeathed by Slavery in regard to these Southern blacks, that they are sluggish and inefficient in labor! Last night, after a hard day's work (our guns and the remainder of our tents being just issued), an order came from Beaufort that we should be ready in the evening to unload a steamboat's cargo of boards, being some of those captured by them a few weeks since, and now assigned for their use. I wondered if the men would grumble at the night-work; but the steamboat arrived by seven, and it was bright moonlight when they went at it. Never have I beheld such a jolly scene of labor. Tugging these wet and heavy boards over a bridge of boats ashore, then across the slimy beach at low tide, then up a steep bank, and all in one great uproar of merriment for two hours. Running most of the time, chattering all the time, snatching the boards from each other's backs as if they were some coveted treasure, getting up eager rivalries between different companies, pouring great choruses of ridicule on the heads of all shirkers, they made the whole scene so enlivening that I gladly stayed out in the moonlight for the whole time to watch it. And all this without any urging or any promised reward, but simply as the most natural way of doing the thing. The steamboat captain declared that they unloaded the ten thousand feet of boards quicker than any white gang could have done it; and they felt it so little, that, when, later in the night, I reproached one whom I found sitting by a campfire, cooking a surreptitious opossum, telling him that he ought to be asleep after such a job of work, he answered, with the broadest grin, "O no, Gunnel, da's no work at all, Gunnel; dat only jess enough for stretch we."

                                                   December 2, 1862.

I believe I have not yet enumerated the probable drawbacks to the success of this regiment, if any. We are exposed to no direct annoyance from the white regiments, being out of their way; and we have as yet no discomforts or privations which we do not share with them. I do not as yet see the slightest obstacle, in the nature of the blacks, to making them good soldiers, but rather the contrary. They take readily to drill, and do not object to discipline; they are not especially dull or inattentive; they seem fully to understand the importance of the contest, and of their share in it. They show no jealousy or suspicion towards their officers.

They do show these feelings, however, towards the Government itself; and no one can wonder. Here lies the drawback to rapid recruiting. Were this a wholly new regiment, it would have been full to overflowing, I am satisfied, ere now. The trouble is in the legacy of bitter distrust bequeathed by the abortive regiment of General Hunter, into which they were driven like cattle, kept for several months in camp, and then turned off without a shilling, by order of the War Department. The formation of that regiment was, on the whole, a great injury to this one; and the men who came from it, though the best soldiers we have in other respects, are the least sanguine and cheerful; while those who now refuse to enlist have a great influence in deterring others. Our soldiers are constantly twitted by their families and friends with their prospect of risking their lives in the service, and being paid nothing; and it is in vain that we read them the instructions of the Secretary of War to General Saxton, promising them the full pay of soldiers. They only half believe it.*

*With what utter humiliation were we, their officers, obliged to confess to them, eighteen months afterwards, that it was their distrust which was wise, and our faith in the pledges of the United States Government which was foolishness!

Another drawback is that some of the white soldiers delight in frightening the women on the plantations with doleful tales of plans for putting us in the front rank in all battles, and such silly talk,—the object being perhaps, to prevent our being employed on active service at all. All these considerations they feel precisely as white men would,—no less, no more; and it is the comparative freedom from such unfavorable influences which makes the Florida men seem more bold and manly, as they undoubtedly do. To-day General Saxton has returned from Fernandina with seventy-six recruits, and the eagerness of the captains to secure them was a sight to see. Yet they cannot deny that some of the very best men in the regiment are South Carolinians.

                                             December 3, 1862.—7 P.M.

What a life is this I lead! It is a dark, mild, drizzling evening, and as the foggy air breeds sand-flies, so it calls out melodies and strange antics from this mysterious race of grown-up children with whom my lot is cast. All over the camp the lights glimmer in the tents, and as I sit at my desk in the open doorway, there come mingled sounds of stir and glee. Boys laugh and shout,—a feeble flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slave-masters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half pow-wow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a "shout." These fires are usually enclosed in a little booth, made neatly of palm-leaves and covered in at top, a regular native African hut, in short, such as is pictured in books, and such as I once got up from dried palm-leaves for a fair at home. This hut is now crammed with men, singing at the top of their voices, in one of their quaint, monotonous, endless, negro-Methodist chants, with obscure syllables recurring constantly, and slight variations interwoven, all accompanied with a regular drumming of the feet and clapping of the hands, like castanets. Then the excitement spreads: inside and outside the enclosure men begin to quiver and dance, others join, a circle forms, winding monotonously round some one in the centre; some "heel and toe" tumultuously, others merely tremble and stagger on, others stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes; spectators applaud special strokes of skill; my approach only enlivens the scene; the circle enlarges, louder grows the singing, rousing shouts of encouragement come in, half bacchanalian, half devout, "Wake 'em, brudder!" "Stan' up to 'em, brudder!"—and still the ceaseless drumming and clapping, in perfect cadence, goes steadily on. Suddenly there comes a sort of snap, and the spell breaks, amid general sighing and laughter. And this not rarely and occasionally, but night after night, while in other parts of the camp the soberest prayers and exhortations are proceeding sedately.

A simple and lovable people, whose graces seem to come by nature, and whose vices by training. Some of the best superintendents confirm the first tales of innocence, and Dr. Zachos told me last night that on his plantation, a sequestered one, "they had absolutely no vices."

Nor have these men of mine yet shown any worth mentioning; since I took command I have heard of no man intoxicated, and there has been but one small quarrel. I suppose that scarcely a white regiment in the army shows so little swearing. Take the "Progressive Friends" and put them in red trousers, and I verily believe they would fill a guard-house sooner than these men. If camp regulations are violated, it seems to be usually through heedlessness. They love passionately three things besides their spiritual incantations; namely, sugar, home, and tobacco. This last affection brings tears to their eyes, almost, when they speak of their urgent need of pay; they speak of their last-remembered quid as if it were some deceased relative, too early lost, and to be mourned forever. As for sugar, no white man can drink coffee after they have sweetened it to their liking.

I see that the pride which military life creates may cause the plantation trickeries to diminish. For instance, these men make the most admirable sentinels. It is far harder to pass the camp lines at night than in the camp from which I came; and I have seen none of that disposition to connive at the offences of members of one's own company which is so troublesome among white soldiers. Nor are they lazy, either about work or drill; in all respects they seem better material for soldiers than I had dared to hope.

There is one company in particular, all Florida men, which I certainly think the finest-looking company I ever saw, white or black; they range admirably in size, have remarkable erectness and ease of carriage, and really march splendidly. Not a visitor but notices them; yet they have been under drill only a fortnight, and a part only two days. They have all been slaves, and very few are even mulattoes.

                                                 December 4, 1862.

"Dwelling in tents, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." This condition is certainly mine,—and with a multitude of patriarchs beside, not to mention Caesar and Pompey, Hercules and Bacchus.

A moving life, tented at night, this experience has been mine in civil society, if society be civil before the luxurious forest fires of Maine and the Adirondack, or upon the lonely prairies of Kansas. But a stationary tent life, deliberately going to housekeeping under canvas, I have never had before, though in our barrack life at "Camp Wool" I often wished for it.

The accommodations here are about as liberal as my quarters there, two wall-tents being placed end to end, for office and bedroom, and separated at will by a "fly" of canvas. There is a good board floor and mop-board, effectually excluding dampness and draughts, and everything but sand, which on windy days penetrates everywhere. The office furniture consists of a good desk or secretary, a very clumsy and disastrous settee, and a remarkable chair. The desk is a bequest of the slaveholders, and the settee of the slaves, being ecclesiastical in its origin, and appertaining to the little old church or "praise-house," now used for commissary purposes. The chair is a composite structure: I found a cane seat on a dust-heap, which a black sergeant combined with two legs from a broken bedstead and two more from an oak-bough. I sit on it with a pride of conscious invention, mitigated by profound insecurity. Bedroom furniture, a couch made of gun-boxes covered with condemned blankets, another settee, two pails, a tin cup, tin basin (we prize any tin or wooden ware as savages prize iron), and a valise, regulation size. Seriously considered, nothing more appears needful, unless ambition might crave another chair for company, and, perhaps, something for a wash-stand higher than a settee.

To-day it rains hard, and the wind quivers through the closed canvas, and makes one feel at sea. All the talk of the camp outside is fused into a cheerful and indistinguishable murmur, pierced through at every moment by the wail of the hovering plover. Sometimes a face, black or white, peers through the entrance with some message. Since the light readily penetrates, though the rain cannot, the tent conveys a feeling of charmed security, as if an invisible boundary checked the pattering drops and held the moaning wind. The front tent I share, as yet, with my adjutant; in the inner apartment I reign supreme, bounded in a nutshell, with no bad dreams.

In all pleasant weather the outer "fly" is open, and men pass and repass, a chattering throng. I think of Emerson's Saadi, "As thou sittest at thy door, on the desert's yellow floor,"—for these bare sand-plains, gray above, are always yellow when upturned, and there seems a tinge of Orientalism in all our life.

Thrice a day we go to the plantation-houses for our meals, camp-arrangements being yet very imperfect. The officers board in different messes, the adjutant and I still clinging to the household of William Washington,—William the quiet and the courteous, the pattern of house-servants, William the noiseless, the observing, the discriminating, who knows everything that can be got, and how to cook it. William and his tidy, lady-like little spouse Hetty—a pair of wedded lovers, if ever I saw one—set our table in their one room, half-way between an un glazed window and a large wood-fire, such as is often welcome. Thanks to the adjutant, we are provided with the social magnificence of napkins; while (lest pride take too high a flight) our table-cloth consists of two "New York Tribunes" and a "Leslie's Pictorial." Every steamer brings us a clean table-cloth. Here are we forever supplied with pork and oysters and sweet potatoes and rice and hominy and corn-bread and milk; also mysterious griddle-cakes of corn and pumpkin; also preserves made of pumpkin-chips, and other fanciful productions of Ethiop art. Mr. E. promised the plantation-superintendents who should come down here "all the luxuries of home," and we certainly have much apparent, if little real variety. Once William produced with some palpitation something fricasseed, which he boldly termed chicken; it was very small, and seemed in some undeveloped condition of ante-natal toughness. After the meal he frankly avowed it for a squirrel.

                                                             December 5, 1862.

Give these people their tongues, their feet, and their leisure, and they are happy. At every twilight the air is full of singing, talking, and clapping of hands in unison. One of their favorite songs is full of plaintive cadences; it is not, I think, a Methodist tune, and I wonder where they obtained a chant of such beauty.

"I can't stay behind, my Lord, I can't stay behind!

O, my father is gone, my father is gone,

My father is gone into heaven, my Lord!

I can't stay behind!

Dere's room enough, room enough,

Room enough in de heaven for de sojer:

Can't stay behind!"

It always excites them to have us looking on, yet they sing these songs at all times and seasons. I have heard this very song dimly droning on near midnight, and, tracing it into the recesses of a cook-house, have found an old fellow coiled away among the pots and provisions, chanting away with his "Can't stay behind, sinner," till I made him leave his song behind.

This evening, after working themselves up to the highest pitch, a party suddenly rushed off, got a barrel, and mounted some man upon it, who said, "Gib anoder song, boys, and I'se gib you a speech." After some hesitation and sundry shouts of "Rise de sing, somebody," and "Stan' up for Jesus, brud-der," irreverently put in by the juveniles, they got upon the John Brown song, always a favorite, adding a jubilant verse which I had never before heard,—"We'll beat Beauregard on de clare battlefield." Then came the promised speech, and then no less than seven other speeches by as many men, on a variety of barrels, each orator being affectionately tugged to the pedestal and set on end by his special constituency. Every speech was good, without exception; with the queerest oddities of phrase and pronunciation, there was an invariable enthusiasm, a pungency of statement, and an understanding of the points at issue, which made them all rather thrilling. Those long-winded slaves in "Among the Pines" seemed rather fictitious and literary in comparison. The most eloquent, perhaps, was Corporal Price Lambkin, just arrived from Fernandina, who evidently had a previous reputation among them. His historical references were very interesting. He reminded them that he had predicted this war ever since Fremont's time, to which some of the crowd assented; he gave a very intelligent account of that Presidential campaign, and then described most impressively the secret anxiety of the slaves in Florida to know all about President Lincoln's election, and told how they all refused to work on the fourth of March, expecting their freedom to date from that day. He finally brought out one of the few really impressive appeals for the American flag that I have ever heard. "Our mas'rs dey hab lib under de flag, dey got dere wealth under it, and ebryting beautiful for dere chilen. Under it dey hab grind us up, and put us in dere pocket for money. But de fus' minute dey tink dat ole flag mean freedom for we colored people, dey pull it right down, and run up de rag ob dere own." (Immense applause). "But we'll neber desert de ole flag, boys, neber; we hab lib under it for eighteen hundred sixty-two years, and we'll die for it now." With which overpowering discharge of chronology-at-long-range, this most effective of stump-speeches closed. I see already with relief that there will be small demand in this regiment for harangues from the officers; give the men an empty barrel for a stump, and they will do their own exhortation.

USCT troops Harper’s Weekly

                                                          December 11, 1862.

Haroun Alraschid, wandering in disguise through his imperial streets, scarcely happened upon a greater variety of groups than I, in my evening strolls among our own camp-fires.

Beside some of these fires the men are cleaning their guns or rehearsing their drill,—beside others, smoking in silence their very scanty supply of the beloved tobacco,—beside others, telling stories and shouting with laughter over the broadest mimicry, in which they excel, and in which the officers come in for a full share. The everlasting "shout" is always within hearing, with its mixture of piety and polka, and its castanet-like clapping of the hands. Then there are quieter prayer-meetings, with pious invocations and slow psalms, "deaconed out" from memory by the leader, two lines at a time, in a sort of wailing chant. Elsewhere, there are conversazioni around fires, with a woman for queen of the circle,—her Nubian face, gay headdress, gilt necklace, and white teeth, all resplendent in the glowing light. Sometimes the woman is spelling slow monosyllables out of a primer, a feat which always commands all ears,—they rightly recognizing a mighty spell, equal to the overthrowing of monarchs, in the magic assonance of cat, hat, pat, bat, and the rest of it. Elsewhere, it is some solitary old cook, some aged Uncle Tiff, with enormous spectacles, who is perusing a hymn-book by the light of a pine splinter, in his deserted cooking booth of palmetto leaves. By another fire there is an actual dance, red-legged soldiers doing right-and-left, and "now-lead-de-lady-ober," to the music of a violin which is rather artistically played, and which may have guided the steps, in other days, of Barnwells and Hugers. And yonder is a stump-orator perched on his barrel, pouring out his exhortations to fidelity in war and in religion. To-night for the first time I have heard an harangue in a different strain, quite saucy, sceptical, and defiant, appealing to them in a sort of French materialistic style, and claiming some personal experience of warfare. "You don't know notin' about it, boys. You tink you's brave enough; how you tink, if you stan' clar in de open field,—here you, and dar de Secesh? You's got to hab de right ting inside o' you. You must hab it 'served [preserved] in you, like dese yer sour plums dey 'serve in de barr'l; you's got to harden it down inside o' you, or it's notin'." Then he hit hard at the religionists: "When a man's got de sperit ob de Lord in him, it weakens him all out, can't hoe de corn." He had a great deal of broad sense in his speech; but presently some others began praying vociferously close by, as if to drown this free-thinker, when at last he exclaimed, "I mean to fight de war through, an' die a good sojer wid de last kick, dat's my prayer!" and suddenly jumped off the barrel. I was quite interested at discovering this reverse side of the temperament, the devotional side preponderates so enormously, and the greatest scamps kneel and groan in their prayer-meetings with such entire zest. It shows that there is some individuality developed among them, and that they will not become too exclusively pietistic.

Their love of the spelling-book is perfectly inexhaustible,—they stumbling on by themselves, or the blind leading the blind, with the same pathetic patience which they carry into everything. The chaplain is getting up a schoolhouse, where he will soon teach them as regularly as he can. But the alphabet must always be a very incidental business in a camp.

                                                              December 14.

Passages from prayers in the camp:—

"Let me so lib dat when I die I shall hab manners, dat I shall know what to say when I see my Heabenly Lord."

"Let me lib wid de musket in one hand an' de Bible in de oder,—dat if I die at de muzzle ob de musket, die in de water, die on de land, I may know I hab de bressed Jesus in my hand, an' hab no fear."

"I hab lef my wife in de land o' bondage; my little ones dey say eb'ry night, Whar is my fader? But when I die, when de bressed mornin' rises, when I shall stan' in de glory, wid one foot on de water an' one foot on de land, den, O Lord, I shall see my wife an' my little chil'en once more."

These sentences I noted down, as best I could, beside the glimmering camp-fire last night. The same person was the hero of a singular little contre-temps at a funeral in the afternoon. It was our first funeral. The man had died in hospital, and we had chosen a picturesque burial-place above the river, near the old church, and beside a little nameless cemetery, used by generations of slaves. It was a regular military funeral, the coffin being draped with the American flag, the escort marching behind, and three volleys fired over the grave. During the services there was singing, the chaplain deaconing out the hymn in their favorite way. This ended, he announced his text,—"This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and delivered him out of all his trouble." Instantly, to my great amazement, the cracked voice of the chorister was uplifted, intoning the text, as if it were the first verse of another hymn. So calmly was it done, so imperturbable were all the black countenances, that I half began to conjecture that the chaplain himself intended it for a hymn, though I could imagine no prospective rhyme for trouble unless it were approximated by debbil, which is, indeed, a favorite reference, both with the men and with his Reverence. But the chaplain, peacefully awaiting, gently repeated his text after the chant, and to my great relief the old chorister waived all further recitative, and let the funeral discourse proceed.

Their memories are a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography; and most of the great events of the past, down to the period of the American Revolution, they instinctively attribute to Moses. There is a fine bold confidence in all their citations, however, and the record never loses piquancy in their hands, though strict accuracy may suffer. Thus, one of my captains, last Sunday, heard a colored exhorter at Beaufort proclaim, "Paul may plant, and may polish wid water, but it won't do," in which the sainted Apollos would hardly have recognized himself.

Just now one of the soldiers came to me to say that he was about to be married to a girl in Beaufort, and would I lend him a dollar and seventy-five cents to buy the wedding outfit? It seemed as if matrimony on such moderate terms ought to be encouraged in these days; and so I responded to the appeal.

December 16.

To-day a young recruit appeared here, who had been the slave of Colonel Sammis, one of the leading Florida refugees. Two white companions came with him, who also appeared to be retainers of the Colonel, and I asked them to dine. Being likewise refugees, they had stories to tell, and were quite agreeable: one was English born, the other Floridian, a dark, sallow Southerner, very well bred. After they had gone, the Colonel himself appeared, I told him that I had been entertaining his white friends, and after a while he quietly let out the remark,—

"Yes, one of those white friends of whom you speak is a boy raised on one of my plantations; he has travelled with me to the North, and passed for white, and he always keeps away from the negroes."

Certainly no such suspicion had ever crossed my mind.

I have noticed one man in the regiment who would easily pass for white,—a little sickly drummer, aged fifty at least, with brown eyes and reddish hair, who is said to be the son of one of our commodores. I have seen perhaps a dozen persons as fair, or fairer, among fugitive slaves, but they were usually young children. It touched me far more to see this man, who had spent more than half a lifetime in this low estate, and for whom it now seemed too late to be anything but a "nigger." This offensive word, by the way, is almost as common with them as at the North, and far more common than with well-bred slaveholders. They have meekly accepted it. "Want to go out to de nigger houses, Sah," is the universal impulse of sociability, when they wish to cross the lines. "He hab twenty house-servants, an' two hundred head o' nigger," is a still more degrading form of phrase, in which the epithet is limited to the field-hands, and they estimated like so many cattle. This want of self-respect of course interferes with the authority of the non-commissioned officers, which is always difficult to sustain, even in white regiments. "He needn't try to play de white man ober me," was the protest of a soldier against his corporal the other day. To counteract this I have often to remind them that they do not obey their officers because they are white, but because they are their officers; and guard duty is an admirable school for this, because they readily understand that the sergeant or corporal of the guard has for the time more authority than any commissioned officer who is not on duty.

Corporal Charles Mudd

It is necessary also for their superiors to treat the non-commissioned officers with careful courtesy, and I often caution the line officers never to call them "Sam" or "Will," nor omit the proper handle to their names. The value of the habitual courtesies of the regular army is exceedingly apparent with these men: an officer of polished manners can wind them round his finger, while white soldiers seem rather to prefer a certain roughness. The demeanor of my men to each other is very courteous, and yet I see none of that sort of upstart conceit which is sometimes offensive among free negroes at the North, the dandy-barber strut. This is an agreeable surprise, for I feared that freedom and regimentals would produce precisely that.

They seem the world's perpetual children, docile, gay, and lovable, in the midst of this war for freedom on which they have intelligently entered. Last night, before "taps," there was the greatest noise in camp that I had ever heard, and I feared some riot. On going out, I found the most tumultuous sham-fight proceeding in total darkness, two companies playing like boys, beating tin cups for drums. When some of them saw me they seemed a little dismayed, and came and said, beseechingly,—"Gunnel, Sah, you hab no objection to we playin', Sah?"—which objection I disclaimed; but soon they all subsided, rather to my regret, and scattered merrily. Afterward I found that some other officer had told them that I considered the affair too noisy, so that I felt a mild self-reproach when one said, "Cunnel, wish you had let we play a little longer, Sah." Still I was not sorry, on the whole; for these sham-fights between companies would in some regiments lead to real ones, and there is a latent jealousy here between the Florida and South Carolina men, which sometimes makes me anxious.

The officers are more kind and patient with the men than I should expect, since the former are mostly young, and drilling tries the temper; but they are aided by hearty satisfaction in the results already attained. I have never yet heard a doubt expressed among the officers as to the superiority of these men to white troops in aptitude for drill and discipline, because of their imitativeness and docility, and the pride they take in the service. One captain said to me to-day, "I have this afternoon taught my men to load-in-nine-times, and they do it better than we did it in my former company in three months." I can personally testify that one of our best lieutenants, an Englishman, taught a part of his company the essential movements of the "school for skirmishers" in a single lesson of two hours, so that they did them very passably, though I feel bound to discourage such haste. However, I "formed square" on the third battalion drill. Three fourths of drill consist of attention, imitation, and a good ear for time; in the other fourth, which consists of the application of principles, as, for instance, performing by the left flank some movement before learned by the right, they are perhaps slower than better educated men. Having belonged to five different drill-clubs before entering the army, I certainly ought to know something of the resources of human awkwardness, and I can honestly say that they astonish me by the facility with which they do things. I expected much harder work in this respect.

The habit of carrying burdens on the head gives them erectness of figure, even where physically disabled. I have seen a woman, with a brimming water-pail balanced on her head, or perhaps a cup, saucer, and spoon, stop suddenly, turn round, stoop to pick up a missile, rise again, fling it, light a pipe, and go through many evolutions with either hand or both, without spilling a drop. The pipe, by the way, gives an odd look to a well-dressed young girl on Sunday, but one often sees that spectacle. The passion for tobacco among our men continues quite absorbing, and I have piteous appeals for some arrangement by which they can buy it on credit, as we have yet no sutler. Their imploring, "Cunnel, we can't lib widout it, Sah," goes to my heart; and as they cannot read, I cannot even have the melancholy satisfaction of supplying them with the excellent anti-tobacco tracts of Mr. Trask.

                                                              December 19.

Last night the water froze in the adjutant's tent, but not in mine. To-day has been mild and beautiful. The blacks say they do not feel the cold so much as the white officers do, and perhaps it is so, though their health evidently suffers more from dampness. On the other hand, while drilling on very warm days, they have seemed to suffer more from the heat than their officers. But they dearly love fire, and at night will always have it, if possible, even on the minutest scale,—a mere handful of splinters, that seems hardly more efficacious than a friction-match. Probably this is a natural habit for the short-lived coolness of an out-door country; and then there is something delightful in this rich pine, which burns like a tar-barrel. It was, perhaps, encouraged by the masters, as the only cheap luxury the slaves had at hand.

As one grows more acquainted with the men, their individualities emerge; and I find, first their faces, then their characters, to be as distinct as those of whites. It is very interesting the desire they show to do their duty, and to improve as soldiers; they evidently think about it, and see the importance of the thing; they say to me that we white men cannot stay and be their leaders always and that they must learn to depend on themselves, or else relapse into their former condition.

Beside the superb branch of uneatable bitter oranges which decks my tent-pole, I have to-day hung up a long bough of finger-sponge, which floated to the river-bank. As winter advances, butterflies gradually disappear: one species (a Vanessa) lingers; three others have vanished since I came. Mocking-birds are abundant, but rarely sing; once or twice they have reminded me of the red thrush, but are inferior, as I have always thought. The colored people all say that it will be much cooler; but my officers do not think so, perhaps because last winter was so unusually mild,—with only one frost, they say.

                                                                 December 20.

Philoprogenitiveness is an important organ for an officer of colored troops; and I happen to be well provided with it. It seems to be the theory of all military usages, in fact, that soldiers are to be treated like children; and these singular persons, who never know their own age till they are past middle life, and then choose a birthday with such precision,—"Fifty year old, Sah, de fus' last April,"—prolong the privilege of childhood.

I am perplexed nightly for countersigns,—their range of proper names is so distressingly limited, and they make such amazing work of every new one. At first, to be sure, they did not quite recognize the need of any variation: one night some officer asked a sentinel whether he had the countersign yet, and was indignantly answered, "Should tink I hab 'em, hab 'em for a fortnight"; which seems a long epoch for that magic word to hold out. To-night I thought I would have "Fredericksburg," in honor of Burnside's reported victory, using the rumor quickly, for fear of a contradiction. Later, in comes a captain, gets the countersign for his own use, but presently returns, the sentinel having pronounced it incorrect. On inquiry, it appears that the sergeant of the guard, being weak in geography, thought best to substitute the more familiar word, "Crockery-ware"; which was, with perfect gravity, confided to all the sentinels, and accepted without question. O life! what is the fun of fiction beside thee?

I should think they would suffer and complain these cold nights; but they say nothing, though there is a good deal of coughing. I should fancy that the scarlet trousers must do something to keep them warm, and wonder that they dislike them so much, when they are so much like their beloved fires. They certainly multiply firelight in any case. I often notice that an infinitesimal flame, with one soldier standing by it, looks like quite a respectable conflagration, and it seems as if a group of them must dispel dampness.

                                                                December 21.

To a regimental commander no book can be so fascinating as the consolidated Morning Report, which is ready about nine, and tells how many in each company are sick, absent, on duty, and so on. It is one's newspaper and daily mail; I never grow tired of it. If a single recruit has come in, I am always eager to see how he looks on paper.

To-night the officers are rather depressed by rumors of Burnside's being defeated, after all. I am fortunately equable and undepressible; and it is very convenient that the men know too little of the events of the war to feel excitement or fear. They know General Saxton and me,—"de General" and "de Gunnel,"—and seem to ask no further questions. We are the war. It saves a great deal of trouble, while it lasts, this childlike confidence; nevertheless, it is our business to educate them to manhood, and I see as yet no obstacle.

As for the rumor, the world will no doubt roll round, whether Burnside is defeated or succeeds.

                                                     Christmas Day.

    "We'll fight for liberty

  Till de Lord shall call us home;

    We'll soon be free

  Till de Lord shall call us home."

This is the hymn which the slaves at Georgetown, South Carolina, were whipped for singing when President Lincoln was elected. So said a little drummer-boy, as he sat at my tent's edge last night and told me his story; and he showed all his white teeth as he added, "Dey tink 'de Lord' meant for say de Yankees."

Last night, at dress-parade, the adjutant read General Saxton's Proclamation for the New Year's Celebration. I think they understood it, for there was cheering in all the company-streets afterwards. Christmas is the great festival of the year for this people; but, with New Year's coming after, we could have no adequate programme for to-day, and so celebrated Christmas Eve with pattern simplicity. We omitted, namely, the mystic curfew which we call "taps," and let them sit up and burn their fires, and have their little prayer-meetings as late as they desired; and all night, as I waked at intervals, I could hear them praying and "shouting" and clattering with hands and heels. It seemed to make them very happy, and appeared to be at least an innocent Christmas dissipation, as compared with some of the convivialities of the "superior race" hereabouts.

Dutch Gap

                                                          December 26.

The day passed with no greater excitement for the men than target-shooting, which they enjoyed. I had the private delight of the arrival of our much-desired surgeon and his nephew, the captain, with letters and news from home. They also bring the good tidings that General Saxton is not to be removed, as had been reported.

Two different stands of colors have arrived for us, and will be presented at New Year's,—one from friends in New York, and the other from a lady in Connecticut. I see that "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly" of December 20th has a highly imaginative picture of the muster-in of our first company, and also of a skirmish on the late expedition.

I must not forget the prayer overheard last night by one of the captains: "O Lord! when I tink ob dis Kismas and las' year de Kismas. Las' Kismas he in de Secesh, and notin' to eat but grits, and no salt in 'em. Dis year in de camp, and too much victual!" This "too much" is a favorite phrase out of their grateful hearts, and did not in this case denote an excess of dinner,—as might be supposed,—but of thanksgiving.

                                                                December 29.

Our new surgeon has begun his work most efficiently: he and the chaplain have converted an old gin-house into a comfortable hospital, with ten nice beds and straw pallets. He is now, with a hearty professional faith, looking round for somebody to put into it. I am afraid the regiment will accommodate him; for, although he declares that these men do not sham sickness, as he expected, their catarrh is an unpleasant reality. They feel the dampness very much, and make such a coughing at dress-parade, that I have urged him to administer a dose of cough-mixture, all round, just before that pageant. Are the colored race tough? is my present anxiety; and it is odd that physical insufficiency, the only discouragement not thrown in our way by the newspapers, is the only discouragement which finds any place in our minds. They are used to sleeping indoors in winter, herded before fires, and so they feel the change. Still, the regiment is as healthy as the average, and experience will teach us something.*

* A second winter's experience removed all this solicitude, for they learned to take care of themselves. During the first February the sick-list averaged about ninety, during the second about thirty, this being the worst month in the year for blacks.

                                                                    December 30.

On the first of January we are to have a slight collation, ten oxen or so, barbecued,—or not properly barbecued, but roasted whole. Touching the length of time required to "do" an ox, no two housekeepers appear to agree. Accounts vary from two hours to twenty-four. We shall happily have enough to try all gradations of roasting, and suit all tastes, from Miss A.'s to mine. But fancy me proffering a spare-rib, well done, to some fair lady! What ever are we to do for spoons and forks and plates? Each soldier has his own, and is sternly held responsible for it by "Army Regulations." But how provide for the multitude? Is it customary, I ask you, to help to tenderloin with one's fingers? Fortunately, the Major is to see to that department. Great are the advantages of military discipline: for anything perplexing, detail a subordinate.

                                                      New Year's Eve.

My housekeeping at home is not, perhaps, on any very extravagant scale. Buying beefsteak, I usually go to the extent of two or three pounds. Yet when, this morning at daybreak, the quartermaster called to inquire how many cattle I would have killed for roasting, I turned over in bed, and answered composedly, "Ten,—and keep three to be fatted."

Fatted, quotha! Not one of the beasts at present appears to possess an ounce of superfluous flesh. Never were seen such lean kine. As they swing on vast spits, composed of young trees, the firelight glimmers through their ribs, as if they were great lanterns. But no matter, they are cooking,—nay, they are cooked.

One at least is taken off to cool, and will be replaced tomorrow to warm up. It was roasted three hours, and well done, for I tasted it. It is so long since I tasted fresh beef that forgetfulness is possible; but I fancied this to be successful. I tried to imagine that I liked the Homeric repast, and certainly the whole thing has been far more agreeable than was to be expected. The doubt now is, whether I have made a sufficient provision for my household. I should have roughly guessed that ten beeves would feed as many million people, it has such a stupendous sound; but General Saxton predicts a small social party of five thousand, and we fear that meat will run short, unless they prefer bone. One of the cattle is so small, we are hoping it may turn out veal.

For drink we aim at the simple luxury of molasses-and-water, a barrel per company, ten in all. Liberal housekeepers may like to know that for a barrel of water we allow three gallons of molasses, half a pound of ginger, and a quart of vinegar,—this last being a new ingredient for my untutored palate, though all the rest are amazed at my ignorance. Hard bread, with more molasses, and a dessert of tobacco, complete the festive repast, destined to cheer, but not inebriate.

On this last point, of inebriation, this is certainly a wonderful camp. For us it is absolutely omitted from the list of vices. I have never heard of a glass of liquor in the camp, nor of any effort either to bring it in or to keep it out. A total absence of the circulating medium might explain the abstinence,—not that it seems to have that effect with white soldiers,—but it would not explain the silence. The craving for tobacco is constant, and not to be allayed, like that of a mother for her children; but I have never heard whiskey even wished for, save on Christmas-Day, and then only by one man, and he spoke with a hopeless ideal sighing, as one alludes to the Golden Age. I am amazed at this total omission of the most inconvenient of all camp appetites. It certainly is not the result of exhortation, for there has been no occasion for any, and even the pledge would scarcely seem efficacious where hardly anybody can write.

I do not think there is a great visible eagerness for tomorrow's festival: it is not their way to be very jubilant over anything this side of the New Jerusalem. They know also that those in this Department are nominally free already, and that the practical freedom has to be maintained, in any event, by military success. But they will enjoy it greatly, and we shall have a multitude of people.

                                             January 1, 1863 (evening).

A happy New Year to civilized people,—mere white folks. Our festival has come and gone, with perfect success, and our good General has been altogether satisfied. Last night the great fires were kept smoldering in the pit, and the beeves were cooked more or less, chiefly more,—during which time they had to be carefully watched, and the great spits turned by main force. Happy were the merry fellows who were permitted to sit up all night, and watch the glimmering flames that threw a thousand fantastic shadows among the great gnarled oaks. And such a chattering as I was sure to hear whenever I awoke that night!

My first greeting to-day was from one of the most stylish sergeants, who approached me with the following little speech, evidently the result of some elaboration:—

"I tink myself happy, dis New Year's Day, for salute my own Cunnel. Dis day las' year I was servant to a Gunnel ob Secesh; but now I hab de privilege for salute my own Cunnel."

That officer, with the utmost sincerity, reciprocated the sentiment.

About ten o'clock the people began to collect by land, and also by water,—in steamers sent by General Saxton for the purpose; and from that time all the avenues of approach were thronged. The multitude were chiefly colored women, with gay handkerchiefs on their heads, and a sprinkling of men, with that peculiarly respectable look which these people always have on Sundays and holidays. There were many white visitors also,—ladies on horseback and in carriages, superintendents and teachers, officers, and cavalry-men. Our companies were marched to the neighborhood of the platform, and allowed to sit or stand, as at the Sunday services; the platform was occupied by ladies and dignitaries, and by the band of the Eighth Maine, which kindly volunteered for the occasion; the colored people filled up all the vacant openings in the beautiful grove around, and there was a cordon of mounted visitors beyond. Above, the great live-oak branches and their trailing moss; beyond the people, a glimpse of the blue river.

"Emancipation Day in South Carolina" - the Color-Sergeant of the 1st South Carolina (Colored) addressing the regiment, after having been presented with the Stars and Stripes, at Smith's plantation, Port Royal, January 1, 1863

The services began at half past eleven o'clock, with prayer by our chaplain, Mr. Fowler, who is always, on such occasions, simple, reverential, and impressive. Then the President's Proclamation was read by Dr. W. H. Brisbane, a thing infinitely appropriate, a South Carolinian addressing South Carolinians; for he was reared among these very islands, and here long since emancipated his own slaves. Then the colors were presented to us by the Rev. Mr. French, a chaplain who brought them from the donors in New York. All this was according to the programme.

Then followed an incident so simple, so touching, so utterly unexpected and startling, that I can scarcely believe it on recalling, though it gave the keynote to the whole day. The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women's voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow.—

  My Country, 'tis of thee,

  Sweet land of liberty,

  Of thee I sing!"

People looked at each other, and then at us on the platform, to see whence came this interruption, not set down in the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang on, verse after verse; others of the colored people joined in; some whites on the platform began, but I motioned them to silence. I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it; and when I came to speak of it, after it was ended, tears were everywhere. If you could have heard how quaint and innocent it was!

Old Tiff and his children might have sung it; and close before me was a little slave-boy, almost white, who seemed to belong to the party, and even he must join in. Just think of it!—the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people, and here, while mere spectators stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out in their lay, as if they were by their own hearths at home! When they stopped, there was nothing to do for it but to speak, and I went on; but the life of the whole day was in those unknown people's song.

Receiving the flags, I gave them into the hands of two fine-looking men, jet black, as color-guard, and they also spoke, and very effectively,—Sergeant Prince Rivers and Corporal Robert Sutton. The regiment sang "Marching Along," and then General Saxton spoke, in his own simple, manly way, and Mrs. Francis D. Gage spoke very sensibly to the women, and Judge Stickney, from Florida, added something; then some gentleman sang an ode, and the regiment the John Brown song, and then they went to their beef and molasses. Everything was very orderly, and they seemed to have a very gay time. Most of the visitors had far to go, and so dispersed before dress-parade, though the band stayed to enliven it. In the evening we had letters from home, and General Saxton had a reception at his house, from which I excused myself; and so ended one of the most enthusiastic and happy gatherings I ever knew. The day was perfect, and there was nothing but success.

General John C. Fremont

I forgot to say, that, in the midst of the services, it was announced that General Fremont was appointed Commander-in-Chief,—an announcement which was received with immense cheering, as would have been almost anything else, I verily believe, at that moment of high tide. It was shouted across by the pickets above,—a way in which we often receive news, but not always trustworthy.

                                                               January 3, 1863.

Once, and once only, thus far, the water has frozen in my tent; and the next morning showed a dense white frost outside. We have still mocking-birds and crickets and rosebuds, and occasional noonday baths in the river, though the butterflies have vanished, as I remember to have observed in Fayal, after December. I have been here nearly six weeks without a rainy day; one or two slight showers there have been, once interrupting a drill, but never dress-parade. For climate, by day, we might be among the isles of Greece,—though it may be my constant familiarity with the names of her sages which suggests that impression. For instance, a voice just now called, near my tent,—"Cato, whar's Plato?" The men have somehow got the impression that it is essential to the validity of a marriage that they should come to me for permission, just as they used to go to the master; and I rather encourage these little confidences, because it is so entertaining to hear them. "Now, Cunnel," said a faltering swam the other day, "I want for get me one good lady," which I approved, especially the limitation as to number. Afterwards I asked one of the bridegroom's friends whether he thought it a good match. "O yes, Cunnel," said he, in all the cordiality of friendship, "John's gwine for marry Venus." I trust the goddess will prove herself a better lady than she appeared during her previous career upon this planet. But this naturally suggests the isles of Greece again.

                                                                     January 7.

On first arriving, I found a good deal of anxiety among the officers as to the increase of desertions, that being the rock on which the "Hunter Regiment" split. Now this evil is very nearly stopped, and we are every day recovering the older absentees. One of the very best things that have happened to us was the half-accidental shooting of a man who had escaped from the guard-house, and was wounded by a squad sent in pursuit. He has since died; and this very eve-rung another man, who escaped with him, came and opened the door of my tent, after being five days in the woods, almost without food. His clothes were in rags, and he was nearly starved, poor foolish fellow, so that we can almost dispense with further punishment. Severe penalties would be wasted on these people, accustomed as they have been to the most violent passions on the part of white men; but a mild inexorableness tells on them, just as it does on any other children. It is something utterly new to me, and it is thus far perfectly efficacious. They have a great deal of pride as soldiers, and a very little of severity goes a great way, if it be firm and consistent. This is very encouraging.

The single question which I asked of some of the plantation superintendents, on the voyage, was, "Do these people appreciate justice?" If they did it was evident that all the rest would be easy. When a race is degraded beyond that point it must be very hard to deal with them; they must mistake all kindness for indulgence, all strictness for cruelty. With these freed slaves there is no such trouble, not a particle: let an officer be only just and firm, with a cordial, kindly nature, and he has no sort of difficulty. The plantation superintendents and teachers have the same experience, they say; but we have an immense advantage in the military organization, which helps in two ways: it increases their self-respect, and it gives us an admirable machinery for discipline, thus improving both the fulcrum and the lever.

The wounded man died in the hospital, and the general verdict seemed to be, "Him brought it on heself." Another soldier died of pneumonia on the same day, and we had the funerals in the evening. It was very impressive. A dense mist came up, with a moon behind it, and we had only the light of pine-splinters, as the procession wound along beneath the mighty, moss-hung branches of the ancient grove. The groups around the grave, the dark faces, the red garments, the scattered lights, the misty boughs, were weird and strange. The men sang one of their own wild chants. Two crickets sang also, one on either side, and did not cease their little monotone, even when the three volleys were fired above the graves. Just before the coffins were lowered, an old man whispered to me that I must have their position altered,—the heads must be towards the west; so it was done,—though they are in a place so veiled in woods that either rising or setting sun will find it hard to spy them.

We have now a good regimental hospital, admirably arranged in a deserted gin-house,—a fine well of our own digging, within the camp lines,—a full allowance of tents, all floored,—a wooden cook-house to every company, with sometimes a palmetto mess-house beside,—a substantial wooden guard-house, with a fireplace five feet "in de clar," where the men off duty can dry themselves and sleep comfortably in bunks afterwards. We have also a great circular school-tent, made of condemned canvas, thirty feet in diameter, and looking like some of the Indian lodges I saw in Kansas. We now meditate a regimental bakery. Our aggregate has increased from four hundred and ninety to seven hundred and forty, besides a hundred recruits now waiting at St. Augustine, and we have practised through all the main movements in battalion drill.

Affairs being thus prosperous, and yesterday having been six weeks since my last and only visit to Beaufort, I rode in, glanced at several camps, and dined with the General. It seemed absolutely like re-entering the world; and I did not fully estimate my past seclusion till it occurred to me, as a strange and novel phenomenon, that the soldiers at the other camps were white.                                                         

                                                                 January 8.

This morning I went to Beaufort again, on necessary business, and by good luck happened upon a review and drill of the white regiments. The thing that struck me most was that same absence of uniformity, in minor points, that I noticed at first in my own officers. The best regiments in the Department are represented among my captains and lieutenants, and very well represented too; yet it has cost much labor to bring them to any uniformity in their drill. There is no need of this; for the prescribed "Tactics" approach perfection; it is never left discretionary in what place an officer shall stand, or in what words he shall give his order. All variation would seem to imply negligence. Yet even West Point occasionally varies from the "Tactics,"—as, for instance, in requiring the line officers to face down the line, when each is giving the order to his company. In our strictest Massachusetts regiments this is not done.

It needs an artist's eye to make a perfect drill-master. Yet the small points are not merely a matter of punctilio; for, the more perfectly a battalion is drilled on the parade-ground the more quietly it can be handled in action. Moreover, the great need of uniformity is this: that, in the field, soldiers of different companies, and even of different regiments, are liable to be intermingled, and a diversity of orders may throw everything into confusion. Confusion means Bull Run.

I wished my men at the review to-day; for, amidst all the rattling and noise of artillery and the galloping of cavalry, there was only one infantry movement that we have not practised, and that was done by only one regiment, and apparently considered quite a novelty, though it is easily taught,

—forming square by Casey's method: forward on centre. It is really just as easy to drill a regiment as a company,

—perhaps easier, because one has more time to think; but it is just as essential to be sharp and decisive, perfectly clearheaded, and to put life into the men. A regiment seems small when one has learned how to handle it, a mere handful of men; and I have no doubt that a brigade or a division would soon appear equally small. But to handle either judiciously, ah, that is another affair!

So of governing; it is as easy to govern a regiment as a school or a factory, and needs like qualities, system, promptness, patience, tact; moreover, in a regiment one has the aid of the admirable machinery of the army, so that I see very ordinary men who succeed very tolerably.

Reports of a six months' armistice are rife here, and the thought is deplored by all. I cannot believe it; yet sometimes one feels very anxious about the ultimate fate of these poor people. After the experience of Hungary, one sees that revolutions may go backward; and the habit of injustice seems so deeply impressed upon the whites, that it is hard to believe in the possibility of anything better. I dare not yet hope that the promise of the President's Proclamation will be kept. For myself I can be indifferent, for the experience here has been its own daily and hourly reward; and the adaptedness of the freed slaves for drill and discipline is now thoroughly demonstrated, and must soon be universally acknowledged. But it would be terrible to see this regiment disbanded or defrauded.

                                                                    January 12.

Many things glide by without time to narrate them. On Saturday we had a mail with the President's Second Message of Emancipation, and the next day it was read to the men. The words themselves did not stir them very much, because they have been often told that they were free, especially on New Year's Day, and, being unversed in politics, they do not understand, as well as we do, the importance of each additional guaranty. But the chaplain spoke to them afterwards very effectively, as usual; and then I proposed to them to hold up their hands and pledge themselves to be faithful to those still in bondage. They entered heartily into this, and the scene was quite impressive, beneath the great oak-branches. I heard afterwards that only one man refused to raise his hand, saying bluntly that his wife was out of slavery with him, and he did not care to fight. The other soldiers of his company were very indignant, and shoved him about among them while marching back to their quarters, calling him "Coward." I was glad of their exhibition of feeling, though it is very possible that the one who had thus the moral courage to stand alone among his comrades might be more reliable, on a pinch, than some who yielded a more ready assent. But the whole response, on their part, was very hearty, and will be a good thing to which to hold them hereafter, at any time of discouragement or demoralization,—which was my chief reason for proposing it. With their simple natures it is a great thing to tie them to some definite committal; they never forget a marked occurrence, and never seem disposed to evade a pledge.

It is this capacity of honor and fidelity which gives me such entire faith in them as soldiers. Without it all their religious demonstration would be mere sentimentality. For instance, every one who visits the camp is struck with their bearing as sentinels. They exhibit, in this capacity, not an upstart conceit, but a steady, conscientious devotion to duty. They would stop their idolized General Saxton, if he attempted to cross their beat contrary to orders: I have seen them. No feeble or incompetent race could do this. The officers tell many amusing instances of this fidelity, but I think mine the best.

It was very dark the other night, an unusual thing here, and the rain fell in torrents; so I put on my India-rubber suit, and went the rounds of the sentinels, incognito, to test them. I can only say that I shall never try such an experiment again and have cautioned my officers against it. Tis a wonder I escaped with life and limb,—such a charging of bayonets and clicking of gun-locks. Sometimes I tempted them by refusing to give any countersign, but offering them a piece of tobacco, which they could not accept without allowing me nearer than the prescribed bayonet's distance. Tobacco is more than gold to them, and it was touching to watch the struggle in their minds; but they always did their duty at last, and I never could persuade them. One man, as if wishing to crush all his inward vacillation at one fell stroke, told me stoutly that he never used tobacco, though I found next day that he loved it as much as any one of them. It seemed wrong thus to tamper with their fidelity; yet it was a vital matter to me to know how far it could be trusted, out of my sight. It was so intensely dark that not more than one or two knew me, even after I had talked with the very next sentinel, especially as they had never seen me in India-rubber clothing, and I can always disguise my voice. It was easy to distinguish those who did make the discovery; they were always conscious and simpering when their turn came; while the others were stout and irreverent till I revealed myself, and then rather cowed and anxious, fearing to have offended.

It rained harder and harder, and when I had nearly made the rounds I had had enough of it, and, simply giving the countersign to the challenging sentinel, undertook to pass within the lines.

"Halt!" exclaimed this dusky man and brother, bringing down his bayonet, "de countersign not correck."

Now the magic word, in this case, was "Vicksburg," in honor of a rumored victory. But as I knew that these hard names became quite transformed upon their lips, "Carthage" being familiarized into Cartridge, and "Concord" into Corn-cob, how could I possibly tell what shade of pronunciation my friend might prefer for this particular proper name?

"Vicksburg," I repeated, blandly, but authoritatively, endeavoring, as zealously as one of Christy's Minstrels, to assimilate my speech to any supposed predilection of the Ethiop vocal organs.

"Halt dar! Countersign not correck," was the only answer.

The bayonet still maintained a position which, in a military point of view, was impressive.

I tried persuasion, orthography, threats, tobacco, all in vain. I could not pass in. Of course my pride was up; for was I to defer to an untutored African on a point of pronunciation? Classic shades of Harvard, forbid! Affecting scornful indifference, I tried to edge away, proposing to myself to enter the camp at some other point, where my elocution would be better appreciated. Not a step could I stir.

"Halt!" shouted my gentleman again, still holding me at his bayonet's point, and I wincing and halting.

I explained to him the extreme absurdity of this proceeding, called his attention to the state of the weather, which, indeed, spoke for itself so loudly that we could hardly hear each other speak, and requested permission to withdraw. The bayonet, with mute eloquence, refused the application.

There flashed into my mind, with more enjoyment in the retrospect than I had experienced at the time, an adventure on a lecturing tour in other years, when I had spent an hour in trying to scramble into a country tavern, after bed-time, on the coldest night of winter. On that occasion I ultimately found myself stuck midway in the window, with my head in a temperature of 80 degrees, and my heels in a temperature of -10 degrees, with a heavy windowsash pinioning the small of my back. However, I had got safe out of that dilemma, and it was time to put an end to this one,

"Call the corporal of the guard," said I at last, with dignity, unwilling to make a night of it or to yield my incognito.

"Corporal ob de guard!" he shouted, lustily,—"Post Number Two!" while I could hear another sentinel chuckling with laughter. This last was a special guard, placed over a tent, with a prisoner in charge. Presently he broke silence.

"Who am dat?" he asked, in a stage whisper. "Am he a buckra [white man]?"

"Dunno whether he been a buckra or not," responded, doggedly, my Cerberus in uniform; "but I's bound to keep him here till de corporal ob de guard come."

Yet, when that dignitary arrived, and I revealed myself, poor Number Two appeared utterly transfixed with terror, and seemed to look for nothing less than immediate execution. Of course I praised his fidelity, and the next day complimented him before the guard, and mentioned him to his captain; and the whole affair was very good for them all. Hereafter, if Satan himself should approach them in darkness and storm, they will take him for "de Cunnel," and treat him with special severity.

                                                                      January 13.

In many ways the childish nature of this people shows itself. I have just had to make a change of officers in a company which has constantly complained, and with good reason, of neglect and improper treatment. Two excellent officers have been assigned to them; and yet they sent a deputation to me in the evening, in a state of utter wretchedness. "We's bery grieved dis evening, Cunnel; 'pears like we couldn't bear it, to lose de Cap'n and de Lieutenant, all two togeder." Argument was useless; and I could only fall back on the general theory, that I knew what was best for them, which had much more effect; and I also could cite the instance of another company, which had been much improved by a new captain, as they readily admitted. So with the promise that the new officers should not be "savage to we," which was the one thing they deprecated, I assuaged their woes. Twenty-four hours have passed, and I hear them singing most merrily all down that company street.

I often notice how their griefs may be dispelled, like those of children, merely by permission to utter them: if they can tell their sorrows, they go away happy, even without asking to have anything done about them. I observe also a peculiar dislike of all intermediate control: they always wish to pass by the company officer, and deal with me personally for everything. General Saxton notices the same thing with the people on the plantations as regards himself. I suppose this proceeds partly from the old habit of appealing to the master against the overseer. Kind words would cost the master nothing, and he could easily put off any non-fulfilment upon the overseer. Moreover, the negroes have acquired such constitutional distrust of white people, that it is perhaps as much as they can do to trust more than one person at a tune. Meanwhile this constant personal intercourse is out of the question in a well-ordered regiment; and the remedy for it is to introduce by degrees more and more of system, so that their immediate officers will become all-sufficient for the daily routine.

It is perfectly true (as I find everybody takes for granted) that the first essential for an officer of colored troops is to gain their confidence. But it is equally true, though many persons do not appreciate it, that the admirable methods and proprieties of the regular army are equally available for all troops, and that the sublimest philanthropist, if he does not appreciate this, is unfit to command them.

Another childlike attribute in these men, which is less agreeable, is a sort of blunt insensibility to giving physical pain. If they are cruel to animals, for instance, it always reminds me of children pulling off flies' legs, in a sort of pitiless, untaught, experimental way. Yet I should not fear any wanton outrage from them. After all their wrongs, they are not really revengeful; and I would far rather enter a captured city with them than with white troops, for they would be more subordinate. But for mere physical suffering they would have no fine sympathies. The cruel things they have seen and undergone have helped to blunt them; and if I ordered them to put to death a dozen prisoners, I think they would do it without remonstrance.

Yet their religious spirit grows more beautiful to me in living longer with them; it is certainly far more so than at first, when it seemed rather a matter of phrase and habit. It influences them both on the negative and the positive side. That is, it cultivates the feminine virtues first,—makes them patient, meek, resigned. This is very evident in the hospital; there is nothing of the restless, defiant habit of white invalids. Perhaps, if they had more of this, they would resist disease better. Imbued from childhood with the habit of submission, drinking in through every pore that other-world trust which is the one spirit of their songs, they can endure everything. This I expected; but I am relieved to find that their religion strengthens them on the positive side also,—gives zeal, energy, daring. They could easily be made fanatics, if I chose; but I do not choose. Their whole mood is essentially Mohammedan, perhaps, in its strength and its weakness; and I feel the same degree of sympathy that I should if I had a Turkish command,—that is, a sort of sympathetic admiration, not tending towards agreement, but towards co-operation. Their philosophizing is often the highest form of mysticism; and our dear surgeon declares that they are all natural transcendentalists. The white camps seem rough and secular, after this; and I hear our men talk about "a religious army," "a Gospel army," in their prayer-meetings. They are certainly evangelizing the chaplain, who was rather a heretic at the beginning; at least, this is his own admission. We have recruits on their way from St. Augustine, where the negroes are chiefly Roman Catholics; and it will be interesting to see how their type of character combines with that elder creed. It is time for rest; and I have just looked out into the night, where the eternal stars shut down, in concave protection, over the yet glimmering camp, and Orion hangs above my tent-door, giving to me the sense of strength and assurance which these simple children obtain from their Moses and the Prophets. Yet external Nature does its share in their training; witness that most poetic of all their songs, which always reminds me of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in the "Scottish Border Minstrelsy,"—

  I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;

          Lay dis body down.

  I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

          To lay dis body down.

  I'll walk in de graveyard, I'll walk through de graveyard,

          To lay dis body down.

  I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

          Lay dis body down.

  I go to de Judgment in de evening ob de day

          When I lay dis body down;

  And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

          When I lay dis body down.

                                                                     January 14.

In speaking of the military qualities of the blacks, I should add, that the only point where I am disappointed is one I have never seen raised by the most incredulous newspaper critics,—namely, their physical condition. To be sure they often look magnificently to my gymnasium-trained eye; and I always like to observe them when bathing,—such splendid muscular development, set off by that smooth coating of adipose tissue which makes them, like the South-Sea Islanders appear even more muscular than they are. Their skins are also of finer grain than those of whites, the surgeons say, and certainly are smoother and far more free from hair. But their weakness is pulmonary; pneumonia and pleurisy are their besetting ailments; they are easily made ill,—and easily cured, if promptly treated: childish organizations again. Guard-duty injures them more than whites, apparently; and double-quick movements, in choking dust, set them coughing badly. But then it is to be remembered that this is their sickly season, from January to March, and that their healthy season will come in summer, when the whites break down. Still my conviction of the physical superiority of more highly civilized races is strengthened on the whole, not weakened, by observing them. As to availability for military drill and duty in other respects, the only question I ever hear debated among the officers is, whether they are equal or superior to whites. I have never heard it suggested that they were inferior, although I expected frequently to hear such complaints from hasty or unsuccessful officers.

Of one thing I am sure, that their best qualities will be wasted by merely keeping them for garrison duty. They seem peculiarly fitted for offensive operations, and especially for partisan warfare; they have so much dash and such abundant resources, combined with such an Indian-like knowledge of the country and its ways. These traits have been often illustrated in expeditions sent after deserters. For instance, I despatched one of my best lieutenants and my best sergeant with a squad of men to search a certain plantation, where there were two separate negro villages. They went by night, and the force was divided. The lieutenant took one set of huts, the sergeant the other. Before the lieutenant had reached his first house, every man in the village was in the woods, innocent and guilty alike. But the sergeant's mode of operation was thus described by a corporal from a white regiment who happened to be in one of the negro houses. He said that not a sound was heard until suddenly a red leg appeared in the open doorway, and a voice outside said, "Rally." Going to the door, he observed a similar pair of red legs before every hut, and not a person was allowed to go out, until the quarters had been thoroughly searched, and the three deserters found. This was managed by Sergeant Prince Rivers, our color-sergeant, who is provost-sergeant also, and has entire charge of the prisoners and of the daily policing of the camp. He is a man of distinguished appearance, and in old times was the crack coachman of Beaufort, in which capacity he once drove Beauregard from this plantation to Charleston, I believe. They tell me that he was once allowed to present a petition to the Governor of South Carolina in behalf of slaves, for the redress of certain grievances; and that a placard, offering two thousand dollars for his recapture, is still to be seen by the wayside between here and Charleston. He was a sergeant in the old "Hunter Regiment," and was taken by General Hunter to New York last spring, where the chevrons on his arm brought a mob upon him in Broadway, whom he kept off till the police interfered. There is not a white officer in this regiment who has more administrative ability, or more absolute authority over the men; they do not love him, but his mere presence has controlling power over them. He writes well enough to prepare for me a daily report of his duties in the camp; if his education reached a higher point, I see no reason why he should not command the Army of the Potomac. He is jet-black, or rather, I should say, wine-black; his complexion, like that of others of my darkest men, having a sort of rich, clear depth, without a trace of sootiness, and to my eye very handsome. His features are tolerably regular, and full of command, and his figure superior to that of any of our white officers,—being six feet high, perfectly proportioned, and of apparently inexhaustible strength and activity. His gait is like a panther's; I never saw such a tread. No anti-slavery novel has described a man of such marked ability. He makes Toussaint perfectly intelligible; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king.

                                                                       January 15.

This morning is like May. Yesterday I saw bluebirds and a butterfly; so this whiter of a fortnight is over. I fancy there is a trifle less coughing in the camp. We hear of other stations in the Department where the mortality, chiefly from yellow fever, has been frightful. Dr. —— is rubbing his hands professionally over the fearful tales of the surgeon of a New York regiment, just from Key West, who has had two hundred cases of the fever. "I suppose he is a skilful, highly educated man," said I. "Yes," he responded with enthusiasm. "Why, he had seventy deaths!"—as if that proved his superiority past question.

                                                      January 19.

"And first, sitting proud as a lung on his throne, At the    head of them all rode Sir Richard Tyrone."

But I fancy that Sir Richard felt not much better satisfied with his following than I to-day. J. R. L. [Lowell]  said once that nothing was quite so good as turtle-soup, except mock-turtle; and I have heard officers declare that nothing was so stirring as real war, except some exciting parade. To-day, for the first time, I marched the whole regiment through Beaufort and back,—the first appearance of such a novelty on any stage. They did march splendidly; this all admit. M——'s prediction was fulfilled: "Will not —— be in bliss? A thousand men, every one as black as a coal!" I confess it. To look back on twenty broad double-ranks of men (for they marched by platoons),—every polished musket having a black face beside it, and every face set steadily to the front,—a regiment of freed slaves marching on into the future,—it was something to remember; and when they returned through the same streets, marching by the flank, with guns at a "support," and each man covering his file-leader handsomely, the effect on the eye was almost as fine. The band of the Eighth Maine joined us at the entrance of the town, and escorted us in. Sergeant Rivers said ecstatically afterwards, in describing the affair, "And when dat band wheel in before us, and march on,—my God! I quit dis world altogeder." I wonder if he pictured to himself the many dusky regiments, now unformed, which I seemed to see marching up behind us, gathering shape out of the dim air.

I had cautioned the men, before leaving camp, not to be staring about them as they marched, but to look straight to the front, every man; and they did it with their accustomed fidelity, aided by the sort of spontaneous eye-for-effect which is in all their melodramatic natures. One of them was heard to say exultingly afterwards, "We didn't look to de right nor to de leff. I didn't see notin' in Beaufort. Eb'ry step was worth a half a dollar." And they all marched as if it were so. They knew well that they were marching through throngs of officers and soldiers who had drilled as many months as we had drilled weeks, and whose eyes would readily spy out every defect. And I must say, that, on the whole, with a few trivial exceptions, those spectators behaved in a manly and courteous manner, and I do not care to write down all the handsome things that were said. Whether said or not, they were deserved; and there is no danger that our men will not take sufficient satisfaction in their good appearance. I was especially amused at one of our recruits, who did not march in the ranks, and who said, after watching the astonishment of some white soldiers, "De buckra sojers look like a man who been-a-steal a sheep,"—that is, I suppose, sheepish.

After passing and repassing through the town, we marched to the parade-ground, and went through an hour's drill, forming squares and reducing them, and doing other things which look hard on paper, and are perfectly easy in fact; and we were to have been reviewed by General Saxton, but he had been unexpectedly called to Ladies Island, and did not see us at all, which was the only thing to mar the men's enjoyment. Then we marched back to camp (three miles), the men singing the "John Brown Song," and all manner of things,—as happy creatures as one can well conceive.

It is worth mentioning, before I close, that we have just received an article about "Negro Troops," from the London Spectator, which is so admirably true to our experience that it seems as if written by one of us. I am confident that there never has been, in any American newspaper, a treatment of the subject so discriminating and so wise.

Major-General David D. Hunter

                                                                     January 21.

To-day brought a visit from Major-General Hunter and his staff, by General Saxton's invitation,—the former having just arrived in the Department. I expected them at dress-parade, but they came during battalion drill, rather to my dismay, and we were caught in our old clothes. It was our first review, and I dare say we did tolerably; but of course it seemed to me that the men never appeared so ill before,—just as one always thinks a party at one's own house a failure, even if the guests seem to enjoy it, because one is so keenly sensitive to every little thing that goes wrong. After review and drill, General Hunter made the men a little speech, at my request, and told them that he wished there were fifty thousand of them. General Saxton spoke to them afterwards, and said that fifty thousand muskets were on their way for colored troops. The men cheered both the generals lustily; and they were complimentary afterwards, though I knew that the regiment could not have appeared nearly so well as on its visit to Beaufort. I suppose I felt like some anxious mamma whose children have accidentally appeared at dancing-school in their old clothes.

General Hunter promises us all we want,—pay when the funds arrive, Springfield rifled muskets, and blue trousers. Moreover, he has graciously consented that we should go on an expedition along the coast, to pick up cotton, lumber, and, above all, recruits. I declined an offer like this just after my arrival, because the regiment was not drilled or disciplined, not even the officers; but it is all we wish for now.

  What care I how black I be?

  Forty pounds will marry me.

quoth Mother Goose. Forty rounds will marry us to the American Army, past divorcing, if we can only use them well. Our success or failure may make or mar the prospects of colored troops. But it is well to remember in advance that military success is really less satisfactory than any other, because it may depend on a moment's turn of events, and that may be determined by some trivial thing, neither to be anticipated nor controlled. Napoleon ought to have won at Waterloo by all reasonable calculations; but who cares? All that one can expect is, to do one's best, and to take with equanimity the fortune of war.

CHAPTER III

UP THE ST. MARY’S

If Sergeant Rivers was a natural king among my dusky soldiers, Corporal Robert Sutton was the natural prime-minister. If not in all respects the ablest, he was the wisest man in our ranks. As large, as powerful, and as black as our good-looking Color-Sergeant, but more heavily built and with less personal beauty, he had a more massive brain and a far more meditative and systematic intellect. Not yet grounded even in the spelling-book, his modes of thought were nevertheless strong, lucid, and accurate; and he yearned and pined for intellectual companionship beyond all ignorant men whom I have ever met. I believe that he would have talked all day and all night, for days together, to any officer who could instruct him, until his companions, at least, fell asleep exhausted. His comprehension of the whole problem of Slavery was more thorough and far-reaching than that of any Abolitionist, so far as its social and military aspects went; in that direction I could teach him nothing, and he taught me much. But it was his methods of thought which always impressed me chiefly: superficial brilliancy he left to others, and grasped at the solid truth.

Of course his interest in the war and in the regiment was unbounded; he did not take to drill with especial readiness, but he was insatiable of it, and grudged every moment of relaxation. Indeed, he never had any such moments; his mind was at work all the time, even when he was singing hymns, of which he had endless store. He was not, however, one of our leading religionists, but his moral code was solid and reliable, like his mental processes. Ignorant as he was, the "years that bring the philosophic mind" had yet been his, and most of my young officers seemed boys beside him. He was a Florida man, and had been chiefly employed in lumbering and piloting on the St. Mary's River, which divides Florida from Georgia. Down this stream he had escaped in a "dug-out," and after thus finding the way, had returned (as had not a few of my men in other cases) to bring away wife and child. "I wouldn't have left my child, Cunnel," he said, with an emphasis that sounded the depths of his strong nature. And up this same river he was always imploring to be allowed to guide an expedition.

Many other men had rival propositions to urge, for they gained self-confidence from drill and guard-duty, and were growing impatient of inaction. "Ought to go to work, Sa,—don't believe in we lyin' in camp eatin' up de perwisions." Such were the quaint complaints, which I heard with joy. Looking over my note-books of that period, I find them filled with topographical memoranda, jotted down by a flickering candle, from the evening talk of the men,—notes of vulnerable points along the coast, charts of rivers, locations of pickets. I prized these conversations not more for what I thus learned of the country than for what I learned of the men. One could thus measure their various degrees of accuracy and their average military instinct; and I must say that in every respect, save the accurate estimate of distances, they stood the test well. But no project took my fancy so much, after all, as that of the delegate from the St. Mary's River.

The best peg on which to hang an expedition in the Department of the South, in those days, was the promise of lumber. Dwelling in the very land of Southern pine, the Department authorities had to send North for it, at a vast expense. There was reported to be plenty in the enemy's country, but somehow the colored soldiers were the only ones who had been lucky enough to obtain any, thus far, and the supply brought in by our men, after flooring the tents of the white regiments and our own, was running low. An expedition of white troops, four companies, with two steamers and two schooners, had lately returned empty-handed, after a week's foraging; and now it was our turn. They said the mills were all burned; but should we go up the St. Mary's, Corporal Sutton was prepared to offer more lumber than we had transportation to carry. This made the crowning charm of his suggestion. But there is never any danger of erring on the side of secrecy, in a military department; and I resolved to avoid all undue publicity for our plans, by not finally deciding on any until we should get outside the bar. This was happily approved by my superior officers, Major-General Hunter and Brigadier-General Saxton; and I was accordingly permitted to take three steamers, with four hundred and sixty-two officers and men, and two or three invited guests, and go down the coast on my own responsibility. We were, in short, to win our spurs; and if, as among the Araucanians, our spurs were made of lumber, so much the better. The whole history of the Department of the South had been defined as "a military picnic," and now we were to take our share of the entertainment.

Union transport ships

It seemed a pleasant share, when, after the usual vexations and delays, we found ourselves (January 23, 1863) gliding down the full waters of Beaufort River, the three vessels having sailed at different hours, with orders to rendezvous at St. Simon's Island, on the coast of Georgia. Until then, the flagship, so to speak, was to be the "Ben De Ford," Captain Hallet,—this being by far the largest vessel, and carrying most of the men. Major Strong was in command upon the "John Adams," an army gunboat, carrying a thirty-pound Parrott gun, two ten-pound Parrotts, and an eight-inch howitzer. Captain Trowbridge (since promoted Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment) had charge of the famous "Planter," brought away from the Rebels by Robert Small; she carried a ten-pound Parrott gun, and two howitzers. The John Adams was our main reliance. She was an old East Boston ferry-boat, a "double-ender," admirable for river-work, but unfit for sea-service. She drew seven feet of water; the Planter drew only four; but the latter was very slow, and being obliged to go to St. Simon's by an inner passage, would delay us from the beginning. She delayed us so much, before the end, that we virtually parted company, and her career was almost entirely separated from our own.

Union gunboat

From boyhood I have had a fancy for boats, and have seldom been without a share, usually more or less fractional, in a rather indeterminate number of punts and wherries. But when, for the first time, I found myself at sea as Commodore of a fleet of armed steamers,—for even the Ben De Ford boasted a six-pounder or so,—it seemed rather an unexpected promotion. But it is a characteristic of army life, that one adapts one's self, as coolly as in a dream, to the most novel responsibilities. One sits on court-martial, for instance, and decides on the life of a fellow-creature, without being asked any inconvenient questions as to previous knowledge of Blackstone; and after such an experience, shall one shrink from wrecking a steamer or two in the cause of the nation? So I placidly accepted my naval establishment, as if it were a new form of boat-club, and looked over the charts, balancing between one river and another, as if deciding whether to pull up or down Lake Quinsigamond. If military life ever contemplated the exercise of the virtue of humility under any circumstances this would perhaps have been a good opportunity to begin its practice. But as the "Regulations" clearly contemplated nothing of the kind, and as I had never met with any precedent which looked in that direction, I had learned to check promptly all such weak proclivities.

Captain Hallett proved the most frank and manly of sailors, and did everything for our comfort. He was soon warm in his praises of the demeanor of our men, which was very pleasant to hear, as this was the first time that colored soldiers in any number had been conveyed on board a transport, and I know of no place where a white volunteer appears to so much disadvantage. His mind craves occupation, his body is intensely uncomfortable, the daily emergency is not great enough to call out his heroic qualities, and he is apt to be surly, discontented, and impatient even of sanitary rules. The Southern black soldier, on the other hand, is seldom sea-sick (at least, such is my experience), and, if properly managed, is equally contented, whether idle or busy; he is, moreover, so docile that all needful rules are executed with cheerful acquiescence, and the quarters can therefore be kept clean and wholesome. Very forlorn faces were soon visible among the officers in the cabin, but I rarely saw such among the men.

Union Wharf

Pleasant still seemed our enterprise, as we anchored at early morning in the quiet waters of St. Simon's Sound, and saw the light fall softly on the beach and the low bluffs, on the picturesque plantation-houses which nestled there, and the graceful naval vessels that lay at anchor before us. When we afterwards landed the air had that peculiar Mediterranean translucency which Southern islands wear; and the plantation we visited had the loveliest tropical garden, though tangled and desolate, which I have ever seen in the South. The deserted house was embowered In great blossoming shrubs, and filled with hyacinthine odors, among which predominated that of the little Chickasaw roses which everywhere bloomed and trailed around. There were fig-trees and date-palms, crape-myrtles and wax-myrtles, Mexican agaves and English ivies, japonicas, bananas, oranges, lemons, oleanders, jonquils, great cactuses, and wild Florida lilies. This was not the plantation which Mrs. Kemble has since made historic, although that was on the same island; and I could not waste much sentiment over it, for it had belonged to a Northern renegade, Thomas Butler King. Yet I felt then, as I have felt a hundred times since, an emotion of heart-sickness at this desecration of a homestead,—and especially when, looking from a bare upper window of the empty house upon a range of broad, flat, sunny roofs, such as children love to play on, I thought how that place might have been loved by yet Innocent hearts, and I mourned anew the sacrilege of war.

Admiral Samuel F. Dupont

I had visited the flag-ship Wabash ere we left Port Royal Harbor, and had obtained a very kind letter of introduction from Admiral Dupont, that stately and courtly potentate, elegant as one's ideal French marquis; and under these credentials I received polite attention from the naval officers at St. Simon's,—Acting Volunteer Lieutenant Budd, of the gunboat Potomska, and Acting Master Moses, of the barque Fernandina. They made valuable suggestions in regard to the different rivers along the coast, and gave vivid descriptions of the last previous trip up the St. Mary's undertaken by Captain Stevens, U.S.N., in the gunboat Ottawa, when he had to fight his way past batteries at every bluff in descending the narrow and rapid stream. I was warned that no resistance would be offered to the ascent, but only to our return; and was further cautioned against the mistake, then common, of underrating the courage of the Rebels. "It proved impossible to dislodge those fellows from the banks," my informant said; "they had dug rifle-pits, and swarmed like hornets, and when fairly silenced in one direction they were sure to open upon us from another." All this sounded alarming, but it was nine months since the event had happened; and although nothing had gone up the river meanwhile, I counted on less resistance now. And something must be risked anywhere.

We were delayed all that day in waiting for our consort, and improved our time by verifying certain rumors about a quantity of new railroad-iron which was said to be concealed in the abandoned Rebel forts on St. Simon's and Jekyll Islands, and which would have much value at Port Royal, if we could unearth it. Some of our men had worked upon these very batteries, so that they could easily guide us; and by the additional discovery of a large flat-boat we were enabled to go to work in earnest upon the removal of the treasure. These iron bars, surmounted by a dozen feet of sand, formed an invulnerable roof for the magazines and bomb-proofs of the fort, and the men enjoyed demolishing them far more than they had relished their construction. Though the day was the 24th of January, 1863, the sun was very oppressive upon the sands; but all were in the highest spirits, and worked with the greatest zeal. The men seemed to regard these massive bars as their first trophies; and if the rails had been wreathed with roses, they could not have been got out in more holiday style. Nearly a hundred were obtained that day, besides a quantity of five-inch plank with which to barricade the very conspicuous pilot-houses of the John Adams. Still another day we were delayed, and could still keep at this work, not neglecting some foraging on the island from which horses, cattle, and agricultural implements were to be removed, and the few remaining colored families transferred to Fernandina. I had now become quite anxious about the missing steamboat, as the inner passage, by which alone she could arrive, was exposed at certain points to fire from Rebel batteries, and it would have been unpleasant to begin with a disaster. I remember that, as I stood on deck, in the still and misty evening, listening with strained senses for some sound of approach, I heard a low continuous noise from the distance, more wild and desolate than anything in my memory can parallel. It came from within the vast girdle of mist, and seemed like the cry of a myriad of lost souls upon the horizon's verge; it was Dante become audible: and yet it was but the accumulated cries of innumerable seafowl at the entrance of the outer bay.

Steamboat Planter

Late that night the Planter arrived. We left St. Simon's on the following morning, reached Fort Clinch by four o'clock, and there transferring two hundred men to the very scanty quarters of the John Adams, allowed the larger transport to go into Fernandina, while the two other vessels were to ascend the St. Mary's River, unless (as proved inevitable in the end) the defects in the boiler of the Planter should oblige her to remain behind. That night I proposed to make a sort of trial-trip up stream, as far as Township landing, some fifteen miles, there to pay our respects to Captain Clark's company of cavalry, whose camp was reported to lie near by. This was included in Corporal Sutton's programme, and seemed to me more inviting, and far more useful to the men, than any amount of mere foraging. The thing really desirable appeared to be to get them under fire as soon as possible, and to teach them, by a few small successes, the application of what they had learned in camp.

I had ascertained that the camp of this company lay five miles from the landing, and was accessible by two roads, one of which was a lumber-path, not commonly used, but which Corporal Sutton had helped to construct, and along which he could easily guide us. The plan was to go by night, surround the house and negro cabins at the landing (to prevent an alarm from being given), then to take the side path, and if all went well, to surprise the camp; but if they got notice of our approach, through their pickets, we should, at worst, have a fight, in which the best man must win.

The moon was bright, and the river swift, but easy of navigation thus far. Just below Township I landed a small advance force, to surround the houses silently. With them went Corporal Sutton; and when, after rounding the point, I went on shore with a larger body of men, he met me with a silent chuckle of delight, and with the information that there was a negro in a neighboring cabin who had just come from the Rebel camp, and could give the latest information. While he hunted up this valuable auxiliary, I mustered my detachment, winnowing out the men who had coughs (not a few), and sending them ignominiously on board again: a process I had regularly to perform, during this first season of catarrh, on all occasions where quiet was needed. The only exception tolerated at this time was in the case of one man who offered a solemn pledge, that, if unable to restrain his cough, he would lie down on the ground, scrape a little hole, and cough into it unheard. The ingenuity of this proposition was irresistible, and the eager patient was allowed to pass muster.

It was after midnight when we set off upon our excursion. I had about a hundred men, marching by the flank, with a small advanced guard, and also a few flankers, where the ground permitted. I put my Florida company at the head of the column, and had by my side Captain Metcalf, an excellent officer, and Sergeant Mclntyre, his first sergeant. We plunged presently in pine woods, whose resinous smell

Emancipation Proclamation

I can still remember. Corporal Sutton marched near me, with his captured negro guide, whose first fear and sullenness had yielded to the magic news of the President's Proclamation, then just issued, of which Governor Andrew had sent me a large printed supply;—we seldom found men who could read it, but they all seemed to feel more secure when they held it in their hands. We marched on through the woods, with no sound but the peeping of the frogs in a neighboring marsh, and the occasional yelping of a dog, as we passed the hut of some "cracker." This yelping always made Corporal Sutton uneasy; dogs are the detective officers of Slavery's police.

We had halted once or twice to close up the ranks, and had marched some two miles, seeing and hearing nothing more. I had got all I could out of our new guide, and was striding on, rapt in pleasing contemplation. All had gone so smoothly that I had merely to fancy the rest as being equally smooth. Already I fancied our little detachment bursting out of the woods, in swift surprise, upon the Rebel quarters,—already the opposing commander, after hastily firing a charge or two from his revolver (of course above my head), had yielded at discretion, and was gracefully tendering, in a stage attitude, his unavailing sword,—when suddenly—

There was a trampling of feet among the advanced guard as they came confusedly to a halt, and almost at the same instant a more ominous sound, as of galloping horses in the path before us. The moonlight outside the woods gave that dimness of atmosphere within which is more bewildering than darkness, because the eyes cannot adapt themselves to it so well. Yet I fancied, and others aver, that they saw the leader of an approaching party mounted on a white horse and reining up in the pathway; others, again, declare that he drew a pistol from the holster and took aim; others heard the words, "Charge in upon them! Surround them!" But all this was confused by the opening rifle-shots of our advanced guard, and, as clear observation was impossible, I made the men fix their bayonets and kneel in the cover on each side the pathway, and I saw with delight the brave fellows, with Sergeant Mclntyre at their head, settling down in the grass as coolly and warily as if wild turkeys were the only game. Perhaps at the first shot a man fell at my elbow. I felt it no more than if a tree had fallen,—I was so busy watching my own men and the enemy, and planning what to do next. Some of our soldiers, misunderstanding the order, "Fix bayonets," were actually charging with them, dashing off into the dim woods, with nothing to charge at but the vanishing tail of an imaginary horse,—for we could really see nothing. This zeal I noted with pleasure, and also with anxiety, as our greatest danger was from confusion and scattering; and for infantry to pursue cavalry would be a novel enterprise. Captain Metcalf stood by me well in keeping the men steady, as did Assistant Surgeon Minor, and Lieutenant, now Captain, Jackson. How the men in the rear were behaving I could not tell,—not so coolly, I afterwards found, because they were more entirely bewildered, supposing, until the shots came, that the column had simply halted for a moment's rest, as had been done once or twice before. They did not know who or where their assailants might be, and the fall of the man beside me created a hasty rumor that I was killed, so that it was on the whole an alarming experience for them. They kept together very tolerably, however, while our assailants, dividing, rode along on each side through the open pine-barren, firing into our ranks, but mostly over the heads of the men. My soldiers in turn fired rapidly,—too rapidly, being yet beginners,—and it was evident that, dim as it was, both sides had opportunity to do some execution.

I could hardly tell whether the fight had lasted ten minutes or an hour, when, as the enemy's fire had evidently ceased or slackened, I gave the order to cease firing. But it was very difficult at first to make them desist: the taste of gunpowder was too intoxicating. One of them was heard to mutter, indignantly, "Why de Cunnel order Cease firing, when de Secesh blazin' away at de rate ob ten dollar a day?" Every incidental occurrence seemed somehow to engrave itself upon my perceptions, without interrupting the main course of thought. Thus I know, that, in one of the pauses of the affair, there came wailing through the woods a cracked female voice, as if calling back some stray husband who had run out to join in the affray, "John, John, are you going to leave me, John? Are you going to let me and the children be killed, John?" I suppose the poor thing's fears of gunpowder were very genuine; but it was such a wailing squeak, and so infinitely ludicrous, and John was probably ensconced so very safely in some hollow tree, that I could see some of the men showing all their white teeth in the very midst of the fight. But soon this sound, with all others, had ceased, and left us in peaceful possession of the field.

I have made the more of this little affair because it was the first stand-up fight in which my men had been engaged, though they had been under fire, in an irregular way, in their small early expeditions. To me personally the event was of the greatest value: it had given us all an opportunity to test each other, and our abstract surmises were changed into positive knowledge. Hereafter it was of small importance what nonsense might be talked or written about colored troops; so long as mine did not flinch, it made no difference to me. My brave young officers, themselves mostly new to danger, viewed the matter much as I did; and yet we were under bonds of life and death to form a correct opinion, which was more than could be said of the Northern editors, and our verdict was proportionately of greater value.

I was convinced from appearances that we had been victorious, so far, though I could not suppose that this would be the last of it. We knew neither the numbers of the enemy, nor their plans, nor their present condition: whether they had surprised us or whether we had surprised them was all a mystery. Corporal Sutton was urgent to go on and complete the enterprise. All my impulses said the same thing; but then I had the most explicit injunctions from General Saxton to risk as little as possible in this first enterprise, because of the fatal effect on public sentiment of even an honorable defeat. We had now an honorable victory, so far as it went; the officers and men around me were in good spirits, but the rest of the column might be nervous; and it seemed so important to make the first fight an entire success, that I thought it wiser to let well alone; nor have I ever changed this opinion. For one's self, Montrose's verse may be well applied, "To win or lose it all." But one has no right to deal thus lightly with the fortunes of a race, and that was the weight which I always felt as resting on our action. If my raw infantry force had stood unflinchingly a night-surprise from "de boss cavalry," as they reverentially termed them, I felt that a good beginning had been made. All hope of surprising the enemy's camp was now at an end; I was willing and ready to fight the cavalry over again, but it seemed wiser that we, not they, should select the ground.

Attending to the wounded, therefore, and making as we best could stretchers for those who were to be carried, including the remains of the man killed at the first discharge (Private William Parsons of Company G), and others who seemed at the point of death, we marched through the woods to the landing,—expecting at every moment to be involved in another fight. This not occurring, I was more than ever satisfied that we had won a victory; for it was obvious that a mounted force would not allow a detachment of infantry to march two miles through open woods by night without renewing the fight, unless they themselves had suffered a good deal. On arrival at the landing, seeing that there was to be no immediate affray, I sent most of the men on board, and called for volunteers to remain on shore with me and hold the plantation-house till morning. They eagerly offered; and I was glad to see them, when posted as sentinels by Lieutenants Hyde and Jackson, who stayed with me, pace their beats as steadily and challenge as coolly as veterans, though of course there was some powder wasted on imaginary foes. Greatly to my surprise, however, we had no other enemies to encounter. We did not yet know that we had killed the first lieutenant of the cavalry, and that our opponents had retreated to the woods in dismay, without daring to return to their camp. This at least was the account we heard from prisoners afterwards, and was evidently the tale current in the neighborhood, though the statements published in Southern newspapers did not correspond. Admitting the death of Lieutenant Jones, the Tallahassee Floridian of February 14th stated that "Captain Clark, finding the enemy in strong force, fell back with his command to camp, and removed his ordnance and commissary and other stores, with twelve negroes on their way to the enemy, captured on that day."

In the morning, my invaluable surgeon, Dr. Rogers, sent me his report of killed and wounded; and I have been since permitted to make the following extracts from his notes: "One man killed instantly by ball through the heart, and seven wounded, one of whom will die. Braver men never lived. One man with two bullet-holes through the large muscles of the shoulders and neck brought off from the scene of action, two miles distant, two muskets; and not a murmur has escaped his lips. Another, Robert Sutton, with three wounds,—one of which, being on the skull, may cost him his life,—would not report himself till compelled to do so by his officers. While dressing his wounds, he quietly talked of what they had done, and of what they yet could do. To-day I have had the Colonel order him to obey me. He is perfectly quiet and cool, but takes this whole affair with the religious bearing of a man who realizes that freedom is sweeter than life. Yet another soldier did not report himself at all, but remained all night on guard, and possibly I should not have known of his having had a buck-shot in his shoulder, if some duty requiring a sound shoulder had not been required of him to-day." This last, it may be added, had persuaded a comrade to dig out the buck-shot, for fear of being ordered on the sick-list. And one of those who were carried to the vessel—a man wounded through the lungs—asked only if I were safe, the contrary having been reported. An officer may be pardoned some enthusiasm for such men as these.

The anxious night having passed away without an attack, another problem opened with the morning. For the first time, my officers and men found themselves in possession of an enemy's abode; and though there was but little temptation to plunder, I knew that I must here begin to draw the line. I had long since resolved to prohibit absolutely all indiscriminate pilfering and wanton outrage, and to allow nothing to be taken or destroyed but by proper authority. The men, to my great satisfaction, entered into this view at once, and so did (perhaps a shade less readily, in some cases) the officers. The greatest trouble was with the steamboat hands, and I resolved to let them go ashore as little as possible. Most articles of furniture were already, however, before our visit, gone from the plantation-house, which was now used only as a picket-station. The only valuable article was a pianoforte, for which a regular packing-box lay invitingly ready outside. I had made up my mind, in accordance with the orders given to naval commanders in that department,* to burn all picket-stations, and all villages from which I should be covertly attacked, and nothing else; and as this house was destined to the flames, I should have left the piano in it, but for the seductions of that box. With such a receptacle all ready, even to the cover, it would have seemed like flying in the face of Providence not to put the piano in. I ordered it removed, therefore, and afterwards presented it to the school for colored children at Fernandina. This I mention because it was the only article of property I ever took, or knowingly suffered to be taken, in the enemy's country, save for legitimate military uses, from first to last; nor would I have taken this, but for the thought of the school, and, as aforesaid, the temptation of the box. If any other officer has been more rigid, with equal opportunities, let him cast the first stone.

* "It is my desire to avoid the destruction of private property, unless used for picket or guard-stations, or for other military purposes, by the enemy.... Of course, if fired upon from any place, it is your duty, if possible, to destroy it." Letter of ADMIRAL DUPONT, commanding South Atlantic Squadron, to LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER HUGHES of United States Gunboat Mohawk, Fernandina Harbor.

I think the zest with which the men finally set fire to the house at my order was enhanced by this previous abstemiousness; but there is a fearful fascination in the use of fire, which every child knows in the abstract, and which I found to hold true in the practice. On our way down river we had opportunity to test this again.

The ruined town of St. Mary's had at that time a bad reputation, among both naval and military men. Lying but a short distance above Fernandina, on the Georgia side, it was occasionally visited by our gunboats. I was informed that the only residents of the town were three old women, who were apparently kept there as spies,—that, on our approach, the aged crones would come out and wave white handkerchiefs,—that they would receive us hospitably, profess to be profoundly loyal, and exhibit a portrait of Washington,—that they would solemnly assure us that no Rebel pickets had been there for many weeks,—but that in the adjoining yard we should find fresh horse-tracks, and that we should be fired upon by guerillas the moment we left the wharf. My officers had been much excited by these tales; and I had assured them that, if this programme were literally carried out, we would straightway return and burn the town, or what was left of it, for our share. It was essential to show my officers and men that, while rigid against irregular outrage, we could still be inexorable against the enemy.

We had previously planned to stop at this town, on our way down river, for some valuable lumber which we had espied on a wharf; and gliding down the swift current, shelling a few bluffs as we passed, we soon reached it. Punctual as the figures in a panorama appeared the old ladies with their white handkerchiefs. Taking possession of the town, much of which had previously been destroyed by the gunboats, and stationing the color-guard, to their infinite delight, in the cupola of the most conspicuous house, I deployed skirmishers along the exposed suburb, and set a detail of men at work on the lumber. After a stately and decorous interview with the queens of society of St. Mary's,—is it Scott who says that nothing improves the manners like piracy?—I peacefully withdrew the men when the work was done. There were faces of disappointment among the officers,—for all felt a spirit of mischief after the last night's adventure,—when, just as we had fairly swung out into the stream and were under way, there came, like the sudden burst of a tropical tornado, a regular little hail-storm of bullets into the open end of the boat, driving every gunner in an instant from his post, and surprising even those who were looking to be surprised. The shock was but for a second; and though the bullets had pattered precisely like the sound of hail upon the iron cannon, yet nobody was hurt. With very respectable promptness, order was restored, our own shells were flying into the woods from which the attack proceeded, and we were steaming up to the wharf again, according to promise.

Who shall describe the theatrical attitudes assumed by the old ladies as they reappeared at the front-door,—being luckily out of direct range,—and set the handkerchiefs in wilder motion than ever? They brandished them, they twirled them after the manner of the domestic mop, they clasped their hands, handkerchiefs included. Meanwhile their friends in the wood popped away steadily at us, with small effect; and occasionally an invisible field-piece thundered feebly from another quarter, with equally invisible results. Reaching the wharf, one company, under Lieutenant (now Captain) Danil-son, was promptly deployed in search of our assailants, who soon grew silent. Not so the old ladies, when I announced to them my purpose, and added, with extreme regret, that, as the wind was high, I should burn only that half of the town which lay to leeward of their house, which did not, after all, amount to much. Between gratitude for this degree of mercy, and imploring appeals for greater, the treacherous old ladies manoeuvred with clasped hands and demonstrative handkerchiefs around me, impairing the effect of their eloquence by constantly addressing me as "Mr. Captain"; for I have observed, that, while the sternest officer is greatly propitiated by attributing to him a rank a little higher than his own, yet no one is ever mollified by an error in the opposite direction. I tried, however, to disregard such low considerations, and to strike the correct mean between the sublime patriot and the unsanctified incendiary, while I could find no refuge from weak contrition save in greater and greater depths of courtesy; and so melodramatic became our interview that some of the soldiers still maintain that "dem dar ole Secesh women been a-gwine for kiss de Cunnel," before we ended. But of this monstrous accusation I wish to register an explicit denial, once for all.

Colonel Hawley, of the Seventh Connecticut

Dropping down to Fernandina unmolested after this affair, we were kindly received by the military and naval commanders,—Colonel Hawley, of the Seventh Connecticut (now Brigadier-General Hawley), and Lieutenant-Commander Hughes, of the gunboat Mohawk. It turned out very opportunely that both of these officers had special errands to suggest still farther up the St. Mary's, and precisely in the region where I wished to go. Colonel Hawley showed me a letter from the War Department, requesting him to ascertain the possibility of obtaining a supply of brick for Fort Clinch from the brickyard which had furnished the original materials, but which had not been visited since the perilous river-trip of the Ottawa. Lieutenant Hughes wished to obtain information for the Admiral respecting a Rebel steamer,—the Berosa,—said to be lying somewhere up the river, and awaiting her chance to run the blockade. I jumped at the opportunity. Berosa and brickyard,—both were near Wood-stock, the former home of Corporal Sutton; he was ready and eager to pilot us up the river; the moon would be just right that evening, setting at 3h. 19m. A.M.; and our boat was precisely the one to undertake the expedition. Its double-headed shape was just what was needed in that swift and crooked stream; the exposed pilot-houses had been tolerably barricaded with the thick planks from St. Simon's; and we further obtained some sand-bags from Fort Clinch, through the aid of Captain Sears, the officer in charge, who had originally suggested the expedition after brick. In return for this aid, the Planter was sent back to the wharf at St. Mary's, to bring away a considerable supply of the same precious article, which we had observed near the wharf. Meanwhile the John Adams was coaling from naval supplies, through the kindness of Lieutenant Hughes; and the Ben De Ford was taking in the lumber which we had yesterday brought down. It was a great disappointment to be unable to take the latter vessel up the river; but I was unwillingly convinced that, though the depth of water might be sufficient, yet her length would be unmanageable in the swift current and sharp turns. The Planter must also be sent on a separate cruise, as her weak and disabled machinery made her useless for my purpose. Two hundred men were therefore transferred, as before, to the narrow hold of the John Adams, in addition to the company permanently stationed on board to work the guns. At seven o'clock on the evening of January 29th, beneath a lovely moon, we steamed up the river.

Never shall I forget the mystery and excitement of that night. I know nothing in life more fascinating than the nocturnal ascent of an unknown river, leading far into an enemy's country, where one glides in the dim moonlight between dark hills and meadows, each turn of the channel making it seem like an inland lake, and cutting you off as by a barrier from all behind,—with no sign of human life, but an occasional picket-fire left glimmering beneath the bank, or the yelp of a dog from some low-lying plantation. On such occasions every nerve is strained to its utmost tension; all dreams of romance appear to promise immediate fulfilment; all lights on board the vessel are obscured, loud voices are hushed; you fancy a thousand men on shore, and yet see nothing; the lonely river, unaccustomed to furrowing keels, lapses by the vessel with a treacherous sound; and all the senses are merged in a sort of anxious trance. Three tunes I have had in full perfection this fascinating experience; but that night was the first, and its zest was the keenest. It will come back to me in dreams, if I live a thousand years.

I feared no attack during our ascent,—that danger was for our return; but I feared the intricate navigation of the river, though I did not fully know, till the actual experience, how dangerous it was. We passed without trouble far above the scene of our first fight,—the Battle of the Hundred Pines, as my officers had baptized it; and ever, as we ascended, the banks grew steeper, the current swifter, the channel more tortuous and more encumbered with projecting branches and drifting wood. No piloting less skilful than that of Corporal Sutton and his mate, James Bezzard, could have carried us through, I thought; and no side-wheel steamer less strong than a ferry-boat could have borne the crash and force with which we struck the wooded banks of the river. But the powerful paddles, built to break the Northern ice, could crush the Southern pine as well; and we came safely out of entanglements that at first seemed formidable. We had the tide with us, which makes steering far more difficult; and, in the sharp angles of the river, there was often no resource but to run the bow boldly on shore, let the stern swing round, and then reverse the motion. As the reversing machinery was generally out of order, the engineer stupid or frightened, and the captain excited, this involved moments of tolerably concentrated anxiety. Eight times we grounded in the upper waters, and once lay aground for half an hour; but at last we dropped anchor before the little town of Woodstock, after moonset and an hour before daybreak, just as I had planned, and so quietly that scarcely a dog barked, and not a soul in the town, as we afterwards found, knew of our arrival.

As silently as possible, the great flat-boat which we had brought from St. Simon's was filled with men. Major Strong was sent on shore with two companies,—those of Captain James and Captain Metcalf,—with instructions to surround the town quietly, allow no one to leave it, molest no one, and hold as temporary prisoners every man whom he found. I watched them push off into the darkness, got the remaining force ready to land, and then paced the deck for an hour in silent watchfulness, waiting for rifle-shots. Not a sound came from the shore, save the barking of dogs and the morning crow of cocks; the time seemed interminable; but when daylight came, I landed, and found a pair of scarlet trousers pacing on their beat before every house in the village, and a small squad of prisoners, stunted and forlorn as Falstaff's ragged regiment, already hi hand. I observed with delight the good demeanor of my men towards these forlorn Anglo-Saxons, and towards the more tumultuous women. Even one soldier, who threatened to throw an old termagant into the river, took care to append the courteous epithet "Madam."

I took a survey of the premises. The chief house, a pretty one with picturesque outbuildings, was that of Mrs. A., who owned the mills and lumber-wharves adjoining. The wealth of these wharves had not been exaggerated. There was lumber enough to freight half a dozen steamers, and I half regretted that I had agreed to take down a freight of bricks instead. Further researches made me grateful that I had already explained to my men the difference between public foraging and private plunder. Along the river-bank I found building after building crowded with costly furniture, all neatly packed, just as it was sent up from St. Mary's when that town was abandoned. Pianos were a drug; china, glass-ware, mahogany, pictures, all were here. And here were my men, who knew that their own labor had earned for their masters these luxuries, or such as these; their own wives and children were still sleeping on the floor, perhaps, at Beaufort or Fernandina; and yet they submitted, almost without a murmur, to the enforced abstinence. Bed and bedding for our hospitals they might take from those store-rooms,—such as the surgeon selected,—also an old flag which we found in a corner, and an old field-piece (which the regiment still possesses),—but after this the doors were closed and left unmolested. It cost a struggle to some of the men, whose wives were destitute, I know; but their pride was very easily touched, and when this abstinence was once recognized as a rule, they claimed it as an honor, in this and all succeeding expeditions. I flatter myself that, if they had once been set upon wholesale plundering, they would have done it as thoroughly as their betters; but I have always been infinitely grateful, both for the credit and for the discipline of the regiment,—as well as for the men's subsequent lives,—that the opposite method was adopted.

When the morning was a little advanced, I called on Mrs. A., who received me in quite a stately way at her own door with "To what am I indebted for the honor of this visit, Sir?" The foreign name of the family, and the tropical look of the buildings, made it seem (as, indeed, did all the rest of the adventure) like a chapter out of "Amyas Leigh"; but as I had happened to hear that the lady herself was a Philadelphian, and her deceased husband a New-Yorker, I could not feel even that modicum of reverence due to sincere Southerners. However, I wished to present my credentials; so, calling up my companion, I said that I believed she had been previously acquainted with Corporal Robert Sutton? I never saw a finer bit of unutterable indignation than came over the face of my hostess, as she slowly recognized him. She drew herself up, and dropped out the monosyllables of her answer as if they were so many drops of nitric acid. "Ah," quoth my lady, "we called him Bob!"

It was a group for a painter. The whole drama of the war seemed to reverse itself in an instant, and my tall, well-dressed, imposing, philosophic Corporal dropped down the immeasurable depth into a mere plantation "Bob" again. So at least in my imagination; not to that person himself. Too essentially dignified in his nature to be moved by words where substantial realities were in question, he simply turned from the lady, touched his hat to me, and asked if I would wish to see the slave-jail, as he had the keys in his possession.

If he fancied that I was in danger of being overcome by blandishments, and needed to be recalled to realities, it was a master-stroke.

I must say that, when the door of that villanous edifice was thrown open before me, I felt glad that my main interview with its lady proprietor had passed before I saw it. It was a small building, like a Northern corn-barn, and seemed to have as prominent and as legitimate a place among the outbuildings of the establishment. In the middle of the door was a large staple with a rusty chain, like an ox-chain, for fastening a victim down. When the door had been opened after the death of the late proprietor, my informant said, a man was found padlocked in that chain. We found also three pairs of stocks of various construction, two of which had smaller as well as larger holes, evidently for the feet of women or children. In a building near by we found something far more complicated, which was perfectly unintelligible till the men explained all its parts: a machine so contrived that a person once imprisoned in it could neither sit, stand, nor lie, but must support the body half raised, in a position scarcely endurable. I have since bitterly reproached myself for leaving this piece of ingenuity behind; but it would have cost much labor to remove it, and to bring away the other trophies seemed then enough. I remember the unutterable loathing with which I leaned against the door of that prison-house; I had thought myself seasoned to any conceivable horrors of Slavery, but it seemed as if the visible presence of that den of sin would choke me. Of course it would have been burned to the ground by us, but that this would have involved the sacrifice of every other building and all the piles of lumber, and for the moment it seemed as if the sacrifice would be righteous. But I forbore, and only took as trophies the instruments of torture and the keys of the jail.

We found but few colored people in this vicinity; some we brought away with us, and an old man and woman preferred to remain. All the white males whom we found I took as hostages, in order to shield us, if possible, from attack on our way down river, explaining to them that they would be put on shore when the dangerous points were passed. I knew that their wives could easily send notice of this fact to the Rebel forces along the river. My hostages were a forlorn-looking set of "crackers," far inferior to our soldiers in physique, and yet quite equal, the latter declared, to the average material of the Southern armies. None were in uniform, but this proved nothing as to their being soldiers. One of them, a mere boy, was captured at his own door, with gun in hand. It was a fowling-piece, which he used only, as his mother plaintively assured me, "to shoot little birds with." As the guileless youth had for this purpose loaded the gun with eighteen buck-shot, we thought it justifiable to confiscate both the weapon and the owner, in mercy to the birds.

We took from this place, for the use of the army, a flock of some thirty sheep, forty bushels of rice, some other provisions, tools, oars, and a little lumber, leaving all possible space for the bricks which we expected to obtain just below. I should have gone farther up the river, but for a dangerous boom which kept back a great number of logs in a large brook that here fell into the St. Mary's; the stream ran with force, and if the Rebels had wit enough to do it, they might in ten minutes so choke the river with drift-wood as infinitely to enhance our troubles. So we dropped down stream a mile or two, found the very brickyard from which Fort Clinch had been constructed,—still stored with bricks, and seemingly unprotected. Here Sergeant Rivers again planted his standard, and the men toiled eagerly, for several hours, in loading our boat to the utmost with the bricks. Meanwhile we questioned black and white witnesses, and learned for the first tune that the Rebels admitted a repulse at Township Landing, and that Lieutenant Jones and ten of their number were killed,—though this I fancy to have been an exaggeration. They also declared that the mysterious steamer Berosa was lying at the head of the river, but was a broken-down and worthless affair, and would never get to sea. The result has since proved this; for the vessel subsequently ran the blockade and foundered near shore, the crew barely escaping with their lives. I had the pleasure, as it happened, of being the first person to forward this information to Admiral Dupont, when it came through the pickets, many months after,—thus concluding my report on the Berosa.

Before the work at the yard was over the pickets reported mounted men in the woods near by, as had previously been the report at Woodstock. This admonished us to lose no time; and as we left the wharf, immediate arrangements were made to have the gun crews all in readiness, and to keep the rest of the men below, since their musketry would be of little use now, and I did not propose to risk a life unnecessarily. The chief obstacle to this was their own eagerness; penned down on one side, they popped up on the other; their officers, too, were eager to see what was going on, and were almost as hard to cork down as the men. Add to this, that the vessel was now very crowded, and that I had to be chiefly on the hurricane-deck with the pilots. Captain Clifton, master of the vessel, was brave to excess, and as much excited as the men; he could no more be kept in the little pilot-house than they below; and when we had passed one or two bluffs, with no sign of an enemy, he grew more and more irrepressible, and exposed himself conspicuously on the upper deck. Perhaps we all were a little lulled by apparent safety; for myself, I lay down for a moment on a settee in a state-room, having been on my feet, almost without cessation, for twenty-four hours.

Suddenly there swept down from a bluff above us, on the Georgia side, a mingling of shout and roar and rattle as of a tornado let loose; and as a storm of bullets came pelting against the sides of the vessel, and through a window, there went up a shrill answering shout from our own men. It took but an instant for me to reach the gun-deck. After all my efforts the men had swarmed once more from below, and already, crowding at both ends of the boat, were loading and firing with inconceivable rapidity, shouting to each other, "Nebber gib it up!" and of course having no steady aim, as the vessel glided and whirled in the swift current. Meanwhile the officers in charge of the large guns had their crews in order, and our shells began to fly over the bluffs, which, as we now saw, should have been shelled in advance, only that we had to economize ammunition. The other soldiers I drove below, almost by main force, with the aid of their officers, who behaved exceedingly well, giving the men leave to fire from the open port-holes which lined the lower deck, almost at the water's level. In the very midst of the melee Major Strong came from the upper deck, with a face of horror, and whispered to me, "Captain Clifton was killed at the first shot by my side."

St. Mary’s River and Fernandina Harbor

If he had said that the vessel was on fire the shock would hardly have been greater. Of course, the military commander on board a steamer is almost as helpless as an unarmed man, so far as the risks of water go. A seaman must command there. In the hazardous voyage of last night, I had learned, though unjustly, to distrust every official on board the steamboat except this excitable, brave, warm-hearted sailor; and now, among these added dangers, to lose him! The responsibility for his life also thrilled me; he was not among my soldiers, and yet he was killed. I thought of his wife and children, of whom he had spoken; but one learns to think rapidly in war, and, cautioning the Major to silence, I went up to the hurricane-deck and drew in the helpless body, that it should be safe from further desecration, and then looked to see where we were.

We were now gliding past a safe reach of marsh, while our assailants were riding by cross-paths to attack us at the next bluff. It was Reed's Bluff where we were first attacked, and Scrubby Bluff, I think, was next. They were shelled in advance, but swarmed manfully to the banks again as we swept round one of the sharp angles of the stream beneath their fire. My men were now pretty well imprisoned below in the hot and crowded hold, and actually fought each other, the officers afterwards said, for places at the open port-holes, from which to aim. Others implored to be landed, exclaiming that they "supposed de Cunnel knew best," but it was "mighty mean" to be shut up down below, when they might be "fightin' de Secesh in de clar field." This clear field, and no favor, was what they thenceforward sighed for. But in such difficult navigation it would have been madness to think of landing, although one daring Rebel actually sprang upon the large boat which we towed astern, where he was shot down by one of our sergeants. This boat was soon after swamped and abandoned, then taken and repaired by the Rebels at a later date, and finally, by a piece of dramatic completeness, was seized by a party of fugitive slaves, who escaped in it to our lines, and some of whom enlisted in my own regiment.

It has always been rather a mystery to me why the Rebels did not fell a few trees across the stream at some of the many sharp angles where we might so easily have been thus imprisoned. This, however, they did not attempt, and with the skilful pilotage of our trusty Corporal,—philosophic as Socrates through all the din, and occasionally relieving his mind by taking a shot with his rifle through the high portholes of the pilot-house,—we glided safely on. The steamer did not ground once on the descent, and the mate in command, Mr. Smith, did his duty very well. The plank sheathing of the pilot-house was penetrated by few bullets, though struck by so many outside that it was visited as a curiosity after our return; and even among the gun-crews, though they had no protection, not a man was hurt. As we approached some wooded bluff, usually on the Georgia side, we could see galloping along the hillside what seemed a regiment of mounted riflemen, and could see our shell scatter them ere we approached. Shelling did not, however, prevent a rather fierce fusilade from our old friends of Captain dark's company at Waterman's Bluff, near Township Landing; but even this did no serious damage, and this was the last.

It was of course impossible, while thus running the gauntlet, to put our hostages ashore, and I could only explain to them that they must thank their own friends for their inevitable detention. I was by no means proud of their forlorn appearance, and besought Colonel Hawley to take them off my hands; but he was sending no flags of truce at that time, and liked their looks no better than I did. So I took them to Port Royal, where they were afterwards sent safely across the lines. Our men were pleased at taking them back with us, as they had already said, regretfully, "S'pose we leave dem Secesh at Fernandina, General Saxby won't see 'em,"—as if they were some new natural curiosity, which indeed they were. One soldier further suggested the expediency of keeping them permanently in camp, to be used as marks for the guns of the relieved guard every morning. But this was rather an ebullition of fancy than a sober proposition.

Against these levities I must put a piece of more tragic eloquence, which I took down by night on the steamer's deck from the thrilling harangue of Corporal Adam Allston, one of our most gifted prophets, whose influence over the men was unbounded. "When I heard," he said, "de bombshell a-screamin' troo de woods like de Judgment Day, I said to myself, 'If my head was took off to-night, dey couldn't put my soul in de torments, perceps [except] God was my enemy!' And when de rifle-bullets came whizzin' across de deck, I cried aloud, 'God help my congregation! Boys, load and fire!'"

Fernandina

I must pass briefly over the few remaining days of our cruise. At Fernandina we met the Planter, which had been successful on her separate expedition, and had destroyed extensive salt-works at Crooked River, under charge of the energetic Captain Trowbridge, efficiently aided by Captain Rogers. Our commodities being in part delivered at Fernandina, our decks being full, coal nearly out, and time up, we called once more at St. Simon's Sound, bringing away the remainder of our railroad-iron, with some which the naval officers had previously disinterred, and then steamed back to Beaufort. Arriving there at sunrise (February 2, 1863), I made my way with Dr. Rogers to General Saxton's bedroom, and laid before him the keys and shackles of the slave-prison, with my report of the good conduct of the men,—as Dr. Rogers remarked, a message from heaven and another from hell.

Slight as this expedition now seems among the vast events of the war, the future student of the newspapers of that day will find that it occupied no little space in their columns, so intense was the interest which then attached to the novel experiment of employing black troops. So obvious, too, was the value, during this raid, of their local knowledge and their enthusiasm, that it was impossible not to find in its successes new suggestions for the war. Certainly I would not have consented to repeat the enterprise with the bravest white troops, leaving Corporal Sutton and his mates behind, for I should have expected to fail. For a year after our raid the Upper St. Mary's remained unvisited, till in 1864 the large force with which we held Florida secured peace upon its banks; then Mrs. A. took the oath of allegiance, the Government bought her remaining lumber, and the John Adams again ascended with a detachment of my men under Lieutenant Parker, and brought a portion of it to Fernandina. By a strange turn of fortune, Corporal Sutton (now Sergeant) was at this time in jail at Hilton Head, under sentence of court-martial for an alleged act of mutiny,—an affair in which the general voice of our officers sustained him and condemned his accusers, so that he soon received a full pardon, and was restored in honor to his place in the regiment, which he has ever since held.

Nothing can ever exaggerate the fascinations of war, whether on the largest or smallest scale. When we settled down into camp-life again, it seemed like a butterfly's folding its wings to re-enter the chrysalis. None of us could listen to the crack of a gun without recalling instantly the sharp shots that spilled down from the bluffs of the St. Mary's, or hear a sudden trampling of horsemen by night without recalling the sounds which startled us on the Field of the Hundred Pines. The memory of our raid was preserved in the camp by many legends of adventure, growing vaster and more incredible as time wore on,—and by the morning appeals to the surgeon of some veteran invalids, who could now cut off all reproofs and suspicions with "Doctor, I's been a sickly pusson eber since de expeditious." But to me the most vivid remembrancer was the flock of sheep which we had "lifted." The Post Quartermaster discreetly gave us the charge of them, and they rilled a gap in the landscape and in the larder,—which last had before presented one unvaried round of impenetrable beef. Mr. Obabiah Oldbuck, when he decided to adopt a pastoral life, and assumed the provisional name of Thyrsis, never looked upon his flocks and herds with more unalloyed contentment than I upon that fleecy family. I had been familiar, in Kansas, with the metaphor by which the sentiments of an owner were credited to his property, and had heard of a proslavery colt and an antislavery cow. The fact that these sheep were but recently converted from "Se-cesh" sentiments was their crowning charm. Methought they frisked and fattened in the joy of their deliverance from the shadow of Mrs. A.'s slave-jail, and gladly contemplated translation into mutton-broth for sick or wounded soldiers. The very slaves who once, perchance, were sold at auction with yon aged patriarch of the flock, had now asserted their humanity, and would devour him as hospital rations. Meanwhile our shepherd bore a sharp bayonet without a crook, and I felt myself a peer of Ulysses and Rob Roy,—those sheep-stealers of less elevated aims,—when I met in my daily rides these wandering trophies of our wider wanderings.

CHAPTER III

UP THE ST. JOHN’S

There was not much stirring in the Department of the South early in 1863, and the St. Mary's expedition had afforded a new sensation. Of course the few officers of colored troops, and a larger number who wished to become such, were urgent for further experiments in the same line; and the Florida tax-commissioners were urgent likewise. I well remember the morning when, after some preliminary correspondence, I steamed down from Beaufort, S. C., to Hilton Head, with General Saxton, Judge S., and one or two others, to have an interview on the matter with Major-General Hunter, then commanding the Department.

Hilton Head, in those days, seemed always like some foreign military station in the tropics. The long, low, white buildings, with piazzas and verandas on the water-side; the general impression of heat and lassitude, existence appearing to pulsate only with the sea-breeze; the sandy, almost impassable streets; and the firm, level beach, on which everybody walked who could get there: all these suggested Jamaica or the East Indies. Then the head-quarters at the end of the beach, the Zouave sentinels, the successive anterooms, the lounging aids, the good-natured and easy General,—easy by habit and energetic by impulse,—all had a certain air of Southern languor, rather picturesque, but perhaps not altogether bracing. General Hunter received us, that day, with his usual kindliness; there was a good deal of pleasant chat; Miles O'Reilly was called in to read his latest verses; and then we came to the matter in hand.

Jacksonville, on the St. John's River, in Florida, had been already twice taken and twice evacuated; having been occupied by Brigadier-General Wright, in March, 1862, and by Brigadier-General Brannan, in October of the same year. The second evacuation was by Major-General Hunter's own order, on the avowed ground that a garrison of five thousand was needed to hold the place, and that this force could not be spared. The present proposition was to take and hold it with a brigade of less than a thousand men, carrying, however, arms and uniforms for twice that number, and a month's rations. The claim was, that there were fewer rebel troops in the Department than formerly, and that the St. Mary's expedition had shown the advantage possessed by colored troops, in local knowledge, and in the confidence of the loyal blacks. It was also urged, that it was worth while to risk something, in the effort to hold Florida, and perhaps bring it back into the Union.

My chief aim in the negotiation was to get the men into action, and that of the Florida Commissioners to get them into Florida. Thus far coinciding, we could heartily co-operate; and though General Hunter made some reasonable objections, they were yielded more readily than I had feared; and finally, before half our logical ammunition was exhausted, the desired permission was given, and the thing might be considered as done.

We were now to leave, as we supposed forever, the camp which had thus far been our home. Our vast amount of surplus baggage made a heavy job in the loading, inasmuch as we had no wharf, and everything had to be put on board by means of flat-boats. It was completed by twenty-four hours of steady work; and after some of the usual uncomfortable delays which wait on military expeditions, we were at last afloat.

I had tried to keep the plan as secret as possible, and had requested to have no definite orders, until we should be on board ship. But this larger expedition was less within my own hands than was the St. Mary's affair, and the great reliance for concealment was on certain counter reports, ingeniously set afloat by some of the Florida men. These reports rapidly swelled into the most enormous tales, and by the time they reached the New York newspapers, the expedition was "a great volcano about bursting, whose lava will burn, flow, and destroy," "the sudden appearance in arms of no less than five thousand negroes," "a liberating host," "not the phantom, but the reality, of servile insurrection." What the undertaking actually was may be best seen in the instructions which guided it.*

                  * HEAD-QUARTERS, BEAUFORT, S. C.,

                                         March 5, 1863.

COLONEL,—You will please proceed with your command, the First and Second Regiments South Carolina Volunteers, which are now embarked upon the steamers John Adams, Boston, and Burn-side, to Fernandina, Florida.

Relying upon your military skill and judgment. I shall give you no special directions as to your procedure after you leave Fernandina. I expect, however, that you will occupy Jacksonville, Florida, and intrench yourselves there.

The main objects of your expedition are to carry the proclamation of freedom to the enslaved; to call all loyal men into the service of the United States; to occupy as much of the State of Florida as possible with the forces under your command; and to neglect no means consistent with the usages of civilized warfare to weaken, harass, and annoy those who are in rebellion against the Government of the United States.

Trusting that the blessing of our Heavenly Father will rest upon your noble enterprise,

                                   I am yours, sincerely,

                                                   R. SAXTON,

Brig.-Gen., Mil. Gov. Dept. of the South. Colonel Higginson, Comdg. Expeditionary Corps.

In due time, after touching at Fernandina, we reached the difficult bar of the St. John's, and were piloted safely over. Admiral Dupont had furnished a courteous letter of introduction.* and we were cordially received by Commander Duncan of the Norwich, and Lieutenant Watson, commanding the Uncas. Like all officers on blockade duty, they were impatient of their enforced inaction, and gladly seized the opportunity for a different service. It was some time since they had ascended as high as Jacksonville, for their orders were strict, one vessel's coal was low, the other was in infirm condition, and there were rumors of cotton-clads and torpedoes. But they gladly agreed to escort us up the river, so soon as our own armed gunboat, the John Adams, should arrive,—she being unaccountably delayed.

                          FLAG SHIP WABASH,

   PORT ROYAL HARBOR, S. C., March 6, 1863.

SIR,—I am informed by Major-General Hunter that he is sending Colonel Higginson on an important mission in the southerly part of his Department.

I have not been made acquainted with the objects of this mission, but any assistance that you can offer Colonel Higginson, which will not interfere with your other duties, you are authorized to give.

                Respectfully your obedient servant,

                                            S. F. DUPONT,

                        Rear-Adm. Comdg. S. Atl. Block. Squad.

To the Senior Officer at the different Blockading Stations on the Coast of Georgia and Florida.

We waited twenty-four hours for her, at the sultry mouth of that glassy river, watching the great pelicans which floated lazily on its tide, or sometimes shooting one, to admire the great pouch, into which one of the soldiers could insert his foot, as into a boot. "He hold one quart," said the admiring experimentalist. "Hi! boy," retorted another quickly, "neber you bring dat quart measure in my peck o' corn." The protest came very promptly, and was certainly fair; for the strange receptacle would have held nearly a gallon.

We went on shore, too, and were shown a rather pathetic little garden, which the naval officers had laid out, indulging a dream of vegetables. They lingered over the little microscopic sprouts, pointing them out tenderly, as if they were cradled babies. I have often noticed this touching weakness, in gentlemen of that profession, on lonely stations.

We wandered among the bluffs, too, in the little deserted hamlet called "Pilot Town." The ever-shifting sand had in some cases almost buried the small houses, and had swept around others a circular drift, at a few yards' distance, overtopping then: eaves, and leaving each the untouched citadel of this natural redoubt. There was also a dismantled lighthouse, an object which always seems the most dreary symbol of the barbarism of war, when one considers the national beneficence which reared and kindled it. Despite the service rendered by this once brilliant light, there were many wrecks which had been strown upon the beach, victims of the most formidable of the Southern river-bars. As I stood with my foot on the half-buried ribs of one of these vessels,—so distinctly traced that one might almost fancy them human,—the old pilot, my companion, told me the story of the wreck. The vessel had formerly been in the Cuba trade; and her owner, an American merchant residing in Havana, had christened her for his young daughter. I asked the name, and was startled to recognize that of a favorite young cousin of mine, besides the bones of whose representative I was thus strangely standing, upon this lonely shore.

It was well to have something to relieve the anxiety naturally felt at the delay of the John Adams,—anxiety both for her safety and for the success of our enterprise, The Rebels had repeatedly threatened to burn the whole of Jacksonville, in case of another attack, as they had previously burned its mills and its great hotel. It seemed as if the news of our arrival must surely have travelled thirty miles by this time. All day we watched every smoke that rose among the wooded hills, and consulted the compass and the map, to see if that sign announced the doom of our expected home. At the very last moment of the tide, just in time to cross the bar that day, the missing vessel arrived; all anxieties vanished; I transferred my quarters on board, and at two the next morning we steamed up the river.

Again there was the dreamy delight of ascending an unknown stream, beneath a sinking moon, into a region where peril made fascination. Since the time of the first explorers, I suppose that those Southern waters have known no sensations so dreamy and so bewitching as those which this war has brought forth. I recall, in this case, the faintest sensations of our voyage, as Ponce de Leon may have recalled those of his wandering search, in the same soft zone, for the secret of the mystic fountain. I remember how, during that night, I looked for the first time through a powerful night-glass. It had always seemed a thing wholly inconceivable, that a mere lens could change darkness into light; and as I turned the instrument on the preceding gunboat, and actually discerned the man at the wheel and the others standing about him,—all relapsing into vague gloom again at the withdrawal of the glass,—it gave a feeling of childish delight. Yet it seemed only in keeping with the whole enchantment of the scene; and had I been some Aladdin, convoyed by genii or giants, I could hardly have felt more wholly a denizen of some world of romance.

But the river was of difficult navigation; and we began to feel sometimes, beneath the keel, that ominous, sliding, grating, treacherous arrest of motion which makes the heart shudder, as the vessel does. There was some solicitude about torpedoes, also,—a peril which became a formidable thing, one year later, in the very channel where we found none. Soon one of our consorts grounded, then another, every vessel taking its turn, I believe, and then in turn getting off, until the Norwich lay hopelessly stranded, for that tide at least, a few miles below Jacksonville, and out of sight of the city, so that she could not even add to our dignity by her visible presence from afar.

This was rather a serious matter, as the Norwich was our main naval reliance, the Uncas being a small steamer of less than two hundred tons, and in such poor condition that Commander Duncan, on finding himself aground, at first quite declined to trust his consort any farther alone. But, having got thus far, it was plainly my duty to risk the remainder with or without naval assistance; and this being so, the courageous officer did not long object, but allowed his dashing subordinate to steam up with us to the city. This left us one naval and one army gunboat; and, fortunately, the Burn-side, being a black propeller, always passed for an armed vessel among the Rebels, and we rather encouraged that pleasing illusion.

We had aimed to reach Jacksonville at daybreak; but these mishaps delayed us, and we had several hours of fresh, early sunshine, lighting up the green shores of that lovely river, wooded to the water's edge, with sometimes an emerald meadow, opening a vista to some picturesque house,—all utterly unlike anything we had yet seen in the South, and suggesting rather the Penobscot or Kennebec. Here and there we glided by the ruins of some saw-mill burned by the Rebels on General Wright's approach; but nothing else spoke of war, except, perhaps, the silence. It was a delicious day, and a scene of fascination. Our Florida men were wild with delight; and when we rounded the point below the city, and saw from afar its long streets, its brick warehouses, its white cottages, and its overshadowing trees,—all peaceful and undisturbed by flames,—it seemed, in the men's favorite phrase, "too much good," and all discipline was merged, for the moment, in a buzz of ecstasy.

The city was still there for us, at any rate; though none knew what perils might be concealed behind those quiet buildings. Yet there were children playing on the wharves; careless men, here and there, lounged down to look at us, hands in pockets; a few women came to their doors, and gazed listlessly upon us, shading their eyes with their hands. We drew momently nearer, in silence and with breathless attention. The gunners were at their posts, and the men in line. It was eight o'clock. We were now directly opposite the town: yet no sign of danger was seen; not a rifle-shot was heard; not a shell rose hissing in the air. The Uncas rounded to, and dropped anchor in the stream; by previous agreement, I steamed to an upper pier of the town, Colonel Montgomery to a lower one; the little boat-howitzers were run out upon the wharves, and presently to the angles of the chief streets; and the pretty town was our own without a shot. In spite of our detention, the surprise had been complete, and not a soul in Jacksonville had dreamed of our coming.

The day passed quickly, in eager preparations for defence; the people could or would give us no definite information about the Rebel camp, which was, however, known to be near, and our force did not permit our going out to surprise it. The night following was the most anxious I ever spent. We were all tired out; the companies were under arms, in various parts of the town, to be ready for an attack at any moment. My temporary quarters were beneath the loveliest grove of linden-trees, and as I reclined, half-dozing, the mocking-birds sang all night like nightingales,—their notes seeming to trickle down through the sweet air from amid the blossoming boughs. Day brought relief and the sense of due possession, and we could see what we had won.

Union occupied Jacksonville 1864

Jacksonville was now a United States post again: the only post on the main-land in the Department of the South. Before the war it had three or four thousand inhabitants, and a rapidly growing lumber-trade, for which abundant facilities were evidently provided. The wharves were capacious, and the blocks of brick warehouses along the lower street were utterly unlike anything we had yet seen in that region, as were the neatness and thrift everywhere visible. It had been built up by Northern enterprise, and much of the property was owned by loyal men. It had been a great resort for invalids, though the Rebels had burned the large hotel which once accommodated them. Mills had also been burned; but the dwelling-houses were almost all in good condition. The quarters for the men were admirable; and I took official possession of the handsome brick house of Colonel Sunder-land, the established head-quarters through every occupation, whose accommodating flag-staff had literally and repeatedly changed its colors. The seceded Colonel, reputed author of the State ordinance of Secession, was a New-Yorker by birth, and we found his law-card, issued when in practice in Easton, Washington County, New York. He certainly had good taste in planning the inside of a house, though time had impaired its condition. There was a neat office with ample bookcases and no books, a billiard-table with no balls, gas-fixtures without gas, and a bathing-room without water. There was a separate building for servants' quarters, and a kitchen with every convenience, even to a few jars of lingering pickles. On the whole, there was an air of substance and comfort about the town, quite alien from the picturesque decadence of Beaufort.

Jacksonville wharf, 1864

The town rose gradually from the river, and was bounded on the rear by a long, sluggish creek, beyond which lay a stretch of woods, affording an excellent covert for the enemy, but without great facilities for attack, as there were but two or three fords and bridges. This brook could easily be held against a small force, but could at any time and at almost any point be readily crossed by a large one. North of the town the land rose a little, between the river and the sources of the brook, and then sank to a plain, which had been partially cleared by a previous garrison. For so small a force as ours, however, this clearing must be extended nearer to the town; otherwise our lines would be too long for our numbers.

This deficiency in numbers at once became a source of serious anxiety. While planning the expedition, it had seemed so important to get the men a foothold in Florida that I was willing to risk everything for it. But this important post once in our possession, it began to show some analogies to the proverbial elephant in the lottery. To hold it permanently with nine hundred men was not, perhaps, impossible, with the aid of a gunboat (I had left many of my own regiment sick and on duty in Beaufort, and Colonel Montgomery had as yet less than one hundred and fifty); but to hold it, and also to make forays up the river, certainly required a larger number. We came in part to recruit, but had found scarcely an able-bodied negro in the city; all had been removed farther up, and we must certainly contrive to follow them. I was very unwilling to have, as yet, any white troops under my command, with the blacks. Finally, however, being informed by Judge S. of a conversation with Colonel Hawley, commanding at Fernandina, in which the latter had offered to send four companies and a light battery to swell our force,—in view of the aid given to his position by this more advanced post, I decided to authorize the energetic Judge to go back to Fernandina and renew the negotiation, as the John Adams must go thither at any rate for coal.

Meanwhile all definite display of our force was avoided; dress-parades were omitted; the companies were so distributed as to tell for the utmost; and judicious use was made, here and there, of empty tents. The gunboats and transports moved impressively up and down the river, from time to time. The disposition of pickets was varied each night to perplex the enemy, and some advantage taken of his distrust, which might be assumed as equalling our own. The citizens were duly impressed by our supply of ammunition, which was really enormous, and all these things soon took effect. A loyal woman, who came into town, said that the Rebel scouts, stopping at her house, reported that there were "sixteen hundred negroes all over the woods, and the town full of them besides." "It was of no use to go in. General Finnegan had driven them into a bad place once, and should not do it again." "They had lost their captain and their best surgeon in the first skirmish, and if the Savannah people wanted the negroes driven away, they might come and do it themselves." Unfortunately, we knew that they could easily come from Savannah at any time, as there was railroad communication nearly all the way; and every time we heard the steam-whistle, the men were convinced of their arrival. Thus we never could approach to any certainty as to their numbers, while they could observe, from the bluffs, every steamboat that ascended the river.

To render our weak force still more available, we barricaded the approaches to the chief streets by constructing barriers or felling trees. It went to my heart to sacrifice, for this purpose, several of my beautiful lindens; but it was no time for aesthetics. As the giants lay on the ground, still scenting the air with their abundant bloom, I used to rein up my horse and watch the children playing hide-and-seek amongst their branches, or some quiet cow grazing at the foliage. Nothing impresses the mind in war like some occasional object or association that belongs apparently to peace alone.

Among all these solicitudes, it was a great thing that one particular anxiety vanished in a day. On the former expedition the men were upon trial as to their courage; now they were to endure another test, as to their demeanor as victors. Here were five hundred citizens, nearly all white, at the mercy of their former slaves. To some of these whites it was the last crowning humiliation, and they were, or professed to be, in perpetual fear. On the other hand, the most intelligent and lady-like woman I saw, the wife of a Rebel captain, rather surprised me by saying that it seemed pleasanter to have these men stationed there, whom they had known all their lives, and who had generally borne a good character, than to be in the power of entire strangers. Certainly the men deserved the confidence, for there was scarcely an exception to their good behavior. I think they thoroughly felt that their honor and dignity were concerned in the matter, and took too much pride in their character as soldiers,—to say nothing of higher motives,—to tarnish it by any misdeeds. They watched their officers vigilantly and even suspiciously, to detect any disposition towards compromise; and so long as we pursued a just course it was evident that they could be relied on. Yet the spot was pointed out to me where two of our leading men had seen their brothers hanged by Lynch law; many of them had private wrongs to avenge; and they all had utter disbelief in all pretended loyalty, especially on the part of the women.

One citizen alone was brought to me in a sort of escort of honor by Corporal Prince Lambkin,—one of the color-guard, and one of our ablest men,—the same who had once made a speech in camp, reminding his hearers that they had lived under the American flag for eighteen hundred and sixty-two years, and ought to live and die under it. Corporal Lambkin now introduced his man, a German, with the highest compliment in his power, "He hab true colored-man heart." Surrounded by mean, cajoling, insinuating white men and women who were all that and worse, I was quite ready to appreciate the quality he thus proclaimed. A colored-man heart, in the Rebel States, is a fair synonyme for a loyal heart, and it is about the only such synonyme. In this case, I found afterwards that the man in question, a small grocer, had been an object of suspicion to the whites from his readiness to lend money to the negroes, or sell to them on credit; in which, perhaps, there may have been some mixture of self-interest with benevolence.

I resort to a note-book of that period, well thumbed and pocket-worn, which sometimes received a fragment of the day's experience.

                                                           March 16, 1863.

"Of course, droll things are constantly occurring. Every white man, woman, and child is flattering, seductive, and professes Union sentiment; every black ditto believes that every white ditto is a scoundrel, and ought to be shot, but for good order and military discipline. The Provost Marshal and I steer between them as blandly as we can. Such scenes as succeed each other! Rush of indignant Africans. A white man, in woman's clothes, has been seen to enter a certain house,—undoubtedly a spy. Further evidence discloses the Roman Catholic priest, a peaceful little Frenchman, in his professional apparel.—Anxious female enters. Some sentinel has shot her cow by mistake for a Rebel. The United States cannot think of paying the desired thirty dollars. Let her go to the Post-Quartermaster and select a cow from his herd. If there is none to suit her (and, indeed, not one of them gave a drop of milk,—neither did hers), let her wait till the next lot comes in,—that is all.—Yesterday's operations gave the following total yield: Thirty 'contrabands,' eighteen horses, eleven cattle, ten saddles and bridles, and one new army-wagon. At this rate we shall soon be self-supporting cavalry.

"Where complaints are made of the soldiers, it almost always turns out that the women have insulted them most grossly, swearing at them, and the like. One unpleasant old Dutch woman came in, bursting with wrath, and told the whole narrative of her blameless life, diversified with sobs:—

"'Last January I ran off two of my black people from St. Mary's to Fernandina,' (sob,)—'then I moved down there myself, and at Lake City I lost six women and a boy,' (sob,)—'then I stopped at Baldwin for one of the wenches to be confined,' (sob,)—'then I brought them all here to live in a Christian country' (sob, sob). "Then the blockheads' [blockades, that is, gunboats] 'came, and they all ran off with the blockheads,' (sob, sob, sob,) 'and left me, an old lady of forty-six, obliged to work for a living.' (Chaos of sobs, without cessation.)

"But when I found what the old sinner had said to the soldiers I rather wondered at their self-control in not throttling her."

Meanwhile skirmishing went on daily in the outskirts of the town. There was a fight on the very first day, when our men killed, as before hinted, a Rebel surgeon, which was oddly metamorphosed in the Southern newspapers into their killing one of ours, which certainly never happened. Every day, after this, they appeared in small mounted squads in the neighborhood, and exchanged shots with our pickets, to which the gunboats would contribute their louder share, their aim being rather embarrassed by the woods and hills. We made reconnoissances, too, to learn the country in different directions, and were apt to be fired upon during these. Along the farther side of what we called the "Debatable Land" there was a line of cottages, hardly superior to negro huts, and almost all empty, where the Rebel pickets resorted, and from whose windows they fired. By degrees all these nests were broken up and destroyed, though it cost some trouble to do it, and the hottest skirmishing usually took place around them.

Among these little affairs was one which we called "Company K's Skirmish," because it brought out the fact that this company, which was composed entirely of South Carolina men, and had never shone in drill or discipline, stood near the head of the regiment for coolness and courage,—the defect of discipline showing itself only in their extreme unwillingness to halt when once let loose. It was at this time that the small comedy of the Goose occurred,—an anecdote which Wendell Phillips has since made his own.

One of the advancing line of skirmishers, usually an active fellow enough, was observed to move clumsily and irregularly. It soon appeared that he had encountered a fine specimen of the domestic goose, which had surrendered at discretion. Not wishing to lose it, he could yet find no way to hold it but between his legs; and so he went on, loading, firing, advancing, halting, always with the goose writhing and struggling and hissing in this natural pair of stocks. Both happily came off unwounded, and retired in good order at the signal, or some time after it; but I have hardly a cooler thing to put on record.

Meanwhile, another fellow left the field less exultingly; for, after a thoroughly courageous share in the skirmish, he came blubbering to his captain, and said,—"Cappen, make Caesar gib me my cane." It seemed that, during some interval of the fighting, he had helped himself to an armful of Rebel sugar-cane, such as they all delighted in chewing. The Roman hero, during another pause, had confiscated the treasure; whence these tears of the returning warrior. I never could accustom myself to these extraordinary interminglings of manly and childish attributes.

Our most untiring scout during this period was the chaplain of my regiment,—the most restless and daring spirit we had, and now exulting in full liberty of action. He it was who was daily permitted to stray singly where no other officer would have been allowed to go, so irresistible was his appeal, "You know I am only a chaplain." Methinks I see our regimental saint, with pistols in belt and a Ballard rifle slung on shoulder, putting spurs to his steed, and cantering away down some questionable wood-path, or returning with some tale of Rebel haunt discovered, or store of foraging. He would track an enemy like an Indian, or exhort him, when apprehended, like an early Christian. Some of our devout soldiers shook their heads sometimes over the chaplain's little eccentricities. "Woffor Mr. Chapman made a preacher for?" said one of them, as usual transforming his title into a patronymic. "He's de fightingest more Yankee I eber see in all my days."

And the criticism was very natural, though they could not deny that, when the hour for Sunday service came, Mr. F. commanded the respect and attention of all. That hour never came, however, on our first Sunday in Jacksonville; we were too busy and the men too scattered; so the chaplain made his accustomed foray beyond the lines instead.

"Is it not Sunday?" slyly asked an unregenerate lieutenant. "Nay," quoth his Reverence, waxing fervid; "it is the Day of Judgment"

This reminds me of a raid up the river, conducted by one of our senior captains, an enthusiast whose gray beard and prophetic manner always took me back to the Fifth-Monarchy men. He was most successful that day, bringing back horses, cattle, provisions, and prisoners; and one of the latter complained bitterly to me of being held, stating that Captain R. had promised him speedy liberty. But that doughty official spurned the imputation of such weak blandishments, in this day of triumphant retribution.

"Promise him!" said he, "I promised him nothing but the Day of Judgment and Periods of Damnation!"

Often since have I rolled beneath my tongue this savory and solemn sentence, and I do not believe that since the days of the Long Parliament there has been a more resounding anathema.

In Colonel Montgomery's hands these up-river raids reached the dignity of a fine art. His conceptions of foraging were rather more Western and liberal than mine, and on these excursions he fully indemnified himself for any undue abstinence demanded of him when in camp. I remember being on the wharf, with some naval officers, when he came down from his first trip. The steamer seemed an animated hen-coop. Live poultry hung from the foremast shrouds, dead ones from the mainmast, geese hissed from the binnacle, a pig paced the quarter-deck, and a duck's wings were seen fluttering from a line which was wont to sustain duck trousers. The naval heroes, mindful of their own short rations, and taking high views of one's duties in a conquered country, looked at me reproachfully, as who should say, "Shall these things be?" In a moment or two the returning foragers had landed.

"Captain ——," said Montgomery, courteously, "would you allow me to send a remarkably fine turkey for your use on board ship?"

"Lieutenant ——," said Major Corwin, "may I ask your acceptance of a pair of ducks for your mess?"

Never did I behold more cordial relations between army and navy than sprang into existence at those sentences. So true it is, as Charles Lamb says, that a single present of game may diffuse kindly sentiments through a whole community. These little trips were called "rest"; there was no other rest during those ten days. An immense amount of picket and fatigue duty had to be done. Two redoubts were to be built to command the Northern Valley; all the intervening grove, which now afforded lurking-ground for a daring enemy, must be cleared away; and a few houses must be reluctantly razed for the same purpose. The fort on the left was named Fort Higginson, and that built by my own regiment, in return, Fort Montgomery. The former was necessarily a hasty work, and is now, I believe, in ruins; the latter was far more elaborately constructed, on lines well traced by the Fourth New Hampshire during the previous occupation. It did great credit to Captain Trowbridge, of my regiment (formerly of the New York Volunteer Engineers), who had charge of its construction.

How like a dream seems now that period of daily skirmishes and nightly watchfulness! The fatigue was so constant that the days hurried by. I felt the need of some occasional change of ideas, and having just received from the North Mr. Brook's beautiful translation of Jean Paul's "Titan," I used to retire to my bedroom for some ten minutes every afternoon, and read a chapter or two. It was more refreshing than a nap, and will always be to me one of the most fascinating books in the world, with this added association. After all, what concerned me was not so much the fear of an attempt to drive us out and retake the city,—for that would be against the whole policy of the Rebels in that region,—as of an effort to fulfil their threats and burn it, by some nocturnal dash. The most valuable buildings belonged to Union men, and the upper part of the town, built chiefly of resinous pine, was combustible to the last degree. In case of fire, if the wind blew towards the river, we might lose steamers and all. I remember regulating my degree of disrobing by the direction of the wind; if it blew from the river, it was safe to make one's self quite comfortable; if otherwise, it was best to conform to Suwarrow's idea of luxury, and take off one spur.

So passed our busy life for ten days. There were no tidings of reinforcements, and I hardly knew whether I wished for them,—or rather, I desired them as a choice of evils; for our men were giving out from overwork, and the recruiting excursions, for which we had mainly come, were hardly possible. At the utmost, I had asked for the addition of four companies and a light battery. Judge of my surprise when two infantry regiments successively arrived! I must resort to a scrap from the diary. Perhaps diaries are apt to be thought tedious; but I would rather read a page of one, whatever the events described, than any more deliberate narrative,—it gives glimpses so much more real and vivid.

                   "HEAD-QUARTERS, JACKSONVILLE,

                                "March 20, 1863, Midnight.

"For the last twenty-four hours we have been sending women and children out of town, in answer to a demand by flag of truce, with a threat of bombardment. [N. B. I advised them not to go, and the majority declined doing so.] It was designed, no doubt, to intimidate; and in our ignorance of the force actually outside, we have had to recognize the possibility of danger, and work hard at our defences. At any time, by going into the outskirts, we can have a skirmish, which is nothing but fun; but when night closes in over a small and weary garrison, there sometimes steals into my mind, like a chill, that most sickening of all sensations, the anxiety of a commander. This was the night generally set for an attack, if any, though I am pretty well satisfied that they have not strength to dare it, and the worst they could probably do is to burn the town. But to-night, instead of enemies, appear friends,—our devoted civic ally, Judge S., and a whole Connecticut regiment, the Sixth, under Major Meeker; and though the latter are aground, twelve miles below, yet they enable one to breathe more freely. I only wish they were black; but now I have to show, not only that blacks can fight, but that they and white soldiers can act in harmony together."

That evening the enemy came up for a reconnoissance, in the deepest darkness, and there were alarms all night. The next day the Sixth Connecticut got afloat, and came up the river; and two days after, to my continued amazement, arrived a part of the Eighth Maine, under Lieutenant-Colonel Twichell. This increased my command to four regiments, or parts of regiments, half white and half black. Skirmishing had almost ceased,—our defences being tolerably complete, and looking from without much more effective than they really were. We were safe from any attack by a small force, and hoped that the enemy could not spare a large one from Charleston or Savannah. All looked bright without, and gave leisure for some small anxieties within.

It was the first time in the war (so far as I know) that white and black soldiers had served together on regular duty. Jealousy was still felt towards even the officers of colored regiments, and any difficult contingency would be apt to bring it out. The white soldiers, just from ship-board, felt a natural desire to stray about the town; and no attack from an enemy would be so disastrous as the slightest collision between them and the black provost-guard. I shudder, even now, to think of the train of consequences, bearing on the whole course of subsequent national events, which one such mishap might then have produced. It is almost impossible for us now to remember in what a delicate balance then hung the whole question of negro enlistments, and consequently of Slavery. Fortunately for my own serenity, I had great faith in the intrinsic power of military discipline, and also knew that a common service would soon produce mutual respect among good soldiers; and so it proved. But the first twelve hours of this mixed command were to me a more anxious period than any outward alarms had created.

Let us resort to the note-book again.

St. Helena Island S.C.

"JACKSONVILLE, March 22, 1863.

"It is Sunday; the bell is ringing for church, and Rev. Mr. F., from Beaufort, is to preach. This afternoon our good quartermaster establishes a Sunday-school for our little colony of 'contrabands,' now numbering seventy.

                                                          Sunday Afternoon.

"The bewildering report is confirmed; and in addition to the Sixth Connecticut, which came yesterday, appears part of the Eighth Maine. The remainder, with its colonel, will be here to-morrow, and, report says, Major-General Hunter. Now my hope is that we may go to some point higher up the river, which we can hold for ourselves. There are two other points [Magnolia and Pilatka], which, in themselves, are as favorable as this, and, for getting recruits, better. So I shall hope to be allowed to go. To take posts, and then let white troops garrison them,—that is my programme.

"What makes the thing more puzzling is, that the Eighth Maine has only brought ten days' rations, so that they evidently are not to stay here; and yet where they go, or why they come, is a puzzle. Meanwhile we can sleep sound o' nights; and if the black and white babies do not quarrel and pull hair, we shall do very well."

Colonel Rust, on arriving, said frankly that he knew nothing of the plans prevailing in the Department, but that General Hunter was certainly coming soon to act for himself; that it had been reported at the North, and even at Port Royal, that we had all been captured and shot (and, indeed, I had afterwards the pleasure of reading my own obituary in a Northern Democratic journal), and that we certainly needed reinforcements; that he himself had been sent with orders to carry out, so far as possible, the original plans of the expedition; that he regarded himself as only a visitor, and should remain chiefly on shipboard,—which he did. He would relieve the black provost-guard by a white one, if I approved,—which I certainly did. But he said that he felt bound to give the chief opportunities of action to the colored troops,—which I also approved, and which he carried out, not quite to the satisfaction of his own eager and daring officers.

I recall one of these enterprises, out of which we extracted a good deal of amusement; it was baptized the Battle of the Clothes-Lines. A white company was out scouting in the woods behind the town, with one of my best Florida men for a guide; and the captain sent back a message that he had discovered a Rebel camp with twenty-two tents, beyond a creek, about four miles away; the officers and men had been distinctly seen, and it would be quite possible to capture it. Colonel Rust at once sent me out with two hundred men to do the work, recalling the original scouts, and disregarding the appeals of his own eager officers. We marched through the open pine woods, on a delightful afternoon, and met the returning party. Poor fellows! I never shall forget the longing eyes they cast on us, as we marched forth to the field of glory, from which they were debarred. We went three or four miles out, sometimes halting to send forward a scout, while I made all the men lie down in the long, thin grass and beside the fallen trees, till one could not imagine that there was a person there. I remember how picturesque the effect was, when, at the signal, all rose again, like Roderick Dhu's men, and the green wood appeared suddenly populous with armed life. At a certain point forces were divided, and a detachment was sent round the head of the creek, to flank the unsuspecting enemy; while we of the main body, stealing with caution nearer and nearer, through ever denser woods, swooped down at last in triumph upon a solitary farmhouse,—where the family-washing had been hung out to dry! This was the "Rebel camp"!

It is due to Sergeant Greene, my invaluable guide, to say that he had from the beginning discouraged any high hopes of a crossing of bayonets. He had early explained that it was not he who claimed to have seen the tents and the Rebel soldiers, but one of the officers,—and had pointed out that our undisturbed approach was hardly reconcilable with the existence of a hostile camp so near. This impression had also pressed more and more upon my own mind, but it was our business to put the thing beyond a doubt. Probably the place may have been occasionally used for a picket-station, and we found fresh horse-tracks in the vicinity, and there was a quantity of iron bridle-bits in the house, of which no clear explanation could be given; so that the armed men may not have been wholly imaginary. But camp there was none. After enjoying to the utmost the fun of the thing, therefore, we borrowed the only horse on the premises, hung all the bits over his neck, and as I rode him back to camp, they clanked like broken chains. We were joined on the way by our dear and devoted surgeon, whom I had left behind as an invalid, but who had mounted his horse and ridden out alone to attend to our wounded, his green sash looking quite in harmony with the early spring verdure of those lovely woods. So came we back in triumph, enjoying the joke all the more because some one else was responsible. We mystified the little community at first, but soon let out the secret, and witticisms abounded for a day or two, the mildest of which was the assertion that the author of the alarm must have been "three sheets in the wind."

Another expedition was of more exciting character. For several days before the arrival of Colonel Rust a reconnaissance had been planned in the direction of the enemy's camp, and he finally consented to its being carried out. By the energy of Major Corwin, of the Second South Carolina Volunteers, aided by Mr. Holden, then a gunner on the Paul Jones, and afterwards made captain of the same regiment, one of the ten-pound Parrott guns had been mounted on a hand-car, for use on the railway. This it was now proposed to bring into service. I took a large detail of men from the two white regiments and from my own, and had instructions to march as far as the four-mile station on the railway, if possible, examine the country, and ascertain if the Rebel camp had been removed, as was reported, beyond that distance. I was forbidden going any farther from camp, or attacking the Rebel camp, as my force comprised half our garrison, and should the town meanwhile be attacked from some other direction, it would be in great danger.

I never shall forget the delight of that march through the open pine barren, with occasional patches of uncertain swamp. The Eighth Maine, under Lieutenant-Colonel Twichell, was on the right, the Sixth Connecticut, under Major Meeker, on the left, and my own men, under Major Strong, in the centre, having in charge the cannon, to which they had been trained. Mr. Heron, from the John Adams, acted as gunner. The mounted Rebel pickets retired before us through the woods, keeping usually beyond range of the skirmishers, who in a long line—white, black, white—were deployed transversely. For the first time I saw the two colors fairly alternate on the military chessboard; it had been the object of much labor and many dreams, and I liked the pattern at last. Nothing was said about the novel fact by anybody,—it all seemed to come as matter-of-course; there appeared to be no mutual distrust among the men, and as for the officers, doubtless "each crow thought its own young the whitest,"—I certainly did, although doing full justice to the eager courage of the Northern portion of my command. Especially I watched with pleasure the fresh delight of the Maine men, who had not, like the rest, been previously in action, and who strode rapidly on with their long legs, irresistibly recalling, as their gaunt, athletic frames and sunburnt faces appeared here and there among the pines, the lumber regions of their native State, with which I was not unfamiliar.

We passed through a former camp of the Rebels, from which everything had been lately removed; but when the utmost permitted limits of our reconnoissance were reached, there were still no signs of any other camp, and the Rebel cavalry still kept provokingly before us. Their evident object was to lure us on to their own stronghold, and had we fallen into the trap, it would perhaps have resembled, on a smaller scale, the Olustee of the following year. With a good deal of reluctance, however, I caused the recall to be sounded, and, after a slight halt, we began to retrace our steps.

Straining our eyes to look along the reach of level railway which stretched away through the pine barren, we began to see certain ominous puffs of smoke, which might indeed proceed from some fire in the woods, but were at once set down by the men as coming from the mysterious locomotive battery which the Rebels were said to have constructed. Gradually the smoke grew denser, and appeared to be moving up along the track, keeping pace with our motion, and about two miles distant. I watched it steadily through a field-glass from our own slowly moving battery: it seemed to move when we moved and to halt when we halted. Sometimes in the dun smoke I caught a glimpse of something blacker, raised high in the air like the threatening head of some great gliding serpent. Suddenly there came a sharp puff of lighter smoke that seemed like a forked tongue, and then a hollow report, and we could see a great black projectile hurled into the air, and falling a quarter of a mile away from us, in the woods. I did not at once learn that this first shot killed two of the Maine men, and wounded two more. This was fired wide, but the numerous shots which followed were admirably aimed, and seldom failed to fall or explode close to our own smaller battery.

It was the first time that the men had been seriously exposed to artillery fire,—a danger more exciting to the ignorant mind than any other, as this very war has shown.* So I watched them anxiously. Fortunately there were deep trenches on each side the railway, with many stout, projecting roots, forming very tolerable bomb-proofs for those who happened to be near them. The enemy's gun was a sixty-four-pound Blakely, as we afterward found, whose enormous projectile moved very slowly and gave ample time to cover,—insomuch, that, while the fragments of shell fell all around and amongst us, not a man was hurt. This soon gave the men the most buoyant confidence, and they shouted with childish delight over every explosion.

*Take this for example: "The effect was electrical. The Rebels were the best men in Ford's command, being Lieutenant-Colonel Showalter's Californians, and they are brave men. They had dismounted and sent their horses to the rear, and were undoubtedly determined upon a desperate fight, and their superior numbers made them confident of success. But they never fought with artillery, and a cannon has more terror for them than ten thousand rifles and all the wild Camanches on the plains of Texas. At first glimpse of the shining brass monsters there was a visible wavering in the determined front of the enemy, and as the shells came screaming over their heads the scare was complete. They broke ranks, fled for their horses, scrambled on the first that came to hand, and skedaddled in the direction of Brownsville."New York Evening Post, September 25, 1864.

The moment a shell had burst or fallen unburst, our little gun was invariably fired in return, and that with some precision, so far as we could judge, its range also being nearly as great. For some reason they showed no disposition to overtake us, in which attempt their locomotive would have given them an immense advantage over our heavy hand-car, and their cavalry force over our infantry. Nevertheless, I rather hoped that they would attempt it, for then an effort might have been made to cut them off in the rear by taking up some rails. As it was, this was out of the question, though they moved slowly, as we moved, keeping always about two miles away. When they finally ceased firing we took up the rails beyond us before withdrawing, and thus kept the enemy from approaching so near the city again. But I shall never forget that Dantean monster, rearing its black head amid the distant smoke, nor the solicitude with which I watched for the puff which meant danger, and looked round to see if my chickens were all under cover. The greatest peril, after all, was from the possible dismounting of our gun, in which case we should have been very apt to lose it, if the enemy had showed any dash. There may be other such tilts of railway artillery on record during the war; but if so, I have not happened to read of them, and so have dwelt the longer on this.

This was doubtless the same locomotive battery which had previously fired more than once upon the town,—running up within two miles and then withdrawing, while it was deemed inexpedient to destroy the railroad, on our part, lest it might be needed by ourselves in turn. One night, too, the Rebel threat had been fulfilled, and they had shelled the town with the same battery. They had the range well, and every shot fell near the post headquarters. It was exciting to see the great Blakely shell, showing a light as it rose, and moving slowly towards us like a comet, then exploding and scattering its formidable fragments. Yet, strange to say, no serious harm was done to life or limb, and the most formidable casualty was that of a citizen who complained that a shell had passed through the wall of his bedroom, and carried off his mosquito curtain in its transit.

Little knew we how soon these small entertainments would be over. Colonel Montgomery had gone up the river with his two companies, perhaps to remain permanently; and I was soon to follow. On Friday, March 27th, I wrote home: "The Burnside has gone to Beaufort for rations, and the John Adams to Fernandina for coal; we expect both back by Sunday, and on Monday I hope to get the regiment off to a point farther up,—Magnolia, thirty-five miles, or Pilatka, seventy-five,—either of which would be a good post for us. General Hunter is expected every day, and it is strange he has not come." The very next day came an official order recalling the whole expedition, and for the third time evacuating Jacksonville.

A council of military and naval officers was at once called (though there was but one thing to be done), and the latter were even more disappointed and amazed than the former. This was especially the case with the senior naval officer, Captain Steedman, a South-Carolinian by birth, but who had proved himself as patriotic as he was courteous and able, and whose presence and advice had been of the greatest value to me. He and all of us felt keenly the wrongfulness of breaking the pledges which we had been authorized to make to these people, and of leaving them to the mercy of the Rebels once more. Most of the people themselves took the same view, and eagerly begged to accompany us on our departure. They were allowed to bring their clothing and furniture also, and at once developed that insane mania for aged and valueless trumpery which always seizes upon the human race, I believe, in moments of danger. With the greatest difficulty we selected between the essential and the non-essential, and our few transports were at length loaded to the very water's edge on the morning of March 29th,—Colonel Montgomery having by this time returned from up-river, with sixteen prisoners, and the fruits of foraging in plenty.

And upon that last morning occurred an act on the part of some of the garrison most deeply to be regretted, and not to be excused by the natural indignation at their recall,—an act which, through the unfortunate eloquence of one newspaper correspondent, rang through the nation,—the attempt to burn the town. I fortunately need not dwell much upon it, as I was not at the time in command of the post,—as the white soldiers frankly took upon themselves the whole responsibility,—and as all the fires were made in the wooden part of the city, which was occupied by them, while none were made in the brick part, where the colored soldiers were quartered. It was fortunate for our reputation that the newspaper accounts generally agreed in exculpating us from all share in the matter;* and the single exception, which one correspondent asserted, I could never verify, and do not believe to have existed. It was stated by Colonel Rust, in his official report, that some twenty-five buildings in all were burned, and I doubt if the actual number was greater; but this was probably owing in part to a change of wind, and did not diminish the discredit of the transaction. It made our sorrow at departure no less, though it infinitely enhanced the impressiveness of the scene.

     *"The colored regiments had nothing at all to do with it;

they behaved with propriety throughout" Boston Journal

Correspondence. ("Carleton.")

"The negro troops took no part whatever in the perpetration of this Vandalism."New York Tribune Correspondence. ("N. P.")

"We know not whether we are most rejoiced or saddened to observe, by the general concurrence of accounts, that the negro soldiers had nothing to do with the barbarous act" Boston Journal Editorial, April 10, 1863.

The excitement of the departure was intense. The embarkation was so laborious that it seemed as if the flames must be upon us before we could get on board, and it was also generally expected that the Rebel skirmishers would be down among the houses, wherever practicable, to annoy us to the utmost, as had been the case at the previous evacuation. They were, indeed, there, as we afterwards heard, but did not venture to molest us. The sight and roar of the flames, and the rolling clouds of smoke, brought home to the impressible minds of the black soldiers all their favorite imagery of the Judgment-Day; and those who were not too much depressed by disappointment were excited by the spectacle, and sang and exhorted without ceasing.

With heavy hearts their officers floated down the lovely river, which we had ascended with hopes so buoyant; and from that day to this, the reasons for our recall have never been made public. It was commonly attributed to proslavery advisers, acting on the rather impulsive nature of Major-General Hunter, with a view to cut short the career of the colored troops, and stop their recruiting. But it may have been simply the scarcity of troops in the Department, and the renewed conviction at head-quarters that we were too few to hold the post alone. The latter theory was strengthened by the fact that, when General Seymour reoccupied Jacksonville, the following year, he took with him twenty thousand men instead of one thousand,—and the sanguinary battle of Olustee found him with too few.

CHAPTER V

OUT ON PICKET

One can hardly imagine a body of men more disconsolate than a regiment suddenly transferred from an adventurous life in the enemy's country to the quiet of a sheltered camp, on safe and familiar ground. The men under my command were deeply dejected when, on a most appropriate day,—the First of April, 1863,—they found themselves unaccountably recalled from Florida, that region of delights which had seemed theirs by the right of conquest. My dusky soldiers, who based their whole walk and conversation strictly on the ancient Israelites, felt that the prophecies were all set at naught, and that they were on the wrong side of the Red Sea; indeed, I fear they regarded even me as a sort of reversed Moses, whose Pisgah fronted in the wrong direction. Had they foreseen how the next occupation of the Promised Land was destined to result, they might have acquiesced with more of their wonted cheerfulness. As it was, we were very glad to receive, after a few days of discontented repose on the very ground where we had once been so happy, an order to go out on picket at Port Royal Ferry, with the understanding that we might remain there for some time. This picket station was regarded as a sort of military picnic by the regiments stationed at Beaufort, South Carolina; it meant blackberries and oysters, wild roses and magnolias, flowery lanes instead of sandy barrens, and a sort of guerilla existence in place of the camp routine. To the colored soldiers especially, with their love of country life, and their extensive personal acquaintance on the plantations, it seemed quite like a Christmas festival. Besides, they would be in sight of the enemy, and who knew but there might, by the blessing of Providence, be a raid or a skirmish? If they could not remain on the St. John's River, it was something to dwell on the Coosaw. In the end they enjoyed it as much as they expected, and though we "went out" several times subsequently, until it became an old story, the enjoyment never waned. And as even the march from the camp to the picket lines was something that could not possibly have been the same for any white regiment in the service, it is worth while to begin at the beginning and describe it.

A regiment ordered on picket was expected to have reveille at daybreak, and to be in line for departure by sunrise. This delighted our men, who always took a childlike pleasure in being out of bed at any unreasonable hour; and by the time I had emerged, the tents were nearly all struck, and the great wagons were lumbering into camp to receive them, with whatever else was to be transported. The first rays of the sun must fall upon the line of these wagons, moving away across the wide parade-ground, followed by the column of men, who would soon outstrip them. But on the occasion which I especially describe the sun was shrouded, and, when once upon the sandy plain, neither camp nor town nor river could be seen in the dimness; and when I rode forward and looked back there was only visible the long, moving, shadowy column, seeming rather awful in its snake-like advance. There was a swaying of flags and multitudinous weapons that might have been camels' necks for all one could see, and the whole thing might have been a caravan upon the desert. Soon we debouched upon the "Shell Road," the wagon-train drew on one side into the fog, and by the time the sun appeared the music ceased, the men took the "route step," and the fun began.

The "route step" is an abandonment of all military strictness, and nothing is required of the men but to keep four abreast, and not lag behind. They are not required to keep step, though, with the rhythmical ear of our soldiers, they almost always instinctively did so; talking and singing are allowed, and of this privilege, at least, they eagerly availed themselves. On this day they were at the top of exhilaration. There was one broad grin from one end of the column to the other; it might soon have been a caravan of elephants instead of camels, for the ivory and the blackness; the chatter and the laughter almost drowned the tramp of feet and the clatter of equipments.

At cross-roads and plantation gates the colored people thronged to see us pass; every one found a friend and a greeting. "How you do, aunty?" "Huddy (how d'ye), Budder Benjamin?" "How you find yourself dis mor-nin', Tittawisa (Sister Louisa)?" Such saluations rang out to everybody, known or unknown. In return, venerable, kerchiefed matrons courtesied laboriously to every one, with an unfailing "Bress de Lord, budder." Grave little boys, blacker than ink, shook hands with our laughing and utterly unmanageable drummers, who greeted them with this sure word of prophecy, "Dem's de drummers for de nex' war!"

Pretty mulatto girls ogled and coquetted, and made eyes, as Thackeray would say, at half the young fellows in the battalion. Meantime the singing was brisk along the whole column, and when I sometimes reined up to see them pass, the chant of each company, entering my ear, drove out from the other ear the strain of the preceding. Such an odd mixture of things, military and missionary, as the successive waves of song drifted byl First, "John Brown," of course; then, "What make old Satan for follow me so?" then, "Marching Along"; then, "Hold your light on Canaan's shore"; then, "When this cruel war is over" (a new favorite, sung by a few); yielding presently to a grand burst of the favorite marching song among them all, and one at which every step instinctively quickened, so light and jubilant its rhythm,—

  All true children gwine in de wilderness,

  Gwine in de wilderness, gwine in de wilderness,

  True believers gwine in de wilderness,

  To take away de sins ob de world,"—

ending in a "Hoigh!" after each verse,—a sort of Irish yell. For all the songs, but especially for their own wild hymns, they constantly improvised simple verses, with the same odd mingling,—the little facts of to-day's march being interwoven with the depths of theological gloom, and the same jubilant chorus annexed to all; thus,—

  We're gwin to de Ferry,

          De bell done ringing;

  Gwine to de landing,

          De bell done ringing;

  Trust, believer

          O, de bell done ringing;

  Satan's behind me,

          De bell done ringing;

  'T is a misty morning,

          De bell done ringing;

  O de road am sandy,

          De bell done ringing;

  Hell been open,

          De bell done ringing;—

and so on indefinitely.

The little drum-corps kept in advance, a jolly crew, their drums slung on their backs, and the drum-sticks perhaps balanced on their heads. With them went the officers' servant-boys, more uproarious still, always ready to lend their shrill treble to any song.

Mansion of former Confederate General

At the head of the whole force there walked, by some self-imposed pre-eminence, a respectable elderly female, one of the company laundresses, whose vigorous stride we never could quite overtake, and who had an enormous bundle balanced on her head, while she waved in her hand, like a sword, a long-handled tin dipper. Such a picturesque medley of fun, war, and music I believe no white regiment in the service could have shown; and yet there was no straggling, and a single tap of the drum would at any moment bring order out of this seeming chaos. So we marched our seven miles out upon the smooth and shaded road,—beneath jasmine clusters, and great pine-cones dropping, and great bunches of misletoe still in bloom among the branches. Arrived at the station, the scene soon became busy and more confused; wagons were being unloaded, tents pitched, water brought, wood cut, fires made, while the "field and staff" could take possession of the abandoned quarters of their predecessors, and we could look round in the lovely summer morning to "survey our empire and behold our home."

The only thoroughfare by land between Beaufort and Charleston is the "Shell Road," a beautiful avenue, which, about nine miles from Beaufort, strikes a ferry across the Coosaw River. War abolished the ferry, and made the river the permanent barrier between the opposing picket lines. For ten miles, right and left, these lines extended, marked by well-worn footpaths, following the endless windings of the stream; and they never varied until nearly the end of the war. Upon their maintenance depended our whole foothold on the Sea Islands; and upon that again finally depended the whole campaign of Sherman. But for the services of the colored troops, which finally formed the main garrison of the Department of the South, the Great March would never have been performed.

Former slaves of a Confederate General

There was thus a region ten or twelve miles square of which I had exclusive military command. It was level, but otherwise broken and bewildering to the last degree. No road traversed it, properly speaking, but the Shell Road. All the rest was a wild medley of cypress swamp, pine barren, muddy creek, and cultivated plantation, intersected by interminable lanes and bridle-paths, through which we must ride day and night, and which our horses soon knew better than ourselves. The regiment was distributed at different stations, the main force being under my immediate command, at a plantation close by the Shell Road, two miles from the ferry, and seven miles from Beaufort. Our first picket duty was just at the time of the first attack on Charleston, under Dupont and Hunter; and it was generally supposed that the Confederates would make an effort to recapture the Sea Islands. My orders were to watch the enemy closely, keep informed as to his position and movements, attempt no advance, and, in case any were attempted from the other side, to delay it as long as possible, sending instant notice to head-quarters. As to the delay, that could be easily guaranteed. There were causeways on the Shell Road which a single battery could hold against a large force; and the plantations were everywhere so intersected by hedges and dikes that they seemed expressly planned for defence. Although creeks wound in and out everywhere, yet these were only navigable at high tide, and at all other times were impassable marshes. There were but few posts where the enemy were within rifle range, and their occasional attacks at those points were soon stopped by our enforcement of a pithy order from General Hunter, "Give them as good as they send." So that, with every opportunity for being kept on the alert, there was small prospect of serious danger; and all promised an easy life, with only enough of care to make it pleasant. The picket station was therefore always a coveted post among the regiments, combining some undeniable importance with a kind of relaxation; and as we were there three months on our first tour of duty, and returned there several times afterwards, we got well acquainted with it. The whole region always reminded me of the descriptions of La Vende'e, and I always expected to meet Henri Larochejaquelein riding in the woods.

Headquarters of the 1st Mass Cavalry Edisto Island S.C.

How can I ever describe the charm and picturesqueness of that summer life? Our house possessed four spacious rooms and a piazza; around it were grouped sheds and tents; the camp was a little way off on one side, the negro-quarters of the plantation on the other; and all was immersed in a dense mass of waving and murmuring locust-blossoms. The spring days were always lovely, while the evenings were always conveniently damp; so that we never shut the windows by day, nor omitted our cheerful fire by night. Indoors, the main head-quarters seemed like the camp of some party of young engineers in time of peace, only with a little female society added, and a good many martial associations thrown in. A large, low, dilapidated room, with an immense fireplace, and with window-panes chiefly broken, so that the sashes were still open even when closed,—such was our home. The walls were scrawled with capital charcoal sketches by R. of the Fourth New Hampshire, and with a good map of the island and its wood-paths by C. of the First Massachusetts Cavalry. The room had the picturesqueness which comes everywhere from the natural grouping of articles of daily use,—swords, belts, pistols, rifles, field-glasses, spurs, canteens, gauntlets,—while wreaths of gray moss above the windows, and a pelican's wing three feet long over the high mantel-piece, indicated more deliberate decoration. This, and the whole atmosphere of the place, spoke of the refining presence of agreeable women; and it was pleasant when they held their little court in the evening, and pleasant all day, with the different visitors who were always streaming in and out,—officers and soldiers on various business; turbaned women from the plantations, coming with complaints or questionings; fugitives from the main-land to be interrogated; visitors riding up on horseback, their hands full of jasmine and wild roses; and the sweet sunny air all perfumed with magnolias and the Southern pine. From the neighboring camp there was a perpetual low hum. Louder voices and laughter re-echoed, amid the sharp sounds of the axe, from the pine woods; and sometimes, when the relieved pickets were discharging their pieces, there came the hollow sound of dropping rifle-shots, as in skirmishing,—perhaps the most unmistakable and fascinating association that war bequeaths to the memory of the ear.

Our domestic arrangements were of the oddest description. From the time when we began housekeeping by taking down the front-door to complete therewith a little office for the surgeon on the piazza, everything seemed upside down. I slept on a shelf in the corner of the parlor, bequeathed me by Major F., my jovial predecessor, and, if I waked at any time, could put my head through the broken window, arouse my orderly, and ride off to see if I could catch a picket asleep. We used to spell the word picquet, because that was understood to be the correct thing, in that Department at least; and they used to say at post head-quarters that as soon as the officer in command of the outposts grew negligent, and was guilty of a k, he was ordered in immediately. Then the arrangements for ablution were peculiar. We fitted up a bathing-place in a brook, which somehow got appropriated at once by the company laundresses; but I had my revenge, for I took to bathing in the family washtub. After all, however, the kitchen department had the advantage, for they used my solitary napkin to wipe the mess-table. As for food, we found it impossible to get chickens, save in the immature shape of eggs; fresh pork was prohibited by the surgeon, and other fresh meat came rarely. We could, indeed, hunt for wild turkeys, and even deer, but such hunting was found only to increase the appetite, without corresponding supply. Still we had our luxuries,—large, delicious drum-fish, and alligator steaks,—like a more substantial fried halibut,—which might have afforded the theme for Charles Lamb's dissertation on Roast Pig, and by whose aid "for the first time in our lives we tested crackling"

Camp cook

The post bakery yielded admirable bread; and for vegetables and fruit we had very poor sweet potatoes, and (in their season) an unlimited supply of the largest blackberries. For beverage, we had the vapid milk of that region, in which, if you let it stand, the water sinks instead of the cream's rising; and the delicious sugar-cane syrup, which we had brought from Florida, and which we drank at all hours. Old Floridians say that no one is justified in drinking whiskey, while he can get cane-juice; it is sweet and spirited, without cloying, foams like ale, and there were little spots on the ceiling of the dining-room where our lively beverage had popped out its cork. We kept it in a whiskey-bottle; and as whiskey itself was absolutely prohibited among us, it was amusing to see the surprise of our military visitors when this innocent substitute was brought in. They usually liked it in the end, but, like the old Frenchwoman over her glass of water, wished that it were a sin to give it a relish. As the foaming beakers of molasses and water were handed round, the guests would make with them the courteous little gestures of polite imbiding, and would then quaff the beverage, some with gusto, others with a slight afterlook of dismay. But it was a delicious and cooling drink while it lasted; and at all events was the best and the worst we had.

We used to have reveille at six, and breakfast about seven; then the mounted couriers began to arrive from half a dozen different directions, with written reports of what had happened during the night,—a boat seen, a picket fired upon, a battery erecting. These must be consolidated and forwarded to head-quarters, with the daily report of the command,—so many sick, so many on detached service, and all the rest. This was our morning newspaper, our Herald and Tribune; I never got tired of it. Then the couriers must be furnished with countersign and instructions, and sent off again. Then we scattered to our various rides, all disguised as duty; one to inspect pickets, one to visit a sick soldier, one to build a bridge or clear a road, and still another to head-quarters for ammunition or commissary stores. Galloping through green lanes, miles of triumphal arches of wild roses,—roses pale and large and fragrant, mingled with great boughs of the white cornel, fantastic masses, snowy surprises,—such were our rides, ranging from eight to fifteen and even twenty miles. Back to a late dinner with our various experiences, and perhaps specimens to match,—a thunder-snake, eight feet long; a live opossum, with a young clinging to the natural pouch; an armful of great white, scentless pond-lilies. After dinner, to the tangled garden for rosebuds or early magnolias, whose cloying fragrance will always bring back to me the full zest of those summer days; then dress-parade and a little drill as the day grew cool. In the evening, tea; and then the piazza or the fireside, as the case might be,—chess, cards,—perhaps a little music by aid of the assistant surgeon's melodeon, a few pages of Jean Paul's "Titan," almost my only book, and carefully husbanded,—perhaps a mail, with its infinite felicities. Such was our day.

Night brought its own fascinations, more solitary and profound. The darker they were, the more clearly it was our duty to visit the pickets. The paths that had grown so familiar by day seemed a wholly new labyrinth by night; and every added shade of darkness seemed to shift and complicate them all anew, till at last man's skill grew utterly baffled, and the clew must be left to the instinct of the horse. Riding beneath the solemn starlight, or soft, gray mist, or densest blackness, the frogs croaking, the strange "chuckwuts-widow" droning his ominous note above my head, the mocking-bird dreaming in music, the great Southern fireflies rising to the tree-tops, or hovering close to the ground like glowworms, till the horse raised his hoofs to avoid them; through pine woods and cypress swamps, or past sullen brooks, or white tents, or the dimly seen huts of sleeping negroes; down to the glimmering shore, where black statues leaned against trees or stood alert in the pathways;—never, in all the days of my life, shall I forget the magic of those haunted nights.

We had nocturnal boat service, too, for it was a part of our instructions to obtain all possible information about the enemy's position; and we accordingly, as usual in such cases, incurred a great many risks that harmed nobody, and picked up much information which did nobody any good. The centre of these nightly reconnoissances, for a long time, was the wreck of the George Washington, the story of whose disaster is perhaps worth telling.

Till about the time when we went on picket, it had been the occasional habit of the smaller gunboats to make the circuit of Port Royal Island,—a practice which was deemed very essential to the safety of our position, but which the Rebels effectually stopped, a few days after our arrival, by destroying the army gunboat George Washington with a single shot from a light battery. I was roused soon after daybreak by the firing, and a courier soon came dashing in with the particulars. Forwarding these hastily to Beaufort (for we had then no telegraph), I was soon at the scene of action, five miles away. Approaching, I met on the picket paths man after man who had escaped from the wreck across a half-mile of almost impassable marsh. Never did I see such objects,—some stripped to their shirts, some fully clothed, but all having every garment literally pasted to them—bodies with mud. Across the river, the Rebels were retiring, having done their work, but were still shelling, from greater and greater distances, the wood through which I rode. Arrived at the spot nearest the wreck (a point opposite to what we called the Brickyard Station), I saw the burning vessel aground beyond a long stretch of marsh, out of which the forlorn creatures were still floundering. Here and there in the mud and reeds we could see the laboring heads, slowly advancing, and could hear excruciating cries from wounded men in the more distant depths. It was the strangest mixture of war and Dante and Robinson Crusoe. Our energetic chaplain coming up, I sent him with four men, under a flag of truce, to the place whence the worst cries proceeded, while I went to another part of the marsh. During that morning we got them all out, our last achievement being the rescue of the pilot, an immense negro with a wooden leg,—an article so particularly unavailable for mud travelling, that it would have almost seemed better, as one of the men suggested, to cut the traces, and leave it behind.

A naval gunboat, too, which had originally accompanied this vessel, and should never have left it, now came back and took off the survivors, though there had been several deaths from scalding and shell. It proved that the wreck was not aground after all, but at anchor, having foolishly lingered till after daybreak, and having thus given time for the enemy to bring down then: guns. The first shot had struck the boiler, and set the vessel on fire; after which the officer in command had raised a white flag, and then escaped with his men to our shore; and it was for this flight in the wrong direction that they were shelled in the marshes by the Rebels. The case furnished in this respect some parallel to that of the Kearsage and Alabama, and it was afterwards cited, I believe, officially or unofficially, to show that the Rebels had claimed the right to punish, in this case, the course of action which they approved in Semmes. I know that they always asserted thenceforward that the detachment on board the George Washington had become rightful prisoners of war, and were justly fired upon when they tried to escape.

This was at the tune of the first attack on Charleston, and the noise of this cannonading spread rapidly thither, and brought four regiments to reinforce Beaufort in a hurry, under the impression that the town was already taken, and that they must save what remnants they could. General Saxton, too, had made such capital plans for defending the post that he could not bear not to have it attacked; so, while the Rebels brought down a force to keep us from taking the guns off the wreck, I was also supplied with a section or two of regular artillery, and some additional infantry, with which to keep them from it; and we tried to "make believe very hard," and rival the Charleston expedition on our own island. Indeed, our affair came to about as much,—nearly nothing,—and lasted decidedly longer; for both sides nibbled away at the guns, by night, for weeks afterward, though I believe the mud finally got them,—at least, we did not. We tried in vain to get the use of a steamboat or floating derrick of any kind; for it needed more mechanical ingenuity than we possessed to transfer anything so heavy to our small boats by night, while by day we did not go near the wreck in anything larger than a "dug-out."

One of these nocturnal visits to the wreck I recall with peculiar gusto, because it brought back that contest with catarrh and coughing among my own warriors which had so ludicrously beset me in Florida. It was always fascinating to be on those forbidden waters by night, stealing out with muffled oars through the creeks and reeds, our eyes always strained for other voyagers, our ears listening breathlessly to all the marsh sounds,—blackflsh splashing, and little wakened reed-birds that fled wailing away over the dim river, equally safe on either side. But it always appeared to the watchful senses that we were making noise enough to be heard at Fort Sumter; and somehow the victims of catarrh seemed always the most eager for any enterprise requiring peculiar caution. In this case I thought I had sifted them before-hand; but as soon as we were afloat, one poor boy near me began to wheeze, and I turned upon him in exasperation. He saw his danger, and meekly said, "I won't cough, Gunnel!" and he kept his word. For two mortal hours he sat grasping his gun, with never a chirrup. But two unfortunates in the bow of the boat developed symptoms which I could not suppress; so, putting in at a picket station, with some risk I dumped them in mud knee-deep, and embarked a substitute, who after the first five minutes absolutely coughed louder than both the others united. Handkerchiefs, blankets, over-coats, suffocation in its direst forms, were tried in vain, but apparently the Rebel pickets slept through it all, and we exploded the wreck in safety. I think they were asleep, for certainly across the level marshes there came a nasal sound, as of the "Con-thieveracy" in its slumbers. It may have been a bull-frog, but it sounded like a human snore.

Picket life was of course the place to feel the charm of natural beauty on the Sea Islands. We had a world of profuse and tangled vegetation around us, such as would have been a dream of delight to me, but for the constant sense of responsibility and care which came between. Amid this preoccupation, Nature seemed but a mirage, and not the close and intimate associate I had before known. I pressed no flowers, collected no insects or birds' eggs, made no notes on natural objects, reversing in these respects all previous habits. Yet now, in the retrospect, there seems to have been infused into me through every pore the voluptuous charm of the season and the place; and the slightest corresponding sound or odor now calls back the memory of those delicious days. Being afterwards on picket at almost every season, I tasted the sensations of all; and though I hardly then thought of such a result, the associations of beauty will remain forever.

In February, for instance,—though this was during a later period of picket service,—the woods were usually draped with that "net of shining haze" which marks our Northern May; and the house was embowered in wild-plum-blossoms, small, white, profuse, and tenanted by murmuring bees. There were peach-blossoms, too, and the yellow jasmine was opening its multitudinous buds, climbing over tall trees, and waving from bough to bough. There were fresh young ferns and white bloodroot in the edges of woods, matched by snowdrops in the garden, beneath budded myrtle and Petisporum. In this wilderness the birds were busy; the two main songsters being the mocking-bird and the cardinal-grosbeak, which monopolized all the parts of our more varied Northern orchestra save the tender and liquid notes, which in South Carolina seemed unattempted except by some stray blue-bird. Jays were as loud and busy as at the North in autumn; there were sparrows and wrens; and sometimes I noticed the shy and whimsical chewink.

From this early spring-time onward, there seemed no great difference in atmospheric sensations, and only a succession of bloom. After two months one's notions of the season grew bewildered, just as very early rising bewilders the day. In the army one is perhaps roused after a bivouac, marches before daybreak, halts, fights, somebody is killed, a long day's life has been lived, and after all it is not seven o'clock, and breakfast is not ready. So when we had lived in summer so long as hardly to remember winter, it suddenly occurred to us that it was not yet June. One escapes at the South that mixture of hunger and avarice which is felt in the Northern summer, counting each hour's joy with the sad consciousness that an hour is gone. The compensating loss is in missing those soft, sweet, liquid sensations of the Northern spring, that burst of life and joy, those days of heaven that even April brings; and this absence of childhood in the year creates a feeling of hardness in the season, like that I have suggested in the melody of the Southern birds. It seemed to me also that the woods had not those pure, clean, innocent odors which so abound in the New England forest in early spring; but there was something luscious, voluptuous, almost oppressively fragrant about the magnolias, as if they belonged not to Hebe, but to Magdalen.

Such immense and lustrous butterflies I had never seen but in dreams; and not even dreams had prepared me for sand-flies. Almost too small to be seen, they inflicted a bite which appeared larger than themselves,—a positive wound, more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving more annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while tears rolled profusely down my face, from mere muscular irritation. Had I stirred a finger, the whole battalion would have been slapping its cheeks. Such enemies were, however, a valuable aid to discipline, on the whole, as they abounded in the guard-house, and made that institution an object of unusual abhorrence among the men.

The presence of ladies and the homelike air of everything, made the picket station a very popular resort while we were there. It was the one agreeable ride from Beaufort, and we often had a dozen people unexpectedly to dinner. On such occasions there was sometimes mounting in hot haste, and an eager search among the outlying plantations for additional chickens and eggs, or through the company kitchens for some of those villanous tin cans which everywhere marked the progress of our army. In those cans, so far as my observation went, all fruits relapsed into a common acidulation, and all meats into a similarity of tastelessness; while the "condensed milk" was best described by the men, who often unconsciously stumbled on a better joke than they knew, and always spoke of it as condemned milk.

Plantation slave cabins Hilton Head, S.C.

We had our own excursions too,—to the Barnwell plantations, with their beautiful avenues and great live-oaks, the perfection of Southern beauty,—to Hall's Island, debatable ground, close under the enemy's fire, where half-wild cattle were to be shot, under military precautions, like Scottish moss-trooping,—or to the ferry, where it was fascinating to the female mind to scan the Rebel pickets through a field-glass. Our horses liked the by-ways far better than the level hardness of the Shell Road, especially those we had brought from Florida, which enjoyed the wilderness as if they had belonged to Marion's men. They delighted to feel the long sedge brush their flanks, or to gallop down the narrow wood-paths, leaping the fallen trees, and scaring the bright little lizards which shot across our track like live rays broken from the sunbeams. We had an abundance of horses, mostly captured and left in our hands by some convenient delay of the post quartermaster. We had also two side-saddles, which, not being munitions of war, could not properly (as we explained) be transferred like other captured articles to the general stock; otherwise the P. Q. M. (a married man) would have showed no unnecessary delay in their case. For miscellaneous accommodation was there not an ambulance,—that most inestimable of army conveniences, equally ready to carry the merry to a feast or the wounded from a fray. "Ambulance" was one of those words, rather numerous, which Ethiopian lips were not framed by Nature to articulate. Only the highest stages of colored culture could compass it; on the tongue of the many it was transformed mystically as "amulet," or ambitiously as "epaulet," or in culinary fashion as "omelet." But it was our experience that an ambulance under any name jolted equally hard.

Besides these divertisements, we had more laborious vocations,—a good deal of fatigue, and genuine though small alarms. The men went on duty every third day at furthest, and the officers nearly as often,—most of the tours of duty lasting twenty-four hours, though the stream was considered to watch itself tolerably well by daylight. This kind of responsibility suited the men; and we had already found, as the whole army afterwards acknowledged, that the constitutional watchfulness and distrustfulness of the colored race made them admirable sentinels. Soon after we went on picket, the commanding general sent an aid, with a cavalry escort, to visit all the stations, without my knowledge. They spent the whole night, and the officer reported that he could not get within thirty yards of any post without a challenge. This was a pleasant assurance for me; since our position seemed so secure, compared with Jacksonville, that I had feared some relaxation of vigilance, while yet the safety of all depended on our thorough discharge of duty.

Jacksonville had also seasoned the men so well that they were no longer nervous, and did not waste much powder on false alarms. The Rebels made no formal attacks, and rarely attempted to capture pickets. Sometimes they came stealing through the creeks in "dugouts," as we did on their side of the water, and occasionally an officer of ours was fired upon while making his rounds by night. Often some boat or scow would go adrift, and sometimes a mere dark mass of river-weed would be floated by the tide past the successive stations, eliciting a challenge and perhaps a shot from each. I remember the vivid way in which one of the men stated to his officer the manner in which a faithful picket should do his duty, after challenging, in case a boat came in sight. "Fus' ting I shoot, and den I shoot, and den I shoot again. Den I creep-creep up near de boat, and see who dey in 'em; and s'pose anybody pop up he head, den I shoot again. S'pose I fire my forty rounds. I tink he hear at de camp and send more mans,"—which seemed a reasonable presumption. This soldier's name was Paul Jones, a daring fellow, quite worthy of his namesake.

In time, however, they learned quieter methods, and would wade far out in the water, there standing motionless at last, hoping to surround and capture these floating boats, though, to their great disappointment, the prize usually proved empty. On one occasion they tried a still profounder strategy; for an officer visiting the pickets after midnight, and hearing in the stillness a portentous snore from the end of the causeway (our most important station), straightway hurried to the point of danger, with wrath in his soul. But the sergeant of the squad came out to meet him, imploring silence, and explaining that they had seen or suspected a boat hovering near, and were feigning sleep in order to lure and capture those who would entrap them.

The one military performance at the picket station of which my men were utterly intolerant was an occasional flag of truce, for which this was the appointed locality. These farces, for which it was our duty to furnish the stock actors, always struck them as being utterly despicable, and unworthy the serious business of war. They felt, I suppose, what Mr. Pickwick felt, when he heard his counsel remark to the counsel for the plaintiff, that it was a very fine morning. It goaded their souls to see the young officers from the two opposing armies salute each other courteously, and interchange cigars. They despised the object of such negotiations, which was usually to send over to the enemy some family of Rebel women who had made themselves quite intolerable on our side, but were not above collecting a subscription among the Union officers, before departure, to replenish their wardrobes. The men never showed disrespect to these women by word or deed, but they hated them from the bottom of their souls. Besides, there was a grievance behind all this.

The Rebel order remained unrevoked which consigned the new colored troops and their officers to a felon's death, if captured; and we all felt that we fought with ropes round our necks. "Dere's no flags ob truce for us," the men would contemptuously say. "When de Secesh fight de Fus' Souf" (First South Carolina), "he fight in earnest." Indeed, I myself took it as rather a compliment when the commander on the other side—though an old acquaintance of mine in Massachusetts and in Kansas—at first refused to negotiate through me or my officers,—a refusal which was kept up, greatly to the enemy's inconvenience, until our men finally captured some of the opposing pickets, and their friends had to waive all scruples in order to send them supplies. After this there was no trouble, and I think that the first Rebel officer in South Carolina who officially met any officer of colored troops under a flag of truce was Captain John C. Calhoun. In Florida we had been so recognized long before; but that was when they wished to frighten us out of Jacksonville.

Such was our life on picket at Port Royal,—a thing whose memory is now fast melting into such stuff as dreams are made of. We stayed there more than two months at that tune; the first attack on Charleston exploded with one puff, and had its end; General Hunter was ordered North, and the busy Gilmore reigned in his stead; and in June, when the blackberries were all eaten, we were summoned, nothing loath, to other scenes and encampments new.

CHAPTER VI

A NIGHT IN THE WATER

Yes, that was a pleasant life on picket, in the delicious early summer of the South, and among the endless flowery forests of that blossoming isle. In the retrospect I seem to see myself adrift upon a horse's back amid a sea of roses. The various outposts were within a six-mile radius, and it was one long, delightful gallop, day and night. I have a faint impression that the moon shone steadily every night for two months; and yet I remember certain periods of such dense darkness that in riding through the wood-paths it was really unsafe to go beyond a walk, for fear of branches above and roots below; and one of my officers was once shot at by a Rebel scout who stood unperceived at his horse's bridle.

To those doing outpost-duty on an island, however large, the main-land has all the fascination of forbidden fruit, and on a scale bounded only by the horizon. Emerson says that every house looks ideal until we enter it,—and it is certainly so, if it be just the other side of the hostile lines. Every grove in that blue distance appears enchanted ground, and yonder loitering gray-back leading his horse to water in the farthest distance, makes one thrill with a desire to hail him, to shoot at him, to capture him, to do anything to bridge this inexorable dumb space that lies between. A boyish feeling, no doubt, and one that time diminishes, without effacing; yet it is a feeling which lies at the bottom of many rash actions in war, and of some brilliant ones. For one, I could never quite outgrow it, though restricted by duty from doing many foolish things in consequence, and also restrained by reverence for certain confidential advisers whom I had always at hand, and who considered it their mission to keep me always on short rations of personal adventure. Indeed, most of that sort of entertainment in the army devolves upon scouts detailed for the purpose, volunteer aides-de-camp and newspaper-reporters,—other officers being expected to be about business more prosaic.

All the excitements of war are quadrupled by darkness; and as I rode along our outer lines at night, and watched the glimmering flames which at regular intervals starred the opposite river-shore, the longing was irresistible to cross the barrier of dusk, and see whether it were men or ghosts who hovered round those dying embers. I had yielded to these impulses in boat-adventures by night,—for it was a part of my instructions to obtain all possible information about the Rebel outposts,—and fascinating indeed it was to glide along, noiselessly paddling, with a dusky guide, through the endless intricacies of those Southern marshes, scaring the reed-birds, which wailed and fled away into the darkness, and penetrating several miles into the ulterior, between hostile fires, where discovery might be death. Yet there were drawbacks as to these enterprises, since it is not easy for a boat to cross still water, even on the darkest night, without being seen by watchful eyes; and, moreover, the extremes of high and low tide transform so completely the whole condition of those rivers that it needs very nice calculation to do one's work at precisely the right tune. To vary the experiment, I had often thought of trying a personal reconnoissance by swimming, at a certain point, whenever circumstances should make it an object.

The opportunity at last arrived, and I shall never forget the glee with which, after several postponements, I finally rode forth, a little before midnight, on a night which seemed made for the purpose. I had, of course, kept my own secret, and was entirely alone. The great Southern fireflies were out, not haunting the low ground merely, like ours, but rising to the loftiest tree-tops with weird illumination, and anon hovering so low that my horse often stepped the higher to avoid them. The dewy Cherokee roses brushed my face, the solemn "Chuckwill's-widow" croaked her incantation, and the rabbits raced phantom-like across the shadowy road. Slowly in the darkness I followed the well-known path to the spot where our most advanced outposts were stationed, holding a causeway which thrust itself far out across the separating river,—thus fronting a similar causeway on the other side, while a channel of perhaps three hundred yards, once traversed by a ferry-boat, rolled between. At low tide this channel was the whole river, with broad, oozy marshes on each side; at high tide the marshes were submerged, and the stream was a mile wide. This was the point which I had selected. To ascertain the numbers and position of the picket on the opposite causeway was my first object, as it was a matter on which no two of our officers agreed.

To this point, therefore, I rode, and dismounting, after being duly challenged by the sentinel at the causeway-head, walked down the long and lonely path. The tide was well up, though still on the flood, as I desired; and each visible tuft of marsh-grass might, but for its motionlessness, have been a prowling boat. Dark as the night had appeared, the water was pale, smooth, and phosphorescent, and I remember that the phrase "wan water," so familiar in the Scottish ballards, struck me just then as peculiarly appropriate, though its real meaning is quite different. A gentle breeze, from which I had hoped for a ripple, had utterly died away, and it was a warm, breathless Southern night. There was no sound but the faint swash of the coming tide, the noises of the reed-birds in the marshes, and the occasional leap of a fish; and it seemed to my overstrained ear as if every footstep of my own must be heard for miles. However, I could have no more postponements, and the thing must be tried now or never.

Reaching the farther end of the causeway, I found my men couched, like black statues, behind the slight earthwork there constructed. I expected that my proposed immersion would rather bewilder them, but knew that they would say nothing, as usual. As for the lieutenant on that post, he was a steady, matter-of-fact, perfectly disciplined Englishman, who wore a Crimean medal, and never asked a superfluous question in his life. If I had casually remarked to him, "Mr. Hooper, the General has ordered me on a brief personal reconnoissance to the Planet Jupiter, and I wish you to take care of my watch, lest it should be damaged by the Precession of the Equinoxes," he would have responded with a brief "All right, Sir," and a quick military gesture, and have put the thing in his pocket. As it was, I simply gave him the watch, and remarked that I was going to take a swim.

I do not remember ever to have experienced a greater sense of exhilaration than when I slipped noiselessly into the placid water, and struck out into the smooth, eddying current for the opposite shore. The night was so still and lovely, my black statues looked so dream-like at their posts behind the low earthwork, the opposite arm of the causeway stretched so invitingly from the Rebel main, the horizon glimmered so low around me,—for it always appears lower to a swimmer than even to an oarsman,—that I seemed floating in some concave globe, some magic crystal, of which I was the enchanted centre. With each little ripple of my steady progress all things hovered and changed; the stars danced and nodded above; where the stars ended the great Southern fireflies began; and closer than the fireflies, there clung round me a halo of phosphorescent sparkles from the soft salt water.

Had I told any one of my purpose, I should have had warnings and remonstrances enough. The few negroes who did not believe in alligators believed in sharks; the sceptics as to sharks were orthodox in respect to alligators; while those who rejected both had private prejudices as to snapping-turtles. The surgeon would have threatened intermittent fever, the first assistant rheumatism, and the second assistant congestive chills; non-swimmers would have predicted exhaustion, and swimmers cramp; and all this before coming within bullet-range of any hospitalities on the other shore. But I knew the folly of most alarms about reptiles and fishes; man's imagination peoples the water with many things which do not belong there, or prefer to keep out of his way, if they do; fevers and congestions were the surgeon's business, and I always kept people to their own department; cramp and exhaustion were dangers I could measure, as I had often done; bullets were a more substantial danger, and I must take the chance,—if a loon could dive at the flash, why not I? If I were once ashore, I should have to cope with the Rebels on their own ground, which they knew better than I; but the water was my ground, where I, too, had been at home from boyhood.

I swam as swiftly and softly as I could, although it seemed as if water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it caused that undefinable shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially comes over one by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping and contest against chocking, that seemed to me a perfect convulsion; for I suppose the tendency to choke and sneeze is always enhanced by the circumstance that one's life may depend on keeping still, just as yawning becomes irresistible where to yawn would be social ruin, and just as one is sure to sleep in church, if one sits in a conspicuous pew. At other times, some unguarded motion would create a splashing which seemed, in the tension of my senses, to be loud enough to be heard at Richmond, although it really mattered not, since there are fishes in those rivers which make as much noise on special occasions as if they were misguided young whales.

As I drew near the opposite shore, the dark causeway projected more and more distinctly, to my fancy at least, and I swam more softly still, utterly uncertain as to how far, in the stillness of air and water, my phosphorescent course could be traced by eye or ear. A slight ripple would have saved me from observation, I was more than ever sure, and I would have whistled for a fair wind as eagerly as any sailor, but that my breath was worth to me more than anything it was likely to bring. The water became smoother and smoother, and nothing broke the dim surface except a few clumps of rushes and my unfortunate head. The outside of this member gradually assumed to its inside a gigantic magnitude; it had always annoyed me at the hatter's from a merely animal bigness, with no commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of the Aztec children, of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm. Plotinus was less ashamed of his whole body than I of this inconsiderate and stupid appendage. To be sure, I might swim for a certain distance under water. But that accomplishment I had reserved for a retreat, for I knew that the longer I stayed down the more surely I should have to snort like a walrus when I came up again, and to approach an enemy with such a demonstration was not to be thought of.

Suddenly a dog barked. We had certain information that a pack of hounds was kept at a Rebel station a few miles off, on purpose to hunt runaways, and I had heard from the negroes almost fabulous accounts of the instinct of these animals. I knew that, although water baffled their scent, they yet could recognize in some manner the approach of any person across water as readily as by land; and of the vigilance of all dogs by night every traveller among Southern plantations has ample demonstration. I was now so near that I could dimly see the figures of men moving to and fro upon the end of the causeway, and could hear the dull knock, when one struck his foot against a piece of limber.

As my first object was to ascertain whether there were sentinels at that time at that precise point, I saw that I was approaching the end of my experiment Could I have once reached the causeway unnoticed, I could have lurked in the water beneath its projecting timbers, and perhaps made my way along the main shore, as I had known fugitive slaves to do, while coming from that side. Or had there been any ripple on the water, to confuse the aroused and watchful eyes, I could have made a circuit and approached the causeway at another point, though I had already satisfied myself that there was only a narrow channel on each side of it, even at high tide, and not, as on our side, a broad expanse of water. Indeed, this knowledge alone was worth all the trouble I had taken, and to attempt much more than this, in the face of a curiosity already roused, would have been a waste of future opportunities. I could try again, with the benefit of this new knowledge, on a point where the statements of the negroes had always been contradictory.

Resolving, however, to continue the observation a very little longer, since the water felt much warmer than I had expected, and there was no sense of chill or fatigue, I grasped at some wisps of straw or rushes that floated near, gathering them round my face a little, and then drifting nearer the wharf in what seemed a sort of eddy was able, without creating further alarm, to make some additional observations on points which it is not best now to particularize. Then, turning my back upon the mysterious shore which had thus far lured me, I sank softly below the surface, and swam as far as I could under water.

During this unseen retreat, I heard, of course, all manner of gurglings and hollow reverberations, and could fancy as many rifle-shots as I pleased. But on rising to the surface all seemed quiet, and even I did not create as much noise as I should have expected. I was now at a safe distance, since the enemy were always chary of showing their boats, and always tried to convince us they had none. What with absorbed attention first, and this submersion afterwards, I had lost all my bearings but the stars, having been long out of sight of my original point of departure. However, the difficulties of the return were nothing; making a slight allowance for the floodtide, which could not yet have turned, I should soon regain the place I had left. So I struck out freshly against the smooth water, feeling just a little stiffened by the exertion, and with an occasional chill running up the back of the neck, but with no nips from sharks, no nudges from alligators, and not a symptom of fever-and-ague.

Time I could not, of course, measure,—one never can in a novel position; but, after a reasonable amount of swimming, I began to look, with a natural interest, for the pier which I had quitted. I noticed, with some solicitude, that the woods along the friendly shore made one continuous shadow, and that the line of low bushes on the long causeway could scarcely be relieved against them, yet I knew where they ought to be, and the more doubtful I felt about it, the more I put down my doubts, as if they were unreasonable children. One can scarcely conceive of the alteration made in familiar objects by bringing the eye as low as the horizon, especially by night; to distinguish foreshortening is impossible, and every low near object is equivalent to one higher and more remote. Still I had the stars; and soon my eye, more practised, was enabled to select one precise line of bushes as that which marked the causeway, and for which I must direct my course.

As I swam steadily, but with some sense of fatigue, towards this phantom-line, I found it difficult to keep my faith steady and my progress true; everything appeared to shift and waver, in the uncertain light. The distant trees seemed not trees, but bushes, and the bushes seemed not exactly bushes, but might, after all, be distant trees. Could I be so confident that, out of all that low stretch of shore, I could select the one precise point where the friendly causeway stretched its long arm to receive me from the water? How easily (some tempter whispered at my ear) might one swerve a little, on either side, and be compelled to flounder over half a mile of oozy marsh on an ebbing tide, before reaching our own shore and that hospitable volley of bullets with which it would probably greet me! Had I not already (thus the tempter continued) been swimming rather unaccountably far, supposing me on a straight track for that inviting spot where my sentinels and my drapery were awaiting my return?

Suddenly I felt a sensation as of fine ribbons drawn softly across my person, and I found myself among some rushes. But what business had rushes there, or I among them? I knew that there was not a solitary spot of shoal in the deep channel where I supposed myself swimming, and it was plain in an instant that I had somehow missed my course, and must be getting among the marshes. I felt confident, to be sure, that I could not have widely erred, but was guiding my course for the proper side of tie river. But whether I had drifted above or below the causeway I had not the slightest clew to tell.

I pushed steadily forward, with some increasing sense of lassitude, passing one marshy islet after another, all seeming strangely out of place, and sometimes just reaching with my foot a soft tremulous shoal which gave scarce the shadow of a support, though even that shadow rested my feet. At one of these moments of stillness it suddenly occurred to my perception (what nothing but this slight contact could have assured me, in the darkness) that I was in a powerful current, and that this current set the wrong way. Instantly a flood of new intelligence came. Either I had unconsciously turned and was rapidly nearing the Rebel shore,—a suspicion which a glance at the stars corrected,—or else it was the tide itself which had turned, and which was sweeping me down the river with all its force, and was also sucking away at every moment the narrowing water from that treacherous expanse of mud out of whose horrible miry embrace I had lately helped to rescue a shipwrecked crew.

Either alternative was rather formidable. I can distinctly remember that for about one half-minute the whole vast universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary things could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted? It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight glimpse of the same sensation, and then, too, strangely enough, while swimming,—in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared plunge my mortal body. Keats hints at the same sudden emotion, in a wild poem written among the Scottish mountains. It was not the distinctive sensation which drowning men are said to have, that spasmodic passing in review of one's whole personal history. I had no well-defined anxiety, felt no fear, was moved to no prayer, did not give a thought to home or friends; only it swept over me, as with a sudden tempest, that, if I meant to get back to my own camp, I must keep my wits about me. I must not dwell on any other alternative, any more than a boy who climbs a precipice must look down. Imagination had no business here. That way madness lay. There was a shore somewhere before me, and I must get to it, by the ordinary means, before the ebb laid bare the flats, or swept me below the lower bends of the stream. That was all.

Suddenly a light gleamed for an instant before me, as if from a house in a grove of great trees upon a bank; and I knew that it came from the window of a ruined plantation-building, where our most advanced outposts had their headquarters. The flash revealed to me every point of the situation. I saw at once where I was, and how I got there: that the tide had turned while I was swimming, and with a much briefer interval of slack-water than I had been led to suppose,—that I had been swept a good way down stream, and was far beyond all possibility of regaining the point I had left.

Could I, however, retain my strength to swim one or two hundred yards farther, of which I had no doubt,—and if the water did not ebb too rapidly, of which I had more fear,—then I was quite safe. Every stroke took me more and more out of the power of the current, and there might even be an eddy to aid me. I could not afford to be carried down much farther, for there the channel made a sweep toward the wrong side of the river; but there was now no reason why I should not reach land. I could dismiss all fear, indeed, except that of being fired upon by our own sentinels, many of whom were then new recruits, and with the usual disposition to shoot first and investigate afterwards.

I found myself swimming in shallow and shallower water, and the flats seemed almost bare when I neared the shore, where the great gnarled branches of the liveoaks hung far over the muddy bank. Floating on my back for noiselessness, I paddled rapidly in with my hands, expecting momentarily to hear the challenge of the picket, and the ominous click so likely to follow. I knew that some one should be pacing to and fro, along that beat, but could not tell at what point he might be at that precise moment. Besides, there was a faint possibility that some chatty corporal might have carried the news of my bath thus far along the line, and they might be partially prepared for this unexpected visitor. Suddenly, like another flash, came the quick, quaint challenge,—

"Halt! Who's go dar?"

"F-f-friend with the c-c-countersign," retorted I, with chilly, but conciliatory energy, rising at full length out of the shallow water, to show myself a man and a brother.

"Ac-vance, friend, and give de countersign," responded the literal soldier, who at such a tune would have accosted: a spirit of light or goblin damned with no other formula.

I advanced and gave it, he recognized my voice at once. | And then and there, as I stood, a dripping ghost, beneath the f trees before him, the unconscionable fellow, wishing to exhaust upon me the utmost resources of military hospitality, deliberately presented arms!

Now a soldier on picket, or at night, usually presents arms to nobody; but a sentinel on camp-guard by day is expected to perform that ceremony to anything in human shape that has two rows of buttons. Here was a human shape, but so utterly buttonless that it exhibited not even a rag to which a button could by any earthly possibility be appended, button-less even potentially; and my blameless Ethiopian presented arms to even this. Where, then, are the theories of Carlyle, the axioms of "Sartor Resartus," the inability of humanity to conceive "a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords"? Cautioning my adherent, however, as to the proprieties suitable for such occasions thenceforward, I left him watching the river with renewed vigilance, and awaiting the next merman who should report himself.

Finding my way to the building, I hunted up a sergeant and a blanket, got a fire kindled in the dismantled chimney, and sat before it in my single garment, like a moist but undismayed Choctaw, until horse and clothing could be brought round from the causeway. It seemed strange that the morning had not yet dawned, after the uncounted periods that must have elapsed; but when the wardrobe arrived I looked at my watch and found that my night in the water had lasted precisely one hour.

Galloping home, I turned in with alacrity, and without a drop of whiskey, and waked a few hours after in excellent condition. The rapid changes of which that Department has seen so many—and, perhaps, to so little purpose—soon transferred us to a different scene. I have been on other scouts since then, and by various processes, but never with a zest so novel as was afforded by that night's experience. The thing soon got wind in the regiment, and led to only one ill consequence, so far as I know. It rather suppressed a way I had of lecturing the officers on the importance of reducing their personal baggage to a minimum. They got a trick of congratulating me, very respectfully, on the thoroughness with which I had once conformed my practice to my precepts.

CHAPTER VII

UP THE EDISTO

In reading military history, one finds the main interest to lie, undoubtedly, in the great campaigns, where a man, a regiment, a brigade, is but a pawn in the game. But there is a charm also in the more free and adventurous life of partisan warfare, where, if the total sphere be humbler, yet the individual has more relative importance, and the sense of action is more personal and keen. This is the reason given by the eccentric Revolutionary biographer, Weems, for writing the Life of Washington first, and then that of Marion. And there were, certainly, hi the early adventures of the colored troops in the Department of the South, some of the same elements of picturesqueness that belonged to Marion's band, on the same soil, with the added feature that the blacks were fighting for their personal liberties, of which Marion had helped to deprive them.

Major-General Quincy A. Gillmore

It is stated by Major-General Gillmore, in his "Siege of Charleston," as one of the three points in his preliminary strategy, that an expedition was sent up the Edisto River to destroy a bridge on the Charleston and Savannah Railway. As one of the early raids of the colored troops, this expedition may deserve narration, though it was, in a strategic point of view, a disappointment. It has already been told, briefly and on the whole with truth, by Greeley and others, but I will venture on a more complete account.

The project dated back earlier than General Gillmore's siege, and had originally no connection with that movement. It had been formed by Captain Trowbridge and myself in camp, and was based on facts learned from the men. General Saxton and Colonel W. W. H. Davis, the successive post-commanders, had both favored it. It had been also approved by General Hunter, before his sudden removal, though he regarded the bridge as a secondary affair, because there was another railway communication between the two cities. But as my main object was to obtain permission to go, I tried to make the most of all results which might follow, while it was very clear that the raid would harass and confuse the enemy, and be the means of bringing away many of the slaves. General Hunter had, therefore, accepted the project mainly as a stroke for freedom and black recruits; and General Gillmore, because anything that looked toward action found favor in his eyes, and because it would be convenient to him at that time to effect a diversion, if nothing more.

It must be remembered that, after the first capture of Port Royal, the outlying plantations along the whole Southern coast were abandoned, and the slaves withdrawn into the interior. It was necessary to ascend some river for thirty miles in order to reach the black population at all. This ascent could only be made by night, as it was a slow process, and the smoke of a steamboat could be seen for a great distance. The streams were usually shallow, winding, and muddy, and the difficulties of navigation were such as to require a full moon and a flood tide. It was really no easy matter to bring everything to bear, especially as every projected raid must be kept a secret so far as possible. However, we were now somewhat familiar with such undertakings, half military, half naval, and the thing to be done on the Edisto was precisely what we had proved to be practicable on the St. Mary's and the St. John's,—to drop anchor before the enemy's door some morning at daybreak, without his having dreamed of our approach.

Since a raid made by Colonel Montgomery up the Combahee, two months before, the vigilance of the Rebels had increased. But we had information that upon the South Edisto, or Pon-Pon River, the rice plantations were still being actively worked by a large number of negroes, in reliance on obstructions placed at the mouth of that narrow stream, where it joins the main river, some twenty miles from the coast. This point was known to be further protected by a battery of unknown strength, at Wiltown Bluff, a commanding and defensible situation. The obstructions consisted of a row of strong wooden piles across the river; but we convinced ourselves that these must now be much decayed, and that Captain Trowbridge, an excellent engineer officer, could remove them by the proper apparatus. Our proposition was to man the John Adams, an armed ferry-boat, which had before done us much service,—and which has now reverted to the pursuits of peace, it is said, on the East Boston line,—to ascend in this to Wiltown Bluff, silence the battery, and clear a passage through the obstructions. Leaving the John Adams to protect this point, we could then ascend the smaller stream with two light-draft boats, and perhaps burn the bridge, which was ten miles higher, before the enemy could bring sufficient force to make our position at Wiltown Bluff untenable.

The expedition was organized essentially upon this plan. The smaller boats were the Enoch Dean,—a river steamboat, which carried a ten-pound Parrott gun, and a small howitzer,—and a little mosquito of a tug, the Governor Milton, upon which, with the greatest difficulty, we found room for two twelve-pound Armstrong guns, with their gunners, forming a section of the First Connecticut Battery, under Lieutenant Clinton, aided by a squad from my own regiment, under Captain James. The John Adams carried, I if I remember rightly, two Parrott guns (of twenty and ten | pounds calibre) and a howitzer or two. The whole force of men did not exceed two hundred and fifty.

We left Beaufort, S. C., on the afternoon of July 9th, 1863. In former narrations I have sufficiently described the charm of a moonlight ascent into a hostile country, upon an unknown stream, the dark and silent banks, the rippling water, the wail of the reed-birds, the anxious watch, the breathless listening, the veiled lights, the whispered orders. To this was now to be added the vexation of an insufficient pilotage, for our negro guide knew only the upper river, and, as it finally proved, not even that, while, to take us over the bar which obstructed the main stream, we must borrow a pilot from Captain Dutch, whose gunboat blockaded that point. This active naval officer, however, whose boat expeditions had penetrated all the lower branches of those rivers, could supply our want, and we borrowed from him not only a pilot, but a surgeon, to replace our own, who had been prevented by an accident from coming with us. Thus accompanied, we steamed over the bar in safety, had a peaceful ascent, passed the island of Jehossee,—the fine estate of Governor Aiken, then left undisturbed by both sides,—and fired our first shell into the camp at Wiltown Bluff at four o'clock in the morning.

The battery—whether fixed or movable we knew not—met us with a promptness that proved very short lived. After three shots it was silent, but we could not tell why. The bluff was wooded, and we could see but little. The only course was to land, under cover of the guns. As the firing ceased and the smoke cleared away, I looked across the rice-fields which lay beneath the bluff. The first sunbeams glowed upon their emerald levels, and on the blossoming hedges along the rectangular dikes.

Recently freed slaves Aiken’s Landing Va.

What were those black dots which everywhere appeared? Those moist meadows had become alive with human heads, and along each narrow path came a straggling file of men and women, all on a run for the river-side. I went ashore with a boat-load of troops at once. The landing was difficult and marshy. The astonished negroes tugged us up the bank, and gazed on us as if we had been Cortez and Columbus.

Arrival at Union Army lines

They kept arriving by land much faster than we could come by water; every moment increased the crowd, the jostling, the mutual clinging, on that miry foothold. What a scene it was! With the wild faces, eager figures, strange garments, it seemed, as one of the poor things reverently suggested, "like notin' but de judgment day." Presently they began to come from the houses also, with their little bundles on their heads; then with larger bundles. Old women, trotting on the narrow paths, would kneel to pray a little prayer, still balancing the bundle; and then would suddenly spring up, urged by the accumulating procession behind, and would move on till irresistibly compelled by thankfulness to dip down for another invocation.

Free at last

Reaching us, every human being must grasp our hands, amid exclamations of "Bress you, mas'r," and "Bress de Lord," at the rate of four of the latter ascriptions to one of the former.

Women brought children on their shoulders; small black boys learned on their back little brothers equally inky, and, gravely depositing them, shook hands. Never had I seen human beings so clad, or rather so unclad, in such amazing squalid-ness and destitution of garments.

I recall one small urchin without a rag of clothing save the basque waist of a lady's dress, bristling with whalebones, and worn wrong side before, beneath which his smooth ebony legs emerged like those of an ostrich from its plumage. How weak is imagination, how cold is memory, that I ever cease, for a day of my life, to see before me the picture of that astounding scene!

Yet at the time we were perforce a little impatient of all this piety, protestation, and hand-pressing; for the vital thing was to ascertain what force had been stationed at the bluff, and whether it was yet withdrawn. The slaves, on the other hand, were too much absorbed in their prospective freedom to aid us in taking any further steps to secure it. Captain Trowbridge, who had by this time landed at a different point, got quite into despair over the seeming deafness of the people to all questions. "How many soldiers are there on the bluff?" he asked of the first-comer.

"Mas'r," said the man, stuttering terribly, "I c-c-c—"

"Tell me how many soldiers there are!" roared Trowbridge, in his mighty voice, and all but shaking the poor old thing, in his thirst for information.

"O mas'r," recommenced in terror the incapacitated wit-ness, "I c-c-carpenter!" holding up eagerly a little stump of a hatchet, his sole treasure, as if his profession ought to excuse from all military opinions.

I wish that it were possible to present all this scene from the point of view of the slaves themselves. It can be most nearly done, perhaps, by quoting the description given of a similar scene on the Combahee River, by a very aged man, who had been brought down on the previous raid, already mentioned. I wrote it down in tent, long after, while the old man recited the tale, with much gesticulation, at the door; and it is by far the best glimpse I have ever had, through a negro's eyes, at these wonderful birthdays of freedom.

"De people was all a hoein', mas'r," said the old man. "Dey was a hoein' in the rice-field, when de gunboats come. Den ebry man drap dem hoe, and leff de rice. De mas'r he stand and call, 'Run to de wood for hide! Yankee come, sell you to Cuba! run for hide!' Ebry man he run, and, my God! run all toder way!

"Mas'r stand in de wood, peep, peep, faid for truss [afraid to trust]. He say, 'Run to de wood!' and ebry man run by him, straight to de boat.

"De brack sojer so presumptious, dey come right ashore, hold up dere head. Fus' ting I know, dere was a barn, ten tousand bushel rough rice, all in a blaze, den mas'r's great house, all cracklin' up de roof. Didn't I keer for see 'em blaze? Lor, mas'r, didn't care notin' at all, was gwine to de boat."

Dore's Don Quixote could not surpass the sublime absorption in which the gaunt old man, with arm uplifted, described this stage of affairs, till he ended in a shrewd chuckle, worthy of Sancho Panza. Then he resumed.

"De brack sojers so presumptious!" This he repeated three times, slowly shaking his head in an ecstasy of admiration. It flashed upon me that the apparition of a black soldier must amaze those still in bondage, much as a butterfly just from the chrysalis might astound his fellow-grubs. I inwardly vowed that my soldiers, at least, should be as "presumptious" as I could make them. Then he went on.

"Ole woman and I go down to de boat; den dey say behind us, 'Rebels comin'l Rebels comin'!' Ole woman say, 'Come ahead, come plenty ahead!' I hab notin' on but my shirt and pantaloon; ole woman one single frock he hab on, and one handkerchief on he head; I leff all-two my blanket and run for de Rebel come, and den dey didn't come, didn't truss for come.

"Ise eighty-eight year old, mas'r. My ole Mas'r Lowndes keep all de ages in a big book, and when we come to age ob sense we mark em down ebry year, so I know. Too ole for come? Mas'r joking. Neber too ole for leave de land o' bondage. I old, but great good for chil'en, gib tousand tank ebry day. Young people can go through, force [forcibly], mas'r, but de ole folk mus' go slow."

Such emotions as these, no doubt, were inspired by our arrival, but we could only hear their hasty utterance in passing; our duty being, with the small force already landed, to take possession of the bluff. Ascending, with proper precautions, the wooded hill, we soon found ourselves in the deserted camp of a light battery, amid scattered equipments and suggestions of a very unattractive breakfast. As soon as possible, skirmishers were thrown out through the woods to the farther edge of the bluff, while a party searched the houses, finding the usual large supply of furniture and pictures,—brought up for safety from below,—but no soldiers. Captain Trowbridge then got the John Adams beside the row of piles, and went to work for their removal.

Again I had the exciting sensation of being within the hostile lines,—the eager explorations, the doubts, the watchfulness, the listening for every sound of coming hoofs. Presently a horse's tread was heard in earnest, but it was a squad of our own men bringing in two captured cavalry soldiers. One of these, a sturdy fellow, submitted quietly to his lot, only begging that, whenever we should evacuate the bluff, a note should be left behind stating that he was a prisoner. The other, a very young man, and a member of the "Rebel Troop," a sort of Cadet corps among the Charleston youths, came to me in great wrath, complaining that the corporal of our squad had kicked him after he had surrendered. His air of offended pride was very rueful, and it did indeed seem a pathetic reversal of fortunes for the two races. To be sure, the youth was a scion of one of the foremost families of South Carolina, and when I considered the wrongs which the black race had encountered from those of his blood, first and last, it seemed as if the most scrupulous Recording Angel might tolerate one final kick to square the account. But I reproved the corporal, who respectfully disclaimed the charge, and said the kick was an incident of the scuffle. It certainly was not their habit to show such poor malice; they thought too well of themselves.

His demeanor seemed less lofty, but rather piteous, when he implored me not to put him on board any vessel which was to ascend the upper stream, and hinted, by awful implications, the danger of such ascent. This meant torpedoes, a peril which we treated, in those days, with rather mistaken contempt. But we found none on the Edisto, and it may be that it was only a foolish attempt to alarm us.

Meanwhile, Trowbridge was toiling away at the row of piles, which proved easier to draw out than to saw asunder, either work being hard enough. It took far longer than we had hoped, and we saw noon approach and the tide rapidly fall, taking with it, inch by inch, our hopes of effecting a surprise at the bridge. During this time, and indeed all day, the detachments on shore, under Captains Whitney and Sampson, were having occasional skirmishes with the enemy, while the colored people were swarming to the shore, or running to and fro like ants, with the poor treasures of their houses. Our busy Quartermaster, Mr. Bingham—who died afterwards from the overwork of that sultry day—was transporting the refugees on board the steamer, or hunting up bales of cotton, or directing the burning of rice-houses, in accordance with our orders. No dwelling-houses were destroyed or plundered by our men,—Sherman's "bummers" not having yet arrived,—though I asked no questions as to what the plantation negroes might bring in their great bundles. One piece of property, I must admit, seemed a lawful capture,—a United States dress-sword, of the old pattern, which had belonged to the Rebel general who afterwards gave the order to bury Colonel Shaw "with his niggers." That I have retained, not without some satisfaction, to this day.

A passage having been cleared at last, and the tide having turned by noon, we lost no time in attempting the ascent, leaving the bluff to be held by the John Adams, and by the small force on shore. We were scarcely above the obstructions, however, when the little tug went aground, and the Enoch Dean, ascending a mile farther, had an encounter with a battery on the right,—perhaps our old enemy,—and drove it back. Soon after, she also ran aground, a misfortune of which our opponent strangely took no advantage; and, on getting off, I thought it best to drop down to the bluff again, as the tide was still hopelessly low. None can tell, save those who have tried them, the vexations of those muddy Southern streams, navigable only during a few hours of flood-tide.

After waiting an hour, the two small vessels again tried the ascent. The enemy on the right had disappeared; but we could now see, far off on our left, another light battery moving parallel with the river, apparently to meet us at some upper bend. But for the present we were safe, with the low rice-fields on each side of us; and the scene was so peaceful, it seemed as if all danger were done. For the first time, we saw in South Carolina blossoming river-banks and low emerald meadows, that seemed like New England. Everywhere there were the same rectangular fields, smooth canals, and bushy dikes. A few negroes stole out to us in dugouts, and breathlessly told us how others had been hurried away by the overseers. We glided safely on, mile after mile. The day was unutterably hot, but all else seemed propitious. The men had their combustibles all ready to fire the bridge, and our hopes were unbounded.

But by degrees the channel grew more tortuous and difficult, and while the little Milton glided smoothly over everything, the Enoch Dean, my own boat, repeatedly grounded. On every occasion of especial need, too, something went wrong in her machinery,—her engine being constructed on some wholly new patent, of which, I should hope, this trial would prove entirely sufficient. The black pilot, who was not a soldier, grew more and more bewildered, and declared that it was the channel, not his brain, which had gone wrong; the captain, a little elderly man, sat wringing his hands in the pilot-box; and the engineer appeared to be mingling his groans with those of the diseased engine. Meanwhile I, in equal ignorance of machinery and channel, had to give orders only justified by minute acquaintance with both. So I navigated on general principles, until they grounded us on a mud-bank, just below a wooded point, and some two miles from the bridge of our destination. It was with a pang that I waved to Major Strong, who was on the other side of the channel in a tug, not to risk approaching us, but to steam on and finish the work, if he could.

Short was his triumph. Gliding round the point, he found himself instantly engaged with a light battery of four or six guns, doubtless the same we had seen in the distance. The Milton was within two hundred and fifty yards. The Connecticut men fought then: guns well, aided by the blacks, and it was exasperating for us to hear the shots, while we could see nothing and do nothing. The scanty ammunition of our bow gun was exhausted, and the gun in the stern was useless, from the position in which we lay. In vain we moved the men from side to side, rocking the vessel, to dislodge it. The heat was terrific that August afternoon; I remember I found myself constantly changing places, on the scorched deck, to keep my feet from being blistered. At last the officer in charge of the gun, a hardy lumberman from Maine, got the stern of the vessel so far round that he obtained the range of the battery through the cabin windows, "but it would be necessary," he cooly added, on reporting to me this fact, "to shoot away the corner of the cabin." I knew that this apartment was newly painted and gilded, and the idol of the poor captain's heart; but it was plain that even the thought of his own upholstery could not make the poor soul more wretched than he was. So I bade Captain Dolly blaze away, and thus we took our hand in the little game, though at a sacrifice.

It was of no use. Down drifted out little consort round the point, her engine disabled and her engineer killed, as we afterwards found, though then we could only look and wonder. Still pluckily firing, she floated by upon the tide, which had now just turned; and when, with a last desperate effort, we got off, our engine had one of its impracticable fits, and we could only follow her. The day was waning, and all its range of possibility had lain within the limits of that one tide.

All our previous expeditions had been so successful it now seemed hard to turn back; the river-banks and rice-fields, so beautiful before, seemed only a vexation now. But the swift current bore us on, and after our Parthian shots had died away, a new discharge of artillery opened upon us, from our first antagonist of the morning, which still kept the other side of the stream. It had taken up a strong position on another bluff, almost out of range of the John Adams, but within easy range of us. The sharpest contest of the day was before us. Happily the engine and engineer were now behaving well, and we were steering in a channel already traversed, and of which the dangerous points were known. But we had a long, straight reach of river before us, heading directly toward the battery, which, having once got our range, had only to keep it, while we could do nothing in return. The Rebels certainly served then: guns well. For the first time I discovered that there were certain compensating advantages in a slightly built craft, as compared with one more substantial; the missiles never lodged in the vessel, but crashed through some thin partition as if it were paper, to explode beyond us, or fall harmless in the water. Splintering, the chief source of wounds and death in wooden ships, was thus entirely avoided; the danger was that our machinery might be disabled, or that shots might strike below the water-line and sink us.

This, however, did not happen. Fifteen projectiles, as we afterwards computed, passed through the vessel or cut the rigging. Yet few casualties occurred, and those instantly fatal. As my orderly stood leaning on a comrade's shoulder, the head of the latter was shot off. At last I myself felt a sudden blow in the side, as if from some prize-fighter, doubling me up for a moment, while I sank upon a seat. It proved afterwards to have been produced by the grazing of a ball, which, without tearing a garment, had yet made a large part of my side black and blue, leaving a sensation of paralysis which made it difficult to stand. Supporting myself on Captain Rogers, I tried to comprehend what had happened, and I remember being impressed by an odd feeling that I had now got my share, and should henceforth be a great deal safer than any of the rest. I am told that this often follows one's first experience of a wound.

But this immediate contest, sharp as it was, proved brief; a turn in the river enabled us to use our stern gun, and we soon glided into the comparative shelter of Wiltown Bluff. There, however, we were to encounter the danger of shipwreck, superadded to that of fight. When the passage through the piles was first cleared, it had been marked by stakes, lest the rising tide should cover the remaining piles, and make it difficult to run the passage. But when we again reached it, the stakes had somehow been knocked away, the piles were just covered by the swift current, and the little tug-boat was aground upon them. She came off easily, however, with our aid, and, when we in turn essayed the passage, we grounded also, but more firmly. We getting off at last, and making the passage, the tug again became lodged, when nearly past danger, and all our efforts proved powerless to pull her through. I therefore dropped down below, and sent the John Adams to her aid, while I superintended the final recall of the pickets, and the embarkation of the remaining refugees.

While thus engaged, I felt little solicitude about the boats above. It was certain that the John Adams could safely go close to the piles on the lower side, that she was very strong, and that the other was very light. Still, it was natural to cast some anxious glances up the river, and it was with surprise that I presently saw a canoe descending, which contained Major Strong. Coming on board, he told me with some excitement that the tug could not possibly be got off, and he wished for orders.

It was no time to consider whether it was not his place to have given orders, instead of going half a mile to seek them. I was by this time so far exhausted that everything seemed to pass by me as by one in a dream; but I got into a boat, pushed up stream, met presently the John Adams returning, and was informed by the officer in charge of the Connecticut battery that he had abandoned the tug, and—worse news yet—that his guns had been thrown overboard. It seemed to me then, and has always seemed, that this sacrifice was utterly needless, because, although the captain of the John Adams had refused to risk his vessel by going near enough to receive the guns, he should have been compelled to do so. Though the thing was done without my knowledge, and beyond my reach, yet, as commander of the expedition, I was technically responsible. It was hard to blame a lieutenant when his senior had shrunk from a decision, and left him alone; nor was it easy to blame Major Strong, whom I knew to be a man of personal courage though without much decision of character. He was subsequently tried by court-martial and acquitted, after which he resigned, and was lost at sea on his way home.

The tug, being thus abandoned, must of course be burned to prevent her falling into the enemy's hands. Major Strong went with prompt fearlessness to do this, at my order; after which he remained on the Enoch Dean, and I went on board the John Adams, being compelled to succumb at last, and transfer all remaining responsibility to Captain Trowbridge. Exhausted as I was, I could still observe, in a vague way, the scene around me. Every available corner of the boat seemed like some vast auction-room of second-hand goods. Great piles of bedding and bundles lay on every side, with black heads emerging and black forms reclining in every stage of squalidness. Some seemed ill, or wounded, or asleep, others were chattering eagerly among themselves, singing, praying, or soliloquizing on joys to come. "Bress de Lord," I heard one woman say, "I spec' I got salt victual now,—notin' but fresh victual dese six months, but Ise get salt victual now,"—thus reversing, under pressure of the salt-embargo, the usual anticipations of voyagers.

Trowbridge told me, long after, that, on seeking a fan for my benefit, he could find but one on board. That was in the hands of a fat old "aunty," who had just embarked, and sat on an enormous bundle of her goods, in everybody's way, fanning herself vehemently, and ejaculating, as her gasping breath would permit, "Oh! Do, Jesus! Oh! Do, Jesus!" when the captain abruptly disarmed her of the fan, and left her continuing her pious exercises.

Thus we glided down the river in the waning light. Once more we encountered a battery, making five in all; I could hear the guns of the assailants, and could not distinguish the explosion of their shells from the answering throb of our own guns. The kind Quartermaster kept bringing me news of what occurred, like Rebecca in Front-de-Boeuf s castle, but discreetly withholding any actual casualties. Then all faded into safety and sleep; and we reached Beaufort in the morning, after thirty-six hours of absence. A kind friend, who acted in South Carolina a nobler part amid tragedies than in any of her early stage triumphs, met us with an ambulance at the wharf, and the prisoners, the wounded, and the dead were duly attended.

The reader will not care for any personal record of convalescence; though, among the general military laudations of whiskey, it is worth while to say that one life was saved, in the opinion of my surgeons, by an habitual abstinence from it, leaving no food for peritoneal inflammation to feed upon. The able-bodied men who had joined us were, sent to aid General Gillmore in the trenches, while their families were established in huts and tents on St. Helena Island. A year after, greatly to the delight of the regiment, in taking possession of a battery which they had helped to capture on James Island, they found in their hands the selfsame guns which they had seen thrown overboard from the Governor Milton. They then felt that their account with the enemy was squared, and could proceed to further operations.

USCT liberating slaves in North Carolina

Before the war, how great a thing seemed the rescue of even one man from slavery; and since the war has emancipated all, how little seems the liberation of two hundred! But no one then knew how the contest might end; and when I think of that morning sunlight, those emerald fields, those thronging numbers, the old women with their prayers, and the little boys with them: living burdens, I know that the day was worth all it cost, and more.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BABY OF THE REGIMENT

We were in our winter camp on Port Royal Island. It was a lovely November morning, soft and spring-like; the mocking-birds were singing, and the cotton-fields still white with fleecy pods. Morning drill was over, the men were cleaning their guns and singing very happily; the officers were in their tents, reading still more happily their letters just arrived from home. Suddenly I heard a knock at my tent-door, and the latch clicked. It was the only latch in camp, and I was very proud of it, and the officers always clicked it as loudly as possible, in order to gratify my feelings. The door opened, and the Quartermaster thrust in the most beaming face I ever saw.

"Colonel," said he, "there are great news for the regiment. My wife and baby are coming by the next steamer!"

"Baby!" said I, in amazement. "Q. M., you are beside yourself." (We always called the Quartermaster Q. M. for shortness.) "There was a pass sent to your wife, but nothing was ever said about a baby. Baby indeed!"

"But the baby was included in the pass," replied the triumphant father-of-a-family. "You don't suppose my wife would come down here without her baby! Besides, the pass itself permits her to bring necessary baggage, and is not a baby six months old necessary baggage?"

"But, my dear fellow," said I, rather anxiously, "how can you make the little thing comfortable in a tent, amidst these rigors of a South Carolina winter, when it is uncomfortably hot for drill at noon, and ice forms by your bedside at night?"

"Trust me for that," said the delighted papa, and went off whistling. I could hear him telling the same news to three others, at least, before he got to his own tent.

That day the preparations began, and soon his abode was a wonder of comfort. There were posts and rafters, and a raised floor, and a great chimney, and a door with hinges,—every luxury except a latch, and that he could not have, for mine was the last that could be purchased. One of the regimental carpenters was employed to make a cradle, and another to make a bedstead high enough for the cradle to go under. Then there must be a bit of red carpet beside the bedstead, and thus the progress of splendor went on. The wife of one of the colored sergeants was engaged to act as nursery-maid. She was a very respectable young woman; the only objection to her being that she smoked a pipe. But we thought that perhaps Baby might not dislike tobacco; and if she did, she would have excellent opportunities to break the pipe in pieces.

In due time the steamer arrived, and Baby and her mother were among the passengers. The little recruit was soon settled in her new cradle, and slept in it as if she had never known any other. The sergeant's wife soon had her on exhibition through the neighborhood, and from that time forward she was quite a queen among us. She had sweet blue eyes and pretty brown hair, with round, dimpled cheeks, and that perfect dignity which is so beautiful in a baby. She hardly ever cried, and was not at all timid. She would go to anybody, and yet did not encourage any romping from any but the most intimate friends. She always wore a warm long-sleeved scarlet cloak with a hood, and in this costume was carried or "toted," as the soldiers said, all about the camp. At "guard-mounting" in the morning, when the men who are to go on guard duty for the day are drawn up to be inspected, Baby was always there, to help inspect them. She did not say much, but she eyed them very closely, and seemed fully to appreciate their bright buttons. Then the Officer-of-the-Day, who appears at guard-mounting with his sword and sash, and comes afterwards to the Colonel's tent for orders, would come and speak to Baby on his way, and receive her orders first. When the time came for drill she was usually present to watch the troops; and when the drum beat for dinner she liked to see the long row of men in each company march up to the cookhouse, in single file, each with tin cup and plate.

During the day, in pleasant weather, she might be seen in her nurse's arms, about the company streets, the centre of an admiring circle, her scarlet costume looking very pretty amidst the shining black cheeks and neat blue uniforms of the soldiers. At "dress-parade," just before sunset, she was always an attendant. As I stood before the regiment, I could see the little spot of red out of the corner of my eye, at one end of the long line of men; and I looked with so much interest for her small person, that, instead of saying at the proper time, "Attention, Battalion! Shoulder arms!"—it is a wonder that I did not say, "Shoulder babies!"

Our little lady was very impartial, and distributed her kind looks to everybody. She had not the slightest prejudice against color, and did not care in the least whether her particular friends were black or white. Her especial favorites, I think, were the drummer-boys, who were not my favorites by any means, for they were a roguish set of scamps, and gave more trouble than all the grown men in the regiment. I think Annie liked them because they were small, and made a noise, and had red caps like her hood, and red facings on their jackets, and also because they occasionally stood on their heads for her amusement. After dress-parade the whole drum-corps would march to the great flag-staff, and wait till just sunset-time, when they would beat "the retreat," and then the flag would be hauled down,—a great festival for Annie. Sometimes the Sergeant-Major would wrap her in the great folds of the flag, after it was taken down, and she would peep out very prettily from amidst the stars and stripes, like a new-born Goddess of Liberty.

About once a month, some inspecting officer was sent to the camp by the general in command, to see to the condition of everything in the regiment, from bayonets to buttons. It was usually a long and tiresome process, and, when everything else was done, I used to tell the officer that I had one thing more for him to inspect, which was peculiar to our regiment. Then I would send for Baby to be exhibited, and I never saw an inspecting officer, old or young, who did not look pleased at the sudden appearance of the little, fresh, smiling creature,—a flower in the midst of war. And Annie in her turn would look at them, with the true baby dignity La her face,—that deep, earnest look which babies often have, and which people think so wonderful when Raphael paints it, although they might often see just the same expression in the faces of their own darlings at home.

Meanwhile Annie seemed to like the camp style of housekeeping very much. Her father's tent was double, and he used the front apartment for his office, and the inner room for parlor and bedroom; while the nurse had a separate tent and wash-room behind all. I remember that, the first time I went there in the evening, it was to borrow some writing-paper; and while Baby's mother was hunting for it in the front tent, I heard a great cooing and murmuring in the inner room. I asked if Annie was still awake, and her mother told me to go in and see. Pushing aside the canvas door, I entered. No sign of anybody was to be seen; but a variety of soft little happy noises seemed to come from some unseen corner. Mrs. C. came quietly in, pulled away the counterpane of her own bed, and drew out the rough cradle where lay the little damsel, perfectly happy, and wider awake than anything but a baby possibly can be. She looked as if the seclusion of a dozen family bedsteads would not be enough to discourage her spirits, and I saw that camp life was likely to suit her very well.

A tent can be kept very warm, for it is merely a house with a thinner wall than usual; and I do not think that Baby felt the cold much more than if she had been at home that winter. The great trouble is, that a tent-chimney, not being built very high, is apt to smoke when the wind is in a certain direction; and when that happens it is hardly possible to stay inside. So we used to build the chimneys of some tents on the east side, and those of others on the west, and thus some of the tents were always comfortable. I have seen Baby's mother running in a hard rain, with little Red-Riding-Hood in her arms, to take refuge with the Adjutant's wife, when every other abode was full of smoke; and I must admit that there were one or two windy days that season when nobody could really keep warm, and Annie had to remain ignominiously in her cradle, with as many clothes on as possible, for almost the whole time.

The Quartermaster's tent was very attractive to us in the evening. I remember that once, on passing near it after nightfall, I heard our Major's fine voice singing Methodist hymns within, and Mrs. C.'s sweet tones chiming in. So I peeped through the outer door. The fire was burning very pleasantly in the inner tent, and the scrap of new red carpet made the floor look quite magnificent. The Major sat on a box, our surgeon on a stool; "Q. M." and his wife, and the Adjutant's wife, and one of the captains, were all sitting on the bed, singing as well as they knew how; and the baby was under the bed. Baby had retired for the night, was overshadowed, suppressed, sat upon; the singing went on, and she had wandered away into her own land of dreams, nearer to heaven, perhaps, than any pitch their voices could attain. I went in, and joined the party. Presently the music stopped, and another officer was sent for, to sing some particular song. At this pause the invisible innocent waked a little, and began to cluck and coo.

"It's the kitten," exclaimed somebody.

"It's my baby!" exclaimed Mrs. C. triumphantly, in that tone of unfailing personal pride which belongs to young mothers.

The people all got up from the bed for a moment, while Annie was pulled from beneath, wide awake and placid as usual; and she sat in one lap or another during the rest of the concert, sometimes winking at the candle, but usually listening to the songs, with a calm and critical expression, as if she could make as much noise as any of them, whenever she saw fit to try. Not a sound did she make, however, except one little soft sneeze, which led to an immediate flood-tide of red shawl, covering every part of her but the forehead. But I soon hinted that the concert had better be ended, because I knew from observation that the small damsel had Carefully watched a regimental inspection and a brigade drill on that day, and that an interval of repose was certainly necessary.

Annie did not long remain the only baby in camp. One day, on going out to the stables to look at a horse, I heard a sound of baby-talk, addressed by some man to a child near by, and, looking round the corner of a tent, I saw that one of the hostlers had something black and round, lying on the sloping side of a tent, with which he was playing very eagerly. It proved to be his baby, a plump, shiny thing, younger than Annie; and I never saw a merrier picture than the happy father frolicking with his child, while the mother stood quietly by. This was Baby Number Two, and she stayed in camp several weeks, the two innocents meeting each other every day, in the placid indifference that belonged to their years; both were happy little healthy things, and it never seemed to cross their minds that there was any difference in their complexions. As I said before, Annie was not troubled by any prejudice in regard to color, nor do I suppose that the other little maiden was.

Annie enjoyed the tent-life very much; but when we were Sent out on picket soon after, she enjoyed it still more. Our head-quarters were at a deserted plantation house, with one large parlor, a dining-room, and a few bedrooms. Baby's father and mother had a room up stairs, with a stove whose pipe went straight out at the window. This was quite comfortable, though half the windows were broken, and there was no glass and no glazier to mend them. The windows of the large parlor were in much the same condition, though we had an immense fireplace, where we had a bright fire whenever it was cold, and always in the evening. The walls of this room were very dirty, and it took our ladies several days to cover all the unsightly places with wreaths and hangings of evergreen. In the performance Baby took an active part. Her duties consisted in sitting in a great nest of evergreen, pulling and fingering the fragrant leaves, and occasionally giving a little cry of glee when she had accomplished some piece of decided mischief.

There was less entertainment to be found in the camp itself at this time; but the household at head-quarters was larger than Baby had been accustomed to. We had a great deal of company, moreover, and she had quite a gay life of it. She usually made her appearance in the large parlor soon after breakfast; and to dance her for a few moments in our arms was one of the first daily duties of each one. Then the morning reports began to arrive from the different outposts,—a mounted officer or courier coming in from each place, dismounting at the door, and clattering in with jingling arms and spurs, each a new excitement for Annie. She usually got some attention from any officer who came, receiving with her wonted dignity any daring caress. When the messengers had ceased to be interesting, there were always the horses to look at, held or tethered under the trees beside the sunny piazza. After the various couriers had been received, other messengers would be despatched to the town, seven miles away, and Baby had all the excitement of their mounting and departure. Her father was often one of the riders, and would sometimes seize Annie for a good-by kiss, place her on the saddle before him, gallop her round the house once or twice, and then give her back to her nurse's arms again. She was perfectly fearless, and such boisterous attentions never frightened her, nor did they ever interfere with her sweet, infantine self-possession.

After the riding-parties had gone, there was the piazza still for entertainment, with a sentinel pacing up and down before it; but Annie did not enjoy the sentinel, though his breastplate and buttons shone like gold, so much as the hammock which always hung swinging between the pillars. It was a pretty hammock, with great open meshes; and she delighted to lie in it, and have the netting closed above her, so that she could only be seen through the apertures. I can see her now, the fresh little rosy thing, in her blue and scarlet wrappings, with one round and dimpled arm thrust forth through the netting, and the other grasping an armful of blushing roses and fragrant magnolias. She looked like those pretty French bas-reliefs of Cupids imprisoned in baskets, and peeping through. That hammock was a very useful appendage; it was a couch for us, a cradle for Baby, a nest for the kittens; and we had, moreover, a little hen, which tried to roost there every night.

When the mornings were colder, and the stove up stairs smoked the wrong way, Baby was brought down in a very incomplete state of toilet, and finished her dressing by the great fire. We found her bare shoulders very becoming, and she was very much interested in her own little pink toes. After a very slow dressing, she had a still slower breakfast out of a tin cup of warm milk, of which she generally spilt a good deal, as she had much to do in watching everybody who came into the room, and seeing that there was no mischief done. Then she would be placed on the floor, on our only piece of carpet, and the kittens would be brought in for her to play with.

We had, at different times, a variety of pets, of whom Annie did not take much notice. Sometimes we had young partridges, caught by the drummer-boys in trap-cages. The children called them "Bob and Chloe," because the first notes of the male and female sound like those names. One day I brought home an opossum, with her blind bare little young clinging to the droll pouch where their mothers keep them. Sometimes we had pretty green lizards, their color darkening or deepening, like that of chameleons, in light or shade. But the only pets that took Baby's fancy were the kittens. They perfectly delighted her, from the first moment she saw them; they were the only things younger than herself that she had ever beheld, and the only things softer than themselves that her small hands had grasped. It was astonishing to see how much the kittens would endure from her. They could scarcely be touched by any one else without mewing; but when Annie seized one by the head and the other by the tail, and rubbed them violently together, they did not make a sound. I suppose that a baby's grasp is really soft, even if it seems ferocious, and so it gives less pain than one would think. At any rate, the little animals had the best of it very soon; for they entirely outstripped Annie in learning to walk, and they could soon scramble away beyond her reach, while she sat in a sort of dumb despair, unable to comprehend why anything so much smaller than herself should be so much nimbler. Meanwhile, the kittens would sit up and look at her with the most provoking indifference, just out of arm's length, until some of us would take pity on the young lady, and toss her furry playthings back to her again. "Little baby," she learned to call them; and these were the very first words she spoke.

Baby had evidently a natural turn for war, further cultivated by an intimate knowledge of drills and parades. The nearer she came to actual conflict the better she seemed to like it, peaceful as her own little ways might be. Twice, at least, while she was with us on picket, we had alarms from the Rebel troops, who would bring down cannon to the opposite side of the Ferry, about two miles beyond us, and throw shot and shell over upon our side. Then the officer at the Ferry would think that there was to be an attack made, and couriers would be sent, riding to and fro, and the men would all be called to arms in a hurry, and the ladies at headquarters would all put on their best bonnets and come down stairs, and the ambulance would be made ready to carry them to a place of safety before the expected fight. On such occasions Baby was in all her glory. She shouted with delight at being suddenly uncribbed and thrust into her little scarlet cloak, and brought down stairs, at an utterly unusual and improper hour, to a piazza with lights and people and horses and general excitement. She crowed and gurgled and made gestures with her little fists, and screamed out what seemed to be her advice on the military situation, as freely as if she had been a newspaper editor. Except that it was rather difficult to understand her precise direction, I do not know but the whole Rebel force might have been captured through her plans. And at any rate, I should much rather obey her orders than those of some generals whom I have known; for she at least meant no harm, and would lead one into no mischief.

However, at last the danger, such as it was, would be all over, and the ladies would be induced to go peacefully to bed again; and Annie would retreat with them to her ignoble cradle, very much disappointed, and looking vainly back at the more martial scene below. The next morning she would seem to have forgotten all about it, and would spill her bread and milk by the fire as if nothing had happened.

I suppose we hardly knew, at the time, how large a part of the sunshine of our daily lives was contributed by dear little Annie. Yet, when I now look back on that pleasant Southern home, she seems as essential a part of it as the mocking-birds or the magnolias, and I cannot convince myself that in returning to it I should not find her there. But Annie went back, with the spring, to her Northern birthplace, and then passed away from this earth before her little feet had fairly learned to tread its paths; and when I meet her next it must be in some world where there is triumph without armies, and where innocence is trained in scenes of peace. I know, however, that her little life, short as it seemed, was a blessing to us all, giving a perpetual image of serenity and sweetness, recalling the lovely atmosphere of far-off homes, and holding us by unsuspected ties to whatsoever things were pure.

CHAPTER IX

NEGRO SPIRITUALS

The war brought to some of us, besides its direct experiences, many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer had been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always more quaint, and often as essentially poetic.

This interest was rather increased by the fact that I had for many years heard of this class of songs under the name of "Negro Spirituals," and had even heard some of them sung by friends from South Carolina. I could now gather on their own soil these strange plants, which I had before seen as in museums alone. True, the individual songs rarely coincided; there was a line here, a chorus there,—just enough to fix the class, but this was unmistakable. It was not strange that they differed, for the range seemed almost endless, and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida seemed to have nothing but the generic character in common, until all were mingled in the united stock of camp-melodies.

Often in the starlit evening, I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river, or on the plover-haunted barrens, and, entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a "shout," chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain. Writing down in the darkness, as I best could,—perhaps with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket,—the words of the song, I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by. Or, summoning one of the men at some period of leisure,—Corporal Robert Sutton, for instance, whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest,—I have completed the new specimen by supplying the absent parts. The music I could only retain by ear, and though the more common strains were repeated often enough to fix their impression, there were others that occurred only once or twice.

The words will be here given, as nearly as possible, in the original dialect; and if the spelling seems sometimes inconsistent, or the misspelling insufficient, it is because I could get no nearer. I wished to avoid what seems to me the only error of Lowell's "Biglow Papers" in respect to dialect, the occasional use of an extreme misspelling, which merely confuses the eye, without taking us any closer to the peculiarity of sound.

The favorite song in camp was the following, sung with no accompaniment but the measured clapping of hands and the clatter of many feet. It was sung perhaps twice as often as any other. This was partly due to the fact that it properly consisted of a chorus alone, with which the verses of other songs might be combined at random.

I. HOLD YOUR LIGHT.

  Hold your light, Brudder Robert,

            Hold your light,

  Hold your light on Canaan's shore.

  "What make ole Satan for follow me so?

  Satan ain't got notin' for do wid me.

            Hold your light,

            Hold your light,

  Hold your light on Canaan's shore.

This would be sung for half an hour at a time, perhaps each person present being named in turn. It seemed the simplest primitive type of "spiritual." The next in popularity was almost as elementary, and, like this, named successively each one of the circle. It was, however, much more resounding and convivial in its music.

II. BOUND TO GO.

  Jordan River, I'm bound to go,

    Bound to go, bound to go,—

  Jordan River, I'm bound to go,

    And bid 'em fare ye well.

  My Brudder Robert, I'm bound to go,

    Bound to go," &c.

  My Sister Lucy, I'm bound to go,

    Bound to go, &c.

Sometimes it was "tink 'em" (think them) "fare ye well." The ye was so detached that I thought at first it was "very" or "vary well."

Another picturesque song, which seemed immensely popular, was at first very bewildering to me. I could not make out the first words of the chorus, and called it the "Roman-dar," being reminded of some Romaic song which I had formerly heard. That association quite fell in with the Orientalism of the new tent-life.

III. ROOM IN THERE.

  O, my mudder is gone! my mudder is gone!

  My mudder is gone into heaven, my Lord!

            I can't stay behind!

  Dere's room in dar, room in dar,

  Room in dar, in de heaven, my Lord!

            I can't stay behind!

  Can't stay behind, my dear,

           I can't stay behind!

  O, my fader is gone! &c.

  O, de angels are gone! &c.

  O, I'se been on de road! I'se been on de road!

  I'se been on de road into heaven, my Lord!

           I can't stay behind!

  O, room in dar, room in dar,

  Room in dar, in de heaven, my Lord!

           I can't stay behind!

By this time every man within hearing, from oldest to youngest, would be wriggling and shuffling, as if through some magic piper's bewitchment; for even those who at first affected contemptuous indifference would be drawn into the vortex erelong.

Next to these in popularity ranked a class of songs belonging emphatically to the Church Militant, and available for camp purposes with very little strain upon their symbolism. This, for instance, had a true companion-in-arms heartiness about it, not impaired by the feminine invocation at the end.

IV. HAIL MARY.

One more valiant soldier here,

One more valiant soldier here,

One more valiant soldier here,

        To help me bear de cross.

O hail, Mary, hail!

Hail, Mary, hail!

Hail, Mary, hail!

        To help me bear de cross.

I fancied that the original reading might have been "soul," instead of "soldier,"—with some other syllable inserted to fill out the metre,—and that the "Hail, Mary," might denote a Roman Catholic origin, as I had several men from St. Augustine who held in a dim way to that faith. It was a very ringing song, though not so grandly jubilant as the next, which was really impressive as the singers pealed it out, when marching or rowing or embarking.

V. MY ARMY CROSS OVER.

  My army cross over,

  My army cross over,

  O, Pharaoh's army drowndedl

  My army cross over.

  "We'll cross de mighty river,

       My army cross over;

  We'll cross de river Jordan,

       My army cross over;

  We'll cross de danger water,

       My army cross over;

  We'll cross de mighty Myo,

       My army cross over. (Thrice.)

    O, Pharaoh's army drowndedl

       My army cross over.

I could get no explanation of the "mighty Myo," except that one of the old men thought it meant the river of death. Perhaps it is an African word. In the Cameroon dialect, "Mawa" signifies "to die."

The next also has a military ring about it, and the first line is well matched by the music. The rest is conglomerate, and one or two lines show a more Northern origin. "Done" is a Virginia shibboleth, quite distinct from the "been" which replaces it in South Carolina. Yet one of their best choruses, without any fixed words, was, "De bell done ringing," for which, in proper South Carolina dialect, would have been substituted, "De bell been a-ring." This refrain may have gone South with our army.

VI. RIDE IN, KIND SAVIOUR.

  Ride in, kind Saviour!

         No man can hinder me.

  O, Jesus is a mighty man!

         No man, &c.

  We're marching through Virginny fields.

         No man, &c.

  O, Satan is a busy man,

         No man, &c.

  And he has his sword and shield,

         No man, &c.

  O, old Secesh done come and gone!

         No man can hinder me.

Sometimes they substituted "binder we," which was more spicy to the ear, and more in keeping with the usual head-over-heels arrangement of their pronouns.

Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, however quaint then: expression, and were in a minor key, both as to words and music. The attitude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life,—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination is always implied. In the following, for instance, we hear simply the patience.

VII. THIS WORLD ALMOST DONE.

  Brudder, keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin',

  Keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin',

  Keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin',

        For dis world most done.

  So keep your lamp, &c.

        Dis world most done.

But in the next, the final reward of patience is proclaimed as plaintively.

VIII. I WANT TO GO HOME.

  Dere's no rain to wet you,

    O, yes, I want to go home.

  Dere's no sun to burn you,

      O, yes, I want to go home;

  O, push along, believers,

      O, yes, &c.

  Dere's no hard trials,

      O, yes, &c.

  Dere's no whips a-crackin',

      O, yes, &c.

  My brudder on de wayside,

      O, yes, &c.

  O, push along, my brudder,

      O, yes, &c.

  Where dere's no stormy weather,

      O, yes, &c.

  Dere's no tribulation,

      O, yes, &c.

This next was a boat-song, and timed well with the tug of the oar.

IX. THE COMING DAY

  I want to go to Canaan,

  I want to go to Canaan,

  I want to go to Canaan,

    To meet 'em at de comin' day.

  O, remember, let me go to Canaan, (Thrice.)

    To meet "em, &c.

  O brudder, let me go to Canaan, (Thrice.)

    To meet 'em, &c.

My brudder, you—oh!—remember, (Thrice.)

    To meet 'em at de comin' day."

The following begins with a startling affirmation, yet the last line quite outdoes the first. This, too, was a capital boat-song.

X. ONE MORE RIVER.

  O, Jordan bank was a great old bank,

    Dere ain't but one more river to cross.

  We have some valiant soldier here,

    Dere ain't, &c.

  O, Jordan stream will never run dry,

    Dere ain't, &c.

  Dere's a hill on my leff, and he catch on my right,

    Dere ain't but one more river to cross.

I could get no explanation of this last riddle, except, "Dat mean, if you go on de leff, go to 'struction, and if you go on de right, go to God, for sure."

In others, more of spiritual conflict is implied, as in this next

XI. O THE DYING LAMB!

  I wants to go where Moses trod,

      O de dying Lamb!

  For Moses gone to de promised land,

      O de dying Lamb!

  To drink from springs dat never run dry,

      O, &c.

  Cry O my Lord!

      O, &c.

  Before I'll stay in hell one day,

      O, &c.

  I'm in hopes to pray my sins away,

      O, &c.

  Cry O my Lord!

      O, &c.

  Brudder Moses promised for be dar too,

      O, &c.

  To drink from streams dat never run dry,

      O de dying Lamb!

In the next, the conflict is at its height, and the lurid imagery of the Apocalypse is brought to bear. This book, with the books of Moses, constituted their Bible; all that lay between, even the narratives of the life of Jesus, they hardly cared to read or to hear.

XII. DOWN IN THE VALLEY.

  We'll run and never tire,

  We'll run and never tire,

  We'll run and never tire,

      Jesus set poor sinners free.

  Way down in de valley,

      Who will rise and go with me?

  You've heern talk of Jesus,

    Who set poor sinners free.

  De lightnin' and de flashin'

  De lightnin' and de flashin',

  De lightnin' and de flashin',

      Jesus set poor shiners free.

  I can't stand the fire. (Thrice.)

      Jesus set poor sinners free,

  De green trees a-flamin'. (Thrice.)

      Jesus set poor shiners free,

        Way down in de valley,

          Who will rise and go with me?

      You've heern talk of Jesus

          Who set poor shiners free.

"De valley" and "de lonesome valley" were familiar words in their religious experience. To descend into that region implied the same process with the "anxious-seat" of the camp-meeting. When a young girl was supposed to enter it, she bound a handkerchief by a peculiar knot over her head, and made it a point of honor not to change a single garment till the day of her baptism, so that she was sure of being in physical readiness for the cleansing rite, whatever her spiritual mood might be. More than once, in noticing a damsel thus mystically kerchiefed, I have asked some dusky attendant its meaning, and have received the unfailing answer,—framed with their usual indifference to the genders of pronouns—"He in de lonesome valley, sa."

The next gives the same dramatic conflict, while its detached and impersonal refrain gives it strikingly the character of the Scotch and Scandinavian ballads.

XIII. CRY HOLY.

  Cry holy, holy!

      Look at de people dat is born of God.

  And I run down de valley, and I run down to pray,

        Says, look at de people dat is born of God.

  When I get dar, Cappen Satan was dar,

        Says, look at, &c.

  Says, young man, young man, dere's no use for pray,

        Says, look at, &c.

  For Jesus is dead, and God gone away,

        Says, look at, &c.

  And I made him out a liar, and I went my way,

      Says, look at, &c.

        Sing holy, holy!

  O, Mary was a woman, and he had a one Son,

      Says, look at, &c.

  And de Jews and de Romans had him hung,

      Says, look at, &c.

          Cry holy, holy!

  And I tell you, sinner, you had better had pray,

      Says, look at, &c.

  For hell is a dark and dismal place,

    Says, look at, &c.

  And I tell you, sinner, and I wouldn't go dar!

    Says, look at, &c.

       Cry holy, holy!

Here is an infinitely quaint description of the length of the heavenly road:—

XIV. O'ER THE CROSSING.

  Vonder's my old mudder,

     Been a-waggin' at de hill so long.

  It's about time she'll cross over;

     Get home bimeby.

  Keep prayin', I do believe

     We're a long time waggin' o'er de crossin'.

  Keep prayin', I do believe

     We'll get home to heaven bimeby.

  Hear dat mournful thunder

     Roll from door to door,

  Calling home God's children;

     Get home bimeby.

  Little chil'en, I do believe

     We're a long time, &c.

  Little chil'en, I do believe

     We'll get home, &c.

  See dat forked lightnin'

     Flash from tree to tree,

  Callin' home God's chil'en;

     Get home bimeby.

  True believer, I do believe

     We're a long time, &c.

  O brudders, I do believe,

     We'll get home to heaven bimeby."

One of the most singular pictures of future joys, and with fine flavor of hospitality about it, was this:—

XV. WALK 'EM EASY.

 O, walk 'em easy round de heaven,

 Walk 'em easy round de heaven,

  Walk 'em easy round de heaven,

     Dat all de people may join de band.

  Walk 'em easy round de heaven. (Thrice.)

     O, shout glory till 'em join dat band!"

The chorus was usually the greater part of the song, and often came in paradoxically, thus:—

XVI. O YES, LORD.

  O, must I be like de foolish mans?

               O yes, Lord!

  Will build de house on de sandy hill.

               O yes, Lord!

  I'll build my house on Zion hill,

               O yes, Lord!

  No wind nor rain can blow me down,

               O yes, Lord!

The next is very graceful and lyrical, and with more variety of rhythm than usual:—

XVII. BOW LOW, MARY.

  Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,

       For Jesus come and lock de door,

       And carry de keys away.

  Sail, sail, over yonder,

  And view de promised land.

       For Jesus come, &c.

  Weep, O Mary, bow low, Martha,

       For Jesus come, &c.

  Sail, sail, my true believer;

  Sail, sail, over yonder;

  Mary, bow low, Martha, bow low,

       For Jesus come and lock de door

       And carry de keys away.

But of all the "spirituals" that which surprised me the most, I think,—perhaps because it was that in which external nature furnished the images most directly,—was this. With all my experience of their ideal ways of speech, I was startled when first I came on such a flower of poetry in that dark soil.

XVIII. I KNOW MOON-RISE.

  I know moon-rise, I know star-rise,

              Lay dis body down.

  I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

              To lay dis body down.

  I'll walk in de graveyard, I'll walk through de graveyard,

              To lay dis body down.

  I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

              Lay dis body down.

  I go to de judgment in de evenin' of de day,

             When I lay dis body down;

  And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

                 When I lay dis body down."

"I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms." Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered, was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively than in that line.

The next is one of the wildest and most striking of the whole series: there is a mystical effect and a passionate striving throughout the whole. The Scriptural struggle between Jacob and the angel, which is only dimly expressed in the words, seems all uttered in the music. I think it impressed my imagination more powerfully than any other of these songs.

XIX. WRESTLING JACOB.

  O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, day's a-breakin';

              I will not let thee go!

  O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, day's a-breakin';

              He will not let me go!

  O, I hold my brudder wid a tremblin' hand

              I would not let him go!

  I hold my sister wid a tremblin' hand;

              I would not let her go!

  O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin' limb,

              He would not let him go!

  O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin' limb;

              De Lord will bless my soul.

  O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob," &c.

Of "occasional hymns," properly so called, I noticed but one, a funeral hymn for an infant, which is sung plaintively over and over, without variety of words.

XX. THE BABY GONE HOME.

  De little baby gone home,

  De little baby gone home,

  De little baby gone along,

      For to climb up Jacob's ladder.

  And I wish I'd been dar,

  I wish I'd been dar,

  I wish I'd been dar, my Lord,

      For to climb up Jacob's ladder.

Still simpler is this, which is yet quite sweet and touching.

XXI. JESUS WITH US.

  He have been wid us, Jesus

    He still wid us, Jesus,

  He will be wid us, Jesus,

    Be wid us to the end.

The next seemed to be a favorite about Christmas time, when meditations on "de rollin' year" were frequent among them.

XXII. LORD, REMEMBER ME.

  O do, Lord, remember me!

      O do, Lord, remember me!

  O, do remember me, until de year roll round!

      Do, Lord, remember me!

  If you want to die like Jesus died,

      Lay in de grave,

  You would fold your arms and close your eyes

      And die wid a free good will.

  For Death is a simple ting,

      And he go from door to door,

  And he knock down some, and he cripple op some,

      And he leave some here to pray.

  O do, Lord remember me!

      O do, Lord, remember me!

  My old fader's gone till de year roll round;

      Do, Lord, remember me!

The next was sung in such an operatic and rollicking way that it was quite hard to fancy it a religious performance, which, however, it was. I heard it but once.

XXIII. EARLY IN THE MORNING.

  I meet little Rosa early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! early in de mornin';

  And I ax her, How you do, my darter?

      O Jerusalem! early in de mornin'.

  "I meet my mudder early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  And I ax her, How you do, my mudder?

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  "I meet Brudder Robert early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  And I ax him, How you do, my sonny?

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  "I meet Tittawisa early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  And I ax her, How you do, my darter?

      O Jerusalem! etc.

"Tittawisa" means "Sister Louisa." In songs of this class the name of every person present successively appears.

Their best marching song, and one which was invaluable to lift their feet along, as they expressed it, was the following. There was a kind of spring and lilt to it, quite indescribable by words.

XXIV. GO IN THE WILDERNESS.

  Jesus call you. Go in de wilderness,

      Go in de wilderness, go in de wilderness,

  Jesus call you. Go in de wilderness

      To wait upon de Lord.

  Go wait upon de Lord,

  Go wait upon de Lord,

  Go wait upon de Lord, my God,

      He take away de sins of de world.

  Jesus a-waitin'. Go in de wilderness,

      Go, etc.

  All dem chil'en go in de wilderness

      To wait upon de Lord.

The next was one of those which I had heard in boyish days, brought North from Charleston. But the chorus alone was identical; the words were mainly different, and those here given are quaint enough.

XXV. BLOW YOUR TRUMPET, GABRIEL.

  O, blow your trumpet, Gabriel,

      Blow your trumpet louder;

  And I want dat trumpet to blow me home

      To my new Jerusalem.

  De prettiest ting dat ever I done

  Was to serve de Lord when I was young.

      So blow your trumpet, Gabriel, etc.

  O, Satan is a liar, and he conjure too,

  And if you don't mind, he'll conjure you.

      So blow your trumpet, Gabriel, etc.

  O, I was lost in de wilderness.

  King Jesus hand me de candle down.

      So blow your trumpet, Gabriel," etc.

The following contains one of those odd transformations of proper names with which their Scriptural citations were often enriched. It rivals their text, "Paul may plant, and may polish wid water," which I have elsewhere quoted, and in which the sainted Apollos would hardly have recognized himself.

XXVI. IN THE MORNING.

  In de mornin',

  In de mornin',

  Chil'en? Yes, my Lord!

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  If I had a-died when I was young,

  I never would had de race for run.

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  O Sam and Peter was fishin' in de sea,

  And dey drop de net and follow my Lord.

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  Dere's a silver spade for to dig my grave

  And a golden chain for to let me down.

  Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  In de mornin', In de mornin',

  Chil'en? Yes, my Lord!

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?"

These golden and silver fancies remind one of the King of Spain's daughter in "Mother Goose," and the golden apple, and the silver pear, which are doubtless themselves but the vestiges of some simple early composition like this. The next has a humbler and more domestic style of fancy.

XXVII. FARE YE WELL.

  My true believers, fare ye well,

  Fare ye well, fare ye well,

  Fare ye well, by de grace of God,

     For I'm going home.

  Massa Jesus give me a little broom

  For to sweep my heart clean,

  And I will try, by de grace of God,

     To win my way home.

Among the songs not available for marching, but requiring the concentrated enthusiasm of the camp, was "The Ship of Zion," of which they had three wholly distinct versions, all quite exuberant and tumultuous.

XXVIII. THE SHIP OF ZION.

  Come along, come along,

     And let us go home,

  O, glory, hallelujah?

  Dis de ole ship o' Zion,

     Halleloo! Halleloo!

  Dis de ole ship o' Zion,

     Hallelujah!

  She has landed many a tousand,

  She can land as many more.

     O, glory, hallelujah! &c.

  Do you tink she will be able

  For to take us all home?

     O, glory, hallelujah! &c.

  You can tell 'em I'm a comin',

     Halleloo! Halleloo!

  You can tell 'em I'm a comin',

     Hallelujah!

  Come along, come along," &c.

XXIX. THE SHIP OF ZION. (Second version.)

  Dis de good ole ship o' Zion,

  Dis de good ole ship o' Zion,

  Dis de good ole ship o' Zion,

    And she's makin' for de Promise Land.

  She hab angels for de sailors, (Thrice.)

     And she's, &c.

  And how you know dey's angels? (Thrice.)

     And she's, &c.

  Good Lord, Shall I be one? (Thrice.)

     And she's, &c.

  Dat ship is out a-sailin', sailin', sailin',

     And she's, &c.

  She's a-sailin' mighty steady, steady, steady,

     And she's, &c.

  She'll neither reel nor totter, totter, totter,

     And she's, &c.

  She's a-sailin' away cold Jordan, Jordan, Jordan,

     And she's, &c.

  King Jesus is de captain, captain, captain,

     And she's makin' for de Promise Land.

XXX. THE SHIP OF ZION. (Third version.)

  De Gospel ship is sailin',

     Hosann—sann.

  O, Jesus is de captain,

     Hosann—sann.

  De angels are de sailors,

     Hosann—sann.

  O, is your bundle ready?

     Hosann—sann.

  O, have you got your ticket?

     Hosann—sann.

This abbreviated chorus is given with unspeakable unction.

The three just given are modifications of an old camp-meeting melody; and the same may be true of the three following, although I cannot find them in the Methodist hymn-books. Each, however, has its characteristic modifications, which make it well worth giving. In the second verse of this next, for instance, "Saviour" evidently has become "soldier."

XXXI. SWEET MUSIC

  Sweet music in heaven,

    Just beginning for to roll.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

  Yes, late I heard my soldier say,

    Come, heavy soul, I am de way.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

  I'll go and tell to sinners round

    What a kind Saviour I have found.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

  My grief my burden long has been,

    Because I was not cease from sin.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

XXXII. GOOD NEWS.

  O, good news! O, good news!

  De angels brought de tidings down,

    Just comin' from de trone.

  As grief from out my soul shall fly,

    Just comin' from de trone;

  I'll shout salvation when I die,

    Good news, O, good news!

    Just comin' from de trone.

  Lord, I want to go to heaven when I die,

    Good news, O, good news! &c.

  De white folks call us a noisy crew,

    Good news, O, good news!

  But dis I know, we are happy too,

    Just comin' from de trone.

XXXIII. THE HEAVENLY ROAD.

  You may talk of my name as much as you please,

    And carry my name abroad,

  But I really do believe I'm a child of God

    As I walk in de heavenly road.

  O, won't you go wid me? (Thrice.)

    For to keep our garments clean.

  O Satan is a mighty busy ole man,

    And roll rocks in my way;

  But Jesus is my bosom friend,

    And roll 'em out of de way.

  O, won't you go wid me? (Thrice.)

    For to keep our garments clean.

  Come, my brudder, if you never did pray,

    I hope you may pray to-night;

  For I really believe I'm a child of God

    As I walk in de heavenly road.

  O, won't you, &c.

Some of the songs had played an historic part during the war. For singing the next, for instance, the negroes had been put in jail in Georgetown, S. C., at the outbreak of the Rebellion. "We'll soon be free" was too dangerous an assertion; and though the chant was an old one, it was no doubt sung with redoubled emphasis during the new events. "De Lord will call us home," was evidently thought to be a symbolical verse; for, as a little drummer-boy explained to me, showing all his white teeth as he sat in the moonlight by the door of my tent, "Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees."

XXXIV. WE'LL SOON BE FREE.

  We'll soon be free,

  We'll soon be free,

  We'll soon be free,

      When de Lord will call us home.

  My brudder, how long,

  My brudder, how long,

  My brudder, how long,

      'Fore we done sufferin' here?

  It won't be long (Thrice.)

      'Fore de Lord will call us home.

  We'll walk de miry road (Thrice.)

      Where pleasure never dies.

  We'll walk de golden street (Thrice.)

      Where pleasure never dies.

  My brudder, how long (Thrice.)

      'Fore we done sufferin' here?

  We'll soon be free (Thrice.)

      When Jesus sets me free.

  We'll fight for liberty (Thrice.)

      When de Lord will call us home."

The suspicion in this case was unfounded, but they had another song to which the Rebellion had actually given rise. This was composed by nobody knew whom,—though it was the most recent, doubtless, of all these "spirituals,"—and had been sung in secret to avoid detection. It is certainly plaintive enough. The peck of corn and pint of salt were slavery's rations.

XXXV. MANY THOUSAND GO.

  No more peck o' corn for me,

        No more, no more,—

  No more peck o' corn for me,

        Many tousand go.

  No more driver's lash for me, (Twice.)

        No more, &c.

  No more pint o' salt for me, (Twice.)

        No more, &c.

  No more hundred lash for me, (Twice.)

        No more, &c.

  No more mistress' call for me,

        No more, no more,—

  No more mistress' call for me,

        Many tousand go.

Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate date and know nothing of the mode of composition. Allan Ramsay says of the Scotch songs, that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang. And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way. On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song. One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. "Some good sperituals," he said, "are start jess out o' curiosity. I been a-raise a sing, myself, once."

My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out, not the poem alone, but the poet. I implored him to proceed.

"Once we boys," he said, "went for tote some rice and de nigger-driver he keep a-callin' on us; and I say, 'O, de ole nigger-driver!' Den anudder said, 'Fust ting my mammy tole me was, notin' so bad as nigger-driver.' Den I made a sing, just puttin' a word, and den anudder word."

Then he began singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus, as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before. I saw how easily a new "sing" took root among them.

                   XXXVI. THE DRIVER.

  O, de ole nigger-driver!

        O, gwine away!

  Fust ting my mammy tell me,

        O, gwine away!

  Tell me 'bout de nigger-driver,

        O, gwine away!

  Nigger-driver second devil,

        O, gwine away!

  Best ting for do he driver,

        O, gwine away!

  Knock he down and spoil he labor,

        O, gwine away!

It will be observed that, although this song is quite secular in its character, yet its author called it a "spiritual." I heard but two songs among them, at any time, to which they would not, perhaps, have given this generic name. One of these consisted simply in the endless repetition—after the manner of certain college songs—of the mysterious line,—

"Rain fall and wet Becky Lawton."

But who Becky Lawton was, and why she should or should not be wet, and whether the dryness was a reward or a penalty, none could say. I got the impression that, in either case, the event was posthumous, and that there was some tradition of grass not growing over the grave of a sinner; but even this was vague, and all else vaguer.

The other song I heard but once, on a morning when a squad of men came in from picket duty, and chanted it in the most rousing way. It had been a stormy and comfortless night, and the picket station was very exposed. It still rained in the morning when I strolled to the edge of the camp, looking out for the men, and wondering how they had stood it. Presently they came striding along the road, at a great pace, with their shining rubber blankets worn as cloaks around them, the rain streaming from these and from their equally shining faces, which were almost all upon the broad grin, as they pealed out this remarkable ditty:—

HANGMAN JOHNNY.

  O, dey call me Hangman Johnny!

         O, ho! O, ho!

  But I never hang nobody,

         O, hang, boys, hang!

  O dey, call me Hangman Johnny!

         O, ho! O, ho!

  But we'll all hang togedder,

         O, hang, boys, hang!

My presence apparently checked the performance of another verse, beginning, "De buckra 'list for money," apparently in reference to the controversy about the pay-question, then just beginning, and to the more mercenary aims they attributed to the white soldiers. But "Hangman Johnny" remained always a myth as inscrutable as "Becky Lawton."

As they learned all their songs by ear, they often strayed into wholly new versions, which sometimes became popular, and entirely banished the others. This was amusingly the case, for instance, with one phrase in the popular camp-song of "Marching Along," which was entirely new to them until our quartermaster taught it to them, at my request. The words, "Gird on the armor," were to them a stumbling-block, and no wonder, until some ingenious ear substituted, "Guide on de army," which was at once accepted, and became universal.

  "We'll guide on de army, and be marching along"

is now the established version on the Sea Islands.

These quaint religious songs were to the men more than a source of relaxation; they were a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven. I never overheard in camp a profane or vulgar song. With the trifling exceptions given, all had a religious motive, while the most secular melody could not have been more exciting. A few youths from Savannah, who were comparatively men of the world, had learned some of the "Ethiopian Minstrel" ditties, imported from the North. These took no hold upon the mass; and, on the other hand, they sang reluctantly, even on Sunday, the long and short metres of the hymn-books, always gladly yielding to the more potent excitement of their own "spirituals." By these they could sing themselves, as had their fathers before them, out of the contemplation of their own low estate, into the sublime scenery of the Apocalypse. I remember that this minor-keyed pathos used to seem to me almost too sad to dwell upon, while slavery seemed destined to last for generations; but now that their patience has had its perfect work, history cannot afford to lose this portion of its record. There is no parallel instance of an oppressed race thus sustained by the religious sentiment alone. These songs are but the vocal expression of the simplicity of their faith and the sublimity of their long resignation.

CHAPTER X

LIFE AT CAMP SHAW

The Edisto expedition cost me the health and strength of several years. I could say, long after, in the words of one of the men, "I'se been a sickly person, eber since de expeditious." Justice to a strong constitution and good habits compels me, however, to say that, up to the time of my injury, I was almost the only officer in the regiment who had not once been off duty from illness. But at last I had to yield, and went North for a month.

We heard much said, during the war, of wounded officers who stayed unreasonably long at home. I think there were more instances of those who went back too soon. Such at least was my case. On returning to the regiment I found a great accumulation of unfinished business; every member of the field and staff was prostrated by illness or absent on detailed service; two companies had been sent to Hilton Head on fatigue duty, and kept there unexpectedly long: and there was a visible demoralization among the rest, especially from the fact that their pay had just been cut down, in violation of the express pledges of the government. A few weeks of steady sway made all right again; and during those weeks I felt a perfect exhilaration of health, followed by a month or two of complete prostration, when the work was done. This passing, I returned to duty, buoyed up by the fallacious hope that the winter months would set me right again.

Port Royal Island

We had a new camp on Port Royal Island, very pleasantly situated, just out of Beaufort. It stretched nearly to the edge of a shelving bluff, fringed with pines and overlooking the river; below the bluff was a hard, narrow beach, where one might gallop a mile and bathe at the farther end. We could look up and down the curving stream, and watch the few vessels that came and went. Our first encampment had been lower down that same river, and we felt at home.

Colonel Robert G. Shaw 54th Mass.

The new camp was named Camp Shaw, in honor of the noble young officer who had lately fallen at Fort Wagner, under circumstances which had endeared him to all the men. As it happened, they had never seen him, nor was my regiment ever placed within immediate reach of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. This I always regretted, feeling very desirous to compare the military qualities of the Northern and Southern blacks. As it was, the Southern regiments with which the Massachusetts troops were brigaded were hardly a fair specimen of their kind, having been raised chiefly by drafting, and, for this and other causes, being afflicted with perpetual discontent and desertion.

55th Massachusetts Regiment, USCT

We had, of course, looked forward with great interest to the arrival of these new colored regiments, and I had ridden in from the picket-station to see the Fifty-Fourth. Apart from the peculiarity of its material, it was fresh from my own State, and I had relatives and acquaintances among its officers. Governor Andrew, who had formed it, was an old friend, and had begged me, on departure from Massachusetts, to keep him informed as to our experiment I had good reason to believe that my reports had helped to prepare the way for this new battalion, and I had sent him, at his request, some hints as to its formation.*

*COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS,

                    Executive Department,

                                           Boston, February 5, 1863.

To COL. T. W. HIGGINSON, Commanding 1st Regt. S. C. Vols., Port Royal Id., S. C.

COLONEL,—I am under obligations to you for your very interesting letter of January 19th, which I considered to be too important in its testimony to the efficiency of colored troops to be allowed to remain hidden on my files. I therefore placed some portions of it in the hands of Hon. Stephen M. Weld, of Jamaica Plain, for publication, and you will find enclosed the newspaper slip from the "Journal" of February 3d, in which it appeared. During a recent visit at Washington I have obtained permission from the Department of War to enlist colored troops as part of the Massachusetts quota, and I am about to begin to organize a colored infantry regiment, to be numbered the "54th Massachusetts Volunteers."

I shall be greatly obliged by any suggestions which your experience may afford concerning it, and I am determined that it shall serve as a model, in the high character of its officers and the thorough discipline of its men, for all subsequent corps of the like material.

Please present to General Saxton the assurances of my respectful regard.

I have the honor to be, respectfully and obediently yours,

                                                    JOHN A. ANDREW,

                                              Governor of Massachusetts.

In the streets of Beaufort I had met Colonel Shaw, riding with his lieutenant-colonel and successor, Edward Hallowell, and had gone back with them to share their first meal in camp. I should have known Shaw anywhere by his resemblance to his kindred, nor did it take long to perceive that he shared their habitual truthfulness and courage. Moreover, he and Hallowell had already got beyond the commonplaces of inexperience, in regard to colored troops, and, for a wonder, asked only sensible questions. For instance, he admitted the mere matter of courage to be settled, as regarded the colored troops, and his whole solicitude bore on this point, Would they do as well in line-of-battle as they had already done in more irregular service, and on picket and guard duty? Of this I had, of course, no doubt, nor, I think, had he; though I remember his saying something about the possibility of putting them between two fires in case of need, and so cutting off their retreat. I should never have thought of such a project, but I could not have expected bun to trust them as I did, until he had been actually under fire with them. That, doubtless, removed all his anxieties, if he really had any.

This interview had occurred on the 4th of June. Shaw and his regiment had very soon been ordered to Georgia, then to Morris Island; Fort Wagner had been assaulted, and he had been killed. Most of the men knew about the circumstances of his death, and many of them had subscribed towards a monument for him,—a project which originated with General Saxton, and which was finally embodied in the "Shaw School-house" at Charleston. So it gave us all pleasure to name this camp for him, as its predecessor had been named for General Saxton.

The new camp was soon brought into good order. The men had great ingenuity in building screens and shelters of light poles, filled in with the gray moss from the live-oaks. The officers had vestibules built in this way, before all their tents; the cooking-places were walled round in the same fashion; and some of the wide company-streets had sheltered sidewalks down the whole line of tents. The sergeant on duty at the entrance of the camp had a similar bower, and the architecture culminated in a "Praise-House" for school and prayer-meetings, some thirty feet in diameter. As for chimneys and flooring, they were provided with that magic and invisible facility which marks the second year of a regiment's life.

That officer is happy who, besides a constitutional love of adventure, has also a love for the details of camp life, and likes to bring them to perfection. Nothing but a hen with her chickens about her can symbolize the content I felt on getting my scattered companies together, after some temporary separation on picket or fatigue duty. Then we went to work upon the nest. The only way to keep a camp in order is to set about everything as if you expected to stay there forever; if you stay, you get the comfort of it; if ordered away in twenty-four hours, you forget all wasted labor in the excitement of departure. Thus viewed, a camp is a sort of model farm or bit of landscape gardening; there is always some small improvement to be made, a trench, a well, more shade against the sun, an increased vigilance in sweeping. Then it is pleasant to take care of the men, to see them happy, to hear them purr.

Then the duties of inspection and drill, suspended during active service, resume their importance with a month or two of quiet. It really costs unceasing labor to keep a regiment in perfect condition and ready for service. The work is made up of minute and endless details, like a bird's pruning her feathers or a cat's licking her kittens into their proper toilet. Here are eight hundred men, every one of whom, every Sunday morning at farthest, must be perfectly soigne in all personal proprieties; he must exhibit himself provided with every article of clothing, buttons, shoe-strings, hooks and eyes, company letter, regimental number, rifle, bayonet, bayonet-scabbard, cap-pouch, cartridge-box, cartridge-box belt, cartridge-box belt-plate, gun-sling, canteen, haversack, knapsack, packed according to rule, forty cartridges, forty percussion caps; and every one of these articles polished to the highest brightness or blackness as the case may be, and moreover hung or slung or tied or carried in precisely the correct manner.

What a vast and formidable housekeeping is here, my patriotic sisters! Consider, too, that every corner of the camp is to be kept absolutely clean and ready for exhibition at the shortest notice; hospital, stables, guard-house, cook-houses, company tents, must all be brought to perfection, and every square inch of this "farm of four acres" must look as smooth as an English lawn, twice a day. All this, beside the discipline and the drill and the regimental and company books, which must keep rigid account of all these details; consider all this, and then wonder no more that officers and men rejoice in being ordered on active service, where a few strokes of the pen will dispose of all this multiplicity of trappings as "expended in action" or "lost in service."

For one, the longer I remained in service, the better I appreciated the good sense of most of the regular army niceties. True, these things must all vanish when the time of action comes, but it is these things that have prepared you for action. Of course, if you dwell on them only, military life becomes millinery life alone. Kinglake says that the Russian Grand-Duke Constantine, contemplating his beautiful toy-regiments, said that he dreaded war, for he knew that it would spoil the troops. The simple fact is, that a soldier is like the weapon he carries; service implies soiling, but you must have it clean in advance, that when soiled it may be of some use.

The men had that year a Christmas present which they enjoyed to the utmost,—furnishing the detail, every other day, for provost-guard duty in Beaufort. It was the only military service which they had ever shared within the town, and it moreover gave a sense of self-respect to be keeping the peace of their own streets. I enjoyed seeing them put on duty those mornings; there was such a twinkle of delight in their eyes, though their features were immovable. As the "reliefs" went round, posting the guard, under charge of a corporal, one could watch the black sentinels successively dropped and the whites picked up,—gradually changing the complexion, like Lord Somebody's black stockings which became white stockings,—till at last there was only a squad of white soldiers obeying the "Support Arms! Forward, March!" of a black corporal.

Then, when once posted, they glorified their office, you may be sure. Discipline had grown rather free-and-easy in the town about that time, and it is said that the guard-house never was so full within human memory as after their first tour of duty. I remember hearing that one young reprobate, son of a leading Northern philanthropist in those parts, was much aggrieved at being taken to the lock-up merely because he was found drunk in the streets. "Why," said he, "the white corporals always showed me the way home." And I can testify that, after an evening party, some weeks later, I beard with pleasure the officers asking eagerly for the countersign. "Who has the countersign?" said they. "The darkeys are on guard to-night, and we must look out for our lives." Even after a Christmas party at General Saxton's, the guard at the door very properly refused to let the ambulance be brought round from the stable for the ladies because the driver had not the countersign.

One of the sergeants of the guard, on one of these occasions, made to one who questioned his authority an answer that could hardly have been improved. The questioner had just been arrested for some offence.

"Know what dat mean?" said the indignant sergeant, pointing to the chevrons on his own sleeve. "Dat mean Guv'ment." Volumes could not have said more, and the victim collapsed. The thing soon settled itself, and nobody remembered to notice whether the face beside the musket of a sentinel were white or black. It meant Government, all the same.

The men were also indulged with several raids on the mainland, under the direction of Captain J. E. Bryant, of the Eighth Maine, the most experienced scout in that region, who was endeavoring to raise by enlistment a regiment of colored troops.

Freed slaves La.

On one occasion Captains Whitney and Heasley, with their companies, penetrated nearly to Pocataligo, capturing some pickets and bringing away all the slaves of a plantation,—the latter operation being entirely under the charge of Sergeant Harry Williams (Co. K), without the presence of any white man. The whole command was attacked on the return by a rebel force, which turned out to be what was called in those regions a "dog-company," consisting of mounted riflemen with half a dozen trained bloodhounds. The men met these dogs with their bayonets, killed four or five of their old tormentors with great relish, and brought away the carcass of one. I had the creature skinned, and sent the skin to New York to be stuffed and mounted, meaning to exhibit it at the Sanitary Commission Fair in Boston; but it spoiled on the passage. These quadruped allies were not originally intended as "dogs of war," but simply to detect fugitive slaves, and the men were delighted at this confirmation of their tales of dog-companies, which some of the officers had always disbelieved.

Captain Bryant, during his scouting adventures, had learned to outwit these bloodhounds, and used his skill in eluding escape, during another expedition of the same kind. He was sent with Captain Metcalf's company far up the Combahee River to cut the telegraphic wires and intercept despatches. Our adventurous chaplain and a telegraphic operator went with the party. They ascended the river, cut the wires, and read the despatches for an hour or two. Unfortunately, the attached wire was too conspicuously hung, and was seen by a passenger on the railway train in passing. The train was stopped and a swift stampede followed; a squad of cavalry was sent in pursuit, and our chaplain, with Lieutenant Osborn, of Bryant's projected regiment, were captured; also one private,—the first of our men who had ever been taken prisoners. In spite of an agreement at Washington to the contrary, our chaplain was held as prisoner of war, the only spiritual adviser in uniform, so far as I know, who had that honor. I do not know but his reverence would have agreed with Scott's pirate-lieutenant, that it was better to live as plain Jack Bunce than die as Frederick Altamont; but I am very sure that he would rather have been kept prisoner to the close of the war, as a combatant, than have been released on parole as a non-resistant.

After his return, I remember, he gave the most animated accounts of the whole adventure, of which he had enjoyed every instant, from the first entrance on the enemy's soil to the final capture. I suppose we should all like to tap the telegraphic wires anywhere and read our neighbor's messages, if we could only throw round this process the dignity of a Sacred Cause. This was what our good chaplain had done, with the same conscientious zest with which he had conducted his Sunday foraging in Florida. But he told me that nothing so impressed him on the whole trip as the sudden transformation in the black soldier who was taken prisoner with him. The chaplain at once adopted the policy, natural to him, of talking boldly and even defiantly to his captors, and commanding instead of beseeching. He pursued the same policy always and gained by it, he thought. But the negro adopted the diametrically opposite policy, also congenial to his crushed race,—all the force seemed to go out of him, and he surrendered himself like a tortoise to be kicked and trodden upon at their will. This manly, well-trained soldier at once became a slave again, asked no questions, and, if any were asked, made meek and conciliatory answers. He did not know, nor did any of us know, whether he would be treated as a prisoner of war, or shot, or sent to a rice-plantation. He simply acted according to the traditions of his race, as did the chaplain on his side. In the end the soldier's cunning was vindicated by the result; he escaped, and rejoined us in six months, while the chaplain was imprisoned for a year.

The men came back very much exhausted from this expedition, and those who were in the chaplain's squad narrowly escaped with their lives. One brave fellow had actually not a morsel to eat for four days, and then could keep nothing on his stomach for two days more, so that his life was despaired of; and yet he brought all his equipments safe into camp. Some of these men had led such wandering lives, in woods and swamps, that to hunt them was like hunting an otter; shyness and concealment had grown to be their second nature.

After these little episodes came two months of peace. We were clean, comfortable, quiet, and consequently discontented. It was therefore with eagerness that we listened to a rumor of a new Florida expedition, in which we might possibly take a hand.

CHAPTER XI

FLORIDA AGAIN

Let me revert once more to my diary, for a specimen of the sharp changes and sudden disappointments that may come to troops in service. But for a case or two of varioloid in the regiment, we should have taken part in the battle of Olustee, and should have had (as was reported) the right of the line. At any rate we should have shared the hard knocks and the glory, which were distributed pretty freely to the colored troops then and there. The diary will give, better than can any continuous narrative, our ups and down of expectation in those days.

                                 "CAMP SHAW, BEAUFORT, S. C.,

                                              February 7, 1864.

"Great are the uncertainties of military orders! Since our recall from Jacksonville we have had no such surprises as came to us on Wednesday night. It was our third day of a new tour of duty at the picket station. We had just got nicely settled,—men well tented, with good floors, and in high spirits, officers at out-stations all happy, Mrs. —— coming to stay with her husband, we at head-quarters just in order, house cleaned, moss-garlands up, camellias and jessamines in the tin wash-basins, baby in bliss;—our usual run of visitors had just set in, two Beaufort captains and a surgeon had just risen from a late dinner after a flag of truce, General Saxton and his wife had driven away but an hour or two before, we were all sitting about busy, with a great fire blazing, Mrs. D. had just remarked triumphantly, 'Last time I had but a mouthful here, and now I shall be here three weeks'—when—

"In dropped, like a bombshell, a despatch announcing that we were to be relieved by the Eighth Maine, the next morning, as General Gillmore had sent an order that we should be ready for departure from Beaufort at any moment.

"Conjectures, orders, packing, sending couriers to out-stations, were the employments of the evening; the men received the news with cheers, and we all came in next morning."

                                                         "February 11, 1864.

"For three days we have watched the river, and every little steamboat that comes up for coal brings out spy-glasses and conjectures, and 'Dar's de Fourf New Hampshire,'—for when that comes, it is said, we go. Meanwhile we hear stirring news from Florida, and the men are very impatient to be off. It is remarkable how much more thoroughly they look at things as soldiers than last year, and how much less as home-bound men,—the South-Carolinians, I mean, for of course the Floridians would naturally wish to go to Florida.

"But in every way I see the gradual change in them, sometimes with a sigh, as parents watch their children growing up and miss the droll speeches and the confiding ignorance of childhood. Sometimes it comes over me with a pang that they are growing more like white men,—less naive and less grotesque. Still, I think there is enough of it to last, and that their joyous buoyancy, at least, will hold out while life does.

"As for our destination, our greatest fear is of finding ourselves posted at Hilton Head and going no farther. As a dashing Irish officer remarked the other day, 'If we are ordered away anywhere, I hope it will be either to go to Florida or else stay here!'"

"Sublime uncertainties again!

"After being ordered in from picket, under marching orders; after the subsequent ten days of uncertainty; after watching every steamboat that came up the river, to see if the Fourth New Hampshire was on board,—at last the regiment came.

"Then followed another break; there was no transportation to take us. At last a boat was notified.

"Then General Saxton, as anxious to keep us as was the regiment to go, played his last card in small-pox, telegraphing to department head-quarters that we had it dangerously in the regiment. (N. B. All varioloid, light at that, and besides, we always have it.)

"Then the order came to leave behind the sick and those who had been peculiarly exposed, and embark the rest next day.

"Great was the jubilee! The men were up, I verily believe, by three in the morning, and by eight the whole camp was demolished or put in wagons, and we were on our way. The soldiers of the Fourth New Hampshire swarmed in; every board was swept away by them; there had been a time when colored boards (if I may delicately so express myself) were repudiated by white soldiers, but that epoch had long since passed. I gave my new tent-frame, even the latch, to Colonel Bell; ditto Lieutenant-Colonel to Lieutenant-Colonel.

"Down we marched, the men singing 'John Brown' and 'Marching Along' and 'Gwine in de Wilderness'; women in tears and smiles lined the way. We halted opposite the dear General's; we cheered, he speeched, I speeched, we all embraced symbolically, and cheered some more. Then we went to work at the wharf; vast wagon-loads of tents, rations, ordnance, and what-not disappeared in the capacious maw of the Delaware. In the midst of it all came riding down General Saxton with a despatch from Hilton Head:—

"'If you think the amount of small-pox in the First South Carolina Volunteers sufficient, the order will be countermanded.'

"'What shall I say?' quoth the guilty General, perceiving how preposterously too late the negotiation was reopened.

"'Say, sir?' quoth I. 'Say that we are on board already and the small-pox left behind. Say we had only thirteen cases, chiefly varioloid, and ten almost well.'

"Our blood was up with a tremendous morning's work done, and, rather than turn back, we felt ready to hold down Major-General Gillmore, commanding department, and all his staff upon the wharf, and vaccinate them by main force.

"So General Saxton rode away, and we worked away. Just as the last wagon-load but one was being transferred to the omnivorous depths of the Delaware,—which I should think would have been filled ten times over with what we had put into it,—down rode the General with a fiendish joy in his bright eyes and held out a paper,—one of the familiar rescripts from headquarters.

"'The marching orders of the First South Carolina Volunteers are hereby countermanded.'

"'Major Trowbridge,' said I, 'will you give my compliments to Lieutenant Hooper, somewhere in the hold of that steamer, and direct him to set his men at work to bring out every individual article which they have carried hi.' And I sat down on a pile of boards.

"'You will return to your old camping-ground, Colonel,' said the General, placidly. 'Now,' he added with serene satisfaction, 'we will have some brigade drills!'

"Brigade drills! Since Mr. Pickwick, with his heartless tomato-sauce and warming-pans, there had been nothing so aggravating as to try to solace us, who were as good as on board ship and under way,—nay, in imagination as far up the St. John's as Pilatka at least,—with brigade drills! It was very kind and flattering in him to wish to keep us. But unhappily we had made up our minds to go.

"Never did officer ride at the head of a battalion of more wobegone, spiritless wretches than I led back from Beaufort that day. 'When I march down to de landin',' said one of the men afterwards, 'my knapsack full of feathers. Comin' back, he lead!' And the lead, instead of the feathers, rested on the heart of every one.

"As if the disappointment itself were not sufficient, we had to return to our pretty camp, accustomed to its drawing-room order, and find it a desert. Every board gone from the floors, the screens torn down from the poles, all the little conveniences scattered, and, to crown all, a cold breeze such as we had not known since New-Year's Day blowing across the camp and flooding everything with dust. I sincerely hope the regiment would never behave after a defeat as they behaved then. Every man seemed crushed, officers and soldiers alike; when they broke ranks, they went and lay down like sheep where their tents used to be, or wandered disconsolately about, looking for their stray belongings. The scene was so infinitely dolorous that it gradually put me in the highest spirits; the ludicrousness of the whole affair was so complete, there was nothing to do but laugh. The horrible dust blew till every officer had some black spot on his nose which paralyzed pathos. Of course the only way was to set them all at work as soon as possible; and work them we did,—I at the camp and the Major at the wharf,—loading and unloading wagons and just reversing all which the morning had done.

"The New Hampshire men were very considerate, and gave back most of what they had taken, though many of our men were really too delicate or proud to ask or even take what they had once given to soldiers or to the colored people. I had no such delicacy about my tent-frame, and by night things had resumed something of their old aspect, and cheerfulness was in part restored. Yet long after this I found one first sergeant absolutely in tears,—a Florida man, most of whose kindred were up the St. John's. It was very natural that the men from that region should feel thus bitterly, but it shows how much of the habit of soldiers they have all acquired, that the South Carolina men, who were leaving the neighborhood of their families for an indefinite time, were just as eager to go, and not one deserted, though they knew it for a week beforehand. No doubt my precarious health makes it now easier for me personally to remain here—easier on reflection at least—than for the others. At the same time Florida is fascinating, and offers not only adventure, but the command of a brigade. Certainly at the last moment there was not a sacrifice I would not have made rather than wrench myself and others away from the expedition. We are, of course, thrown back into the old uncertainty, and if the small-pox subsides (and it is really diminishing decidedly) we may yet come in at the wrong end of the Florida affair."

                                                            "February 19.

"Not a bit of it! This morning the General has ridden up radiant, has seen General Gillmore, who has decided not to order us to Florida at all, nor withdraw any of this garrison. Moreover, he says that all which is intended in Florida is done,—that there will be no advance to Tallahassee, and General Seymour will establish a camp of instruction in Jacksonville. Well, if that is all, it is a lucky escape."

We little dreamed that on that very day the march toward Olustee was beginning. The battle took place next day, and I add one more extract to show how the news reached Beaufort.

                                                            "February 23, 1864.

"There was the sound of revelry by night at a ball in Beaufort last night, in a new large building beautifully decorated. All the collected flags of the garrison hung round and over us, as if the stars and stripes were devised for an ornament alone. The array of uniforms was such that a civilian became a distinguished object, much more a lady. All would have gone according to the proverbial marriage-bell, I suppose, had there not been a slight palpable shadow over all of us from hearing vague stories of a lost battle in Florida, and from the thought that perhaps the very ambulances in which we rode to the ball were ours only until the wounded or the dead might tenant them.

"General Gillmore only came, I supposed, to put a good face upon the matter. He went away soon, and General Saxton went; then came a rumor that the Cosmopolitan had actually arrived with wounded, but still the dance went on. There was nothing unfeeling about it,—one gets used to things,—when suddenly, in the midst of the 'Lancers,' there came a perfect hush, the music ceasing, a few surgeons went hastily to and fro, as if conscience-stricken (I should think they might have been),—then there 'waved a mighty shadow in,' as in Uhland's 'Black Knight,' and as we all stood wondering we were 'ware of General Saxton, who strode hastily down the hall, his pale face very resolute, and looking almost sick with anxiety. He had just been on board the steamer; there were two hundred and fifty wounded men just arrived, and the ball must end. Not that there was anything for us to do; but the revel was mistimed, and must be ended; it was wicked to be dancing, with such a scene of suffering near by.

"Of course the ball was instantly broken up, though with some murmurings and some longings of appetite, on the part of some, toward the wasted supper.

"Later, I went on board the boat. Among the long lines of wounded, black and white intermingled, there was the wonderful quiet which usually prevails on such occasions. Not a sob nor a groan, except from those undergoing removal. It is not self-control, but chiefly the shock to the system produced by severe wounds, especially gunshot wounds, and which usually keeps the patient stiller at first than any later time.

"A company from my regiment waited on the wharf, in their accustomed dusky silence, and I longed to ask them what they thought of our Florida disappointment now? In view of what they saw, did they still wish we had been there? I confess that in presence of all that human suffering, I could not wish it. But I would not have suggested any such thought to them.

"I found our kind-hearted ladies, Mrs. Chamberlin and Mrs. Dewhurst, on board the steamer, but there was nothing for them to do, and we walked back to camp in the radiant moonlight; Mrs. Chamberlin more than ever strengthened in her blushing woman's philosophy, 'I don't care who wins the laurels, provided we don't!'"

                                                                "February 29.

"But for a few trivial cases of varioloid, we should certainly have been in that disastrous fight. We were confidently expected for several days at Jacksonville, and the commanding general told Colonel Hallowell that we, being the oldest colored regiment, would have the right of the line. This was certainly to miss danger and glory very closely."

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, 248 South 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

Wartime Letters of Seth Rogers, 33d USCT

Florida History Online

War-Time Letters From Seth Rogers, M.D. Surgeon of the First South Carolina Afterwards the Thirty-third U.S.C.T. 1862-1863.

Letters

Camp Saxon, Beaufort, S.C., December 27, 1862.

There is a little more of solid reality in this work of camp life than I have found in any previous experience. You remember my delight in the life of ship surgeon, when I had three hundred and fifty of the lowest Irish to care for. Multiply that delight by ten and you will approximate to what I get among these children of the tropics. A more childlike, jovial, devotional, musical, shrewd, amusing, set of beings never lived. Be true to them and they will be devoted to you. I leave all of my things in tent unguarded and at loose ends as I could never think of doing in a white regiment, and if I ever lose anything you shall be informed. Their religious devotion is more natural than any I ever witnessed. At this moment the air is full of melody from the tents, of prayer and hymns mingled with the hearty yah, yah, of the playful outsiders.

Last night I had too many business letters to get off in today’s mail to allow me time for writing half of what I wished, and since then I have lived so long that much has been lost in the ages.

I want, once and for all, to say that Col. Higginson is splendid - pardon the McClellan word - beyond even my anticipation, which, you know, has for years been quite exalted. I stood by General Saxton - who is a West Pointer - the other night, witnessing the dress parade and was delighted to hear him say that he knew of no other man who could have magically brought these blacks under the military discipline that makes our camp one of the most enviable. Should we by possibility ever increase to a brigade I can already foresee that our good Colonel is destined to be the Brigadier General.

I am about selecting my orderly from among the privates, just now a Lieutenant brought little “Charlie” before me; a boy of fourteen or fifteen, who saw his master shot at Hilton Head without weeping over it; who had some of his own teeth knocked out at the same time. He has always taken care of his master and knows so many things that I shall probably avail myself of his bright eyes and willing hands. We have had an old uncle “Tiff”, whom I should take if I had the time and strength to wait upon him when he should get too tired to wait upon me. He is a dear old man who prays day and night.

I have forgotten whether I have written that the mocking- bird sings by day and the cricket by night. To me it is South America over again. The live oak grows to enormous size. Today I made thirty of my longest paces across the diameter of the branches of one of these handsome trees. The beautiful gray moss pendent everywhere from its branches gave the most decided impression of fatherliness and age.

Co. H. kindly invited James [Captain James S. Rogers, Dr. Rogers’s nephew] and me to mess with him and the Adjutant, thus we have a pleasant little table under the supervision of “William and Hattie,” in an old home just outside of camp. I am yet sharing the young captain’s tent, but in a day or two shall have my own pitched. . . . We are not more than fifty rods from the shore. Our landing is remarkable for its old fort, built of shells and cement in 16—by Jean Paul de la Ribaudiere. Its preservation is almost equal to the monuments perpetuated by Roman cement. The chance for wild game here is excellent, and in anticipation I enjoy it much, while in reality I doubt whether I shall ever find time for such recreation, and actual profit to our stomachs. It is not very easy for us to get fresh meat here, but we shall not suffer, because oysters are plentiful and fresh.  [In 1562, an ill-fated French settlement was established there by Jean Ribaut (also Ribault);  in 1564 René de Laudonnière, Ribaut’s subordinate, established Fort Caroline at today’s Jacksonville, Florida. The latter settlement was destroyed by Spaniards under Pedro Menéndes de Avilés in 1565.]

Dr. John Milton Hawks, surgeon, United States Colored Infantry. Like Seth Rogers, Dr. Hawks was an avid abolitionist who volunteered for service in a war that he prayed would bring an end to slavery in the United States. The wife of Hawks, Esther Hill Hawks, was also a medical doctor and a life-long abolitionist. Courtesy of Florida State Archives.

Our Chaplain is a great worker, and has a good influence over the soldiers. . . . Mr. Fowler, who was, not long ago at Cambridge. [James H. Fowler, an ordained Unitarian minister, was a dedicated abolitionist before the war. He was educated at Dartmouth and Harvard Divinity School. His brother, Thomas D. Fowler, also an ordained Unitarian minister, became chaplain to another United States Colored Infantry regiment.]

My first assistant surgeon is Dr. Hawks [John Milton Hawks] of Manchester, N.H. He is a radical anti-slavery man, somewhat older than I, and has a large medical experience and in addition has been hospital surgeon at Beaufort during several months. He has been rigidly examined by three regimental surgeons from New England and they have given him a very flattering certificate of qualification. I consider myself fortunate in having a man so well fitted for the place. The men and officers like him and I fancy will take to him quite as much as to me. The second assistant is not yet decided upon, but will probably be a young man who has already been several months in the army. The hospital steward has also had experience. All this accumulation of army experience around me makes me feel particularly green, but I guess I can work up to the sticking point. It is ever so much easier for me than to go in with green hands.

December 31, 1862

I examine from sixty to eighty men every morning and make prescriptions for those who need them. Doing this and visiting those in the hospital, usually keeps me busy from breakfast to dinner, after that my assistants can “see care” ordinarily of everybody till next morning. My afternoons are almost equally busy in contriving ways to keep the soldiers from getting sick, improving my hospital, etc. We have to make everything as we go on. The hospital is the upper floor of an old cotton gin building. I had the machinery moved and bedsteads made, beds made and filled with the dry, course grass that the soldiers brought on their heads from the plains, and eight sick men were put in there last Tuesday. It was a hard day’s work, but the men were very sick and I had all the help that could work in the building. We have no such thing as pillows or sheets, but we have plenty of blankets, and the knapsacks answer nicely for pillows. Dr. Hawks had already got a good fire- place in the room and now everything is as systematic, and almost as comfortable, as in any hospital. . . . Some of our officers and men have been off and captured some oxen, and today all hands have been getting ready for a great barbecue, which we are to have tomorrow. They have killed ten oxen which are now being roasted whole over great pits containing live coals made from burning logs in them.

January 1, 1863

This is the evening of the most eventful day of my life. Our barbeque was a most wonderful success. Two steamboats came loaded with people from Beaufort, St. Helena Island and Hilton Head. Among the visitors were some of my new acquaintances, [including] my friend, Mr. Hall of the voyage Delaware. But the dearest friend I found among them was Miss [Charlotte] Forten, whom you remember. She is a teacher of the freed children on St. Helena Island. Gen Saxton and his father and others came from Beaufort, and several cavalry officers hovered around the outskirts of our multitude of black soldiers and civilians, and in the centre of all was the speakers’ stand where the General and our Colonel and some others, with the band, performed the ceremonies of the day. Several good speeches were made, but the most impressive scene was that which occurred at the presentation of the Dr. Cheever flag to our regiment. After the presentation speech had been made, and just as Col. Higginson advanced to take the flag and respond, a negro woman standing near began to sing “America”, and soon many voices of freedmen and women joined in the beautiful hymn, and sang it so touchingly that every one was thrilled beyond measure. Nothing could have been more unexpected or more inspiring. The President’s proclamation and General Saxton’s New Year’s greeting had been read, and this spontaneous outburst of love and loyalty to a country that has heretofore so terribly wronged these blacks, was the birth of a new hope in the honesty of her intention. I most earnestly trust they not hope in vain. [Charlotte Forten (1837-1914), a Philadelphia-born African American teacher whose parents and grandparents were avid abolitionists, was one of the first teachers to travel to the Sea Islands after Union forces were established there.]

Col. H. was so much inspired by the remarkable thought of, and singing of, the hymn that he made one of his most effective speeches. Then came Gen. Saxton with a most earnest and brotherly speech to the blacks and then Mrs. Frances D. Gage, and finally all joined in the John Brown hymn, and then to dinner. A hundred things of interest occurred which I have not time to relate. Everybody was happy in the bright sunshine, and in the great hope. The ten oxen were hearty relish and barrels of molasses and water and vinegar and ginger were drunk to wash them down. Mr. Hall, Miss Forten and some others took dinner with us. [Frances Dana Barker Gage was the mother of eight children, four of whom served in the Union army, and an avid abolition, temperance, and women’s rights activist. She served in the U.S. Sanitary Commission and as superintendent of a South Carolina freedmen’s school.]

January 2, 1863

I did not observe any reporters at our barbeque yesterday, but I presume some of the journals will contain enough to make it unnecessary for me to write more than my letter of yesterday. I will, however, reiterate the statement that it was the most eventful day of my life. To know what I mean you must stand in the midst of the disenthralled and feel the inspiration of their birth into freedom. For once I heartily cheered for stars and stripes. There is nothing in history more touching and beautiful than the spontaneous outburst of these freed men and women just at the moment when out gallant colonel was receiving the flag of the regiment. None of us had ever heard them sing America, and the most infinite depth and tenderness of “My country ‘tis of thee Sweet land of Liberty,” was inspiring to the last degree. I doubt if our Col. ever spoke so well and he justly attributed inspiration to the unexpected singing of the hymn.

Evening Jan. 3, 1863

We are having summer days and October nights, with the white frost covering the sand of our camp- ground in the morning.

I wish I could send you a photograph of my orderly. I had my choice of a boy from the regiment and selected Wiley Rohan, a shining black boy of fifteen, with handsome eyes, and teeth so perfect and beautiful that I always like to see his smiling face. He is very bright and tractable, with great fund of active willingness. I questioned him relative to the difference between an orderly and a servant, and found him entirely posted, but when I asked if he preferred I should get another boy, who had not enlisted, for my servant, to having extra compensation himself for doing the little things needful for me, he at once decided to fill the two positions. I doubt not we shall get greatly attached to each other. He knows all about managing a boat, has taken care of a horse and has also been taught to cook.

From what I have heretofore written I hope you have not inferred that our regiment is made up of saints. Now and then a soldier among us is not much superior in morals to members of a white regiment. The principle crime here is that of desertion. Today we have had a melancholy result of which will be likely to exert a salutary influence upon the regiment.

Serg’t Rivers [Prince Rivers], our Provost Sergeant, is as black as the ace of spades and a man of remarkable executive ability. He is the one from whom some Philadelphia soldiers attempted to strip the sergeants’ stripes and found wiser and safer to leave him alone. It is his duty here to keep the prisoners at work and yesterday afternoon he left them cutting wood outside the camp while he was at dress parade. Three escaped in spite of the two soldiers who were guarding them. It was already sunset when he started with an armed posse to search for them and as the Col. and I walked out a mile from the camp, it seemed to us impossible that search could avail anything in a country so level and so filled with woodland jungle. But about noon today the party returned with one prisoner in a cart, fatally wounded by a gunshot in the abdomen. The poor fellow would not halt at command and in consequence must linger out a few hours of mortal suffering. This sad contingency of military discipline seems to me just, but falling as it does upon a member of that race so long denied common justice by my own, I cannot help feeling a peculiar sadness about it. Serg’t Rivers is off again with twenty eight men, in search of the others. I most earnestly hope that if found they will surrender. The feeling through the regiment in regard to the fatal result is that the deserter received his just punishment.

Sunday, Jan. 4, 1863

The poor fellow who was shot yesterday died at sunset this evening. His desertion and its consequences made an impressive text for the religious services today. We had service in the grove, using our New Year’ platform for the pulpit and the officers, while the soldiers and women and children, under the live oaks with their pendant mosses, made the missionary pictures seem almost respectable. I doubt, however, whether the American Board of Foreign Missions ever instructed their missionaries to preach the radical doctrines of human brotherhood taught in our camp. Brotherhood in Christ and brotherhood on earth are not always the same in practice. . . .

My young orderly, who should be named Ariel, remarked today that he had all his life been accustomed to take his master’s family out in a boat, till one day he thought he would take his own family off in the same way. He is from Florida.

Jan. 6, 1863

For the first time in the six weeks Colonel H. has been in camp, he to-day went to Beaufort. He returns with a more civilized air and informs me that there are yet many people outside our camp. The rebel pickets above came down to the river bank this morning and announced that an armistice had been agreed upon for six months and therefore laid aside their guns and sat on the bank, fishing. Their statement is not credited because nobody believes the insanity of the nation has taken such a disastrous turn.

I am steadily becoming acquainted with very remarkable men whose lives in slavery and whose heroism in getting out of it, deepens my faith in negro character and intellect. The difference in physiognomy among them now seems to me quite as marked as among the whites and the physiognomy of their diseases is quite apparent to me.

Jan. 9, 1863

This morning, the adjutant and I, with eight oarsmen, went down to Hilton Head in our surf boat, The distance cannot be far from twelve miles and the trip is a charming one, though the shores are wanting in those rugged qualities which help to make the difference in character between the North and the South. Our black soldiers sang as they rowed - not the songs of common sailors - but hymns of praise mingled with those pathetic longings for a better world, so constant with these people. There are times when I could quite enjoy more earthly songs from them, even a touch of the wicked, but this generation must live and die in sadness. The sun can never shine for them as for a nation of freemen whose fathers were not slaves.

My special business in going to Hilton Head was to test the honesty of a certain medical purveyor, who does not incline to honor the requisitions of the surgeon of the 1st Reg. S.C.Vol’s. He has not yet heard of the popularity of black regiments, but Uncle Samuel will teach him that, as well as a few other things. But it will be too late for him to repent in this world when he shall have learned the lesson.

The “Flora” - General Saxton’s steamer - came down from Beaufort and we were towed by her to our camp. I met the General on the steamer and was delighted to find him in that mood over the purveyor’s second refusal, which will work out a line of retributive justice. He read to me a letter just received by him from Secretary Stanton [Edwin McMasters Stanton, Secretary of War], which authorizes me to draw direct from New York. So we shall be all right within two weeks, I hope. In addition to all my other duties, I should be quite like to prescribe for some of those pro-slavery scamps who disgrace the federal shoulder-straps. This particular case was polite enough to me, for which I was sorry. When Gen Hunter gets here there will be a bowing and scraping to the anti-slavery men that awaken wickedness in my heart.

I keep in capital working condition. My tent is up and I shall be in it as soon as I get time to “move.”

Jan. 10, 1863

I have been here two and a half weeks and still am occupying James’s tent, so little time have I far found for getting my own in readiness.

I am just now busy in trying to discover the causes of such an excess of pleurisy and pneumonia in our camp, as compared with white regiments. Thus far I can only get the reiteration of the fact that negroes are more subject to these diseases than are the whites. I should be very sorry to find that their nightly “praise meetings,” or “shouts,” acted an important role in the development of these diseases, yet, thus far our gravest cases are the most religious. It would be a sad but curious coincidence, if while the Colonel and young captain are diligently taking notes of the songs and hymns of the soldiers, the surgeon should note a marked fatality resulting from this sweet religious expression. We shall see. It is as difficult to inculcate temperance in religion here, among these sun-burned children, as to introduce it into a Methodist camp meeting. I hope we shall not have to shut in religious expression by military rules.

Speaking of coincidences, reminds me that I found the steward, this morning, putting up prescriptions in bits of the “Liberator”. I don’t believe Mr. Garrison’s editorials ever before came so near these black soldiers. I wondered if the powers would not have some magic power conveyed to them. South Carolina is getting a simultaneous doctoring of body and soul.

Sunday Evening, Jan. 11, 1863

At service today the President’s proclamation was read and the Colonel asked all who wanted to fight for liberty, to say “I”: The response would have satisfied greater enthusiasts then uncle Abraham.

I have lost more than one hour’s sleep since coming here, listening to the coughing of the soldiers in the night and trying to contrive plans to meet the more obvious causes. In a climate so damp and with change of temperature so great between midday and midnight, I have steadily felt the importance of some means by which the soldier’s A tents could, with their clothing, be more effectually dried and purified than is ordinarily done by the sun. To have a fire in a tent 7 x 8 for four men, without fireplace, stove or even an opening in the top, did not seem quite feasible, but we are trying in James’s and one other company, an experiment which is likely to prove a success. Remembering the antiseptic influence of wood smoke, and also the primitive cabins from which many of our people came, we have, this evening, had fires built in the centre of the tents, the floor boards in the middle being removed and a hole being dug in the sand for the fuel. The soldiers enjoy this scheme. After the smoke ceases, the beds of coals make the tents seem very cozy. The Colonel is not backward in favoring every hygienic measure that offers any good to the soldiers. A few days experiment with two companies will settle the question by comparison of sick lists.

Monday Evening, Jan. 12, 1863

Tonight I am seated in my own tent, and my orderly is patiently practicing on a copy of his name on the other side of my little hard pine table. I have a double tent, two joined, with a rough floor elevated about a foot from the sand and open at the sides so that the wind can whistle under, as well as over, my two rooms. These rooms are each nine feet square and parted by the folds of the two tents. I have room enough for a large family and it seems wrong that I should have so much, while those little 7 x 8 tents of the soldiers, literally steam with four bodies in them. But with the clothing allowed by Government, they could never be comfortable alone at night. On the whole, I like these little tents for soldiers better then those which receive a larger number. I see no way of isolating soldiers into decency. The unnatural life must, of course, have a few material comforts. On the other hand the out of door life compensates for many violations of wholesome laws. I find our officers universally gaining flesh. . . . Instead of a fireplace, I have found a little stove, with so much draft that I can have all the front open and thus get the light which makes a tent so pleasant and social. We have little, select euchre parties, now and then. It is to be regretted that the Colonel’s education does not extend beyond whist.

Jan. 13, 1863

. . . When I sit down at evening it always seems as if there could be but one subject to write upon, the music of these religious soldiers, who sing and pray steadily from supper time till “taps”, at 8:30 interrupted only by roll call at eight. The chaplain’s pagoda-like school house is the scene of earnest prayers and hymns at evening. I am sure the President is remembered more faithfully and gratefully in prayer by these Christian soldiers than by any other regiment in the army. It is one thing for a chaplain to pray for him, but quite another for the soldiers to kneel and implore blessings on his head and divine guidance for the officers placed over them, such prayers ought to make us true to them.

This afternoon, for the first time, our men are getting some money - not direct from the Government, but through that constant friend to them - Gen. Saxton, who waits for Government to refund it to him. The real drawback to enlistments is that the poor fellows who were in the Hunter regiment have never been paid a cent by the Government. Without reflection, one would suppose the offer of freedom quite sufficient for them to join us. But you must remember that not the least curse of slavery is ignorance and that the intellectual enjoyment of freedom cannot, by the present generation, be so fully appreciated as its material gifts and benefits. Just think how few there are, even in New England, who could bravely die for an Idea, you will see that the infinite love of freedom which inspires these people is not the same that fills the heart of a more favored race. . . .

Evening, Jan 14, 1863

My tent is so comfortable and attractive that I never felt more at home anywhere in my life. It is my castle and its walls are to me as good as granite. The Lord only knows how many good things we all the time lose by not having enough exposure to hindrance to sharpen our wits. I can now see plainly enough that the most delightful way to live at the sea-shore or among the mountains, in the summer, is to have at night only canvas walls between you and the bracing air and beautiful scenes you seek. Then just think of a tempest that shall make your frail tenement tremble like a bark at sea, and you in the sweet realization of how little space there is between you and the messengers of God.

Before breakfast this morning I stood on the shore and listened to the John Brown hymn, sung by a hundred of our recruits, as they came up the river on the steamer “Boston,” from St. Augustine, Fla. Our Lieut. Col. Billings went down last week for them and today we have received into our regiment all but five, whom I rejected in consequence of old age and other disabilities. It seemed hard to reject men who came to fight for their freedom, but these poor fellows are a hindrance in active service and we might be compelled to leave them to the mercy of those who know not that “It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

. . . I wish you could see how finely the Colonel appears in my dress coat. His was sent from Worcester quite a time before I left New England, but has never reached him. Very likely some miserable colonel of a poor white regiment appropriated it. I pity those who get so demoralized by association and wish they could have the benefit of our higher code. As I am less for ornament than for use here. I offered my coat to the Col. and was glad to find that Theodore [evidently Rogers’s tailor in Massachusetts] had applied his “celestial principle under the arms,” so that a Beaufort tailor could easily make an exact fit for the upper sphere. To sick soldiers it is unimportant whether I have one or two rows of buttons and my handsome straps fit just as well on my fatigue coat as on the other.

Jan. 15, 1863

Last night I wrote something about the beauties of tent life, tonight I might say something of its adventures. All night the wind blew furiously and all day the fine sand has drifted like snow. The rocking of the tent has been like a ship in a storm at sea and I heard one actually complaining of a sea sickness, in consequence. All day I have prayed for rain, and at this moment it is pouring like mad. Ah! Is it not charming to sit here and bid defiance to the raging storm. I can now fully understand what [Henry David] Thoreau meant when he enjoyed the wild apple that tasted as a squash bug smells, while he felt it a triumph to have eaten it. All the wild in me is called forth by this life and I enjoy it intensely, not because it is easy, but because it is triumphant. Had I time I could write volumes on the merits of Indian tanned buffalo robes in Dixie. The more the wind searches my tent at night the more closely my shaggy friend clings to me and protects me from harm. . . .

Between midnight and morning, while I was dreaming of a magnificent storm on the ocean, I was awakened by a pitiful outcry as if one was being murdered in the rear of my tent. Several voices joined and then the sentinel screamed for the corporal of the guard, and finally it all ended in a low laugh. I put my pistol back under my head and went to sleep again. Today I learned that the Commissary Serg’t had the nightmare and two or three others caught the fright and fancied Secesh after them.

My second assistant has come, Dr. Minor [Thomas S. Minor], a young man whom I was fearful we should not get. I feel peculiarly blessed in having assistants who are honest and trustworthy, but of such different practical attainments that, putting us three together, we make quite a strong team.

Jan 16, evening

All night the wind blew a gale, with an occasional dash of rain to increase the interest. While I slept better than usual I am sorry to say that three tents were blown down, one of which contained a sick man. The wind finally came from the N.W. and today we found our coats none too warm. The sky has been beautiful in the extreme, like that of early summer when the clouds are full of promise. At this moment the camp resounds with the John Brown hymn, sung as no white regiment can sing it, so full of harmony. I know you all think me over enthusiastic about these people, but every one of you would be equally so, if here. Every day deepens my conviction that if we are true to them they will be true to us. The Col. arrives at the same conclusion. When I think of their long suffering at the hands of the whites, and then of their readiness to forgive, I feel reverence for the race that I did not know before coming among them. You need not fancy that I find them perfect: it had not been my fortune to find mortals of that type - even in Worcester - but I do find them, as a people, religious, kind hearted, forgiving and as truth loving as the average of whites, more so than the Irish of the lowest rank.

Jan 17, Evening

Major John D. Strong, the man who, with sword drawn, pursued the white soldier who struck a black man while the 1st South Carolina Volunteers drilled at Beaufort. Strong was later promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 33rd USCI. USMHI.

This has been a triumphant day for our regiment. We have marched to Beaufort and back in such style as to turn jeers into admiration, and tonight our men are full of music and delight. The Colonel, not content with marching the whole length of the front street, actually stopped on the parade ground and drilled the regiment an hour or more and then they marched home to the music of their own voices. The different encampments at Beaufort had large delegations by the way-side, as we entered the town, and we were greeted with such language as pertains to vulgar negro haters. Our men were apparently indifferent to it and the officers could afford to wait in silence. I fell back to the rear with the major and was constantly delighted at the manly bearing of our soldiers. Not a head was turned to the right or left, not a word spoken. At length a white soldier struck a black man, not of our regiment, and the poor fellow appealing to us, we wheeled our horses upon the rabble, and Major Strong [John D. Strong], with drawn sword pursued the offender, with the point of that instrument a little nearer the fellow’s back than seemed wholesome. I have rarely seen one more thoroughly frightened. The effectiveness was magical, no more audible sneers. But wasn’t it good to march our regiment proudly in front of those mansions where two years ago chivalry were plotting something as strange, but quite unlike.

“With a rifle in their hands.” The 29th U. S. Colored Infantry Regiment from Connecticut in training at the Smith Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley, 1863. LC.

January 18, Sunday Evening

Such a transparent day and cool north wind makes even South Carolina endurable, while it lasts, I mean. When General [David] Hunter gets here we expect to nullify the state.

In white regiments, where the sick list is greater then ours, I hear of surgeons who have plenty of leisure. I suppose they are men who do not love their profession, or, possibly, men who fancy that all of the surgeon’s duty is performed when he has seen the sick and made his prescriptions. But in fact the surgeon’s duties in a regiment are like a woman’s work, never done. But to a good housewife there must be a sweet satisfaction in order and cleanliness, and in the long run it must be more economical.

In our camp most curious problems present themselves, as how to keep people from scurvy without vegetables and fresh meat; how to have a good fire in tents without a fireplace, stove or ventilation; how to make bread without yeast and without oven; how to treat the sick without medicines; how to amputate limbs without knives. All these and many other similarly knotty questions the surgeon of the First Regiment of S.C. Vol’s. has to consider, sometimes when he ought to be sleeping. This is not said complainingly. Our men rarely complain and those jeering white soldiers who saw their firm tread in the streets of Beaufort yesterday must have discovered the reason for their patience, this silent waiting. There was a Destiny in the silent, dignified bearing of our men yesterday. I never in my life, felt so proud, so strong, so large. I longed to lead a change upon those uncivil soldiers. Possibly that was wicked - can’t help it - “born so.” But I can afford to wait; the great mill is grinding slowly and surely.

Hurrah! Hurrah! The Quartermaster just in with dispatch from signal officer announcing arrival of “Arago” and a gun boat at Hilton Head and General Hunter has come.

Jan 20, 1863

Gen. Hunter is in earnest about arming the blacks, so we may confidently expect well-done to increase. The little opposition to our movement will fall to the ground so soon we can prove our worthiness by marked success. Remember, it requires not only time but deeds, to undo the hateful lesson this Republic has been so long teaching. The public heart has virus in it and nothing but the flow of arterial blood can purify it. The innocent must suffer for the guilty.

I am beginning to find a little leisure for noting verbatim some of the individual histories of these soldiers and shall endeavor to forward them to you. The Col. and young captain have transcribed many of their songs and hymns, but without the music of their peculiar voices, I confess the words do not much interest me. Now and then a fine, poetical expression, but as a rule, somewhat dry, like the human skull Serg’t Rivers brought me one day. Their autobiographies, on the contrary, if one has the time and patience to draw them out, are often so unique that I feel deeply interested in them.

At dress parade, tonight, the Col. had some of my sanitary measures embodied in a general order and read by the Adjutant. One of the most important details was that each tent is hereafter to have a fire in it every evening. We have tried it long enough in James’ company, to be satisfied of its utility. The men do not greatly mind the smoke and I have convinced the Col. that it is one of the best purifiers and antiseptics we could have.

Jan 21, Evening

Great days seem natural to us now. General Hunter has reviewed our regiment with Gen. Saxton, and the Colonel’s long mourned dress coat has come and I no longer weep in secret silence the sacrifice of mine. But we will leave coats for arms and ask you to congratulate the 1st S.C.V, on the distinction conferred by the General in visiting us before any of those in Beaufort. And was it not refreshing to hear the General in command say to our soldiers, when formed in hollow square, “Men, I am glad to see you so well, I wish we had a hundred thousand soldiers like you. Before Spring I hope we shall have fifty thousand. You are fighting for your liberty and the liberty of your families and friends. The man who is not willing to fight for his liberty is not fit to have it.” Probably I have not the exact phraseology, but it cannot differ materially. It was very impressive to us all, while the cheers that followed were stunning to us all. Then the dear, noble General Saxton, so long thwarted by pro-slavery opposition, stepped forward and informed the regiment that Gen. Hunter had this afternoon told him that fifty thousand Springfield rifles are coming to this department for the black soldiers. Then the Colonel introduced the surgeons to Gen’l Hunter and while taking him to our little hospital, I called his attention to the refusal of Purveyor to honor any requisitions: consequently, I take another requisition to Hilton Head, countersigned by General Hunter, and we shall see with what result.

Jan. 22. Evening

Early this morning I galloped to Beaufort, went to Hilton Head on the “Flora,” and at sunset was back with my instruments and a beginning of the medicines. My success was entire, not however, without considerable ungodliness on one side, possibly not a little on the other. But Gen. Hunter intends to be obeyed and, I fancy, the negro haters will find it out in good season. You know I always fancied retributive justice, so I especially enjoy Gen. Hunter’s presence. He is an awful retribution to many a traitorous scamp in the department. The rule of Brannon-ism is at an end, and we poor sinners must be forgiven a little exultation. I understand that our medical Purveyor is a relative of General Brannon. . . .

Steamer Ben Deford, Jan 23, 1863

I have refrained till now from informing you of a little expedition which for the last few days has been planning for us. I suppose there never was an expedition, however small, that got off at the time specified, nor one that was kept secret. So we are five days later than intended, and the floating rumors of our plans are enough in number to make it appear that we are to take Charleston and all other prominent Secesh places on the coast of Dixie. The “Planter,” the same that Robert Small ran out of Charleston, and the “John Adams,” each with a company of our soldiers and some large guns on board, started from camp at noon today, Major Strong on the John Adams. About four this afternoon we started with four companies including that of Cap’t R., Colonel, Surgeon and second assistant surgeon and at this moment we are outside the bar, off Hilton Head, sailing as quietly in the soft moonlight and warm atmosphere as if our intentions were of the most peaceful nature.

The “Planter,” a Confederate steamship which operated out of Charleston, South Carolina. In May 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved black man and pilot of the steamer, assisted by eight enslaved black crewmen, steamed out of the Charleston harbor and turned the “Planter” over to gunboats of the U.S. Blockading Squadron on patrol offshore. From that day forward, Smalls piloted the USS Planter for the Federal navy.

The “Ben Deford” is really a magnificent steamer for transporting troops. A turn among the soldiers just now, convinced me that we can have ventilation enough and warmth enough to prevent illness. It is a real pleasure to go and see them so quietly wrapped in their blankets, no quarreling, no profanity, and the whole responsibility rests upon our Colonel. He has absolute authority over these three steamers. Our men were all anxious to go, and many, belonging to companies not designated for the trip, went to Col. H. and begged to go. Some have been permitted to do so. It remains to see how they will fight.

St. Simon’s Bay, Jan 24

At nine this morning we entered this bay expecting to find the “John Adams” waiting for us, but she was not to be seen. We dropped anchor and the Col. and I went on board the gunboat “Potomska.” There we found a remarkable negro who resides on St. Simon’s Island and who informed us that he knew of a quantity of Railroad iron that was used in the construction of a fort, below, on the shore. So while waiting for the “John Adams,” the surf boats were manned and men enough taken ashore to secure about two thousand dollars worth of this new iron which is much needed at Hilton Head.

With Lieut. West [James B. West], I went up to the Hon. Thomas Butler King’s estate, and confiscated a nice bath tub and three new windows for my hospital, which has only shutters. At four this afternoon the John Adams” steamed down the bay.

Jan 25

Still lying at anchor in St. Simon’s Bay, waiting for the “Planter.” Judge [Lyman] Stickney of Florida is with us; an able defender of the oppressed and a gentleman. I was much pleased to learn that he is a native of Vermont. Surgeon [Joel] Richardson, formerly of the 9th. Maine, is also with us. We are to leave him at Fernandina. His health has become so frail he was compelled to resign. Last evening he presented me with a pair of shoulder straps for my fatigue coat, with the remark that it might become essential that I have then on. But I fancy that whoever of our regiment falls into the hands of the Rebels would scarcely be saved by straps and sash. I feel that there is a tacit understanding that we are not to surrender under any circumstances. . . . The captain of the steamer [Captain Hallett] is an odd genius. He is a Cape Cod man, whose profanity is so much a part of his nature that total abstinence might kill him. He swears vigorously for freedom and especially for the Massachusetts expression of it. Curses the sluggishness of government officials and swears the democrats ought to be sent to -- . Says he has worked fifteen months with this steamer at an expense of four hundred thousand dollars to the government, and he does not believe he has earned for it ten dollars that could not have been as well earned, if this, and some other steamers, had never been employed. Seven hundred and fifty dollars a day, exclusive of coal, counts up. Government ought to draft property as well as men, and then compensate when it gets through using it. Such a course would put an end to private speculation . . . .

January 26, 1863

The “Planter” got along last night and, with the “John Adams” has gone through the “inside passage,” while we are running outside to meet them at Fernandina Harbor.

Since coming aboard the steamer I have more opportunity than before with the line officers about their men. I find an almost universal attachment and confidence. We have a few mulattoes in the regiment and so far as I have conversed with officers, their testimony is very decidedly in favor of the blacks, both for physical and intellectual points. I was prepared for the former, but was surprised to find that the ruling spirits among the soldiers are found mainly among the blacks.

Steamer “John Adams,” St. Marys River, January 26, 1863

. . .  We are now in the heart of secesh and before morning shall have succeeded or failed in our purpose. At this moment the men are loading their muskets with a will that means fight. Our Colonel is cool and careful and I trust his judgment in this perilous undertaking. But if we should lose him!

This town was partly burned a few weeks ago by the gunboat “Neptune.” Some of her men went ashore when the white flag was shown, but the pickets fired on them, hence the destruction of the town. A woman has been waving her white handkerchief from one of the houses, but we do not care to do anything here. We are moving slowly and silently up the river, all lights above extinguished, save mine and I have put my rubber blanket up for a curtain at the window. The Colonel is too considerate of me, but takes Dr. Minor to land with the troops. I am sadly aware that I could not endure a rapid march of ten miles on foot, so I have reluctantly fitted out Dr. Minor with my orderly, pistol and sash, tourniquets, etc., and shall try to possess my soul in patience, if not peace. Our men show anything but fear as we pass between the double line of pickets.

Midnight

Oh! The terrible waiting! Before eleven P.M. one hundred and seventy-five men had been landed at Township plantation, ten miles above St. Mary’s, with the Colonel at their head. And now volley after volley of musketry off in the woods sets me making final preparations for the wounded.

Jan’y 27, 1863

I appropriated the mess-room and the officer’s berths to receive the wounded. Fortunately we had thought to bring candles along, no others on board.—It was not more than one hour before we were busy dressing gun shot wounds. One man was killed instantly by a ball through the heart and seven were wounded, one of whom will die. Braver men never lived. One man with two bullet holes through the large muscles of the shoulder and neck, brought off from the scene of action, Robert Sutton, with three wounds, one on the skull, which may cost him his life, would not report himself till compelled to do so by his officers. While dressing his wounds he quietly talked of what they had done and what they yet can do. Today I had the Col. order him to obey me. He is perfectly quiet and cool but takes this whole affair with the religious bravery of a man who realizes that freedom is sweeter than life. Yet another did not report at all, but kept all night on guard and perhaps I should not have known of his having had a buckshot in the shoulder if some duty requiring a sound shoulder had not been required of him today. The object of our raid was to surprise and capture a company of rebel cavalry pickets, but, as is usual in this war, the enemy seemed to know of the secret plan, and we only succeeded in making them skedaddle after a few rounds, and in bringing off five contrabands, a fine piano and divers other things. We also had the satisfaction of burning the plantation house and outbuildings, so they will not screen any more pickets. We steadily send shot and shell over the bluffs to prevent their picking off men from our boat, which is their habit. All this is very exciting and I enjoy it much. I just now volunteered to go up on a bluff and burn a picket house of rendezvous, but I believe the Col. thinks it unsafe for his friends to do what he himself is ever ready to do.

We reached St. Mary’s before noon. I believe I have before stated that the town was partially burned by the “Neptune,” yet there fifty or more houses remaining, including two large churches, a bank, etc. As we approached, the waving of white handkerchiefs began again, by the two maiden ladies (! !) residing in sight of the wharf. All the other houses were uninhabited. The women informed us that they were living entirely alone with their aged mother, that they were “St. Domingo ladies,” but had not owned slaves since England abolished slavery there. Their antecedents have been so doubtful that the Colonel thought it best to search their house very carefully in spite of their protestations, and entreaties and talk of honor, etc. etc. I was permitted to join him and one of the captains in the search and found it very interesting though we discovered no rebels. Of course we had a guard around the house, a guard of such color as greatly to annoy the inmates. They told me that they had not seen pickets at all and many other things which I knew to be false. But we politely left them, they avowing that they were ladies and thanking us for being gentlemen. As we were about to leave the wharf, bang, bang, bang, went secesh rifles from behind the houses and whistling went the balls over our heads. We were not long in sending shot and shell enough to protect our skirmishers and then the Col. did what I begged him to do this morning - put nearly all the town in flames, save the house of these women and two or three at the windward of it. I wanted to take the women down to Fernandina and burn every house, but the Col. thought it best to leave them, so there will still be a screen and sympathy left there for the rebels. But we left an immense fire and I trust the pickets will have to rescue the women from it.

Steamer Ben Deford, # 13 Fernandina, Fla., January 28, 1863

From Beaufort, the men of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers were transported to Union-occupied Fernandina to conduct raids up the St. Marys River. Map is courtesy of Erin Soles, Center for Instructional Research and Technology, University of North Florida.

While superintending the transfer of the wounded from the “John Adams” last night, I sent ashore for mattresses, but without success. This morning I had been ashore and procured a bale of fine hay from Quartermaster Seward, a gentleman who was my partner at euchre on the “Delaware” and who is now very prompt in doing what he can for us, so that now our men are about as comfortably placed as if they were in a hospital. Yesterday I saw how difficult it is to keep down vandalism when a town is to be burned. In this respect the blacks are much more easily controlled than the whites. Of course we have a right to appropriate what we need in the service of Uncle Sam, but I would be as severe as the Col. on individual appropriations. My only regret about burning the town is that we did not give those “unprotected ladies” the protection of our flag and then burn every house. I find the same feeling among officers here in Fernandina. If we are ever to put down this ungodly rebellion, we must act in the broadest principles of justice. If I offer my life in the defense of my country I shall not be slow nor economical in my demands upon my enemies. This is the true justice and wise humanity. Just now two companies were sent to St. Mary’s on the “Planter” to load brick: I let Dr. Miner go with them. That I did not go myself instead, was the bravest thing I have done since I came to Dixie.

Jan. 29, noon

I have just received a note from the Col, who is ashore, that sets our line officers to making ready in haste for another expedition. We are not yet done with St. Mary’s River and some of the upper settlements. The “Planter” has not yet returned, but has been using her artillery this morning shelling the pickets in the woods I presume. I shall get some surgeon to care for my men in absence.

Steamboat John Adams, Jan. 29, 1863

Again we are on our way into the heart of secesh [soldier’s slang for secessionist]. If we do not get blown to pieces before morning we shall get some distance above where any of our gunboats have been within a year. Tonight I have heard that a negro has come from the scene of the fight the other night, and he reports seven rebels killed, including the daring Cap’t Clark. Cap’t Clifton of this boat is a most singular mixture of candor and roughness and refinement. Though he swears like a trooper, there is a drollery and generosity and honesty about him that quite captivates me. The other night I was standing beside him in silence after our troops had marched away from shore, and the mate came up and asked permission to go ashore and get some hens. The captain exclaimed, “Oh my God! Doctor just think of this man robbing hen roosts right in the midst of death and damnation.” The deep, sepulchral voice with which this was uttered made the whole thing so tragico-comical that I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Alberti’s Mills, 40 miles from Fernandina, Jan 30, 1863

Nassau County, Florida, in 1864. Rogers refers to Woodstock Mills, a steam powered sawmill established by Edwin R. Alberti in 1837. Woodstock Mills is located on this map, approximately forty miles up the St. Marys River from Fernandina. Courtesy of Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida.

The river is rebellious to the last degree. It is very crooked and sluggish and black and got us aground so many times in the long, sleepless night that rebel pickets might have picked off many of our men and officers. Again and again we had to turn points at right angles and we were never more than two rods from one or another shore. Often the sides of our boat were swept by the boughs of the mournful looking trees. The shores are generally low and marshy and the moss droops so low as to give the appearance of weeping willows, It is now eleven, A.M. and we are starting homeward.

Oh it was a queer night, so queer that more than once I laughed outright, when I thought of the curious fact that T.W.H. and I were so industriously trying to get a peep at real rebels, while they would undoubtedly do something to get a peep at us. In my time I have seen considerable mismanagement of one kind and another, but I do not remember that I ever dreamed that so much of that article could be employed in one night on board a steamboat. Among the boat’s officers there was no mutual understanding, and it is fortunate for us that the rebels did not know it. But at daylight we did reach Alberti’s mills and then came for me an hour of dreamy, fitful sleep. I had made three vigorous efforts to sleep during the night, but enjoyed the calm moonlight and strange scenery and spice of danger too much for drowsiness. We passed picket fires and felt the possibility that our return might be obstructed, or greatly harassed. Very few officers have voluntarily dared such a responsibility as that resting on our Colonel, but he patiently and vigilantly met all the obstacles and had his pickets and skirmishers so arranged.—

Evening and “Ben Deford” again thank God

. . . I had written thus far when the rebels began firing from the shore and I found myself among our soldiers, who replied with a spirit and precision that sent more than one poor fellow to the dust.

Captain Clifton of the “John Adams” was shot through the head and died instantly. My Major’s head had escaped by about two inches. Strange to say no other accidents occurred in this nor in the subsequent firing from the bluffs on the Florida shore. The first attack was from the Georgia bluffs. They were both desperate, but of short duration. One fellow actually jumped on the flat- boat in tow, and was immediately shot by one of our soldiers. I afterwards asked Robert Sutton what he was about during the conflict, and found that he was deliberately shooting from the pilot house, with two guns, having a man load one while he fired the other. But I will not go back to the sunrise. As I was saying, the pickets and the skirmishers were so placed that there was no escape for the white families at Alberti’s Mills. The Col. had gone ashore and a little after sunrise sent for me to go off [the ship] and take with me some copies of the President’s Proclamation. I found a little village all included in the Alberti estate and the mansion was occupied by madame Alberti and her family. She was a New Yorker by birth and her deceased husband was a native of Philadelphia.  [Edwin R. Alberti graduated from the Philadelphia Military Academy and served in the United States Army for a decade before settling in Florida. By 1850, Alberti was the owner of fifty-two slaves and a steam sawmill known as Woodstock Mills.  He died in 1861, leaving his widow, Ernestine Strong Alberti, as sole owner of Woodstock Mills, located on the St. Marys River approximately four miles downriver from Kings Ferry. The “little village” included a post office, schoolhouse, church, retail store and a two-room jail.]

 Mr. [Abraham] Bessent, former business partner of Alberti’s was at the house on a visit, ill with chronic bronchitis. He, being an important person, must be made a prisoner, unless too feeble to be removed from the house. I found on examination, that he could be taken with us without danger to himself. Madame Alberti spent much time trying to convince me that she and her husband had been wonderfully devoted to the interests of their slaves, especially to the fruitless work of trying to educate them. The truth of these assertions was disproved by certain facts, such as a strong slave jail, containing implements of torture which we now have in our possession, (the lock I have), the fact that the slaves have “mostly gone to the Yankees,” and yet other fact that Robert Sutton, a former slave there, said the statement was false. The statement of a black man was lawful in Dixie yesterday. I called madame Alberti’s attention to a former slave of hers, whom she remembered as “Bob” but never before knew as Robert Sutton, corporal in the army of the United States. Robert begged me to forgive him for breaking through my order that he should not exert himself at all till the danger of inflammation of the brain should be averted. The white bandage about his head was conspicuous at the points of danger through all the twenty-four eventful hours of our expedition. It finally devolved upon him and Sergeant Rivers to examine the persons of our six rebel prisoners, for concealed weapons of defense. This last was so very anti-slavery that I fancied the rebels enjoyed it somewhat less than I. I am told that thirteen riderless horses went back to camp after that fight in the woods the other night. That the lieutenant in command and five others were killed and many others wounded. Could our party have known the exact state of affairs, the camp might have been destroyed and many prisoners taken. But it was safer and wiser for the infantry not to follow cavalry in the night.

Our comrades on the “Ben Deford” greeted us heartily and the Provost Marshal was in readiness to take charge of our prisoners. We shall probably take Mr. Bessent to Beaufort with us. He is a wealthy and influential rebel and may become a very important hostage when Jeff Davis begins to hang us. We brought off two or three negroes, and rice, corn, sheep and other valuable things, strictly contraband of war. I wanted the Col. to take a piano, already boxed, and in a store-house at the wharf, but we had no room for it. I thought it would especially please Miss [Charlotte] Forten to have it in her school.

Jan.31, evening.

While I keenly enjoy these moonlight excursions I find that like rising at three o’clock in the morning to go for pond lilies, one is satisfied with about three trips a week. You can imagine a little what an immense tax such a life makes upon the nervous system. But I find we sleep well as soon as opportunity offers. This rough life exposure in the open air puts an end to morbid excitability of the nerves, and one jumps at any reasonable chance for a snooze.

Sunday, Feb.1, 1863

This morning the “Planter,” with Cap’t Trowbridge’s and Cap’t Rogers’ companies, met us in St. Simon’s Bay. They have not been idle. They left Cumberland Bay the day before yesterday and taking the inside route, destroyed some salt works which operation has damaged the rebels to the extent of about twenty five thousand dollars. They met with no opposition, but had a hard time dragging their boats through the marsh. The marshes, or savannahs, in this part of the country, which border the rivers, are almost impassible for human beings, yet many a slave has waded through them toward the north star of freedom.

Today I find a formidable sick list, the result of huddling so many men together in the hold of the “John Adams,” but I think nothing serious will come of it. The officer in command at Fernandina has no authority to send out a flag of truce with prisoners, so we take all ours to Beaufort. I am exceedingly glad of it, since I have found, through Robert Sutton, that one of them shot a man while he was trying to escape to the “Yankees.” After I had dressed Robert’s wound, this morning, he took me to the rebel and ingeniously made him say; “No, you are mistaken, the gun went off accidentally,” “and besides he was not killed, but died of fever.” “Then,” said Robert  “You did threaten to shoot him ?” “Yes, but I intended it only as a threat.” Robert said, “I know you killed him,” and I to Robert, “The testimony of black men is legal now in Florida.”

We are taking several white soldiers and officers from Fernandina to Hilton Head. Their prejudice against our soldiers is amusing. We happen to have command of this steamer and, of course, have the best places. I find white soldiers sleep on deck rather than to go below with our men. Last evening I saw a Lieutenant getting two of our soldiers to take his trunk down to the cabin and he was rather suddenly informed by Lieut. West that United States soldiers were not to be called upon to do menial service. Another Lieut. expressed the opinion to our rough and ready Capt. [George] Dolly, that “these niggers” never would fight much. Dolly, in his fearful way, said; “You d- d fool; these soldiers have already fought more bravely than you ever will, you who have lived a couple of years on Uncle Sam without earning a cent for him.” The Lieut. did not think it safe to reply. I fancy Dolly. He is a vandal, but generous and brave. His men love him and fear him. His orders are somewhat terse, when in battle. I happened to be standing by him when he gave the command, “Cease firing, but if they fire again, give ‘em hell.”

The Colonel’s daring bravery has deepened the love and admiration of his men and officers. I have been a constant source of annoyance to him by words of caution, but am happy to know that they were heeded. The death of Capt. Clifton was a terrible confirmation of all I have said, and I doubt if the Major again puts himself unnecessarily in the way of so much danger. I could not get the ball that passed through the mess room where I was writing, but I picked one up in the prisoner’s room, adjoining. Had we been the prisoners, our places would have been on the upper deck, where they begged we would not put them, and where no one dreamed of putting them. All of them, except Mr Bessent, are now forward with the soldiers. . . .

Our expedition has been a capital success. We have had our soldiers three times under fire and know that they only care to face the enemy. We know also, that they can be trusted with the conquered foe. Not a single unbecoming act have I seen or heard of on the part of the guards, skirmishers or pickets. It was not for want of temptation, and I am led to wonder at their self control. The material benefit to the Government, of the expedition, is not inconsiderable. We are more than ever satisfied that the blacks must help us in this war. The next question to solve, is, how to penetrate far enough into the interior to free them. Possibly it remains for our regiment to solve this problem. Give us a good gunboat and plenty of ammunition to help us into the midst of them and I think we may trust God and our determination for the result. . .

Camp Saxton, Beaufort, S.C. Feb. 3,1863

At break of day we were at Beaufort and my sick and wounded were being carefully conveyed to the “Contraband Hospital” for better care than our camp hospital affords. I left eight there and it seemed like leaving my children among strangers. But this was only a feeling, not a fact. It was very pleasant to have the black soldiers served first. Col. Rich and the other officers and soldiers, must wait the convenience of our freedmen. I should quite enjoy living in some one of our Northern cities a few months with the 1st S.C.Vols. I fancy there would be a conquering of prejudices somewhat satisfactory to your humble servant. Justice is an admirable machine when in good running order and with honest engineers to keep it going.

The Col. Took his official report in one hand and a captured instrument of slave torture in the other, to Gen. Saxton and left them for an early inspection. I was too busy to breakfast there with the Col. At ten o’clock we were disembarking opposite our camp and the home troops were receiving us with wild cheers of joy. All sorts of false rumors had been reported concerning us. We had been cut up and cut down, hung and cut to pieces and various other rebel morsels of information had been circulated. I trust that you have not been tormented by such rumors. Perhaps it is best for me to take this occasion to say that the rebel reports are not always so reliable as their personal sympathizers could wish. Believe nothing short of official reports and --my letters.

Feb. 5

Lieut. O’Neil informed me today that during the eight years of his military life in Texas, Utah and in the present war, he had never been engaged in anything half so daring as our trip up the St. Mary’s River. He is one of our best officers and has seen much service. . . . I would very much like to go up to Alberti’s Mills again, with flat-boats enough to bring away lumber etc. and then set fire to what we could not take. There is not [sufficient] rebel force in that neighborhood to capture us. If they should block the passage by felling trees across the river, our boys would have the opportunity to do what they so much crave -- meet their old masters in “de cl’ar field.” They besought me over and over, to ask “de Cunnel to let we spill out on de sho’an’meet dem fellers in de brush.” There would have been bushwhacking of a startling nature and I have no doubt we could have brought off some of those cavalry horses hitched in the rear. But the Col. is pretty economical of human life when no great object is at stake.

I have noticed that twenty eight boxes of goods await my order at Hilton Head and that the “Flora” will bring them up and land them at our camp, if I wish. This looks as if the day of honoring requisitions in this department has arrived. Meanwhile, during my absence, my requisition on the Purveyor in New York was honored and I found eighteen boxes of the very best material awaiting my return. The Soldiers Relief Association of Norwich, CT. has shipped a goodly supply of bedding, towels, flannel shirts etc. to us. These things were offered by Miss G the very efficient agent. Gen. Saxton has given me the upper part of the Smith mansion for another hospital, so we shall have twenty four beds as comfortably arranged and as well cared for as any in the department.

Yesterday, Miss Forten sent me, from St. Helena Island, a generous box of ginger cakes. I don’t know how she learned my weakness. This box makes my tent very attractive to the Col. and the young captain.

Robert Sutton has quite recovered from his wounds. He told me that the flesh was healthy and I have found it so and the bone did not get involved. I never look at Robert without feeling certain that his father must have been a great Nubian king. I have rarely reverenced a man more than I do him. His manners are exceedingly simple, unaffected and dignified, without the slightest touch of haughtiness. Voice, low, soft and flooding, as if his thoughts were choking him. He is tall, straight and brawny muscled. His face is all of Africa in feeling and in control of expression. By this I do not mean cunning, but manly control. He seems to me kingly, and, oh ! I wish he could read and write. He ought to be a leader, a general, instead of a corporal. I fancy he is like Toussaint l’ Ouverture and it would not surprise me if some great occasion should make him a deliverer of his people from bondage.

Prince Rivers, just as black as Robert Sutton, has a peculiar fineness of texture of skin that gives the most cleanly look. He is agile and fleet, like a deer, in his speed and like a panther in his tread. His features are not very African and his eye is so bright that it must “shine at the night, when de moon am gone away.” His manners are not surpassed on this globe. I feel my awkwardness when I meet him. This because an officer ought to be as polite as a soldier.

Feb. 6. 1863

We are just now through with the hardest and coldest north east storm that we have had since I came to the Department on the South. Living through this is evidence of considerable constitution. The storm politely waited for us to finish an expedition but the two together have succeeded in running our sick list up to 129 in today’s report. This morning a poor fellow died of congestion of the lungs, before the surgeon saw him. In this case, as in nearly all the autopsies I have made, I find extensive adhesions which have resulted from former pleurisy. There are, at this moment, not less than a dozen severe cases of pleuro-pneumonia among our sick. I find it true that these people are more subject than the whites to pulmonary diseases. And here I must put a fact of dispraise to the colored people as I find them. They, as a rule, show remarkable indifference to the sufferings of those not immediately related by the ties of consanguinity. I do not believe this to be a want of affection in the race, but due to long influence of inhuman teaching and treatment. I believe the development of individual responsibility and the inducement to rise, will abolish this want of feeling and respect for each other.

Feb. 7. 1863

. . . [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and Thoreau are oftener in my mind, in connection with this camp life and these people, than any other writers I know. While I am constantly studying how to keep these men well, or to alleviate their sufferings, they as constantly fill me with something higher than a feeling of philanthropy, a sort of oriental sympathy, outreaching the wants of the body. Gen. Saxton has said that these people are “intensely human,” and I will add that I find them intensely divine. It is, however, more difficult to call out the divine than the human.

The blessings resulting from freedom will wash away the accursed stains of slavery and all the world will see that these are also children of God. They have a boundless conception of the divine spirit and a more intense trust in the fatherhood of God than have the cultivated whites of my acquaintance. It is true, they will commit almost as many sins as their white neighbors, but I am speaking now of the religious element and leaving the moral to be controlled by culture.

This morning I had a break in my tent. But in spite of cold and damp, I never sleep cold. Had the Lord anticipated this war I think he would have made buffaloes native here. My robe seems half human in kindness and warmth. The “Free South” has published Col. Higginson’s official report of our expedition. He told me tonight that there were many things he would have been glad to embody in the report, but the rebels would have gained thereby such information as we wish to keep from them. I think our prisoners will be held as hostages.

Keeping our men below so long on the “John Adams” destroyed more lives than the rifle shots would have done. It seemed a choice of evils and the least apparent was chosen. But the return of sunshine will help restore the sick.

St. Helena Island, Feb. 9, 1863

Yesterday afternoon I put my new saddle and bridle on the long-legged horse, claimed by the Col. and Adjutant, and came over here to spend the night with the Hunn’s and Miss Forten. This is the first night I have slept in a house since the 18th day of December. It seems strange to find myself in the midst of civilization and buckwheat cakes. . . . Just before leaving camp, I read Mr Emerson’s “Boston Hymn” to our regiment, while assembled for divine worship. I prefaced it with the remark that many white folks could not understand the poems of Mr. Emerson, but I had no apprehension of that kind from those before me. It was enough that Robert Sutton’s eyes were glistening before me as I read. I was standing on the veranda of the plantation house and the men were under a beautiful magnolia tree toward the river. Mr. Emerson would have trembled with joy to see how much these dark colored men drank in the religion of his poem. The chaplain was filled with emotion by it and straightway took the poem for his text and when I left, was enthusiastically speaking from it.

Camp Saxton, Feb. 8, 1863

My package for you is so enormous this morning that it quite startles me. My reputation for making notes is almost equal to the Colonel’s though I didn’t get out my notebook in the midst of the whistling bullets on St. Mary’s as I saw him do.

I feel that it was a little cowardly in me to run away from camp yesterday, but I knew that three of our good soldiers must die within a few hours and I could do no more for them. It is just impossible for me to get used to losing patients. Such death is equivalent to losing some vital part of one’s self. This comes from distrust of myself, rather than of God. Our sick list is rapidly lessening and all will soon be as usual. I have this afternoon conversed with a pro-slavery surgeon, who has had much to do with negroes. I thought he seemed rather pleased in making the statement that their power of endurance was not equal to that of the whites. I nevertheless gathered valuable information and hints relative to their treatment. If I am permitted to remain in the regiment a year I shall prove that while the blacks are subject to quite different diseases from those of the whites the mortality among them will average less and the available strength or efficiency will average more. This is the season for white soldiers to be well and blacks to be ill. . . . My pleasant visit at Friend Hunn’s made me forgetful of camp trials and I have returned with renewed vigor.

Feb. 10

No day so thoroughly spring-like as this, yet I feel we are to miss the unlocking delight we realize in the New England transition from winter to summer. The bugs and birds and frogs seem to realize the change but they know their own and are grateful for the smallest favors. I miss the melting snow at noon and the crunching crystals at night and morning. My eyes are not dazzled by the pure splendor as the days lengthen. The cawing crow flies back and forth, be he does not seem so earnest, so put to his trumps as those that fly above Wigwam Hill, when Long Pond is all leaden and weeks of sunshine and rain must come to free the ice-bound waters. The shores of our river here are covered with nourishing things, and the tides make high and low for the benefit of lazy lives, but I do not see the use of living such easy terms. Sometimes it seems to me like a funny experiment to try the merits of the body in this land of ease, and of the soul in a less genial clime. How long the experiment is to last the Lord only knows, but I am devotedly thankful that my place of nativity is among the cold mountains of Vermont. I do not believe it is possible for a New England type of man to originate in this level land. I shall soon expect to find alligators in Charles River, or turkey buzzards among the Adirondacks. This reminds me that on my way through the pine woods yesterday, I ran one of these southern birds down. He had probably eaten so much that he could not fly. I easily captured him and brought him into camp for James to prepare for the Natural History Society of Worcester. Can you imagine me galloping across the plains and through the woods with this South Carolina specimen in my arms? I was thankful the long-legged horse did not have a fit of ugliness as he did the day before.

Before the countersign was given, tonight, the Captain and I went out to see a sick soldier at Battery Plantation. It was much more convenient to enter the lines at the guard- house when we returned, than to go to the ordinary entrance. We were challenged in the dark by “Who came darm?” “A friend of the guard: call a corporal of the guard to let us in.” “Halt, halt!” At the same time cocking his musket. We of course halted and asked if his gun was loaded. This raised his suspicion and his gun at the same time and he again demanded, “Who dar?” I said, “The surgeon and Captain Rogers.” “I don’t know any Sur John” and I began to think he might fire upon us before the corporal came, so I told him the doctor and captain. This lessened his apprehension. I believe it would surely be fatal for any one to attempt to get by the guard here at night. To our soldiers, this war is not play, they intend to obey orders.

Feb. 11

. . . It is to be remembered that the officers of a regiment in which the privates do not read and write, have much to do that would otherwise be done by an orderly or by a private detailed for the purpose. Today I have planned a new hospital and begun to lay the foundation of the first ward. This looks a little like having a brigade here sometime. We have a charming spot near the river for hospital buildings. I shall have only sixteen patients in a ward. Each ward is to be a separate building 20 x 50 feet, containing two fireplaces. From morning till evening, all through the summer, a breeze comes up the river and my wards shall be blessed by it. What a relief it would be to have Stephen Earle take charge of this, but it is all to be very simple and our efficient chaplain takes almost all of it on his hands.

Feb. 12. Evening

Tonight the tree toads sing in the adjoining grove and sounds of life are everywhere. The day has been like one in midsummer, when showers are expected in the afternoon and do not come; but the evening is cooler. The Col. and I walked out a little way to a cypress grove, where alligators might thrive, and where they tell of finding one. The trees are large, like oaks and have similar tassel like blossoms, or catkins, but the bole is broad at base and tapers rapidly up six or eight feet in a beautiful compound column and then becomes a simple Doric. All around under these trees are the cypress knees, from six to eight inches in height and looking preciously like cloaked and hooded monks, in prayer. The resemblance was so marked that I hesitated to break the silence of the place which seemed as holy as the “Sanctuary,” opposite Wigwam Hill. I will endeavor to send home one of these knees that you may see how a congregation of them must look.

At last the Adjutant has been made very happy by the arrival of his affianced. They are to be married before the regiment. I confess I should feel somewhat about marrying here as Cap’t. Clifton did about the robbing of hen roosts up the St. Mary’s.

Tonight I chanced to get into conversation with Serg’t McIntyre of Co. G., a soldier whose appearance always interested me. He is a native of Palatka, Fla., was born on the plantation of old Governor Mosley, & was always treated kindly by him. When our gunboats went up the St. John’s, this Serg’t went to his old master, who was much suspected of Union sentiments by the rebels, and begged him to come off under protection of our flag. But, failing to start him, McIntyre informed the old man of his intention to go himself and take with him his parents and sisters, that if he could always be sure of having the old Governor for a master he loved him so much that he would stick by him. The Governor much regretted their leaving him, but, knowing that his children would not treat them as he had done, he interposed no obstacles. All but the mother, who had “brought up” the Governor’s daughters, came away. I have written the above as a preface to the reasons of this man’s gratitude and attachment. [William Dunn Mosley was elected Governor of Florida in 1845.]

By the Governor he was always treated kindly. By trade he is a builder and his master allowed him, for eight years, to work at his trade where he pleased, by paying him (the master) $360.00 a year. He hired six other slaves from their masters, at various rates, according to their ability, and went off to Micanopy - which was not much of a place at that time - and within eight years they had built up “a smart town.” Twice a year he was obliged to go back to Palatka, fifty miles, to pay the masters for their kindness in allowing their slaves to clothe and board themselves and furnish their own tools and bring in from $150.00 to $360.00 per year, per man, in return. Even now this honest fellow does not fully realize the outrage. It was so much to them to escape the constant restraints of bondage that they forgot the rest. Many of the houses were built by contract instead of by the day, and if the chivalry had paid him always as agreed, he could have cleared about $550.00 per year. As it was, he was only even with the world when the war began and he was suspected of giving information about the “Yankees” to the slaves and he was compelled to leave his wife and two children at Micanopy. The first man to appear against him on a sort of trial for such suspicion was one for whom he had just built a home and received nothing for it. Should we ever go up the St. John’s River into the heart of Florida, the Serg’t will be a valuable guide. He has sisters at Beaufort and at Fernandina who have paid their masters fourteen dollars per month year after year, and supported themselves by washing and ironing.

Feb. 13, 1863

Tonight I have been talking with Cato Waring, one of my old nurses in the hospital. The attempt to give a report of his history seems futile. He is a quiet, old black man, this Cato, with singular combination of intellect and ready shrewdness, a subtlety of character that makes you feel as if a serpent might silently coil around you at any moment, without the rustle of a leaf. He appears dull and heavy, but is full of unspent sharpness and agility. He is old, but not gray, body and spirit alike intact. The night after our return from our expedition, I was telling them in the hospital about it and old Cato sat, with his dull eyes bent upon the fire, seemingly indifferent to all, till I came to the death of the rebel officer in the woods. Then his eyes sparkled and glared at me. “Did you know his name?” “No.” “Oh, I hope to God it was my young master who went down that way.”

Tonight Cato came to my tent and began very quietly to tell me of his life in slavery and his escape from it, but it was not long before his tone and manner became too dramatic for me to take notes and I felt as if all the horrors of the accursed system were being poured upon my naked nerves. His voice was always low, but commanding. He was born on the Santee River and “raised by Mr. Cooper as a pet.” But he was sent away to learn the carpenter’s trade, and after seven years apprenticeship returned home to find his old master was dead and the estate insolvent by mismanagement on the part of the widow and children. Finally, he and the other slaves were sold to pay the debts. Dr. Waring, his new master, “was a bad man, but not so bad as his wife.” The Dr’s family increased rapidly and his expenses were so great that Cato was made not only driver, but overseer of the estate, a position he held till his escape, a period of sixteen years. Dr. Waring and his wife ranked among the affectionate specimens of humanity. “Dey ollus kiss wen he go out an wen he come in”. Mrs. Waring was a neat housewife and made her servants “clean all de brasses and eberyting befo’ daylight in de mo’nin’-“ When she arose in the morning and examined the furniture with her white handkerchief for dust, there were usually one or two victims selected for the lash. It was Cato’s business to wait at the door for orders to apply from one hundred to five hundred lashes every morning before going out to the plantation. If the victim was male, he was stripped and cords were fastened to his fingers and then drawn over a horizontal pole above his head, till his toes only, touched the ground; then the master would stand behind Cato with a paddle and knock him over for any delinquency on his part. The same treatment was applied to women, except that instead of stripping off the clothing, the skirts and chemise were drawn up over the head. When the parlor was filled with visitors, the mistress would wind a towel around the end of a stick and have it thrust into the throat of the victim and it would come out all covered in blood- thus the screams of the tortured would be smothered. These statements would seem exaggerated to me if I had not, over and over, in my medical examinations in this regiment, found enormous horizontal scars around the body, and, on inquiry, been told “Dat’s whar my ole Marsa had whipped me.” Never once have these revelations come to me except by inquiry.

Finally, the war began. Old Cato heard the guns for Fort Sumter and waited and waited to hear his master speak of it. He and all his fellow slaves felt that the hour of deliverance had come. Finally, he said one night to his old master, young Doctor who “had been off to some place dey calls Paris,” and who was worse than the old man; “what all dat tunder mean way off dar?” “Oh it’s the d—d Yankees who want to steal all our property.” Of course Cato was indignant at the Yankees and promised to stand by his master. Time went on and the rebels began to doubt their success and at the same time began to swear that they would “work de niggers to deat’ before the d—d Yankees should have them.” Cato was compelled to exact tasks of the slaves that were before unheard of. He could not do it, and told his master so one Sunday night. The Doctor swore vehemently and ordered Cato to report himself in the morning for chastisement. Cato said “I tanked him berry much for de information an’ went to my hut an’ hung all de keys whar de ole woman could fin’ ‘em, but didn’t tell her what I’se gwinen to do, cause she’d make such a hullaboo about it. But Sunday mornin’ befo’ de hen git up, “ Cato was in a dug-out pushing his way through the rice swamp, so that the dogs could not follow his trail. He had gone far before daylight, and during the day, lay quietly in his boat, for he had been three days without eating. When he unexpectedly met a white lady, he assumed nonchalance, touched his hat and said, “howdye,” and told such a plausible story that he got something to eat. At another time he went four days without eating and in the evening saw a black man nailing up a coonskin by torch light, on the side of his hut. “Dis big ole man look like a religion feller,” and Cato was almost on the point of trusting him enough to go up and ask for food, but finally thought it safer to wait a little and try to steal something. He had just entered the yard when a great dog caught him by the chest, but fortunately, got only his clothing in his mouth. His hickory cane silenced that dog, but others came, an’ all de blacks an’ whites came down togedder.” He ran to the woods and found a pond and waded half the night to escape the dogs. “I didn’t git noffin for eat, but I wasn’t hungry no mo’ that night.” At last he found shelter and food and rest under a roof of a negro whom he could trust. He was then twenty-two miles from the river and in the night a black horseman came and said a Yankee gunboat was “commin’ up de ribber, an’ de Cap’n was holdin’ out his arms an’ beck’nin’ de niggahs fus’ from one sho’an’den from de odder.” Cato straightway started toward the river, but there were many roads. The horseman agreed to break off pine boughs at such partings and then go on rejoicing. By some mistake he did not reach the river at the point designated, and afterwards learned that his mistake had saved him from a trap of the rebels for whom the black horseman was acting.

Another night he was lying under a garden fence when a rebel was leaning over it, watching, intently, the house beyond, ready to shoot him when he should jump from a window. “My heart did beat so hard I wondered he didn’t hear it, but he didn’t an’ wen dey come to search de garden, I crawl on my belly till I jump troo de gate an’ it rain so fass I knowed deyre guns wouldn’t go wen dey snapped em at me.” At last, after wandering about “from de secon’ week in May till de las week in June I reached de gunboat.” His approach to the boat was full of apprehension. Before he could be certain of the boat, he saw soldiers on the shore and did not quite know whether they were Yankees or rebels. So he wavered between holding up his “white rag” and keeping out of sight. At last they saw him in his little boat, which he had somewhere confiscated, and “I hol’ up de rag an’ de mo’ de boat come, de mo’ I draw back, but oh, wen I get on de boat I thought I was in hebben.” I shall not trouble you with more slave stories. It is too much like trying to relate a tragedy acted by Rachel - very tame.

Feb. 16, 1863

Our Colonel has been down to Hilton Head today and reported Brig. Gen. Stephenson under arrest and to be sent to Washington for asserting that he would rather the Union cause should be lost than be saved by black soldiers. I should like to see the gentleman this evening. Everything may go against us in the present, but these little episodes are refreshing.

My heart is lightened by the return of usual health to our camp. It is pleasant to find every one looking up instead of down. Some of the replies to medical questions are quite unique, as, for instance, “I feel jail bound an’ cough powerful.” “I’ve got misery all de way down from de top ob de head to de sole ob de foot.” If I had not promised you freedom from individual histories in the future, I should try to write out the history of my head hospital nurse. Mr. Spaulding is a very superior man. He was kept in the stocks three weeks in the winter and his legs have not since been as strong as before. He is averse to speaking of himself. I trust his integrity, tenderness and natural ability as I would trust those qualities in John Milton Earle. He is a prince and commands the respect of all.

Feb. 17, 1863. Evening

Today I have been reading Judge Conway’s speech in Congress. I have found no leisure to watch carefully the reported change in public opinion in the North. I did not believe till today, that our friends are actually getting hopeless about the restoration of the Union on the basis of universal freedom. Judge Conway’s opinion I respect, and in this instance it weighs like lead upon my spirits. Besides, I somehow feel that the sentiments of a majority of the friends of freedom are too nearly represented in this speech. If so, nothing short of a miracle can bring the present generation of slaves into freedom. This thought makes me tremble when I look into the faces of our brave fellows and remember that millions of such are waiting in bondage for an opportunity to be as brave. The contemptible love of dominion so long fostered in this nation will yet be the death of it. Of course a better nation will grow out of the moldering ruins, but it is cruel that the present good of a nation and a race should be sacrificed on the altar of selfishness. These men have wives and children, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers yet in slavery and they daily pray God to bless the nation that has begun to let them fight for freedom. If the nation proves false to this half realized hope the curse of God will weigh more heavily on us than ever before. I would rather make my grave with the oppressed and outraged than survive the day of blighted anticipations. As God lives, liberty will come at last, but long I see her before I die. [The reference to Judge Conway may have been to Marcus Daniel Conway, 1832-1907, a Virginia-born radical abolitionist who published books advocating abolition in 1861 and 1862. Conway gave a lecture in 1862 in the Smithsonian Abolition Lecture series that was intended to pressure Lincoln to embrace abolition as the main goal of the war. He also returned to his home state in 1862 to assist thirty-two of his father’s slaves to escape to freedom in Ohio. Marcus Conway was not a judge, however, it was conservative father, Walker Peyton Conway, and his paternal uncle Eustace Conway who were judges in Virginia. Both men were pro-slavery and states’ rights advocates.]

Feb. 18, Evening

Last evening had more sadness for me that I have known since I left New England. But while gloomily preparing for bed at ten o’clock, my young assistant, Dr. Minor, thrust his head into the tent with, “Doctor, don’t you want to see the Atlantic for February? I have a box from home.”

 “A well known legal writer,” (vide N.Y. Evening Post) made me experience somewhat of the “Law of Costs” by holding open my eyes and heart and soul long beyond the physiological rules of camp, but what was lost in quantity of sleep was made up in quality by the reading. I long to take my old friend by the hand and thank him from my heart for this philosophical statement of vital truth. I find no leisure for reading books when so many unread souls lie open before me and writing and speaking in the face of a bleeding nation seem somewhat disgraceful to me, but the “legal writer” has come in at a critical moment with a reserved force of language which may prove better then a whole division of armed men. We now have the medical department of our regiment so systemized that I find more freedom from care than a few weeks ago. The prospect of a change of location leaves my new hospital in status quo.

Feb. 20. Evening

Yesterday I visited Miss Murray’s school in St. Helena Island. Miss Murray is assisted by Miss Towne and Miss Foster. Since the season for tilling the land had begun, the school has lessened in numbers from 200 to 125; both sexes and from three to fifteen years of age. Many of them have been under tuition several months and compare very favorably with Irish children after some length of instruction, as I have seen them in N.E. From what I have seen in camp, I think the mode of receiving instruction is very different in the two races. Imitation and musical concert are the avenues to the minds of these children. Of course the habit of such dependence will be changed by education, but such is the beginning. After centuries of slavery, which utterly shuts the avenues of thought, we should hardly expect rapid development of activity in the superior regions of thought. Only now and then some genius like Robert Sutton can be left to prove the God-like relation. The simple fact is that use is less destructive than disuse. [Ellen Murray and Laura M. Town were life-long friends who came to St. Helena Island in April 1862 as missionary teachers and founded the Penn School for black children.]

I dined at Friend Hunn’s and was accompanied by Miss Forten on a visit to Mr. Thorpe, who had charge of the Tripp plantation. [Rogers was riding] Edisto, a meager little confiscated creature from Edisto Island, with a saddle that must have been afloat since the flood, a bridle that left him comparatively unbridled and erratic in his ways and a girth that could never gird his loins up to the scriptural injunction without breaking. He had neither sandals nor shoes to his feet nor speed to his body. You can imagine that our ride of four miles through the pine barren was not so rapid as John Gilpin’s. But the afternoon was like the last of June and full of sunshine and jasmine blossoms and the ground was covered with brown pine needles. I have seen none but the pitch tree here. The needles are often a foot long and now that they are enlivened by steady warmth, they sport graceful plumes against the sky. [David Franklin Thorpe, a Brown University student and abolitionist, came to St. Helena Island as part of the Port Royal Experiment. He was a plantation superintendent from 1861-1869.]

But I have made my last visit to St. Helena Island. The fortunes of war uproot, too suddenly, for my fancy, all the little fibers of local attachment just as they begin to take kindly to the soil. I have just got everything in good attitude towards my new hospital when all is to be abandoned and we are to pitch our tents (if rebels permit) in another state. Being exactly what I want, I do not grumble at the fact.

Feb. 24, 1863

Colonel James Montgomery, commander of the Second South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, later renamed the 34th United States Colored Infantry. Montgomery, often called the “Kansas Jayhawker” for his violent prewar experiences, organized the regiment, enrolled the soldiers, and led several historic raids up rivers in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. USMHI.

Colonel Montgomery’s arrival from Key West, with the nucleus of the Second S.C. Vols. is an event of importance to our life here and also to the history of the war. I have heard Col. Higginson declare that he regarded Col. Montgomery alone as equal to one regiment. I have rarely heard our Colonel express deeper confidence in anyone. I have already discovered the secret of it. Col. Montgomery occupied my tent, last night, and before I turned in with James I heard him talk enough to feel sure of his indomitable courage united with that rare verity which belongs only to inborn gentlemen. A compact head on slightly rounded shoulders, a tall form of slender build, dark, bronzed face, deep brown and slightly curling hair, a Roman nose, heavy beard and mustache, a smallish, determined mouth and pointed chin, deep hazel eyes of density, all form a combination of feature and expression belonging to a man who has fought many battles but never surrendered. He once drove fourteen thousand with four hundred. He once ordered five rebel prisoners shot to avenge the death of five of his soldiers who were taken prisoners and shot by the rebels. He would not permit the blasphemy of the oath of allegiance to the remaining ten, but sent them back to their rebel brethren with the information that he could take prisoners and that thereafter he should not be content with life for life, but ten for one if they persisted in their hellish career of atrocity which they had begun. This man seems to me one of the John Brown men of destiny. He is not of the slow, calculating sort, but being in harmony with the elements around him, he counsels with fleeting events and trusts his intuitions more than his calculations. [Colonel James Montgomery of Kansas was in charge of enrolling formerly enslaved men into the ranks of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. He first enlisted men who had been brought by naval vessels to a refugee camp at Key West, Florida. In March 1863 he led raids on St. Johns River plantations near Jacksonville, Florida, freed the enslaved and drafted the able-bodied men into his regiment. The 2nd SCVI later was renamed the 34th United States Colored Infantry. For more on the daring raids conducted by Montgomery and the men of the 2nd South Carolina see “Colonel James Montgomery’s Raids in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina” on this same website.]

Feb. 25, 1863

This afternoon our regiment was received by Gen. Saxton in the presence of Gen. Hunter. The staff and body guards of these two General made about a hundred horsemen. I quite enjoyed the bugle notes as they galloped into camp and thought how much more exciting a cavalry regiment must be than infantry. In the course of the battalion drill our boys were ordered to make a charge toward them and I verily believe that if the Col. had not been in front, the order “Halt” would have passed unheeded till the cavalry had scattered over the field.

All this evening I have been squeezing Kansas history out of Col. Montgomery, a history which he himself is so completely identified that I have really been listening to a wonderful autobiography. Col. M. is born pioneer. Ashtabula County, Ohio, is his native place. Forty nine years ago, Joshua R. Giddings and Ben Wade were young men and Montgomery in his boyhood was accustomed to hear their early pleadings at the bar. So you see how birth and early surroundings fitted him for a fiercer frontier life. New England life seems puny beside the lusty life born on the frontier. Of the Col’s. eight children two of his sons are to hold commissions in his regiment. They are young but as “they don’t know the meaning of fear” and hate slavery he is sure they will get on. In medicine he has a weakness for pellets instead of pills. It is humiliating that our two strong colonels should exhibit such weak points. So long as we remain in good health I don’t know but this foible of homeopathy is as harmless as any of the popular vagaries.—

Yesterday Mingo Leighton died. Many weeks ago, I saw him step out of the ranks one day, when upon the double quick discovered that he had a slight disease of the heart. He was a noble fellow black as midnight, who had suffered in the stocks and under the lash of a savage master and did not accept any offer of discharge papers. Later he realized some of his hopes up the St. Mary’s so that he was very quiet under his fatal congestion of the lungs. He was ill but a few hours and was very calm when he told me on my first visit that his work was finished. He never gave me his history, though he regarded me as his friend, but one of his comrades confirmed my convictions of his worth. This same comrade, John Quincy, a good old man, who for eight years, paid his master twenty dollars per month for his time and eight dollars per month apiece for mules, and boarded himself and animals, this man told me that Mingo was deeply religious but said little about it and that he himself had been “trabblin by dis truth somethin’ like twenty five years” I have rarely met a man whose trust in God has seemed to me more immediate and constant.

Feb. 26

Our visitors increase and I shall not be sorry when we are beyond the reach of those who “doubt the propriety” of arming the negroes. There is but one convincing argument and I don’t care how soon it comes. I am sick of talking to men whose limited capacity renders it necessary for me to explain that humanity lies somewhat deeper than the integument of the human body.

Feb. 28

I keep a blazing fire in my tent about half the time, these hot, humid days, to keep myself from moulding alive. It requires a high pressure of vitality to push off these damps as they crowd in upon me here. Yet I have found only three cases of tubercular disease among our soldiers. Considering the fact that they were recruited without much regard to physical ability, I think this freedom from scrofulous disease remarkable.

March 2, Evening

John Quincy (Co. G.) came and asked me today if I would “send up North” for a pair of spectacles for him, “for common eyes of 60”. The old man said he “could not live long enough to make much account of them,” but that he “could read right smart places in the Testament,” and since he had lost his spectacles he missed it. This is the same soldier who told his congregation on the “Ben Deford,” after our St. Mary’s trip, that he saw the Col. with his shoulder at the wheel of the big gun in the midst of the firing, and that “when de shell went out it was de scream ob de great Jehovah to de rebels.” What made this statement the more interesting to me was the fact that I was standing in the background with the Col. at the time and John Quincy did not know of our presence.

We are now weeding our regiment a little and today I have examined about a hundred and discharged thirty for disability. I find one poor fellow whose mind is very torpid, though he is not idiotic. A companion of his told me that he had been overworked in the Georgia rice swamps and that “he be chilly minded, not brave and expeditious like me.” I believe I have somewhere written that our men were not subjected to examination by a surgeon before enlisting, hence this disagreeable business of discharging now. It is much easier to keep men out of a regiment than to get them out when once in.

March 2

The plot thickens. Our steamers are coaling up and the stores and ammunition are going aboard. This looks southward and before this letter reaches you we shall probably be up some river, I hope not the one spoken of on the streets. Today Dr. M. M. Marsh of the U.S. Sanitary Commission has made his official visit and dined with me. I suppose I care the more for Dr. Marsh that he is not only a gentleman, and a physician whom I greatly respect, but also that he comes from the capital of my native state. He is an elderly man with a countenance all covered with benignity. The following note to me from his agent at Beaufort, Mr. H. G. Spaulding, indicates the right spirit towards our movement. “If you are in want of any hospital or sanitary supplies for your regiment, we shall be most happy to fill out the requisition for you. Send for whatever you need and state in every case the amount wanted. This is all the ‘red tape’ of our Commission and there are no knots in it. In view of your unexpected movement I take this opportunity of assuring you of our desire to assist you in every way in our power.” [The USSC organized volunteer efforts to provide aid and supplies during the war, raising money, recruiting nurses, and operating kitchens at army camps.]

Of course Dr. Minor was posted off with a requisition and our good soldiers shall bless the Commission.

Last night our men seemed bewitched. A few ran guard to be at a dance at the old “Battery plantation.” Very early in the morning a poor fellow refused to halt, when ordered to do so by the guard, and has lost his life for it. He was shot through the side and will die within a few days.

Steamer Boston, March 6

Yesterday, at four p.m. the last tent was struck and we began to move down the river at eight this evening. Like our other expedition, we have three steamers: the “Boston,” “Burnside” and “John Adams.” Col. Montgomery with his men and Co. A (Capt. Trowbridge) of our regiment, started last evening on the “Burnside.” Our Lt. Col. Billings with Co. B (Capt. James [S. Rogers]) and Co. C (Capt. [William J.] Randolph) on the “John Adams.” Col. Higginson and Major Strong with the other seven companies of our regiment, on the Flag Ship “Boston.” I have left Dr. Hawks behind to care for the sick in the hospital, and placed Dr. Minor on the “Adams.” With me are the hospital Steward and my trusty nurse, Mr. Spaulding. You may easily imagine there is not much leeway on this steamer, calculated to carry less than four hundred. Besides we are blocked at every turn by camp equipage, horses, army wagons etc. But the weather is perfect and the line officers cheerfully co-operate in keeping their men where I want them.

To break camp under any circumstances is not an easy thing to do, but divers unforeseen obstacles have made no end of complications. The most serious hindrance I know of was the attempted desertion of Lieutenants O’Neil and Stockdale, two artillerists, who were very brave in our last expedition and upon whom, I fancy, the Col. put much dependence in our present undertaking. [Lt. James B. O’Neill, Co. D, and 1st Lt. William Stockdale, Co. C] The disaffection of these two officers grew out of the discontent and diabolism of their wives. Soon after our expedition, I was obliged to ask Gen. Saxton for increased hospital room. This led to the conclusion that these Irish wives, who were occupying chambers in the plantation house, would be obliged to go to New York for want of room at Beaufort, besides, it seemed necessary to get them away from the regiment. Leave of absence could not be granted the Lieutenants and then commenced such cursing from Madam Stockdale as I never heard from any woman. There was a quiet cooperation on the part of Madam O’Neil. Yesterday morning the Lieutenants would not report to their superiors, as ordered by the Col., but left the camp instead. The Major arrested them in Beaufort and put them in charge of the Ass’t Adjutant General, who, very unwisely, at last let them off with an hour on parole. Not reporting as promised, they were pursued and found on the “shell road” going towards the lines of the enemy. They are now heavily ironed and in jail at Beaufort, with a prospect of execution before them. I am glad for their wives to suffer as they do and inasmuch as these officers have served several years in the regular army and are not at all ignorant of the rules, they cannot complain of any punishment they may have brought upon themselves.

Steamer Boston, Mouth of St. John’s River, March 8, 1863

Mayport Mills, at the “Mouth of the Saint Johns River,” was seized by Federal gunboats of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in March 1862 and held throughout the war. It became the starting point for four occupations of Jacksonville, and for four years of gunboat patrols of the river. Map is courtesy of Erin Soles, Center for Instructional Technology, University of North Florida.

Mayport Mills as it appeared in 1864 when Union army artist Alfred R. Waud sketched the abandoned sawmill and surrounding buildings at the tiny village located south of the St. Johns River at its merger with the Atlantic Ocean. Federal forces occupied this site from March 1862 until the end of the war. LC.

Pilot Town was located across the river from Mayport Mills. River pilots and their families lived in a row of houses along the shore. They plumbed the depth of the sand bars at the mouth of the river after each tide to enable them to guide ships safely across the dangerous shifting sand barriers. Gunboat commanders used Pilot Town (Batten Island today) as a temporary shelter for refugees they picked up during their upriver patrols. Separate settlements of “tent towns” were established for white Union supporters and for freed enslaved men and women. When opportunities arose, the refugees were transported to Fernandina or Hilton Head. Army artist Alfred R. Waud sketched one of the pilot’s houses in 1864. LC.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, with the thermometer at 80 F. this bright Sunday. Great sandbanks like snow, atmosphere shimmering in the hot sunlight, while the young, tender foliage softens the landscape into beauty.

At daylight this morning we left Fernandina and arrived off the bar at the mouth of this river at 9.30 A.M. The gunboat “Uncas” came off to meet us and considerably before noon we were anchored in here with the “Uncas,” the “Norwich” and our transport, the “Burnside.” Why the “John Adams,” has not reached here, we cannot imagine. This delay warns the rebs of our approach to Jacksonville and, if they choose to dispute our landing, I do not see why some lives may not be lost. James and I have been ashore this afternoon and have seen various wild flowers unfamiliar to us. The Col. is deep in consultation with gunboat captains and a steady frown indicates his impatience and perplexity about the “John Adams.” Rough and ready Capt. Dolly remarked when we passed her that he was d-d if he didn’t admire the Lt.Col. because he was always to be found just where we left him. His theory however about the non-arrival of the “Adams” is that the chaplain has gone back for the last well to be dug. Wells are one of the chaplain’s specialties and it would not be surprising if the theory proved correct. To me the worst feature of the delay is the exposure of our men to disease. I dread confinement in close air for them much more than I do rebel bullets.

Yesterday I heard of a little coincidence which quite amused me. One of our captains is not so broad and catholic as Theodore Parker, and very constantly manifests a jealous nature by petty complaints and watching for evil. Yesterday morning he was speaking to me of the Col. and remarked that the only fault he could find with him was a lack of discipline, and that the men ought not to be allowed to insult their officers without severe punishment. I replied that I did not know of an officer in the regiment who was obliged to cross the track of the men so much as I, and yet, without any specific control over any but those in the hospital department, I never dreamed of being insulted and that if I were, I should feel that the fault were mine. This captain happened to be the officer of the day and, towards evening, I noticed that he was looking very demure and that he was minus his sash. On inquiry I found he had permitted some slight improprieties among the men and that the Col. promptly put another officer in his place. I have not heard of a better disciplinarian than Col. H. and I doubt not Capt. – is getting convinced on the same point. [Theodore Parker was a Massachusetts preacher, abolitionist, and social reformer made famous for his writings and his liberal and expansive intellectual pursuits.]

Just now I found one of our men in a collapsed state which will prove fatal.

March 7

This morning, at last, the “John Adams” hove in sight. The officers report fog [was] so dense as to prevent running her over the bar at Fernandina. If the rebels are not duller than I think them, we shall suffer for this most annoying delay. My judgment of it is more severe than I can write.

The poor fellow whom I mentioned yesterday, died this morning. Were our men obliged to sleep aboard a few nights more, such deaths would be frequent. Yet I have done everything to prevent disease that, under the circumstances, can be done. Yesterday I found several ill on the “Burnside,” including Col. Montgomery and one of our best artillerists. Today all are in good condition and anticipating a fight.

Headquarters 1st S.C. Vols., Jacksonville, Fla. March 12, 1863

An 1859 map of Jacksonville, Florida. Several sawmills and buildings shown on this map were burned in March 1862 when Confederate soldiers left the town after Union troop transports and gunboats arrived at Mayport Mills. The Judson House, shown on the right of the map, was one of the buildings burned. The map is courtesy of the Florida Room, Jacksonville Downtown Library.

Military map of Jacksonville, Florida, U.S. Coastal Survey, 1864. This map shows the defensive network constructed around the town during the fourth Union occupation of Jacksonville. The major deterrent to a Confederate capture of the town is not shown on this map; that deterrent was the line of Union gunboats lying in the St. Johns River with their weapons at the ready. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

For once I have been so busy that I could not find time to note the thousand and one incidents of our expedition. Tuesday morning, at two, our fleet of five steamers moved slowly up the St. Johns, passed the yellow bluffs, the night glorious in its blue, misty moonlight, the river wide and beautiful. When daylight came we were delighted by the scenery of the shores and the cozy looking homes scattered here and there.

The USS Pawnee, a sloop-of-war assigned to duty along the South Atlantic Coast from 1861 until the end of the war. Duty assignments for the “Pawnee” included service as a troop transport and gunboat on the St. Johns River. This 1864 sketch is by Alfred R. Waud, accomplished when the ship was anchored off Mayport Mills. LC. The “Pawnee” was not involved in the March 1863 occupation of Jacksonville, although the gunboats that did participate were similar in appearance and armament.

Strange as it may seem, the rebels were taken by surprise and the city was neither defended nor burned and we landed without a gun being fired. One man came down to the wharf and caught the line when it was thrown off and the Col. was the first to step on shore. Then followed Capt. Metcalf and Capt. Rogers with their men and soon other companies followed, till pickets were posted in the suburbs. Meanwhile, Col. Montgomery and Capt. Trowbridge with their men, started off in the direction of the rebel camp. The “John Adams,” “Boston” and “Burnside” remain at the wharves, while the “Uncas” and “Norwich” lie out in the stream.

Union sentry on the roof of a building at the corner of Bay and Ocean streets. Union army equipment can be seen clogging the streets of the town. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley, 1864, during the fourth and permanent occupation of Jacksonville. LC.

Sketch by Alfred R. Waud of the appearance of four gunboats assigned to the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron: General Meigs, Umadilla, Seneca, and Pembina. All four ships conducted patrols on the St. Johns River. LC.

We expect to hold this city, though I don’t see how it is to be done without reinforcements. Our men will do almost anything, but I don’t believe they can do so much picket service without exhaustion. Skirmishing is intensely exciting and they enjoy it beyond measure. Yesterday they brought in a saddle with some instruments that belonged to a surgeon of the cavalry who was shot through the head. At every fight our boys have put the rebels to flight, though they have twice made the attack with force superior to ours.

The rebel camp is eight miles out. It is not easy for us to know their exact force. Under the protection of our gunboats, we are safe, but we hope, ere long, to be safe under our own protection. Many of our men were slaves here, not long ago, and you can scarcely imagine the horror and dread the secesh have of them. We have a few important prisoners, one who was a Lieut. in the U.S. Army and afterward in the Confederate Army.

Capt. Rogers is Provost Marshal and has his powers taxed considerably. He likes his work exceedingly and does it well. He rides a little secesh pony which he captured the first morning here. I am sick of “loyal slaveholders,” and would not resort to the blasphemy of administering the oath to them. I think we are not doing so much of this last as some commanders have done.

I should judge this to be a town of 4000 inhabitants. It has excellent wharves and large brick warehouses more than half a mile in length. The town gradually rises from the river, back a third or half a mile. Streets and houses have gas fixtures, a New England look to everything, streets beautifully shaded by live oaks, now and then a cornus Florida, the ground paved with its white petals, peach trees in full bloom.

Jacksonville building fronting on Bay Street, east of Ocean Street. Black Union soldiers can be seen on the street and in the windows of the second floor of the building on the right. Colonel Higginson billeted the men of the First South Carolina Volunteers on the second story of buildings on Bay Street for security, and also because of space availability. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley, 1864. LC.

This 1864 photograph by Sam A. Cooley focuses on the Jacksonville City Market. Union steamers can be seen at the wharf in the background, to the rear of the warehouse and store of John Clark. USMHI.

Federal soldiers assembling for drill in front of the “Reading Room” located on the south of Bay Street. The Union steamship “Helen Getty,” a troop transport, is tied to the town wharf behind the two-story brick building. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley, 1864. USMHI.

Our headquarters are grand. The new brick house we occupy was owned by Col. [John] Sanderson, one of the ablest lawyers in the state and one of the most traitorous. He is in Dixie while his family is north. I just now asked Serg’t [Thomas] Hodges if he knew Sanderson. “Oh yes, I was one of the carpenters who worked many a hard day on that fine house.”

The residence of Confederate supporter John Sanderson, abandoned as Federal forces approached the town in March 1862. The Sanderson mansion became the residence of Union commanders during four wartime occupations of Jacksonville. Colonel Higginson and Dr. both praised the building. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley, 18164. LC.

Albert Sammis, private in Co. C, First South Carolina Volunteers. Sammis, born free and a blacksmith before the war, volunteered for service at Camp Saxton in December 1862 and became Colonel Higginson’s orderly during the occupation of Jacksonville. Albert was the son of John S. Sammis, a wealthy planter and business owner in Jacksonville, and an enslaved woman who was freed before Albert was born. After the war, Albert worked as a gardener, cook, and constable in Jacksonville. Courtesy of Eileen Brady, Special Collections Librarian, Thomas G. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida.

There are probably 400 or 500 people remaining here. If everything goes right I shall convert the Washington Hotel into a hospital. At present we keep sick and wounded on the “John Adams.”

This is the only place I have yet seen in the South that suits me for a residence. It is the most important position in Florida for us to hold. It has already been twice abandoned by our troops and it remains to be proved whether it must be abandoned a third time.

March 13, Evening

The night was not a very quiet one for our sentinels at the barricades, firing enough to keep all on the qui-vive, though no one was wounded on our side and I cannot learn that anybody but a secesh dog was found dead on the other side. Expecting a noisy night and possibly a dangerous one, I slept, as heretofore, on the “John Adams.” Doing so gave the Col. a good opportunity for quietly saying this morning that he did not doubt Capt. Duncan of the “Norwich” would afford me greater security if I liked. Inasmuch as I am somewhat severe on cowards, I quite enjoyed the laugh brought upon myself. My presence here was entirely unnecessary, consequently I sought a place of less danger. I have not yet considered it quite prudent to bring the sick and wounded to a hospital on shore.

March 14, Evening

A curious incident occurred this morning which gave me a full hundred (from both regiments) sick and wounded to examine and prescribe for and fill out my prescriptions. The “John Adams” started for a secret raid up the river at daylight without notifying Dr Minor, the steward and the hospital nurse who were all sleeping on the boat. It was a good enough joke, but for me not so practical as to make me crave a repetition. Tonight our sick and wounded are in the hospital. Col. Montgomery thought the Lord had grown these handsome shade trees especially for barricades and I have never a doubt that the Washington Hotel, with its sixteen chambers, and a fire-place in each, was especially intended for a military hospital. Possibly it is because it seems too good to last that I deem it hazardous to bring our sick ashore, but the Colonels assure me it is perfectly safe to do so. . . .

Our belligerent Chaplain is armed with a revolver on each side and a Ballard rifle on his back. He keeps so persistently on the advanced picket line that I could scarcely persuade him to conduct the funeral service of the poor fellow who was shot the other day. Today he got on the track of some cavalry and infantry and was certain of surrounding and capturing them if he could only get permission from the Colonel. His hatred of slavery is so intense that his prayers are of a nature to keep his powder dry.

We have burned a good many houses within a mile of town, to get rid of screens for the enemy between us and the woods, where rather formidable trees are being felled to complete our water barricade. The houses are often occupied by women and children whose husbands and fathers are in the Confederate service. The Chaplain, being a man of fire, has much to do with this matter. Today, I questioned him as to his usual mode of proceeding. I found he gave them the choice of the two governments, but with the explicit statement that their friends in arms were to be killed soon unless they came and surrendered. His division of the effects of these families seems rather scriptural. “What seems to belong to the woman, I yield to her, but what seems to belong to the man I have brought into camp.”

“Battery Creighton,” by Alfred R. Waud, 1864. The photograph shows the artillery battery and encampments for Union soldier at the outskirts of Jacksonville. Federal troops cleared houses and trees to create clear lines of fire in the event of an attack by Confederate forces. LC.

Some of these cases are very pitiful and call out my deepest commiseration. Today I visited a poor widow who has a son in the rebel service. Her house was burning and she, with her children, was brought into town. She has not been able to walk a step during the last five months. On examination I found that her prostration was due entirely to privations and hardships resulting from the war. For more than a year her food has been “dry hominy” with now and then a little fish. She was born in Alabama of “poor white” parents. As I talked with her it seemed to me it must be difficult for her to understand the justice of our coming here to invade the homes of those who had always earned their bread by the sweat of their brows.

Yesterday I conversed with a lady who lives in a pleasant cottage, with her beautiful children and her aged mother. Her husband is a captain outside our barricades and when the Colonel granted her permission to go wherever she chose, she said so many had gone from the river and coast towns to the interior that one could scarcely find a barn to stay in or food to subsist on. She remains here for the present. Her husband was a music teacher and was taken into the army by conscription. From what I can learn of him through Union men, I have no doubt he would gladly return to loyalty. What are we to do with such families? “Things are a little mixed” here in the South, but we must all suffer the results of our great national sin, some one way, some another. [Rogers probably conversed with Mrs. A.A. Ochus, whose German-born husband was a music teacher and the owner of a music store in Jacksonville before the war. He joined the Jacksonville Light Infantry in 1859 and became the Captain of Co. D, 11th Florida Infantry in the Confederate States Army.]

I have given out word that the Surgeon of our regiment will cheerfully and gladly attend to the medical needs of all civilians here. To be the means of relieving suffering is sufficient compensation, but in this case there is the additional good of being able to make anti-slavery statements in a satisfactory way. . . .

I never supposed I could be so much gratified by comparatively level scenery. The river is very beautiful, quite clear and of a deep amber color. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy my evening bath. Dr Minor usually goes with me. Once, while in the water, the companies were hurriedly ordered to “fall in,” but seemed so unnatural that one’s bathing should be interfered with that we were not startled by the alarm.

We find the rebel women here exceedingly desirous to prove that our soldiers are guilty of all the outrages they might expect from a long-injured people now in power. Many of our soldiers are natives of this place and meet their old mistresses here. On the day of our landing I was over and over implored, by those who knew their deserts, to protect them from the “niggers.” It was an awful turning of the tables. I quite enjoyed saying “These are United States troops and they will not dishonor the flag.” Several charges have been preferred against the soldiers, but thus far, when sifted down, have proved quite as much against those who complained as against our men. The Adjutant told me of a lady of easy manners, who had been very much insulted by a soldier. Close investigation proved that he actually sat on her front door-steps.

That our soldiers do some outrageous things, I have little doubt. When women taunt them with language most unbecoming, as they sometimes do, I should be very sorry if they did not return a silencer. Thus far they have behaved better than any white regiment has done under such temptations. They “confiscate” pigs and chickens because their captains connive at it and the Provost Marshall cannot do everything alone.

Today the “John Adams” and the “Burnside” are off on some speculation up the river. I was too busy to go with them this morning, or should have asked the privilege. Col. Montgomery has gone with his men. They declare that he is a “perfect devil to fight, he don’t care nuttin ‘bout de revels.” His bravery is apparently rashness but in reality, far from it. He evidently thinks the true mode of self-defense is to attack the enemy on his own ground.

[March 15] Evening

About six, the “Burnside” came down the river with horses, hogs, chickens and prisoners. They took Col. Bryant, just as he returned to his plantation after running his negroes into the back county. They report great quantities of cotton and cattle up the river, so I hope we really are to have fresh beef again.

It is nothing like as damp and unwholesome here as in South Carolina. The same amount of exposure there that our men have had here, would have given the hospital twenty or thirty cases of pleurisy and pneumonia, while today we have but a single case of acute inflammation. There is coughing enough to keep back several rebel regiments. I see no reason, however, why the officers should not get intermittent fever from this handsome river, by and by. It looks as if midsummer might load it with miasma and alligators.

. . . I am gradually confiscating furniture for my spacious chamber in the best house of this beautiful town, as if it were my final residence. I enjoy the long cedar closet that opens out of my room. The fragrance is so sweet that I cannot understand why moths object to it. Then just think of having a perfect bath room, without any water in it and costly gas fixtures without any gas. The war has greatly deranged the machinery of this town. Almost everywhere, except in this house, I have found the lead pipes cut by the rebels and used, I suppose, for bullets. When Col. Sanderson left here he placed his house in charge of a Union man, saying that it would naturally be the headquarters of any Union commander. Hence the more perfect preservation of the property.

March 16. Evening

The second floors of the warehouses on Bay Street make capital quarters for our troops. The rebels burned many of the stores of Union men and would have burned their private dwellings if it could have been done without endangering their own.

Theodore Hartridge store and warehouse on the south side of Bay Street in Jacksonville. Colonel Higginson also billeted his men in this building; in 1864 Union officials made it a commissary headquarters. Photography by Sam A. Cooley. USMHI.

The provost marshal has worked very assiduously in collecting and preserving from destruction, furniture etc., left in the vacated houses. To be his “old Uncle” just now I find a great convenience. Today he sent up to my room the only spiral spring bed the town afforded. After three months of such hard fare I am not sure but so much luxury will make me effeminate. The old buffalo robe seems at home again and there is not an easier bed in the United States.  [The provost marshal at the time was Captain James S. Rogers, the nephew of Dr. Rogers.]

One of our pickets came in today with a conical ball in his foot and complained that “de cunnel stood out forwad ob we looking at de revels wid de glass an wouldn’t let we fire.” The Col. afterwards told me that the range was so long that it would have been a great waste of ammunition.

The mosquitoes are here. I have always heard that they were as large as sheep. It is a mistake, they are not so large as rats. I think those I see are probably “spring poor,” at any rate they seem hungry, and, like the women and children, come in droves for rations.

This afternoon was the first opportunity I have found for a horseback ride. The little confiscated spitfire kicked and pranced beautifully, but I found he could run, having been trained, I suppose for skedaddling. Walking is the last thing to be done here so long as you can get a horse or a boat. At present we can do but little of either, lest we be shot by guerillas.

I asked Major [B. Ryder] Corwin, this morning, if he really liked Colonel Montgomery as much as he expected to, and was delighted by his saying, “A great deal better.”

March 17

We are fairly at work at our legitimate business. The “John Adams” brought down, last evening, thirty contrabands, ten horse, and quantities of corn, hogs, cotton etc. Today the ‘Burnside” is off on a similar errand. Meanwhile our boys have had a smart skirmish about a mile and a half out and burned several houses occupied by the rebel advance pickets. As we are not here to act aggressively against camp Finnegan, but simply to hold this town for headquarters, while making such advances from other points on the river as may seem best, it seems as if the enemy must have reached the conclusion, ere this, that we have means of defense. It is a mystery that they do not contrive some way to burn us out. Women and children are permitted to go and come without hindrance and they could do us the greatest damage by going back to their friends by the light of the town. I trust they will not think of it.

March 18

This morning a message came in by flag of truce from camp Finnegan [Camp Finegan was eight miles west of Jacksonville] giving us 24 hours to send out the women and children to the brick church, where the skirmish was yesterday, and their teams will meet them there. The message was signed by Lieut. Col. [Abner H.] McCormick. This afternoon another came from Col. [Duncan L.] Clinch repeating the former and adding that we should be held responsible for what might happen to those left in town. This looks as if they intend to approach the town with artillery and set it on fire with shells. This is feasible, in spite of our gunboats. If there is any pluck in them the attempt will be made. Many of our officers think the message a mere flourish for intimidation, but I do not and shall hold myself in readiness to send my sick and wounded to the steamer at short notice. Meanwhile we look for reinforcements by the “Boston.” Her delay is unaccountable.

Owing to hard fare and excessive fatigue, several of our officers are quite out of health. I am satisfied that the blacks have too much credit for good cooking. I have yet to find one who knows how to make bread or cook meat. If we hold this town we shall soon have “post oven” and good bread; getting rid of the villainous fried dough which is bringing dysentery into camp.

March 19

The provost marshal and major have been very busy today, escorting the rebel women and children to their friends. Major Strong told me that while the teams were unloading, the marshal sat on his pony whistling the John Brown hymn. As James was not permitted to talk, I suppose he had to whistle in self defense. I very much wanted to go, but could not get permission. I suppose the Col. is afraid I shall, sometime, go over to the rebels. About one hundred and fifty have gone out today, leaving about two hundred here. The Col. is under no obligation to force civilians out of town without positive notification from the enemy that he intends to attack.

March 20

The enemy left us undisturbed during the night and I believe their chance has vanished with the rising of the morning’s sun. The “Boston” has arrived with the sixth Connecticut regiment and there are others to hand. Meanwhile our earthworks are so nearly completed that guns are mounted and a large force could easily be repulsed. But last night more than one officer slept with his boots on.

March 21

Last night was dark and rainy with just wind enough to make sounds everywhere. At midnight, cannonading began at one of the forts and then followed shells for the gunboats. Our pickets were fired upon and there was general impression outside that all secesh were down upon us. But the enemy has not since been heard from. Today Major Strong went with skirmishers far beyond the accustomed line, without opposition. Cannonading in the night is hard for weak nerves and I dreaded the effect upon my sick. One of the convalescents was suddenly attacked with pleurisy in the night, and when I asked him about the time when the pain began, he replied, “Just after de gun done gone shoot.” Another, who had a bullet through his leg, said he had “enjoyed a mighty bad rest.” Tomorrow the “Boston” will take northward some important prisoners whom we have arrested here. Some of them were complaining of Capt. [William J.] Randolph’s tardiness in having them examined, that when he arrested them he promised they should have an early trial. The Capt. replied that he would like to have them prove that he promised them anything but “the day of Judgment and long periods of damnation.”

I wish I had time to tell you some of the curious incidents of the last ten days. I dare say the Col. has them all in his everlasting note book, so you will get them sometime.

Our regiment and the sixth Conn. met harmoniously at church this morning. The prejudice of the white soldiers is very strong, yet I trust there will be no serious collision. Our boys have seen hardships enough to unfit them for receiving taunts very graciously. The question begins to be asked “When shall we make an advance?’

March 23

The 8th Maine arrived today and I am sorry that Col. [John D.] Rust ranks our Col.

March 24

Tonight the “Paul Jones” has returned from Palatka, bringing a single contraband and the intelligence that all the slaves have been run back to the interior. The fact is if we are ever to get black soldiers, we must make a big hole through rebel lines so that the blacks can run back to us. Every day of waiting here is a day of strength to our fortifications, but a day of weakness to our purpose. We need nothing so much as black recruits and it seems to me that if the proclamation of emancipation is ever to be anything more than a dead letter it must be made so before many weeks. Were the North an anti-slavery unit I should not feel at all impatient, but I believe we have more to dread from traitors at home than from their friends who fight against us here. Possibly public opinion may not continue on its anti-slavery decline at home, but if today we had fifty thousand black troops, I should feel more certain of its returning to health. I am perfectly satisfied that there is nothing in this world so dreadful to the rebels as the enlistment of their slaves in the federal service. They will resort to every possible means to prevent our getting recruits. . . .

The USS Paul Jones, a side-wheel, double-ended steam gunboat, assigned to the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and commanded by Charles Steedman. The “Paul Jones” transported black soldiers up the St. Johns River in 1862 and 1863. Photographed circa 1865. Courtesy of the United States Naval Historical Museum.

Our Provost Marshal is succeeded by the appointment of another from one of the older regiments. I believe all the officers of the Post are chosen from the oldest regiment present. The date of one’s commission settles the appointment. I was surgeon of the Post until the 8th Maine arrived, now I am only surgeon of the 1st S.C.Volunteers again. I suppose it would be proper to feel relieved, but not having discovered any change in my daily duties, I feel much the same over; as Capt. Trowbridge would express it, “Hearty but wake.” Speaking of Trowbridge reminds me that I heard him and the Chaplain, on Sunday, entering into a mutual agreement not to swear any more. The Chaplain swears only under the most pressing circumstances, but I have not the remotest faith that in the hour of need either of them will remember the pledge. Yet I am aware of notable instances of self restraint in cases more chronic than theirs. Capt. Dolly is doing his best to give it up, but he told me, confidentially, that he would rather go without eating.

March 25. 4.30,P.M

Three quarters of an hour ago I was dreaming pleasantly of a prayer meeting, when a rebel bombshell burst somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the town. Presently another and another, then the reply of our guns and then the “long roll.” It seemed as if we were at last, fairly in for it. Dr. Minor came up to ask if we were to trust Providence to care for our hospital. I advised him to go back and assure them all that the Lord was on the side of our big guns. Meanwhile I crawled on to the top of our observatory and watched the firing until the secesh sent shell which burst in the air and sent a fragment whistling above my head with a note so shrill that I began to think of Gabriel’s trumpet and crawled down again. Presently the cannonading ceased. I do not think it was chivalric for the rebels to wake us so early, but, I remember, we are not now in South Carolina. The cocks are crowing unconcernedly and I’ll go to bed again.

Evening

Several shells came into town before our guns gave the quietus. A section of one struck within a few feet of the Col. and Major, in front of Headquarters. The hospital of the 8th Maine was perforated by a piece of one, and two dwelling houses were terribly bored. One went through two occupied chambers. A husband and wife lost, respectively, a coat and a skirt, which were hanging on a rocking chair and . . . a portion of the mosquito bar over the bed. Shells make very ugly-looking holes through houses. It seems remarkable that no one was injured, although to me not much more so than that so few are injured in thunder storms, of which the scene forcibly reminded me.
[This shelling came from a weapon mounted on a flatbed rail car that Higginson called a “Dantean monster.” It was a 64-pounder that fired eight inch explosive shells with a range of up to two miles. Lt. Thomas E. Buckman, a Jacksonville resident and the superintendent of the Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad before the war, was in charge of the weapon. The shells were so huge that they could be seen in flight.]

This morning we made a reconnaissance in force. One of our . . . [South Carolina Volunteer]  companies took charge of the rifled ten pounder on the platform car, while the Col and Major advanced on the line of the railroad with four other companies of our regiment together with six of the 8th Maine and 6th Conn, our Colonel in command. Our boys skirmished on the left of the road and the others on the right. The rebel pickets galloped off to camp – which has been moved back ten or twelve miles. When we had advanced about four miles through the open pine barrens and occasional thick woods, the smoke of a rebel engine was seen in the distance. Meantime I had hurried through my morning duties and at about 12.30 P.M. had overtaken the force. I had not been there more than twenty minutes before the 64 pound shells began to come down upon us from their gun on a platform car. Our force had already begun a slow retreat, with repeated halts, when the conical portion of the first shell (which had exploded above our heads) struck four of the 8th Maine soldiers, killing two and wounding two, one slightly and one so that the amputation of the foot is necessary. The firing was very accurate; first on one side of the road, then on the other a shell would come singing over and many of them exploded over our heads. Gen. Saxton believes a special Providence watches over our regiment and that not a man was seriously injured today would seem to justify his belief. I saw a whole shell that did not explode, plough into the sand under the feet of a soldier not six rods from me, knock his gun out of his hands and his cap off his head, but before I could get to him he had gathered himself up and was off uninjured.

Dr. Joseph Mitchell of the 8th Maine who suffered  and I were the only mounted officers out, till the Col’s horse was sent to meet him on the return. My “rebel” pranced well and behaved beautifully. We burned several houses and as I had not before had the satisfaction, I chose a very new, good one and kindled my fire in a costly mahogany sideboard. A portion of the R.R. track was destroyed, but whether enough to hinder them long in repairs I am not certain. [Dr. Mitchell was a native of Maine, a graduate of the Harvard Medical School who moved to Jacksonville in 1852 for health reasons. An ardent Unionist, Mitchell left Florida at the outbreak of the war and volunteered for Union service, eventually becoming a surgeon in the 8th Maine.]

After our return, Sergeant McIntyre of Co. G. came up to headquarters to intercede for his friend Thomas Long, a private in the same company, who had conceived the idea of going alone a dozen miles to destroy by fire a long trestle work, built through a swamp, over which the oar cars run. Thomas Long is a thin, spiritual-looking, unassuming black man, who trusts God. He has gone on his errand, an errand requiring more real courage and heroism than has before been manifested in our regiment. Of course he goes disguised, but he carries with him such evidence of his intention that death would surely follow his capture. My expectation of seeing him again is very small.  [Thomas W. Long became an African Methodist Episcopal minister after the war and represented Marion County in the Florida State Senate.]

March 26

This morning a company of the 8th Maine went over the creek, north of the town, and advanced about three miles through the pine barren. At noon a messenger came in for reinforcements to go out and take a camp containing a hundred cavalry pickets. It was decided that Co. H. and Major Strong with four of our companies should undertake the job, much to the disappointment of Lieut Col [Joseph F.] Twitchell of the 8th Maine, who told me how certain he was of making a fine dash of it if allowed to go. But we had held the town against great odds before they came to our relief, and it was our right to go.

To my surprise, the Col. ordered me to stay behind until the reserve force should come up. I waited as long as I could conveniently and then rode over to the creek where our pickets were stationed. Instead of meeting a “reserve,” I found only the horses of our officers, who had not attempted to get them over the barricades on the causeway and through the creek, where the bridge had been removed. They had already been gone long enough to get two miles in advance and it looked to me as if there must be ample time for our party to capture or be captured long before the 8th Maine could reinforce them. So, for one, I disobeyed orders and gave my Rebel the reins. I found he could leap like a panther and run like a deer. Except in the circus, I have never seen a horse leap so high. The marsh each side of the causeway made it impossible to go round. Once out on the plain, among the tall, handsome pine, we went gaily in pursuit of our party. The scene was so solemn and so beautiful that I had no fear of possible guerilla shots. At length our men were in sight, on the right of the road, and hats were waving me out of the way so likely to be seen by the enemy. Knowing but little of strategy, I suppose I should have made a straight forward push for the enemy. Major Strong, with two companies, had gone around another way to cut off retreat, and I soon perceived, by the silence and ominous motions, that we were in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Finally the trap was handsomely and strategically set, the Major was on the left spring and the Col. on the right, and when the two jaws snapped together they found between their teeth quite a lot of drying sheets and shirts and other articles, resembling, through a thickly wooded ravine, a rebel camp. Chickens were frightened and an old mare confiscated by the Major to ride back to town. I have not seen the 8th Maine captain who made the blunder, but everybody else seems to enjoy it. Our boys could not have had a better skirmish drill. I was not censured for disobeying orders.

March 27, 1863

This afternoon our eyes were gladdened by the sight of the “Boston” and convoy steaming up the river, but when, instead of a cavalry force and light artillery to weigh them down, we perceived they came empty, we were filled with forebodings, till our hearts actually sank within us at the intelligence that an order from Gen. Hunter had come for our forces to evacuate the town to help those further north. This may be wisdom, but I fail to see anything but that fatal vacillation which has thus far cursed us in this war. We have planted ourselves here for the definite purpose of making this state free, and have already so fortified the city that a small force can hold it while the boats are making such raids up the river as may seem best. Col. Montgomery and his men have been off two days up the river and tonight, a steamer is dispatched to call them back. I hope it will take the “John Adams” a week to find the “Gen Meigs,” for we cannot think of leaving without them. Unfortunately we are constantly expecting her back, though it would not surprise me if Col. Montgomery had marched his men twenty miles inland and confiscated all sorts of contrabands. He carefully avoided taking anything but hard bread, for he religiously believes we ought to live on the rebels.

Judge Stickney is exceedingly anxious to take the Convoy and go back to Hilton Head to ask for a reconsideration of the order. Among the officers there is a difference of opinion as to the rightfulness of such a delay. The order was peremptory and were I Gen. Hunter I would cashier the officer who disobeyed it. At the same time I believe the only reason why Gen Hunter calls us back is because he fears our black troops might be overpowered in the absence of the other regiments. There would be no danger of it. If our army ever should happen to do anything at Charleston we could be reinforced after that. [Lyman D. Stickney, a radical abolitionist, was appointed by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to head the U.S. Direct Tax Commission of Florida. Stickney was a political opportunist of the first order and had a sharp eye for personally rewarding and unsavory investments in property owned by Confederates before the war.]

March 28. Evening

Not yet off. Have worked enough for one day in getting our sick and wounded on the “John Adams.” Another steamer has arrived with additional instructions. It seems that each regiment is to return to its former camp, I suppose this mean that we are to protect the Islands while the advance is made on Charleston, if it means anything. The “John Adams” found the “Gen. Meigs” a long way up the river. They returned at noon with twelve rebel prisoners who were caught while asleep at their station. The Lieutenant in command was permitted to say goodbye to his wife, and made his escape through the sobs and crinoline of his female friends. Col Montgomery admits a weak spot in his military nature. He could have shot the Lieut. while escaping, but would not do so in the presence of his wife. [The Confederate lieutenant that escaped was Stephen Bryant, owner of eighty-seven enslaved men and women and the Laurel Grove Plantation on Doctors Lake – today in Clay County.]

Our men made a landing at Palatka and were fired into by the rebs. Lieut. Col Billings received a ball through the fleshy margin of each hand while attempting to get off the steamer. Brave old John Quincy received one through the leg, a little above the ankle, fracturing the small bone and carrying away some of it. I shall not amputate. It seemed peculiarly trying for the old man. He had begged the privilege of going up for his wife and received a shot instead. I don’t quite see how he will harmonize this double affliction with the theory he so often preaches to the men, that when one trusts in God and is not a coward, he will be protected against the bullets of his enemies.

Tonight the Major and Captain, with twenty picked men, go up the river with muffled oars, to try to capture another lot of pickets. I fear they will not be successful.  Thomas Long returned safely day before yesterday. He examined camp Finnegan, eight miles out, and went to the trestle four miles beyond, but finding it closely watched by pickets he did not attempt to burn it. I look at that man with a deep feeling of reverence.

My Rebel and I went, this afternoon, round the circuit of the pickets, forts, rifle pits and stockades for the last time. The pickets were playing euchre and fishing in the creek and enjoying themselves as only pickets can. I thought how much less the rebels troubled them than me. The truth is, the order to evacuate this town this town depresses me. I hate weak vacillation and this seems too much like the unsettled policy that all along has crippled the energy of our forces.

Steamer Convoy, Mouth of St John’s, March 29, 1863

This is one of the sad days of my life. The evacuation of Jacksonville is the burial of so many hopes I had cherished for the oppressed, that I feel like one in attendance at the funeral of a host of his friends. I greatly fear we are to be put back: out of action service at a moment when there is most need for us to work. I believe our retrograde movement today is an error more serious and damaging to the interests of the enslaved than appears on the surface. . . . Major Strong and his partly visited, last night, the picket station of the rebels, but for some reason they found no one and the search was useless.

Early this morning all was hurry and excitement. Insufficient means of transportation caused a good deal of grief among families obliged to leave behind their furniture, and caused a good deal of profanity among officers and soldiers obliged to be packed as you would pack pork. This little Convoy, of 410 tons, has six companies of soldiers with all their equipment, forty or fifty citizens with all the truck we did not throw back upon the wharf; fifty horses; all the Commissary stores and all my hospital stores save those needed on the “John Adams.” Were this crowded state to last but a few hours there would be no trouble, but it is thick weather and raining like fury and the fleet dare not put out to sea before morning. I forgot to say that we have also all our camp tents on board. Here we are for the night.

Quite early this morning the 8th Maine boys began setting fire to the town – a most shameful proceeding. I came near losing my hospital stores before I could find conveyance for them to the steamer. The hospital was burned and many buildings were on fire when we left. It seemed like an interposition of Providence that a heavy rain so soon came on, which probably saved part of town. It also seems to me that Providence is interfering with Gen Hunter’s order in a way that may be more or less destructive. The wind is changing to the East and our prospect of getting off in the morning is passing away.

March 30

Late last evening we succeeding in getting a hundred men ashore and decently quartered in old houses. The wind blew a gale most of the night, the rain poured in torrents, while occasional thunder and lightning added interest to the scene. The Captain of the Convoy insisted on my taking his berth, so that my quarters were very good. I would sooner have lain on the hurricane deck in the storm than have slept in the cabin. At this moment I am writing in the captain’s room with a crowd of homeless women and children around me. One important testimony from them I am glad to record. They prefer to be here with the poorest accommodations rather than on the “Boston” or “Delaware” with nice staterooms and a large saloon. And what do you suppose is the reason? Because black soldiers do not offer them insults and they do not feel so secure with the white ones. It is established beyond all controversy, that black troops, with worthy commanders, are more controllable than white troops. What they would do with a less conscientious Colonel, I cannot say.

This morning the Major and I went on shore and designated quarters for every company on board and now they are all drying and rejoicing themselves before blazing fires. Col H Is on the “John Adams.” I met him this morning and was told that my severe criticisms of those who fail to live up to a decent standard in the fulfillment of duties, [is indicative of] a suspicious nature. Till informed by my superior officer, I did not know exactly the name of the spirit that sometimes makes me sharp on those who do not come up to my standard, but I should be false to myself if I tried to prove that every one did the best he knew. I do not, nor can I believe it. Please don’t infer that I am getting grouchy. On the contrary, I was never better natured in my life.

March 31

Our men are coming aboard again and we shall start for Fernandina this afternoon. Sending the men ashore was a great hit. Nearly all are in good condition. I was this morning obliged to amputate John Quincy’s leg. His chances for life are only about one in three, owing to old age and impaired constitution. I am hard at work. Capt B treats me like a brother. I don’t see how I could be better placed in this department.

Camp Saxton, Beaufort, S.C. April 2, 1863. Evening

Such is the management here that my notes no longer date from satisfying advance posts. Four weeks ago tonight I was saying a last goodbye to our camp ground and at a late hour went on board the steamer that was forever to take us from South Carolina. The deserted camp by moon-light saddened me, but this inglorious return depresses me more than I can express. It seemed appropriate that we should steam Beaufort River the night of April 1.

It was not too late for me to visit dear old Mr. Saxton. He told me how terribly disappointed the General was at the sudden unexpected conclusion of Gen Hunter to order the evacuation of Jacksonville. One night it was agreed that Gen Saxton should visit us in person, but early in the morning all was reversed and empty steamers were sent for us. Gen Hunter could not be persuaded to countermand the order. At the risk of being reckoned “suspicious” I must express the conviction that Gen Hunter has been influenced by pro-slavery counsel. Negroes are now being drafted hereabouts “to do garrison duty.”

Today the long slumbering fleet at Hilton Head has begun to move towards Charleston. I am satisfied that Gen. Foster [General John G. Foster] could have handled the land forces better than Hunter. A very small force is being left to protect these Islands and you will be glad to know that we are to do picket duty in the absence of other troops. An attack upon us is not the most improbable thing to anticipate. I think our boys would enjoy a fight with almost any number of the enemy and some of our officers are slightly belligerent.

One of our soldiers who was expatiating on the pluck of the chaplain exclaimed, “My God, what for made him preacher? He is de fightenest more Yankee I eber did see.”

During the last two nights on the steamer, I insisted that the Capt. should have his berth; sleeping so well on the floor of the pilot house has made mattresses and other fixings seem somewhat effeminate.

Last night about a hundred of the boys bivouacked on the hurricane deck and early this morning they were full of cheerful congratulations. I heard one say, “Well, Jim, how are you? “Bully, tank God.” I am constantly amused by their pointed, laconic remarks.

- - - - - I understand that Gen. Hunter gives as a reason for withdrawing our regiment from Jacksonville that he needed others and dared not leave us alone. So far as safety is concerned, I would rather be on the main land of Florida than the islands here. My box of supplies from the Soldiers Aid Society of Worcester opened well today. We brought it up from Fernandina with us. The “General Burnside” was loaded with stores for us at the moment Gen. Hunter was McClellandized and everything was dumped off at Fernandina. The box has arrived at the moment we most need it, and, with exception of the ling, every article will be exceedingly useful. We confiscated a few bales of oakum up the St. Mary’s and I like it better than any other material for general dressing.

[The “General Burnside” crashed one year later as a Union naval flotilla was attempting to cross the St. John River bar and steam upriver to occupy Jacksonville for the fourth time during the war. The vessel floundered and eventually washed ashore a few miles south of the entrance to the river. It was a popular landmark long after the war ended.]

April 3

You would laugh to see me tonight in the naked, floorless tent, without fire, the rain pouring upon my canvas roof and my candle flickering in the wind. During our absence the regiment took our tent floors and we are on the sand. These drafted men are merged into the second regiment; I shall be delighted if the surgeon of that regiment ever makes his appearance. Dr Hawks is one of the examiners of exempts and as all have to be cared for, we three have quite enough to do. Dr Minor looks fatigued and it would not surprise me if he should have to haul off for rest. Everybody loves him. [The second regiment was the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers under Colonel James Montgomery; later the 34th USCI.]

April 4

Tomorrow I hear we are to pull up stakes and go on picket duty. This is not easy work, but work of any kind is preferable to inactivity. Dr. Minor is down with intermittent fever. I scarcely know how to spare him. I was obliged to send John Quincy to the Beaufort Hospital. . . . Mrs. General Lander drew up her splendid steed before my tent door this afternoon and assured me she would do all in her power for our General Hospital for colored soldiers, now being established in Beaufort. [Mrs. Lander was Jean Margaret Davenport, the widow of Major-General Frederick William Lander.]

It is yet undecided who the surgeon will be and I am somewhat solicitous about it. Very few surgeons will do precisely the same for blacks as they would do for whites, and I know of no people more susceptible to the benign influence of kind words than these long-suffering blacks.

Mrs. Lander told me that sixth Connecticut boys were full of praise for the bravery of our regiment.

This morning I got another curious answer to my question about the condition of the bowels. “Well I haint had bowels better nor a day now.”

April 5

We have no freezing weather since we returned, but have come back to a comparatively cold climate. I sleep warmly, but smile at the transfer from my luxurious chamber and spring bed at Jacksonville to the unwarmed tent in the sand, with hospital store boxes for my bed and my field case of instruments for my pillow. Never an aching bone nor soreness of muscle from this. Sleeping half dressed is the normal condition and when I get along habitually to coat and cap and boots and spurs I don’t see what special advantages bears and buffaloes will have over me.

Advance Picket Station, Port Royal Island, April 6

We are seven miles N.W. of Beaufort. Six companies are encamped here, one at Port Royal Ferry, one at the Seabrook Plantation three miles from here, one at Rose’s two miles off in another direction, one at the brick-yard, three miles off is still another. Picket duty is always honorable, and being assigned to it for a time seems like a sort of compensation for taking us away from Jacksonville, but a pill is a pill, sugared or no, and we have been dosed with a very bad one which will forever stick in my crop. I did not want to lose my respect for Gen’l Hunter’s judgment but his vacillation shakes my confidence. . . . This old plantation house is not large enough to decently hold the colonel and his staff, but if we are very quiet I guess we shall get on amiably. Tonight I sleep on the dirty floor of an attic with two dormer windows and two room mates. The Col. wanted me to share his room below, but in this damp climate I shall always seek an upper room when it is possible.

The scattering of our men will give us pleasant rides and plenty of excitement. The country hereabouts is just as charming as pine barren, slight elevations, running streams, acres of large white single roses climbing to the tops of respectable trees, and milk-white clusters of locust blossoms with their delicate fragrance, wild crimson honeysuckle and trees of cornus Florida in full bloom can make it. Don’t you think I might be happy? Well, I am.

April 7

Some of you can imagine how heartily I enjoy the morning gallop from station to station, to look after our soldiers. They endured the march well but are not equal to whites. I believe the Col. is more easily reconciled to this disparity of endurance, from the fact that it corroborates his theory that physical endurance and longevity are enhanced by civilization. Yesterday morning as we came through Beaufort I visited Gen’l Saxton and asked him to detail Dr. Hawks to take charge of the new General Hospital for colored soldiers instead of carrying out his plan to appoint Dr. ____, whose treatment is open to criticism. Tonight I am glad to hear that all is going as I could wish, and that our men will not be neglected. Dr. Minor is here with me again.

At Seabrook, this morning, I saw the rebel pickets on the opposite shore. They often hail our men but are never answered. The men chafe under this a little; but obey the Col’s order. Charles Follen has charge of that plantation. I like him. There is a prospect of his joining our regiment. I heartily wish we might have all earnest, anti-slavery men for officers. Military training without moral help is not very valuable.

April 9

Everything was going on quietly until we heard heavy cannonading in the direction of the Ferry before sunrise this morning. The “George Washington,” an old steamboat converted into a semi-gunboat, was cruising in the river and got around last evening. The rebels had ample time to send for artillery during the night and they blew her up. The explosion threw her men into the water and marsh, from which they were brought out by our pickets and the Chaplain. I judge that not more than a dozen were killed or wounded. They were sent to the Hospital in Beaufort. I would like to have the care of them, but we have no accommodations here. One of them told the Adjutant’s wife that he was glad to have me take care of him for he had often seen me in Worcester. Another was a handsome Providence boy, who was terribly broken to pieces, but who will recover.

April 10, Evening

My Reb has been ill with a horse distemper that is running through the damp stables, and I am just beginning to ride him again. I hope he and I will live to go home together. He knows a good deal more than can be written here, and is willing to consider me his friend.

April 11, Evening

All astir tonight. Rebel demonstrations at the Ferry. We have a gunboat above and one below, and part of a regular battery in front, ready to dispute any attack or attempt to take the guns from the “George Washington.”

April 12

Should one inquire for my health tonight, I might adopt the reply of a soldier yesterday: “Not superior, thank God”. A good night’s sleep will restore all that was lost under the tramp of couriers and rattle of sabers on the piazza during the whole of last night. Why couriers should carry sabers except to be in harmony with the general spirit of the War Department, I cannot conceive. There would be precisely as much sense in my being tripped up by mine [my saber] at the bedside of the sick or at the operating table. Ample preparations were made for the repulse of a large invading force and no force invaded. I guess we are all a little sorry, since it seems like lying in the face of Providence to leave unused for skirmishing these wonderful pine barrens. I thought Gen Saxton looked a little disappointed about it when he came out this morning. Gen. Hunter, who ought to be holding Charleston today, was with him. Were I not so sleepy I would crowd in a few curses here on the mismanagement which has resulted in the withdrawal of our forces from before Charleston. How much longer are we to be outraged by this blundering imbecility? I don’t yet know how it is to be most balmed. I suppose the rebels don’t care so long as they are left unhurt. This ever lasting talk about the moral effect of taking Charleston and Richmond is about played out. The moral effect of European nations will gravitate toward the successful party. If we whip the rebels we may be sure of European sympathy, and if we do not, with our means, we don’t deserve the sympathy of any one.

April 13

Today I have visited our soldiers in Gen. Hospital No. 10, in Beaufort. I am happy to say that at last we have a hospital with a look of permanence, and about as good as the others. Dr and Mrs. Hawks [Esther Hill Hawks was also a medical doctor] and one hospital steward have worked hard to get it in order. The supply of stores and medicines has been furnished by the Medical Department. Tonight the precious wandering box of capsicum and all the good things found its way to me. The iron band had kept it secure. Not a particle of the candy nor the capsicum had been eaten, not a postage stamp lost.

Today I have read the official report by Col. Root of our Florida expedition. Had the man written it himself I should have felt a sort of respect for his ability in the way of negative lies. But no one who knows him can give him credit for even power enough to write that singularly omissive report. Such is the foundation of history.

April 15

Night before last a boat load of rebels came over to Barnwell’s plantation to capture a squad of our pickets, but the boys were wide awake and gave them a few rounds of buck and ball which caused a hasty retreat. These dark nights are favorable for raids, and Cap’t Rogers, while on picket at the Ferry, took advantage of the rain and intense darkness last evening and went over the river bringing back a valuable boat. It was a daring operation which proved that our pickets are more vigilant than theirs. Up to today the rebels have not fired anything more injurious than oaths across at our men but this morning they tried their muskets. The shots were harmless but I very much regret their return to the barbarous practice. Our boys have thought it a little hard that they were not allowed to “cuss” back, and I doubt if it will be as easy to control them if the rebels repeat the offense. Yesterday I had a talk with “Aunt Sarah,” on the Perryclear Plantation about five miles from here, about her experiences in the revolution of ’76. She is said to be over a hundred years old and I can assure you I felt that I was looking into the dark ages as I sat before her. She spoke of the present war as one that the she and her race had long dreamed of, as the war of freedom for them.

April 16

Up to three days ago, good old John Quincy was getting on nicely, but lockjaw came upon him and today he was buried. He never murmured at his fate, but his religious conversation made everybody about him cheerful. I very much regretted the impossibility of having him under my immediate care.

Our men keep remarkably well out here, this kind of life exactly suits them.

April 17

Last night our Col. forgot the importance of his present position and visited the wreck of the George Washington. He saw how the remaining gun was situated, and gratified his love of adventure without being fired upon. It is a shame that no gunboat has yet been sent to protect the men who might have taken off those guns. The rumor comes to us from town tonight that the troops are ordered back to Charleston and that reinforcements are to meet them there from the North. We shall be left here on picket a while longer, and for this last I am thankful. Gen. Hunter has been consulted about the picket shooting, and writes to Gen. Saxton to “give them back as good as they send.”

April 19

Yesterday the rebels at the Ferry made arrangements for Col. Higginson to meet Gen. Walker this morning under a flag of truce. The request was that the Col. in command here should send of a boat to bring the General across. But the Col. concluded to go over to them at the hour appointed. I would have gone with him but for my lameness, a wrench to the knee from the Quartermaster’s poor horse falling upon it. The Col. was met by the General’s staff with an official letter, but when informed what regiment he represented they replied that their orders were to hold no official communication with officers of such regiments. The Col. learned that General Walker is the W. S. Walker of the regular army, who was under my care in Worcester in the autumn of 1852, and who subsequently in 1856, at the head of a company of dragoons, was sent by Gov. Geary to meet the Col. [Higginson] on the plains of Kansas while he was at the head of an armed emigration train [abolitionists from New England settling the Kansas Territory]. The meeting then was one of mutual surprise, and instead of arrests being made and the train stopped, they went together to the Governor, and the affair took a less stringent turn than had threatened. Yesterday the Col. took especial pains to send him word that his old acquaintance, T.W.H., would have been happy to send his compliments had he been treated with due respect, and that his old medical friend, Dr. R. [Rogers] was also here. [John W. Geary was appointed territorial governor of Kansas on July 31, 1856, amidst the violence of the “Bleeding Kansas” controversy. He tried to bring peace to the troubled territory but was removed from office by newly elected president James Buchanan. He became a Union general during the war.]

I remember an incident that occurred with this Walker, who, by the way, is a nephew of the Hon. R. J. Walker of Virginia, formerly Secretary of War. He had not been in our house many days before I had to settle a difficulty between him and Andrew, our faithful Irishman, whose heart was tender and somewhat larger than that of an ox. Andrew could not bear to be spoken to as if he were a dog, and I agreed with him so fully in the matter that I remonstrated with Cap’t Walker, and informed him that if either of them left the house it would be he. Whereupon the poor fellow was so angry that he remained three days and three nights in his bed before the storm passed away. His physical sufferings were so intense that there was some excuse for his anger, but it all passed away, and as his health gradually returned he became very gentlemanly and a favorite in the family.

In the absence of the Chaplain today, Thomas Long of Go. G. held the divine service. His prayers were so deep and simple and touching that we all found our sight somewhat dimmed by tears. In the course of the sermon he said; “If each one of us was praying men, it appears to me that we could fight as well with prayers as with bullets, for the Lord has said that if we have faith, even as a grain of mustard seed cut into four parts, you could say unto that sycamore tree, arise, and it will come up.”

April 21

I have today conversed with the extraordinary colored man, Peter Burns, who brought  off one hundred and thirty-two persons with him from the main land, and who has, for a long time, been employed by Gen. Hunter and by Gen. Saxton for a scout. He is a dark mulatto with face and form resembling John Brown. To hear his quaint expressions and Cromwellian talk is worth a journey from New England. . . . Too sleepy to repeat any of them to-night.

April 25

This style of warfare which leads one in charming ways while serving the soldiers is for the moment more attractive even than shot and shell. Yet I feel a longing for the battle-fields that lie between me and my home. Nothing less terrible can decide for freedom, and the sooner we are on the bloody field the sooner will come the day of jubilee. Heaven only knows how much more time and how much more human life is to be squandered by incompetent, egotistic officers in high places. When I think of the gradual melting away of the best army the world has ever seen simply because slavery has poisoned the religious earnestness of those in power I find it hard to take off the conviction that retributive justice will yet grind this proud nation to dust.

April 26

Haven’t Reb and I had a wild ride this afternoon? We plunged through the woods without regard to paths under foot, but trusted the paths in the sky. Of course we came out at the point, five miles away, for which we started. Possibly I ought not to include Reb in the sky path, for I gave him the rein in returning and noticed that he put his head near the ground, and with precision retraced the winding way. He leaps the fallen timber like a greyhound and seems so happy in the woods that I half expect him to make remarks on the beautiful things we see. Ah, I wish I could know whether he does see them.

This afternoon I heard a touching prayer from the “Uncle Tom” of our regiment, York Brown. He is a dear old soul and prays as if his “Most Heavenly Father” could not be very remote from him. Our Chaplain spoke of Jesus so much better than usual today I begin to feel as if we may yet Christianize him. He is a godly man and will sometime leave religious theories alone.

April 27

Two or three months ago I wrote you of a fearful monomania among our line officers, called “Muster and Pay Rolls.” The fighting in Florida cured them of the disease, but recently the old enemy has shown himself in another form. One can scarcely stir without seeing anxious inquiry in stifled notes; “Has he come? When will he come?” “Oh he will come and he will be loaded with greenbacks, we shall again be fed and clothed.” I regret to say that this form of the disease extends to the field and staff, and while I fancy myself beyond the reach of the epidemic, I do sometime see floating ghosts of greenbacks which promise much in the future. . . . To be paid in dollars and cents for the work in which I am engaged, I dare say would seem less ridiculous to my creditors than to me, yet doubtless if Uncle Sam should ever proffer pay, my searing irons will be duly heated and my conscience made callous. The Bible says, “The laborer, etc. etc.,” I will read that for consolation.

April 28

We are beginning just now to have showers and are promised that by and by they will come daily, and that we shall be brought to sympathize with Noah, when first he began to think of building the Ark. This evening it had been thundering a long time before I discovered it was not cannonading, so completely have the elements become demoralized by the war.

Dr. Minor found an enormous alligator in a cypress swamp this morning, and I joined him for a skirmish through the woods to find the old fellow. We penetrated to the centre of a low cypress growth and then found ourselves in the most impressive sanctuary I ever saw. A circular, open space of about 300 feet in diameter, in the centre of which were two stagnant pools of about twenty feed in diameter. There was not a stump nor a knee in this open space, but all around were the tall, solemn cypresses, completely draped in the long gray moss. The ground was made dry and soft, like wool, by a kind of moss. The great reptile had gone into one of the pools and roiled the water so we could not see him, but with a pole, I succeeded in making him strike with his tail. We had no opportunity to use our Ballards, and galloped home through the woods with resolves to try again another day. Within a couple of months that swamp will hold enough malarious poison in it to protect the occupants from human intrusion.

After Mr. Bennett and his assistants had finished paying the men today, we took a ride over to Barnwell’s. The “Barnwell oak” measures 126 feet in the broadest diameter in the spread of its branches, at lease such was my pacing. This is not the largest live oak but the broadest spread of branches I have ever seen. They start from the body very near the ground.

April 30

Tomorrow I am to be blessed by taking into my employment, York Brown. The old man has been nurse in the hospital during the last two months, but he prefers to avail himself to Gen. Saxton’s voluntary offer and take his discharge papers. He has been all his life a “gentleman’s waiter” and “knows how to keer of a hoss.” Think of my having this religious old white-headed man, whom I reverence, constantly near me. Do not be surprised if I get converted to Christianity by him.

Today, Dr. Minor, the Chaplain and I went up to the pool in the cypress swamp, but the great reptile drew his head under as we approached. The Chaplain was so religiously impressed by the sanctuary that he declared it would be sacrilegious for us to shoot the alligator; that God would never again permit us to be thrilled by the beauty of natural scenery. We knew it before and thanked the Chaplain for his sermon, and hereafter shall try to practice forbearance. It will be safer, however, for us to leave our Ballard’s at home.

Col. Montgomery’s regiment is nearly full, mostly drafted men from these islands. They are stationed at Pigeon Point, nearer Beaufort. [To draft black soldiers sometimes meant forcibly seizing and enrolling able-bodied black men into Union regiments against their wishes.]

May 5

As I was riding out to see Cap’t James’ men at Rose’s [Captain William James, Co. B, 1st SCV, encamped at Rose’s Plantation] this morning I was drawn aside by an immense chattering of birds down by the river. Not less than five hundred, possibly a thousand, bobolinks, the first I have seen this year, had congregated in the low tree-tops, and were eagerly discussing some important question. I could not believe my eyes, so approached nearer and nearer till all were silent, and then, to clear my doubts, one of the congregation did his best in that bird song so full of liquid melody. Again the business of the convention was resumed and I left them to decide the question whether to go Northward today or wait some finer opportunity.

May 10

Cap’t Rogers performed a deed on the 8th ins’t for which he will always rejoice. The causeway at the Ferry extends out into the river within about 150 yards of one on the opposite shore. There is no spot on the river so thoroughly picketed by both parties, yet he went across at noon in a little “dug-out” and brought over two men who beckoned from the rebel causeway. They were fugitive slaves, who had walked a hundred miles from the interior and had not been discovered by the rebels. They are intelligent fellows and take on liberty as if naturally fitted for it. There was no occasion to suppose that these men were not sent down there to decoy one to destruction, and I regard the crossing in the face of an enemy, who, according to all rules of war, should have been hidden behind the bushes, as an exceedingly daring thing to do. Had I been present as was the Col. I should have protested against it. As usual I find myself the most cautious man in the regiment. Now that it is done I am profoundly thankful but there was not more than one chance in two hundred for him to escape death or capture.

You may remember that I wrote about the attempted desertion of Lieut’s O Neil and Stockdale. They have just had their trial before a court martial and were acquitted on the ground that they were only absent from the camp without leave, and that their long confinement in jail at Beaufort was sufficient punishment. Gen. Hunter took this copper head decision in hand and in a general order makes their discharge disgrace them before the army. The order is pretty severe and ends by decreeing that they shall receive no pay nor bounty.

The rebels told us at picket that Gen. Hooker [Major General Joseph Hooker] was driving everything before him but I confess to a “heap” of incredulity which I hope will vanish before official dispatches.

May 15

We get reports from rebel sources that Hooker has got into Richmond, that Stonewall Jackson was killed and Lee taken prisoner. Were all this true you might expect some of us home within a few months, but it is too good to believe. [Rogers’s skepticism was sensible; Hooker was defeated by Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville at the beginning of May 1862. Stonewall Jackson had been killed as a result of battle, but General Robert E. Lee, rather than being taken prisoner, would continue to lead a brilliant Confederate military campaign.]

May 22

After all it seems the doubters are justified, Hooker is on the wrong side of the Rappahannock. But you will be glad to know that here we are so peaceful there is no danger of my telling you great stories of forced marches and hard fights. Today we endured the trials of a picnic, over in the oak grove at Barnwell’s. It is rare that we exert ourselves so much, but Mrs. Lander gave the order with so much grace that Gen. Saxton and our Colonel and his staff entered the lists manfully, and I have rarely seen better dancing and eating.

Three fugitives came from the main land this morning. They watched from the other shore when [our pickets] discharged their guns and withdrew from a certain post, and then came across in a little “dug-out” which the rebels had buried at some former salt works, an old man and his two sons. He thinks he can run off a good many more. He will have the opportunity to try.

May 27

We are being greatly washed in the rainy season now. Fortunately our tents are all raised eighteen inches from the ground and pitched on solid floors of faced pine logs. It is not easy to procure boards here ‘and these logs do just as well. The men cover the floor with pine needles and sleep after the same fashion that I do. The camp has a most picturesque look. Each row of tents has its long piazza roof of pine boughs under which the men sit more contentedly than would be possible for Yankees.

The pitched tents of a “white” Union regiment encamped in Jacksonville in 1864. Beds are of pine boards raised off the ground. The camp site is believed to have been in what is now Hemming Park in the center of Jacksonville’s downtown business district. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley. LC.

I am getting excessively proud of the physical condition of our regiment. Since we came out here we have enlisted nearly a hundred good, able-bodied men, and discharged about thirty from the service. Gen. Hunter has just issued very good sanitary orders for encampments during the summer. We had anticipated the more important of them.

Yesterday Reb and I found shelter from a great rain, where I saw only an old, gray-headed woman whose name was Rose. I found that she and her old husband and sister were benevolently left for the Yankees, while the younger members were saved from us by the masters. The old woman did not murmur at her fate, and when I said: “You must have found it easier to live in slavery with your children and grandchildren than living alone in freedom” she replied: “Yes, Masre, but we lub de freedom better dan dat, an’we rudder lib here alone dan be in slavery. Dey can no mo’sell we.” I never hear that word sell pronounced by these people without a thrill of horror.

I don’t remember whether I have written about the wonderful persistency of these people when once fully determined to accomplish a thing. You all know what they have gone through to gain freedom, and can easily imagine some of them capable of equal pertinacity for less worthy objects. I have noticed that when one of them fully makes up his mind to get discharged from the service on the ground of disability, there are but two ways to act in the matter. If there be real ground for his complaint, give him papers at once, but if not, pile his falsehoods upon him so crushingly that he at once feels there is no possible hope of deceiving you. Such cases are rare, but they occur, and some of our best soldiers today are men who were put into the guard-house for trying to deceive me. I only wonder that with the accursed teaching of their masters they do not oftener attempt this thing. If, under such circumstances, I am more severe with them than another would be, I never doubt that the Lord will bear in mind that my heart is intent on full justice for them.

I find my hatred of slop philanthropy deepened by living with these intensely human children. While I reverence them more and more, I am more and more convinced that Robert Sutton and Prince Rivers were in the right when they said at Alberti’s Mill: “That man don’t know what is good for him. You know that freedom is better than slavery for him and you ought to force him to go away with us.” The most intelligent men in our regiment urge the policy of conscription on the same ground, and that it will give them a “chance to get sense”. I said to Uncle York, just now, when he came into my den to see that the fire “keep blazin”: “Uncle, if you had not a wife in secesh I might want you to go home with me when the war is over.” Then he told me that he had been twice back to Darien for his wife, once on a gun-boat and once at the imminent risk of losing his life, but that she each time refused to come away, and that he would like to remain forever with me. She is a second wife and much younger than he. The last time he went for her he brought off several fugitives. He closed his narrative as follows: “So I got some sheepskin to muffle de oar, an de moon was berry shine and when at las’ we done got by de danger, I whoop, and de master ob de gun boat Paul Jones say ‘Come on’, and den I make de rowers raise a sing.”

Steamer Fulton. October 13, 1863

The third pleasant day of our voyage from New York to Hilton Head. It is all well enough to be home on leave, but this returning to duty without full health teaches me it were wiser to make my next leave permanent.

[The reason for the absence of letters from May 27 to October of 1863 is explained in this letter. Dr. Rogers had gone home to Massachusetts on medical leave to recuperate from an undisclosed ailment.]

October 16

I landed at Beaufort at sunset last evening and spent the night with the Col. [Higginson] and Cap’t Rogers [his nephew, James S. Rogers] in the hospital. They are both convalescent, and I am not at all anxious about them. Dr. Hawks and Dr. Minor have worked well, and I find my department in excellent condition. Col. Higginson has overcome many obstacles since his return, and the regiment has greatly profited by the hard work that has prostrated him.

No one has received me with such silent joy as Uncle York. The old man has most scrupulously protected my property during my absence, down to a bit of hard soap, regretting that some vandal had actually used said soap a few times in washing his hands. The Chaplain’s vacant tent stands next to mine while he is in the hands of the rebels. Through a deserter we hear that he was not executed. We feel hopeful about him and never doubt that he will be faithful in his testimony against the cause of this war.

October 20

I never knew till today that “John Brown,” the only son of Uncle York, was the first negro soldier who fell in this war. He was shot in a skirmish on St. Simon’s Island, Aug. 8, 1862. A singular coincidence of names. No wonder our soldiers think him to be the hero of the John Brown hymn.

October 21

Yesterday some contrabands from the “main” reported that they overheard a rebel Col. say that the Chaplain they had taken prisoner was the sauciest damned Yankee they had ever seen. No one doubts that he referred to our Chaplain.

October 25

Below I copy verbatim a document that came from one of our best blacks, a man so earnest and brave that he can be depended upon in the hardest places. He is now on picket in a dangerous spot, but you will see that he has dreams of a socialistic depth that might interest a Fourier. [Charles Fourier, an early nineteenth century French romantic socialist that rejected industrialism and was sometimes considered nonsensical for his confusing and contradictory writings.]

“My Officers notice in the 1st S.C. regiment. I am hereby notified to all who it may concern that I have been teased by my sentiments about a society, and for such reason I execute my sentiment. By that reason I so likely find that my option adhere my sentiment to an agricultural society for this reason, our African race must have a society. If the society are carried on by Fidelity because for so reason fidelities is the keeper of societies and society is the keeper of the Profits and Profits execute from Toils. I give my suggest here that all who toils on agriculture will have without any difficulty. And also I am fully testified that I have closed an agriculture society of which will be seen as follows. I have great option of this agricultural society.

“No. 1. St. Helena. S.C.

1. Gabriel Capers            Place [not stated]   22 members   257 acres             $220.00  [money collected].
2. Oliver Tripp                Place [not stated]   27 members   221½  acres         $270.00 [money collected].
3. Lawrence Tripp             Place [not stated]   22 members   221 ½ acres       $220.00 [money collected].
4. Sarah Perry                    Place [not stated]   20 members   330  acres         $200.00 [money collected].

“July 29, 1863 it was formed. No 1 is that number. No. 2 is the man who did own the place. No. 3 is the place. No. 4 is the number of members. No. 5 is the number of acres. No. 6 is money already collected in the society. I am also hoping that this society will bring forward all those that are the means of ruin. All who in favor of this society will say by a ticket.”

Seg’t. William Brown, Co A. 1st S.C.Vols.

Camp Shaw, Beaufort SC, Oct. 29, 1863

It is a pretty severe official joke that Gen. Gilmore is just now playing off on those who have obtained surgeon’s certificates stating that change of climate is necessary “to prevent permanent disability” or to “save life.” Since the 19th [of this month] all such have been sent to Convalescent Camp at St. Augustine, Fla. instead of North. The almost impossibility of getting out of the Department in any other way than on a surgeon’s certificate has led to abuses that are best remedied by this change of program. It seems hard that those who really need to go North should have to suffer for the exaggerated complaints of the unworthy. Cap’t Rogers had been sick in hospital nearly a month and Surgeon Hayden had sent a certificate to Headquarters before my return. Yesterday I saw him off to St. Augustine. Fortunately he is convalescent and can meet the disappointment better than he could two weeks ago. I have now in our regimental hospital an old man who had been more than a year in the regiment and who has never asked for leave of absence and who has never before been away from his company. His name is Thursday Young, gray headed and fighting like a tiger.

November 1

Overheard a rough compliment of our guard this morning. A couple of white soldiers were taking a lot of Government horses along the road where our guards were instructed to examine passes. As they approached, one said to the other, “I shouldn’t think they’d bother us when we have all these horses”. “Hump!” said the other, “they’d stop a feller here if the horses all went to hell.”

My practice of taking one at his word was justified at a late hour last night in the case of a delinquent who got into the guardhouse. He was suddenly attacked with excruciating tooth-ache and insisted on being brought to me for relief. Instead of the expected anodyne and exemption from the guard house he was relieved of his tooth and sent back.

November 3

The guns at Charleston have kept up a great booming all through the day; more constant and frequent than since those memorable days of July. General [Quincy A.] Gilmore could destroy the city any day, but I hope he will not do it.

Beaufort, S.C. Nov. 24

Convalescent, thank Heaven, but I would not object to an opportunity for returning thanks a little more rapidly.Congestive chill two weeks ago, cough, prostration, vertigo -- three days of nowhere, then brought in ambulance from camp to this S.W. corner chamber over the signal office; overlooking the beautiful bay and giving broad view of heaven by day and by night. In my tent I missed this last and the blazing fire on the hearth. With these and dear Uncle York to “tote things” I ought not to find time to hang heavily. Today our companies E and K have proved themselves worthy, in a skirmish over the river, of all the praises that have been showered upon them. The acts which I am not strong enough to write out, will appear in the Northern Journals. Fancy the rebel cavalry sending their pack of blood hounds in advance and our men receiving them on their bayonets and then repulsing the cavalry with buck and ball. Two of our men drowned, several wounded.

A cheerful letter from our Chaplain, dated Columbia Jail, S.C. Oct. 23rd. He was treated the same as other officers, and we infer that our colored soldiers were not subjected to any peculiar hardships. Of course he was not permitted to criticize. We will give him a big reception if he ever comes back to the regiment. [Chaplain Fowler was captured by Confederates after accompanying a group of Union soldiers – including men from the 1st South Carolina – who went behind Confederate lines to tap into a telegraph wire running parallel to the Charleston and Savannah Railroad line. He was held prisoner of war for over a year.]

December 2, 1863

Today is the anniversary of the date of my commission of surgeon, and today I have tendered my resignation on surgeon’s certificate of disability. If it gets perfectly red taped by the first of the year I shall be glad.

Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War

From Wikipedia [edited] illustrations added

Sgt. Samuel Smith (3rd United States Colored Cavalry Regiment) with wife and daughters, c. 1863–65

African Americans, including former slaves, served in the American Civil War. The 186,097 black men who joined the Union Army included 7,122 officers and 178,975 enlisted soldiers.[1] Approximately 20,000 black sailors served in the Union Navy and formed a large percentage of many ships' crews.[2] Later in the war, many regiments were recruited and organized as the United States Colored Troops, which reinforced the Northern forces substantially during the conflict's last two years. Both Northern Free Negro and Southern runaway slaves joined the fight. Throughout the course of the war, black soldiers served in forty major battles and hundreds of more minor skirmishes; sixteen African Americans received the Medal of Honor.[2]

Sgt. Milton Holland Medal of Honor

Union

Our Presidents, Governors, Generals and Secretaries are calling, with almost frantic vehemence, for men.-"Men! men! send us men!" they scream, or the cause of the Union is gone...and yet these very officers, representing the people and the Government, steadily, and persistently refuse to receive the very class of men which have a deeper interest in the defeat and humiliation of the rebels than all others.

-Frederick Douglass [3]

Unidentified African-American Union soldier

Proposals to raise African American regiments in the Union's war efforts were at first met with trepidation by officials within the Union command structure, President Abraham Lincoln included. Concerns over the response of the border states (of which one, Maryland, surrounded in part the capital of Washington D.C.), the response of white soldiers and officers, as well as the effectiveness of a fighting force composed of black men were raised.[4]: 165–167 [5] Despite official reluctance from above, the number of white volunteers dropped throughout the war, and black soldiers were needed, whether the population liked it or not.[6] However, African Americans had been volunteering since the first days of war, though they were turned down.[7]

On July 17, 1862, the U.S. Congress passed two statutes allowing for the enlistment of "colored" troops (African Americans)[8] but official enrollment occurred only after the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. However, state and local militia units had already begun enlisting black men, including the "Black Brigade of Cincinnati", raised in September 1862 to help provide manpower to thwart a feared Confederate raid on Cincinnati from Kentucky, as well as black infantry units raised in Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and South Carolina.[9] In May 1863, Congress established the Bureau of Colored Troops in an effort to organize black people's efforts in the war.[10]

African Americans served as medical officers after 1863, beginning with Baltimore surgeon Alexander Augusta. Augusta was a senior surgeon, with white assistant surgeons under his command at Fort Stanton, MD. [11]

Company I of the 36th Colored Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, (USCT) Infantry.

In actual numbers, African-American soldiers eventually constituted 10% of the entire Union Army (United States Army). Losses among African Americans were high: In the last year and a half and from all reported casualties, approximately 20% of all African Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives during the Civil War.[1]: 16  Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than that of white soldiers:

[We] find, according to the revised official data, that of the slightly over two millions troops in the United States Volunteers, over 316,000 died (from all causes), or 15.2%. Of the 67,000 Regular Army (white) troops, 8.6%, or not quite 6,000, died. Of the approximately 180,000 United States Colored Troops, however, over 36,000 died, or 20.5%. In other words, the mortality "rate" amongst the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War was 35% greater than that among other troops, notwithstanding the fact that the former were not enrolled until some eighteen months after the fighting began.

— Herbert Aptheker [1]: 16 

Teamsters

Non-combatant labor duty

Escaped slaves who sought refuge in Union Army camps were called contrabands. A number of officers in the field experimented, with varying degrees of success, in using contrabands for manual work in Union Army camps. Eventually they composed black regiments of soldiers. These officers included General David Hunter, General James H. Lane, and General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts.[4]: 165–167 

Contraband at Fortress Monroe November 1861

In early 1861, General Butler was the first known Union commander to use black contrabands, in a non-combatant role, to do the physical labor duties, after he refused to return escaped slaves, at Fort Monroe, Virginia, who came to him for asylum from their masters, who sought to capture and reenslave them. In September 1862, free African-American men were conscripted and impressed into forced labor for constructing defensive fortifications, by the police force of the city of Cincinnati, Ohio; however, they were soon released from their forced labor and a call for African-American volunteers was sent out. Some 700 of them volunteered, and they came to be known as the Black Brigade of Cincinnati. Because of the harsh working conditions and the extreme brutality of their Cincinnati police guards, the Union Army, under General Lew Wallace, stepped in to restore order and ensure that the black conscripts received the fair treatment due to soldiers, including the equal pay of privates.

Contrabands were later settled in a number of colonies, such as at the Grand Contraband Camp, Virginia, and in the Port Royal Experiment.

Union Army nurse Susie King Taylor

Blacks also participated in activities further behind the lines that helped keep an army functioning, such as at hospitals and the like. Approximately 10 percent of the Union's female relief workforce was of African descent: free blacks of diverse education and class background who earned wages or worked without pay in the larger cause of freedom, and runaway slaves who sought sanctuary in military camps and hospitals.[12]

U.S. Colored troops freeing slaves in North Carolina

Early battles in 1862 and 1863

A lithograph of the storming of Fort Wagner.

In general, white soldiers and officers believed that black men lacked the ability to fight and fight well. In October 1862, African-American soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, in one of the first engagements involving black troops, silenced their critics by repulsing attacking Confederate guerrillas at the Skirmish at Island Mound, Missouri, in the Western Theatre. By August 1863, fourteen more Negro State Regiments were in the field and ready for service. Union General Benjamin Butler wrote:

Better soldiers never shouldered a musket. I observed a very remarkable trait about them. They learned to handle arms and to march more easily than intelligent white men. My drillmaster could teach a regiment of Negroes that much of the art of war sooner than he could have taught the same number of students from Harvard or Yale.[13]

At the Battle of Port Hudson, Louisiana, May 27, 1863, the African-American soldiers bravely advanced over open ground in the face of deadly artillery fire. Although the attack failed, the black soldiers proved their capability to withstand the heat of battle, with General Nathaniel P. Banks recording in his official report: "Whatever doubt may have existed heretofore as to the efficiency of organizations of this character, the history of this day's proves...in this class of troops effective supporters and defenders."[14] Noted for his bravery was Union Captain Andre Cailloux, who fell early in the battle.[15] This was the first battle involving a formal Federal African-American unit.[16]

Battle of Milliken's Bend

On June 7, 1863, a garrison consisting mostly of black troops assigned to guard a supply depot during the Vicksburg Campaign found themselves under attack by a larger Confederate force. Recently recruited, minimally trained, and poorly armed, the black soldiers still managed to successfully repulse the attack in the ensuing Battle of Milliken's Bend with the help of federal gunboats from the Tennessee river, despite suffering nearly three times as many casualties as the rebels.[17] At one point in the battle, Confederate General Henry McCulloch noted

The line was formed under a heavy fire from the enemy, and the troops charged the breastworks, carrying it instantly, killing and wounding many of the enemy by their deadly fire, as well as the bayonet. This charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy's force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.[18]

Fort Wagner, Fort Pillow, and beyond

[The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts] made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees.

-The New York Tribune, September 8, 1865[19]

This recruitment poster was issued under a July 1863 presidential order with the promise of freedom, protection and pay.

The most widely-known battle fought by African Americans was the assault on Fort Wagner, off the Charleston coast, South Carolina, by the 54th Massachusetts Infantry on July 18, 1863. The 54th volunteered to lead the assault on the strongly fortified Confederate positions of the earthen/sand embankments (very resistant to artillery fire) on the coastal beach. The soldiers of the 54th scaled the fort's parapet, and were only driven back after brutal hand-to-hand combat. Despite the defeat, the unit was hailed for its valor, which spurred further African-American recruitment, giving the Union a numerical military advantage from a large segment of the population the Confederacy did not attempt to exploit until too late in the closing days of the War. Unfortunately for any African-American soldiers captured during these battles, imprisonment could be even worse than death. Black prisoners were not treated the same as white prisoners. They received no medical attention, harsh punishments, and would not be used in a prisoner exchange because the Confederate states only saw them as escaped slaves fighting against their masters.[20]

After the battle, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton praised the recent performances of black troops in a letter to Abraham Lincoln, stating "Many persons believed, or pretended to believe, and confidentially asserted, that freed slaves would not make good soldiers; they would lack courage, and could not be subjected to military discipline. Facts have shown how groundless were these apprehensions. The slave has proved his manhood, and his capacity as an infantry soldier, at Milliken's Bend, at the assault upon Port Hudson, and the storming of Fort Wagner."[18]

African-American soldiers participated in every major campaign of the war's last year, 1864–1865, except for Sherman's Atlanta Campaign in Georgia, and the following "March to the Sea" to Savannah, by Christmas 1864. The year 1864 was especially eventful for African-American troops. On April 12, 1864, at the Battle of Fort Pillow, in Tennessee, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest led his 2,500 men against the Union-held fortification, occupied by 292 black and 285 white soldiers.

After driving in the Union pickets and giving the garrison an opportunity to surrender, Forrest's men swarmed into the Fort with little difficulty and drove the Federals down the river's bluff into a deadly crossfire. Casualties were high and only sixty-two of the U.S. Colored Troops survived the fight. Accounts from both Union and Confederate witnesses suggest a massacre.[21] Many believed that the massacre was ordered by Forrest. The battle cry for some black soldiers became "Remember Fort Pillow!"

Six weeks later, Black troops won a notable victory in their first battle of the Overland Campaign in Virginia at the Battle of Wilson's Wharf, successfully defending Fort Pocahontas. Before the battle, Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee sent a surrender demand to the garrison in the fort, warning them if they did not surrender, he would not be "answerable for the consequences." Interpreting this to be a reference to the massacre at Fort Pillow, Union commanding officer Edward A. Wild defiantly refused, responding with a message stating "Present my compliments to General Fitz Lee and tell him to go to hell.” In the ensuing battle, the garrison force repulsed the assault, inflicting 200 casualties with a loss of just 6 killed and 40 wounded.

The Battle of Chaffin's Farm, Virginia, became one of the most heroic engagements involving black troops. On September 29, 1864, the African-American division of the Eighteenth Corps, after being pinned down by Confederate artillery fire for about 30 minutes, charged the earthworks and rushed up the slopes of the heights. During the hour-long engagement the division suffered tremendous casualties. Of the twenty-five African Americans who were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Civil War, fourteen received the honor as a result of their actions at Chaffin's Farm.

Discrimination in pay and assignments

African-American Federal troops participating in the Inauguration Day parade at Lincoln's second Inauguration, March 1865.[22]

Although black soldiers proved themselves as reputable soldiers, discrimination in pay and other areas remained widespread. According to the Militia Act of 1862, soldiers of African descent were to receive $10.00 per month, with an optional deduction for clothing at $3.00. In contrast, white privates received $12.00 per month plus a clothing allowance of $3.50.[23] Many regiments struggled for equal pay, some refusing any money and pay until June 15, 1864, when the Federal Congress granted equal pay for all soldiers.[24][25]

Besides discrimination in pay, colored units were often disproportionately assigned laborer work, rather than combat assignments.[4]: 198 General Daniel Ullman, commander of the Corps d' Afrique, remarked "I fear that many high officials outside of Washington have no other intention than that these men shall be used as diggers and drudges."[26]

African-American contributions to Union war intelligence

Black people, both enslaved and free, were involved in assisting the Union in matters of intelligence, and their contributions were labeled Black Dispatches.[27] One of these spies was Mary Bowser.

Harriet Tubman was also a spy, a nurse, and a cook whose efforts were key to Union victories and survival. Tubman is most widely recognized for her contributions to freeing slaves via the Underground Railroad. However, her contributions to the Union Army were equally important. She used her knowledge of the country's terrain to gain important intelligence for the Union Army. She became the first woman to lead U.S. soldiers into combat when, under the order of Colonel James Montgomery, she took a contingent of soldiers in South Carolina behind enemy lines, destroying plantations and freeing 750 slaves in the process.[28]

Black people routinely assisted Union armies advancing through Confederate territory as scouts, guides, and spies. Confederate General Robert Lee said "The chief source of information to the enemy is through our negroes."[29] In a letter to Confederate high command, Confederate general Patrick Cleburne complained "All along the lines slavery is comparatively valueless to us for labor, but of great and increasing worth to the enemy for information. It is an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our valuable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources, and yet acting so safely and secretly that there is no means to guard against it. Even in the heart of our country, where our hold upon this secret espionage is firmest, it waits but the opening fire of the enemy's battle line to wake it, like a torpid serpent, into venomous activity."[30]

USS Hunchback

Union Navy (U.S. Navy)

Unlike the army, the U.S. Navy had never prohibited black men from serving, though regulations in place since 1840 had required them to be limited to not more than 5% of all enlisted sailors. Thus at the start of the war, the Union Navy differed from the Army in that it allowed black men to enlist and was racially integrated.[31] The Union Navy's official position at the beginning of the war was ambivalence toward the use of either Northern free black people or runaway slaves. The constant stream, however, of escaped slaves seeking refuge aboard Union ships forced the Navy to formulate a policy towards them.[32] Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Wells in a terse order, pointed out the following;

It is not the policy of this Government to invite or encourage this kind of desertion and yet, under the circumstances, no other course...could be adopted without violating every principle of humanity. To return them would be impolitic as well as cruel...you will do well to employ them.

— Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy July 22, 1861 [33]

In time, the Union Navy would see almost 16% of its ranks supplied by African Americans, performing in a wide range of enlisted roles.[34] In contrast to the Army, the Navy from the outset not only paid equal wages to white and black sailors, but offered considerably more for even entry-level enlisted positions.[35] Food rations and medical care were also improved over the Army, with the Navy benefiting from a regular stream of supplies from Union-held ports.[36]

Becoming a commissioned officer was out of reach for nearly all black sailors. With rare exceptions, the rank of petty officer was the highest available to black sailors, and in practice, only to free blacks (who often were the only ones with naval careers sufficiently long to earn the rank).[37] Robert Smalls, an escaped slave who freed himself, his crew, and their families by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862, and sailing it from Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the U.S. blockade that surrounded it, was given the rank of captain of the steamer "Planter" in December 1864.[38]

Confederacy

Confederate Army

Blacks did not serve in the Confederate Army as combat troops, per law.[2][40][41] Blacks were actively forbidden by the Confederacy for the majority of its existence.[2] Enslaved blacks were sometimes used for camp labor, however. Other times, when a son or sons in a slaveholding family enlisted, he would take along a family slave to work as a personal servant. Such slaves would perform non-combat duties such as carrying and loading supplies, but they were not soldiers. Still, even these civilian usages were comparatively infrequent. In areas where the Union Army approached, a wave of slave escapes would inevitably follow; Southern blacks would inevitably offer themselves as scouts who knew the territory to the Federals. Confederate armies were rationally nervous about having too many blacks marching with them, as their patchy loyalty to the Confederacy meant that the risk of one turning runaway and informing the Federals as to the rebel army's size and position was substantial. Opposition to arming blacks was even stauncher. Many in the South feared slave revolts already, and arming blacks would make the threat of mistreated slaves overthrowing their masters even greater.[2]

The closest the Confederacy came to seriously attempting to equip colored soldiers in the army proper came in the last few weeks of the war. The Confederate Congress narrowly passed a bill allowing slaves to join the army. The bill did not offer or guarantee an end to their servitude as an incentive to enlist, and only allowed slaves to enlist with the consent of their masters. Even this weak bill, supported by Robert E. Lee, passed only narrowly, by a 9–8 vote in the Senate. President Jefferson Davis signed the law on March 13, 1865, but went beyond the terms in the bill by issuing an order on March 23 to offer freedom to slaves so recruited. The emancipation offered, however, was reliant upon a master's consent; "no slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman."[42]

Non-military use

The impressment of slaves and conscription of freedmen into direct military labor initially came on the impetus of state legislatures, and by 1864, six states had regulated impressment (Florida, Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, in order of authorization).[54][55][56] Slave labor was used in a wide variety of support roles, from infrastructure and mining, to teamster and medical roles such as hospital attendants and nurses.[45]: 62–63  Bruce Levine wrote that "Nearly 40% of the Confederacy's population were unfree... the work required to sustain the same society during war naturally fell disproportionately on black shoulders as well. By drawing so many white men into the army, indeed, the war multiplied the importance of the black work force."[45]: 62 

In January 1864, General Patrick Cleburne in the Army of Tennessee proposed using slaves as soldiers in the national army to buttress falling troop numbers.

Cleburne's proposal received a hostile reception. It was sent to Confederate President Jefferson Davis who refused to consider Cleburne's proposal and ordered the report kept private as discussion of it could only produce "discouragement, distraction, and dissension."

The growing setbacks for the Confederacy in late 1864 caused a number of prominent officials to reconsider their earlier stance, however. President Lincoln's re-election in November 1864 seemed to seal the best political chance for victory the South had. President Davis, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, and General Robert E. Lee now were willing to consider modified versions of Cleburne's original proposal. On November 7, 1864, in his annual address to Congress, Davis hinted at arming slaves.[63]

On January 11, 1865, General Robert E. Lee wrote the Confederate Congress urging them to arm and enlist black slaves in exchange for their freedom.[68] On March 13, the Confederate Congress passed legislation to raise and enlist companies of black soldiers by one vote. The law allowed slaves to enlist, but only with the consent of their slave masters. The legislation was then promulgated into military policy by Davis in General Order No. 14 on March 23, 1865.[42] The war ended less than six weeks later, and there is no record of any black unit being accepted into the Confederate army or seeing combat.[69]

United States Colored Troops as prisoners of war

Monument to U.S. Colored Troops at Vicksburg National Military Park

Prisoner exchanges between the Union and Confederacy were suspended when the Confederacy refused to return black soldiers captured in uniform. In October 1862, the Confederate Congress issued a resolution declaring that all Negroes, free and enslaved, should be delivered to their respective states "to be dealt with according to the present and future laws of such State or States".[77] In a letter to General Beauregard on this issue, Secretary Seddon pointed out that "Slaves in flagrant rebellion are subject to death by the laws of every slave-holding State" but that "to guard, however, against possible abuse...the order of execution should be reposed in the general commanding the special locality of the capture."[78]

However, Seddon, concerned about the "embarrassments attending this question",[79] urged that former slaves be sent back to their owners. As for freemen, they would be handed over to Confederates for confinement and put to hard labor.[80] Black troops were actually less likely to be taken prisoner than whites, as in many cases, such as the Battle of Fort Pillow, Confederate troops murdered them on the battlefield; if taken prisoner, black troops and their white officers faced far worse treatment than other prisoners.

In the last few months of the war, the Confederate government agreed to the exchange of all prisoners, white and black, and several thousand troops were exchanged until the surrender of the Confederacy ended all hostilities.[81]

References

Notes

1.     Aptheker, Herbert (January 1947). "Negro Casualties in the Civil War". The Journal of Negro History. 32 (1): 12.

2.     Bonekemper III, Edward (2015). The Myth of the Lost Cause. New York: Regnery Publishing. pp. 78–92.

3.     "Douglass Monthly" V (August 1863) 852

4.     James McPherson, "The Negro's Civil War".

5.     Edward G. Longacre, "Black Troops in the Army of the James", 1863–65 "Military Affairs", Vol. 45, No. 1 (February 1981), p.3

6.     "Teaching With Documents: The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War". National Archives. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved December 3, 2015.

7.     Trudeau, Noah A., Like Men of War, Little, Brown and Company, p.8-9.

8.     U.S. Statutes at Large XII, p. 589-92

9.     "Black Civil War Soldiers - Facts, Death Toll & Enlistment". 22 November 2022.

10. "Black Soldiers in the Civil War". Archives.gov. 2011-10-19. Retrieved 2012-05-27.

11. Butts, Heather (2005). "Alexander Thomas Augusta Physician, Teacher and Human Rights Activist". J Natl Med Assoc. 97 (1): 106–9.

12. Jane E. Schultz, "Seldom Thanked, Never Praised, and Scarcely Recognized: Gender and Racism in Civil War Hospitals", Civil War History, Vol. xlviii No. 3 p. 221

13. "The Color of Bravery". American Battlefield Trust.

14. Official Record of the War of the Rebellion Series I, Vol. XXVI, Pt. 1, p. 45

15. Rogers, Octavia V., "The House of Bondage", Oxford University Press, pg.131.

16. Trudeau, Noah A., Like Men of War, Little, Brown and Company, p.37.

17. "Milliken's Bend". American Battlefield Trust.

18. "Battle of Milliken's Bend, June 7, 1863 - Vicksburg National Military Park (U.S. National Park Service)".

19. "New York Tribune,", September 8, 1865

20. Ward, Thomas J. Jr. (August 27, 2013). "The Plight of the Black P.O.W." The New York Times.

21. Trudeau, Noah A., Like Men of War, Little, Brown and Company, p.166-168.

22. "Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony". NPR.

23. Eric Foner. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 497

24. U.S. Statutes at Large, XIII, 129-131

25. "Black Soldiers in the Civil War". Archives.gov. 2011-10-19. Retrieved 2012-05-27.

26. Official Record Ser. III Vol. III p. 1126

27. "Black Dispatches: Black American Contributions to Union Intelligence During the Civil War". cia.gov. Archived from the original on June 12, 2007. Retrieved 23 November 2010.

28. Chism, Kahlil (March 2005). "Harriet Tubman: Spy, Veteran, and Widow". OAH Magazine of History. 19 (1): 47–51. doi:10.1093/maghis/19.2.47.

29. "African Americans In The Civil War". HistoryNet.

30. "Patrick Cleburne's Proposal to Arm Slaves". American Battlefield Trust. Retrieved 2021-05-30.

31. "African Americans in the U.S. Navy During the Civil War".

32. Steven J. Ramold. Slaves, Sailors, Citizens pp. 3–4

33. Official Record of the Confederate and Union Navies, Ser. I vol. VI, Washington, 1897, pp. 8–10. See http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/ofre.html

34. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens, p. 55

35. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens, pp. 82–84.

36. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens, pp. 92–99.

37. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens, pp. 76–77.

38. "Robert Smalls, from Escaped Slave to House of Representatives – African American History Blog – The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross". PBS. 13 January 2013.

39. Editors, Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Lucinda H. Mackethan. "Reading Marlboro Jones: A Georgia Slave in Civil War Virginia", Virginia's Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

40. Smith, Sam (10 February 2015). "Black Confederates". American Battlefield Trust. Civil War Trust.

41. Martinez, Jaime Amanda. "Black Confederates". Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities Council.

42. Official Record, Series IV, Vol. III, p. 1161-1162.

43. Davis, William C., Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour, p. 599.

44. Statement of the Auditor of the Numbers of Slaves Fit for Service, March 25, 1865, William Smith Executive Papers, Virginia Governor's Office, RG 3, State Records Collection, LV.

45. Bruce Levine. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War.

46. James M. McPherson, ed., The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times, p. 319.[1]

47. Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. p. 518

48. "Jefferson Shields profile in Richmond paper, Nov. 3, 1901". The Daily Times. 1901-11-03. p. 18.

49. Levin, Kevin (2019). Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. UNC Press. pp. 89–90.

50. Levin, Kevin M. (2019). Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. University of North Carolina Press.

51. Levin, Kevin (August 8, 2015). "The Myth of the Black Confederate Soldier". The Daily Beast.

52. Marshall, Josh (January 2, 2018). "In Search of the Black Confederate Unicorn". Talking Points Memo. TPM Media LLC.

53. Levine, Bruce. "Black Confederates", North & South 10, no. 2. p. 40–45.

54. Bergeron, Arthur W., Jr. Louisianans in the Civil War, "Louisiana's Free Men of Color in Gray", University of Missouri Press, 2002, p. 109.

55. Bernard H. Nelson, "Confederate Slave Impressment Legislation, 1861–1865", The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 31, No. 4. (October, 1946), pp. 393–394.

56. Nelson, "Confederate Slave Impressment Legislation," p. 398.

57. Ivan Musicant, "Divided Waters: The Naval History of the Civil War". (1995) p. 74. "Free blacks could enlist with the approval of the local squadron commander, or the Navy Department, and slaves were permitted to serve with their master's consent. It was stipulated that no draft of seamen to a newly commissioned vessel could number more than 5 per cent blacks. Though figures are lacking, a fair number of blacks served as coal heavers, officers' stewards, or at the top end, as highly skilled tidewater pilots."

58. "Tennessee State Library & Archives – Tennessee Secretary of State

59. "Tennessee Colored Pension Applications for CSA Service".

60. Official Record, Series I, Vol. LII, Part 2, pp. 586–592.

61. Official Record, Series I, Vol. LII, Pt. 2, p. 598.

62. Official Record, Series IV, Vol III, p. 1009.

63. Fellman, Michael; Gordon, Lesley Jill; Sutherland, Daniel E. (2008). This Terrible War: The Civil War and its Aftermath (2nd ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.

64. Thomas Robson Hay. "The South and the Arming of the Slaves", The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 6, No. 1. (June, 1919), p. 34.

65. Richmond Enquirer, October 6, 1864

66. Charleston Courier, January 24, 1865

67. ""It Is a Surrender Of the Entire Slavery Question"". civil war memory. 2014-11-13.

68. Official Record. Series IV, Vol. III, p. 1012-1013.

69. "Black Confederates: Truth and Legend". 10 February 2015.

70. Official copy of the militia law of Louisiana, adopted by the state legislature, Jan. 23, 1862

71. Hollandsworth, James G., The Louisiana Native Guards, LSU Press, 1996, p.10.

72. Bergeron, Arhur W., Jr. Louisianans in the Civil War, "Louisiana's Free Men of Color in Gray", University of Missouri Press, 2002, p. 107-109.

73. Daily Delta, August 7, 1862; Grenada (Miss.) Appeal, August 7, 1862

74. Bergeron, Arhur W., Jr. Louisianans in the Civil War, "Louisiana's Free Men of Color in Gray", University of Missouri Press, 2002, p. 108.

75. Dr. Wilbert L. Jenkins: Climbing Up to Glory: A Short History of African Americans During the Civil War and Reconstruction (SR Books, 2002), p. 72.

76. Barbara Tomblin, Life in Jefferson Davis' Navy (Naval Institute Press, 2019)

77. Statutes at Large of the Confederate State (Richmond 1863), 167–168.

78. Official Record, Series II, Vol. VIII, p. 954.

79. Official Record, Series II, Vol. VI, pp. 703–704.

80. "Treatment of Colored Union Troops by Confederates, 1861–1865", The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 20, No. 3. (July, 1935), pp. 278–279.

81. Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 457.

82. "Delany, Martin R. (1812–1885)". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2012-05-27.

Bibliography

·         Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

·         Jaime Amanda Martinez, Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

·         Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. review by David W. Blight.

Further reading

·         William A. Dobak, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013.

·         James G. Mendez, A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

·         John David Smith, Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. I

United States Colored Troops

United States Colored Troops (USCT) were Union Army regiments during the American Civil War that primarily comprised African Americans, with soldiers from other ethnic groups also serving in USCT units. Established in response to a demand for more units from Union Army commanders, by the end of the war in 1865 USCT regiments, which numbered 175 in total, constituted about one-tenth of the manpower of the army. Approximately 20% of USCT soldiers were killed in action or died of disease and other causes, a rate about 35% higher than that of white Union troops.

Sgt. Milton Howland Medal of Honor recipient

Numerous USCT soldiers fought with distinction, with 16 receiving the Medal of Honor. The USCT regiments were precursors to the Buffalo Soldier units which fought in the American Indian Wars.[1]

The courage displayed by colored troops during the Civil War played an important role in African Americans gaining new rights. As Frederick Douglass said during a 1863 speech:

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.[2]

Background

The Confiscation Act

Printed broadside, calling all men of color to arms, 1863

Contraband labors Fort Monroe, Virginia

The U.S. Congress passed the Confiscation Act [3] in July 1862. It freed slaves whose owners were in rebellion against the United States. Congress almost immediately passed the Militia Act that empowered the President to use free blacks and former slaves from the rebel states in any capacity in the army. President Abraham Lincoln was concerned with public opinion in the four border states that remained in the Union, as they had numerous slaveholders, as well as with northern Democrats who supported the war but were less supportive of abolition than many northern Republicans. At first, Lincoln opposed early efforts to recruit African-American soldiers, although he accepted the Army using them as paid workers.

In September 1862, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, announcing that all slaves in rebellious states would be free as of January 1. Recruitment of colored regiments began in full force following the Proclamation in January 1863.[4]

Formation

Main article: Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War

The United States War Department issued General Order Number 143 on May 22, 1863, establishing the Bureau of Colored Troops to facilitate the recruitment of African-American soldiers to fight for the Union Army.[5] Regiments, including infantry, cavalry, engineers, light artillery, and heavy artillery units were recruited from all states of the Union. Approximately 175 regiments comprising more than 178,000 free blacks and freedmen served during the last two years of the war. Their service bolstered the Union war effort at a critical time.

Initially, the USCT were relegated to menial jobs such as that of laborers, teamsters, cooks, and other supports duties. However, even these duties were essential to the war effort.[6] For example, USCT engineers built Fort Pocahontas, a Union supply depot, in Charles City, Virginia.[7] Eventually USCT were sent into combat.

The USCT suffered 2,751 combat casualties during the war, and 68,178 losses from all causes. Disease caused the most fatalities for all troops, both black and white.[8] In the last year-and-a-half and from all reported casualties, approximately 20% of all African Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives.[9] Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than white soldiers:

[We] find, according to the revised official data, that of the slightly over two millions troops in the United States Volunteers, over 316,000 died (from all causes), or 15.2%. Of the 67,000 Regular Army (white) troops, 8.6%, or not quite 6,000, died. Of the approximately 180,000 United States Colored Troops, however, over 36,000 died, or 20.5%. In other words, the mortality rate amongst the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War was thirty-five percent greater than that among other troops, notwithstanding the fact that the former were not enrolled until some eighteen months after the fighting began.[9]— Herbert Aptheker

USCT regiments were led by white Union officers, while rank advancement was limited for Black soldiers, who could only rise to the rank of non-commissioned officers. Approximately 110 blacks did become commissioned officers before the end of the war, primarily as surgeons or chaplains.[10] The Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Philadelphia opened the Free Military Academy for Applicants for the Command of Colored Troops at the end of 1863.[11] For a time, black soldiers received less pay than their white counterparts, but they and their supporters lobbied and eventually gained equal pay.[12] Notable members of USCT regiments included Martin Robinson Delany and the sons of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

The process for white officers aiming to lead USCT was considered more protracted and perhaps rigorous than for ordinary Union officers. This was because it was assumed that leading black soldiers would require a better officer than those leading white troops. At the end of their studies, those men who wished to lead black troops had to pass an examination administered by Brig. Gen. Silas Casey's staff in Washington. After a short period of examinations in mid-1863, only half of the men who had taken the exam passed.[13]

Volunteer regiments

Before the USCT was formed, several volunteer regiments were raised from free black men, including freedmen in the South. In 1863 a former slave, William Henry Singleton, helped recruit 1,000 former slaves in New Bern, North Carolina for the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers. He became a sergeant in the 35th USCT. Freedmen from the Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony, established in 1863 on the island, also formed part of the Free North Carolina Colored Volunteers (FNCCV) and subsequently the 35th.[14] Nearly all of the volunteer regiments were converted into USCT units.

In 1922 Singleton published his memoir (in a slave narrative) of his journey from slavery to freedom and becoming a Union soldier. Glad to participate in reunions, years later at the age of 95, he marched in a Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) event in 1938.

Company I 36th USCT. Fort Lincoln

State volunteers

Four regiments were considered regular units, rather than auxiliaries. Their veteran status allowed them to get federal government jobs after the war, from which African Americans had usually been excluded in earlier years. However, the men received no formal recognition for combat honors and awards until the turn of the 20th century. These units were:

·         5th Regiment Massachusetts Colored Volunteer Cavalry

·         54th Massachusetts (Colored) Volunteer Infantry Regiment

·         55th Massachusetts (Colored) Volunteer Infantry Regiment

·         29th Connecticut (Colored) Volunteer Infantry Regiment

·         30th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry Regiment

·         31st Infantry Regiment (Colored)

1st Louisiana Native Guard (Corps d'Afrique)

USCT soldiers at an abandoned farmhouse in Dutch Gap, Virginia, 1864

The 1st Louisiana Native Guard, one of many Louisiana Union Civil War units, was formed in New Orleans after the city was taken and occupied by Union forces. It was formed in part from the Confederacy's former unit of the same name, which had been made up of property-owning free people of color (gens de couleur libres).[15] These men had wanted to prove their bravery and loyalty to the Confederacy like other Southern property owners by joining the Confederate blacks, but the Confederacy did not allow them to serve and confiscated their arms.

For the new unit, the Union also recruited freedmen from the refugee camps. Liberated from nearby plantations, they and their families had no means to earn a living and no place to go. Local commanders, starved for replacements, started equipping volunteer units with cast-off uniforms and obsolete or captured firearms. The men were treated and paid as auxiliaries, performing guard or picket duties to free up white soldiers for maneuver units. In exchange their families were fed, clothed and housed for free at the Army camps; often schools were set up for them and their children.

Despite class differences between free people of color and freedmen, the troops of the new guard served with distinction, including under Captain Andre Cailloux at the Battle of Port Hudson and throughout the South. Its units included:

·         4 Regiments of Louisiana Native Guards (renamed the 1st–4th Corps d'Afrique Infantry, later renamed as the 73rd–76th US Colored Infantry on April 4, 1864).

·         1st and 2nd Brigade Marching Bands, Corps d'Afrique (later made into Nos. 1 and 2 Bands, USCT).

·         1st Regiment of Cavalry (1st Corps d'Afrique Cavalry, later made into the 4th US Colored Cavalry).

·         22 Regiments of Infantry (1st–20th, 22nd, and 26th Corps d'Afrique Infantry, later converted into the 77th–79th, 80th–83rd, 84th–88th, and 89th–93rd US Colored Infantry on April 4, 1864).

·         5 Regiments of Engineers (1st–5th Corps d'Afrique Engineers, later converted into the 95th–99th US Colored Infantry regiments on April 4, 1864) whose work building Bailey's Dam saved the Union navy's Mississippi River Squadron.

·         1 Regiment of Heavy Artillery (later converted into the 10th US Colored (Heavy) Artillery on May 21, 1864).

Right Wing, XVI Corps (1864)

Colored Troops singing "John Brown's Body" as they marched into Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1865. Note the attitude of the local population, and the white officers. Harper’s Weekly

Colored troops served as laborers in the 16th Army Corps' Quartermaster's Department and Pioneer Corps.

·         Detachment, Quartermaster's Department.

·         Pioneer Corps, 1st Division (Mower), 16th Army Corps.

·         Pioneer Corps, Cavalry Division (Grierson), 16th Army Corps.

USCT Regiments

Main article: List of United States Colored Troops Civil War Units

·         6 Regiments of Cavalry [1st–6th USC Cavalry]

·         1 Regiment of Light Artillery [2nd USC (Light) Artillery]

·         1 Independent USC (Heavy) Artillery Battery

·         13 Heavy Artillery Regiments [1st and 3rd–14th USC (Heavy) Artillery]

·         1 unassigned Company of Infantry [Company A, US Colored Infantry]

·         1 Independent USC Company of Infantry (Southard's Independent Company, Pennsylvania (Colored) Infantry)

·         1 Independent USC Regiment of Infantry [Powell's Regiment, US Colored Infantry]

·         135 Regiments of Infantry [1st–138th USC Infantry] (The 94th, 105th, and 126th USC Infantry regiments were never fully formed)

Details

·         The 2nd USC (Light) Artillery Regiment (2nd USCA) was made up of nine separate batteries grouped into three nominal battalions of three batteries each. The batteries were usually detached.

o    I Battalion: A,B & C Batteries.

o    II Battalion: D, E & F Batteries.

o    III Battalion: G, H & I Batteries.

·         The second raising of the 11th USC Infantry (USCI) was created by converting the 7th USC (Heavy) Artillery into an infantry unit.

·         The second raising of the 79th USC Infantry (USCI) was formed from the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry.

·         The second raising of the 83rd USC Infantry (USCI) was formed from the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry.

·         The second raising of the 87th USCI was formed from merging the first raisings of the 87th and 96th USCI.

·         The second raising of the 113th USCI was formed by merging the first raisings of the 11th, 112th, and 113th USCI.

Notable actions

Main article: Skirmish at Island Mound

George N. Barnard's photograph of a slave trader's business on Whitehall Street Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. A United States Colored Troop Infantry corporal is sitting by the door.

The first engagement by African-American soldiers against Confederate forces during the Civil War was at the Battle of Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri on October 28–29, 1862. African Americans, mostly escaped slaves, had been recruited into the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers. They accompanied white troops to Missouri to break up Confederate guerrilla activities based out of Hog Island near Butler, Missouri. Although outnumbered, the African-American soldiers fought valiantly, and the Union forces won the engagement.

The conflict was reported by The New York Times and Harper's Weekly.[16][17] In 2012 the state established the Battle of Island Mound State Historic Site to preserve this area; the eight Union men killed were buried near the battleground.[18]

USCT regiments fought in all theaters of the war, but mainly served as garrison troops in rear areas. The most famous USCT action took place at the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg. Regiments of USCT suffered heavy casualties attempting to break through Confederate lines.

Other notable engagements include Fort Wagner, one of their first major tests, and the Battle of Nashville.[19]

Colored Troop soldiers were among the first Union forces to enter Richmond, Virginia, after its fall in April 1865. The 41st USCT regiment was among those present at the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Following the war, USCT regiments served among the occupation troops in former Confederate states.

U.S. Army General Ulysses S. Grant praised the competent performance and bearing of the USCT, saying at Vicksburg that:

Negro troops are easier to preserve discipline among than our white troops ... All that have been tried have fought bravely.

— Ulysses S. Grant, at Vicksburg (July 24, 1863).[20]

Prisoners of war

USCT soldiers suffered extra violence at the hands of Confederate soldiers, who singled them out for mistreatment. They were often the victims of battlefield massacres and atrocities by Confederates, most notably at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, at the Battle of the Crater in Virginia,[21] and at the Battle of Olustee in Florida.

They were often murdered when captured by Confederate soldiers, as the Confederacy announced that former slaves fighting for the Union were traitors and would be immediately executed.[19]

The prisoner exchange protocol broke down over the Confederacy's position on black prisoners-of-war. The Confederacy had passed a law stating that white officers commanding black soldiers and blacks captured in uniform would be tried as rebellious slave insurrectionists in civil courts — a capital offense with automatic sentence of death.[22][23] In practice, USCT soldiers were often murdered by Confederate troops without being taken to court. This law became a stumbling block for prisoner exchange, as the U.S. government in the Lieber Code objected to such discriminatory mistreatment of prisoners of war on basis of ethnicity. The Republican Party's platform during the 1864 presidential election also condemned the Confederacy's mistreatment of black U.S. soldiers.[24] In response to such mistreatment, General Ulysses S. Grant, in a letter to Confederate officer Richard Taylor, urged the Confederates to treat captured black U.S. soldiers humanely and professionally, and not to murder them. He stated the U.S. government's official position, that black U.S. soldiers were sworn military men. The Confederacy had said they were escaped slaves who deserved no better treatment.[25]

Numbers of colored troops by state, North and South

The soldiers are classified by the state where they were enrolled; Northern states often sent agents to enroll formerly enslaved from the South. Many soldiers from Delaware, D.C., Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia were formerly enslaved as well. Most of the troops credited to West Virginia, however, were not actually from that state.[26]

North[27]

Number

South[27]

Number

Connecticut

1,764 

  Alabama

4,969 

Colorado Territory

95 

  Arkansas

5,526 

Delaware

954 

  Florida

1,044 

District of Columbia

3,269 

  Georgia

3,486 

Illinois

1,811 

  Louisiana

24,502 

Indiana

1,597 

  Mississippi

17,869 

Iowa

440 

  North Carolina

5,035 

Kansas

2,080 

  South Carolina

5,462 

Kentucky

23,703 

  Tennessee

20,133 

Maine

104 

  Texas

47 

Maryland

8,718 

  Virginia

5,723 

Massachusetts

3,966 

Michigan

1,387 

Total from the South

93,796

Minnesota

104 

Missouri

8,344 

At large

733 

New Hampshire

125 

Not accounted for

5,083 

New Jersey

1,185 

New York

4,125 

Ohio

5,092 

Pennsylvania

8,612 

Rhode Island

1,837 

Vermont

120 

West Virginia

196 

Wisconsin

155 

Total from the North

79,283 

Total

178,895 

Postbellum

The USCT was disbanded in the fall of 1865. In 1867, the Regular Army was set at ten regiments of cavalry and 45 regiments of infantry. The Army was authorized to raise two regiments of black cavalry (the 9th and 10th (Colored) Cavalry) and four regiments of black infantry (the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st (Colored) Infantry), who were mostly drawn from USCT veterans. The first draft of the bill that the House Committee on Military Affairs sent to the full chamber on March 7, 1866, did not include a provision for regiments of black cavalry; however, this provision was added by Senator Benjamin Wade prior to the bill's passing.[28] In 1869 the Regular Army was kept at ten regiments of cavalry but cut to 25 regiments of Infantry, reducing the black complement to two regiments (the 24th and 25th (Colored) Infantry).

The two black infantry regiments represented 10 percent of the size of all twenty-five infantry regiments. Similarly, the black cavalry units represented 20 percent of the size of all ten cavalry regiments.[28]

From 1870 to 1898 the strength of the US Army totaled 25,000 service members with black soldiers maintaining their 10 percent representation.[28] USCT soldiers fought in the Indian Wars in the American West, where they became known as the Buffalo Soldiers, thus nicknamed by Native Americans who compared their hair to the curly fur of bison.[29]

Awards

Sgt Major Christian Fleetwood. Civil War, Medal of Honor recipient

US Medal of Honor

Sixteen African-American USCT soldiers earned the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award, for service in the war:[30]

·         Sergeant William Harvey Carney of the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Volunteer Infantry was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Fort Wagner in July 1863. During the advance, Carney was wounded but still went on. When the color-bearer was shot, Carney grabbed the flagstaff and planted it in the parapet, while the rest of his regiment stormed the fortification. When his regiment was forced to retreat, he was wounded two more times while he carried the colors back to Union lines. He did not relinquish it until he handed it to another soldier of the 54th. Carney received his medal 37 years after the battle.

·         Fourteen African-American soldiers, including Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood and Sergeant Alfred B. Hilton (mortally wounded) of the 4th USCT, were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions at the Battle of Chaffin's Farm in September 1864, during the campaign to take Petersburg.

·         Corporal Andrew Jackson Smith of the 55th Massachusetts (Colored) Volunteer Infantry was recommended for the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Honey Hill in November 1864. Smith prevented the regimental colors from falling into enemy hands after the color sergeant was killed. Due to a lack of official records, he was not awarded the medal until 2001.

The Butler Award

Soldiers who fought in the Army of the James were eligible for the Butler Medal, commissioned by that army's commander, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler. When several slaves escaped to Butler's lines in 1861, at Fort Monroe in Virginia, Butler was the first to declare any refugee slaves as contraband, and refused to return them to slaveholders, a standard that slowly became an unofficial policy throughout the Union Army. Their owner, a Confederate colonel, came to Butler under a flag of truce and demanded that they be returned to him under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Butler informed him that since Virginia claimed to have left the Union, the Fugitive Slave Law no longer applied, declaring the slaves to be contraband of war.

Legacy and modern views

The historian Steven Hahn proposes that when slaves organized themselves and worked with the Union Army during the American Civil War, including as some regiments of the USCT, their actions comprised a slave rebellion that dwarfed all other slave revolts.[31] The African American Civil War Memorial Museum helps to preserve pertinent information from the period.[32]

U.S. Colored Troops

Sgt. William Harvey Carney Medal of Honor recipient

Tributes

·         In 1924, the Grand Army of the Republic unveiled the Colored Soldiers Monument in Frankfort, Kentucky.

·         In September 1996, a national celebration in commemoration of the service of the United States Colored Troops was held.

·         The African American Civil War Memorial (1997), featuring Spirit of Freedom by sculptor Ed Hamilton, was erected at the corner of Vermont Avenue and U Street NW in the capital, Washington, D.C. It is administered by the National Park Service.

·         In 1999 the African American Civil War Museum opened nearby.

·         In July 2011, the African American Civil War Museum celebrated a grand opening of its new facility at 1925 Vermont Avenue Northwest, Washington DC, just across the street from the memorial.[34][35]

Other

Richard Walter Thomas, black scholar of race relations, observed that the relationship between white and black soldiers in the Civil War was an instance of what he calls "the other tradition": "… after sharing the horrors of war with their black comrades in arms, many white officers experienced deep and dramatic transformations in their attitudes toward blacks."[37]

Similar units

·         92nd Infantry Division (United States)

·         93d Infantry Division (United States)

·         366th Infantry Regiment (United States)

·         369th Infantry Regiment (United States)

·         761st Tank Battalion (United States)

·         1st Louisiana Native Guard (CSA)

Notes

1.     This U.S. Colored Troops medal was issued by General Butler

2.     Capt. Francis Jackson Meriam (pictured), was commander of the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry.

References

Citations

1.     "Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military During the Civil War". National Archives. August 15, 2016. Retrieved January 5, 2021.

2.     Douglass, Frederick (July 6, 1863). Speech at National Hall, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments (Speech). Mass meeting held at National Hall, Philadelphia. National Hall, Philadelphia. Retrieved December 7, 2023.

3.     Rodriguez, Junius P. Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, vol. 2, pg 241

4.     Cornish, The Sable Arm, pp. 29–111.

5.     Cornish, The Sable Arm, p. 130.

6.     Henderson, Steward. "The Role of the USCT in the Civil War". www.battlefields.org. American Battlefield Trust.

7.     Rhea, Gordon C. To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee; May 13–25, 1864; Baton Rouge, LA; Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

8.     Cornish, The Sable Arm, p. 288; McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, p. 237

9.     Herbert Aptheker, "Negro Casualties in the Civil War", "The Journal of Negro History", Vol. 32, No. 1. (January, 1947).

10. "National Park Civil War Series: The Civil War's Black Soldiers".

11.  Cornish, The Sable Arm, p. 218.

12. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, Chapter XIV, "The Struggle for Equal Pay," pp. 193–203.

13. Fry, Zachery A. (October 2017). "Philadelphia's Free Military School and the Radicalization of Wartime Officer Education, 1863-64". Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 141 (3): 278–279.

14. "The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony"; Carolina Country Magazine, date?, accessed November 10, 2010

15. This group of mixed-race people were descended generally from male native-born Spanish and French colonists (called Criolla or Créole) and African slave women, or free African-American women. After the United States made the Louisiana Purchase (1803), many Americans moved to Louisiana. They ignored the status of the free people of color, grouping them with the mass of blacks, then mostly slaves. (Today the people of color descended from this group are generally referred to as Louisiana Creoles.)

16. "Affairs In The West.; A Negro Regiment in Action – The Battle of Island Mounds – Desperate Bravery of the Negros – Defeat of the Guerrillas – An Attempted Fraud", The New York Times, 19 November 1862, accessed 22 February 2016

17. Chris Tabor, "Skirmish at Island Mound", Island Mound

18. Battle of Island Mound State Historic Site; Missouri Department of Natural Resources

19. Cornish, The Sable Arm, pp. 173–80.

20. Words of our Hero: Ulysses S. Grant, edited by Jeremiah Chaplin, Boston: D. Lothrop and Company, pp. 13–14.

21. Robertson, James I. Jr.; Pegram, Willuam (1990). "'The Boy Artillerist': Letters of Colonel William Pegram, C.S.A.". Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. 98, no. 2 (The Trumpet Unblown: The Old Dominion in the Civil War). pp. 242–243.

22. Williams, George W., History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negros as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens, vol. II, New York: G.P. Putnam Son's, 1883, pp. 351–52.

23. Congress of the Confederate States of America (April 15, 2014). "No. 5". Joint Resolution on the Subject of Retaliation. May 1, 1863. Retrieved March 6, 2016.

24. Republican Party (June 7, 1864). "Republican Party Platform of 1864". Archived from the original on April 21, 2015. [T]he Government owes to all men employed in its armies, without regard to distinction of color, the full protection of the laws of war—and that any violation of these laws, or of the usages of civilized nations in time of war, by the Rebels now in arms, should be made the subject of prompt and full redress.

25. Grant, Ulysses (1863). "Letter to Richard Taylor". Vicksburg. I feel no inclination to retaliate for the offences of irresponsible persons; but if it is the policy of any General intrusted with the command of troops to show no quarter, or to punish with death prisoners taken in battle, I will accept the issue. It may be you propose a different line of policy towards black troops, and officers commanding them, to that practiced towards white troops. So, I can assure you that these colored troops are regularly mustered into the service of the United States. The Government, and all officers under the Government, are bound to give the same protection to these troops that they do to any other troops.

26. 45th United States Colored Troops

27. Gladstone, William A., United States Colored Troops, p. 120

28. Schubert, Frank N. (1997). Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, 1870-1898. Scholarly Resources Inc. pp. 4-5.

29. "Wild West Western Facts, Buffalo Soldiers". The Wild West. Retrieved December 3, 2015.

30. Schubert, Frank N. (1997). Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, 1870-1898. Scholarly Resources Inc. pp. 2-4.

31. Hahn, Steven (2004). "The Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History: Southern Slaves in the American Civil War". southernspaces.org.

32. African American Civil War Memorial and Museum; organization website

33. "District of Columbia. Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln". loc.gov. 1863.

34. "African American Civil War Museum To Hold Grand Opening". WAMU.

35. memorial & Museum History". www.afroamcivilwar.org.

36. See film review by historian James M. McPherson, "The 'Glory' Story," The New Republic, January 8 & 15, 1990, pp. 22–27.

37. Richard Walter Thomas (January 1996). John H. Standfield II (ed.). Understanding interracial unity: a study of U.S. race relations. Sage series on race and ethnic relations. Vol. 16. Sage Publications. p. 31.

General references

·         Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.

·         Dobak, William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2011.

·         Gladstone, William A. United States Colored Troops, 1863–1867. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1996.

·         Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870.

·         Johnson, Jesse J. Black Armed Forces Officers 1736–1971. Hampton Publications, 1971.

·         Matthews, Harry Bradshaw, African American Freedom Journey in New York and Related Sites, 1823–1870: Freedom Knows No Color, Cherry Hill, NJ: Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers, 2008.

·         McPherson, James M., The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.

·         Schubert, Frank N. (1997). Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, 1870-1898. Scholarly Resources Inc.

·         Smith, John David, Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). 156 pp.

·         Williams, George W., A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887.

·         Film review, James M. McPherson, "The 'Glory' Story," The New Republic, January 8 & 15, 1990, pp. 22–27

Further reading

·         Lee, Ulysses. The Employment of Negro Troops. Published by the Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D.C., 1966. 740 pp.

Appendix: Proposed Gold Medal for Colored Soldiers in the Civil War

Army Life in a Black Regiment

By

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Originally published 1869

Illustrated edition

Susie King Taylor Center for Jubilee

2023

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment 4

Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), by Colonel Higginson. 42

Wartime Letters of Seth Rogers, 33d USCT.. 382

Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War 489

Appendix: Proposed Gold Medal for Colored Soldiers in the Civil War 519

Introduction

In 2023, the Susie King Taylor Center for Jubilee, led by Patt Gunn and Rosalyn Rouse, spearheaded an effort to change Calhoun Square in Savannah to Susie King Taylor Square.  Susie King Taylor Square is an important landmark honoring the first Black female nurse in the Union Army, civil rights activist, community leader, and education.

Susie King Taylor was a nurse in the First South Caroline Colored Infantry Regiment, later designated the 33rd US Colored Troop Infantry Regiment.  The regiment was founded and commanded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  It was one of the first Black regiments formed in the Civil War.

Its distinguished service was documented in a memoir by Colonel Higginson, first published in 1869.

In honor of the renaming of Calhoun Square to Susie King Taylor Square, we are producing illustrated editions of Susie King Taylor’s book, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33D United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, and Colonel Higginson’s book, Army Life in a Black Regiment.

More than 200,000 African Americans served in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War.  They helped not only to preserve the Union, but contributed mightily to the ending of slavery and forever proving the patriotism of African Americans.

These volumes are lovingly dedicated to their memory.

This document is also produced in support of an initiative to create a Congressional Gold Medal in honor of African American soldiers who served in the Civil War.  The legislative initiative in the Senate was introduced by Senator Cory Booker and in the House of Representatives by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.  Here is a link to the legislation: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/273/text?s=1&r=1&q=%7B%22search%22%3A%22colored+troops%22%7D

1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored) From Wikipedia, [edited]

The 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored) was a Union Army regiment during the American Civil War, formed by General Rufus Saxton. It was composed of escaped slaves from South Carolina and Florida. It was one of the first black regiments in the Union Army.[a]

History

Department of the South staff officer James D. Fessenden was heavily involved in efforts to recruit volunteers for the 1st South Carolina. Although it saw some combat, the regiment was not involved in any of the war's major battles. As would be true of all future regiments composed of black men, the officers of the 1st South Carolina were white. A proclamation by Confederate President Jefferson Davis had ordered that members of the regiment would not be treated as prisoners of war if taken in battle: The enlisted men were to be delivered to state authorities to be auctioned off or otherwise treated as runaway slaves, while the white officers were to be hanged.[2][3]

"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

Frederick Douglass

USCT Beaufort, South Carolina

The regiment was particularly effective at conducting raids along the coast of Florida and Georgia, due to the men’s familiarity with the terrain.[4] For example, as early as November 1862, men from Company A of the regiment under the command of Lt. Colonel Oliver T. Beard conducted raids on saltworks in northeast Florida.[5]

The regiment was a step in the evolution of Union thinking towards the escaped slaves who crossed their lines. Initially they were returned to their owners. Next, they were considered contraband and employed as laborers. Finally, the legal fiction that they were property was abandoned and they were allowed to enlist in the Army, although in segregated units commanded by white officers. Harriet Tubman served with these men as a cook, nurse, spy, and scout.

Susie King Taylor, whose husband and other relatives fought with the regiment, also served as a laundress and nurse for the men from August 1862 until mustering out on February 9, 1866.[6] As a holdover from the "contraband" days, black privates were paid $10 per month, the rate for laborers, rather than the $13 paid to white privates. The men served as the precedent for the over 170,000 "colored" troops who followed them into the Union Army.

Officers

The regiment’s first commander was Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister, author and abolitionist. He wrote of his men, “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.”

During the war Higginson documented the Gullah dialect spoken by some of the men and made a record of the spirituals that they sang. Higginson later wrote a book about his experiences titled Army Life in a Black Regiment.[1]

Major Seth Rogers was regimental surgeon and wrote extensive wartime letters. His nephew, Captain James Seth Rogers, previously of the 51st Massachusetts, was captain of Company B.[7]

33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment

Redesignation

The regiment was re-designated the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment on February 8, 1864.

Note

1.     The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, whose exploits are memorialized in the film Glory, was formed afterwards and drew from free Northern blacks.

References

1. "Army Life in a Black Regiment, By Thomas Wentworth Higginson".

2. Nicolay, John G.; Hay, John (1890). Abraham Lincoln: A History, Volume VI. New York: The Century Co. pp. 470-473.

3. "Jefferson Davis's Proclamation Regarding Captured Black Soldiers, December 23, 1862". Freedmen & Southern Society Project. 10 December 2017.

4. "The Color of Bravery". American Battlefield Trust. July 29, 2013.

5. Winsboro, Irvin D. S. (Summer 2007). "Give Them Their Due: A Reassessment of African Americans and Union Military Service in Florida during the Civil War". The Journal of African American History. 92 (3): 330.

6. Taylor, Susie King (1902). Reminiscences of my life in camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops late 1st S.C. Volunteers. Boston.

7. "War-Time Letters From Seth Rogers, M.D. Surgeon of the First South Carolina Afterwards the Thirty-third U.S.C.T. 1862-1863".

Other sources

·         Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (W. W. Norton & Company 2008).

·         Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1869.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

From Wikipedia [edited]

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 – May 9, 1911) was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, politician, and soldier. He was active in abolitionism in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864.[1] Following the war, he wrote about his experiences with African American soldiers and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised peoples. He is also remembered as a mentor to poet Emily Dickinson.

Early life and education

Higginson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 22, 1823. He was a descendant of Francis Higginson, a Puritan minister and immigrant to the colony of Massachusetts Bay.[2] His father, Stephen Higginson (born in Salem, Massachusetts, November 20, 1770; died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 20, 1834), was a merchant and philanthropist in Boston and steward of Harvard University from 1818 until 1834. His grandfather, also named Stephen Higginson, was a member of the Continental Congress. He was a distant cousin of Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a great grandson of his grandfather.[3] A third great grandfather was New Hampshire Lieutenant-Governor John Wentworth.[4]

Education and abolitionism

Higginson entered Harvard College at age thirteen and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at sixteen.[5] He graduated in 1841 at age 18 and taught at a private school for four months, but he detested it and became "a tutor of the three children of his Brookline cousin, Stephen Higginson Perkins".[6][2] After that, in 1843, he became "a nonmatriculated student at Harvard".[7] In 1842 he became engaged to Mary Elizabeth Channing.

He then studied theology at the Harvard Divinity School. In 1845, at the end of his first year of divinity training, he withdrew from the school to turn his attention to the abolitionist cause. He spent the subsequent year studying and, following the lead of Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, fighting against the expected war with Mexico. Believing that war was only an excuse to expand slavery and the Slave Power, Higginson wrote antiwar poems and went door to door to get signatures for antiwar petitions. With the split of the antislavery movement in the 1840s, Higginson subscribed to the Disunion Abolitionists, who believed that as long as slave states remained a part of the Union, the Constitution could never be amended to ban slavery.

Higginson and children

Marriage and family

Higginson re-entered divinity school, and after graduating in 1847 and being ordained as the minister of a Newburyport Unitarian church (see below), he married Mary Channing.[8] Mary was the daughter of Dr. Walter Channing, a pioneer in the field of obstetrics and gynecology who taught at Harvard University, the niece of Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, and the sister of Henry David Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing. Higginson and Mary Channing had no children but raised Margaret Fuller Channing, the eldest daughter of Ellen Fuller and Ellery Channing. Ellen was the sister of  the Transcendentalist and feminist author, Margaret Fuller.[9] Mary Channing died in 1877. Two years later Higginson married Mary Potter Thacher, with whom he had two daughters, one of whom survived into adulthood.[10][

Higginson was also related to Harriet Higginson, whose Wooddale, Illinois, home was the first commission of famed architect Bertrand Goldberg in 1934.

Career

Ministry

Having graduated from divinity school, Higginson was called as pastor at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a Unitarian church known for its liberal Christianity.[11][12] He supported the Essex County Antislavery Society and criticized the poor treatment of workers at Newburyport cotton factories. Additionally, the young minister invited Theodore Parker and fugitive slave William Wells Brown to speak at the church, and in sermons he condemned northern apathy towards slavery. In his role as board member of the Newburyport Lyceum and against the wishes of the majority of the board, Higginson brought Ralph Waldo Emerson to speak.[13] Higginson proved too radical for the congregation and resigned in 1849.[14][15] After that, he lectured on the Lyceum circuit, initially receiving about $15 for each talk (Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson could command $25).[16]

Politics and militant abolitionism

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The Compromise of 1850 brought new challenges and new ambitions for the unemployed minister. He ran as the Free Soil Party candidate for Massachusetts's 3rd congressional district in 1850 but lost. Higginson called upon citizens to uphold God's law and disobey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

He joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization whose purpose was to protect fugitive slaves from pursuit and capture.[15] His joining of the group was inspired by the arrest and trial of the free black Frederick Jenkins, known as Shadrach. Abolitionists helped him escape to Canada. He participated with Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker in the attempt at freeing Thomas Sims, a Georgia slave who had escaped to Boston. In 1854, when the escaped Anthony Burns was threatened with extradition under the Fugitive Slave Act, Higginson led a small group who stormed the federal courthouse in Boston with battering rams, axes, cleavers, and revolvers.[5] They could not prevent Burns from being taken back to the South. Higginson received a saber slash on his chin; he wore the scar proudly for the rest of his life.

In 1852, Higginson became pastor of the Free Church in Worcester. During his tenure, Higginson not only supported abolition, but also temperance, labor rights, and rights of women.

Returning from a voyage to Europe for the health of his wife, who had an unknown illness, Higginson organized a group of men on behalf of the New England Emigration Aid Company to use peaceful means as tensions rose after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The act divided the region into the Kansas and Nebraska territories, whose residents would separately vote on whether to allow slavery within each jurisdiction's borders. Both abolitionist and pro-slavery supporters began to migrate to the territories. After his return, Higginson worked to keep activism aroused in New England by speechmaking, fundraising, and helping to organize the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. He returned to the Kansas territory as an agent of the National Kansas Aid Committee, working to rebuild morale and distribute supplies to settlers. Higginson became convinced that abolition could not be attained by peaceful methods.[17][18]

As sectional conflict escalated, he continued to support disunion abolitionism, organizing the Worcester Disunion Convention in 1857. The convention asserted abolition as its primary goal, even if it would lead the country to war.

John Brown

Higginson was a fervent supporter of John Brown and is remembered as one of the "Secret Six" abolitionists who helped Brown raise money and procure supplies for his intended slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. When Brown was captured, Higginson tried to raise money for a trial defense and made plans to help the leader escape from prison, though he was ultimately unsuccessful. Other members of the Secret Six fled to Canada or elsewhere after Brown's capture, but Higginson never fled, despite his involvement being common knowledge. Higginson was never arrested or called to testify.[15]

In 1879, Higginson was elected to represent Cambridge's first and fifth wards in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.[19] He was re-elected in 1880.[20] He made another run for U.S. House of Representatives in 1888 as a Democrat, but was defeated by Nathaniel P. Banks.

Woman's rights activism

Higginson was one of leading male advocates of women's rights during the decade before the Civil War. In 1853, he addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in support of a petition asking that women be allowed to vote on ratification of the new constitution. Published as "Woman and Her Wishes,"[21] the address was used for many years in a women's rights tract,[22] as was an 1859 article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly,[23] "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"[24] A close friend and supporter of women's rights leader Lucy Stone, he performed the marriage ceremony of Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell in 1855 and, by sending their protest of unjust marriage laws to the press, was responsible for their "Marriage Protest" becoming a famous document.[25] Together with Stone, he compiled and published[26] The Woman's Rights Almanac for 1858,[27] which provided data such as income disparity between the sexes as well as a summary of gains made by the national movement during its first seven years.

Fellow abolitionists Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Thompson, 1851

He also compiled and published, in 1858, "Consistent Democracy. The Elective Franchise for Women. Twenty-five Testimonies of Prominent Men," brief excerpts favoring woman suffrage from the speeches or writing of such men as Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, William Henry Channing, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, and various governors, legislators, and legislative reports.[28] A member of the National Woman's Rights Central Committee since 1853 or 1854, he was one of nine activists retained in that post when that large body of state representatives was reduced in 1858.[29]

After the Civil War, Higginson was an organizer of the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868,[30] and of the American Woman Suffrage Association the following year. He was one of the original editors of the suffrage newspaper Woman's Journal, founded in 1870, and contributed a front-page column to it for fourteen years. As a two-year member of the Massachusetts legislature, 1880–82, he was a valuable link between suffragists and the legislature.[31]

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Civil War years

During the early part of the Civil War, Higginson was a captain in the 51st Massachusetts Infantry from November 1862 to October 1864, when he was retired because of a wound received in the preceding August.

He was colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first authorized regiment recruited from freedmen for Union military service.[2] Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton required that black regiments be commanded by white officers. "We, their officers, did not go there to teach lessons, but to receive them," Higginson wrote. "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."

The regiment was particularly effective at conducting raids along the coast of Florida and Georgia, due to the men’s familiarity with the terrain.[4] For example, as early as November 1862, men from Company A of the regiment under the command of Lt. Colonel Oliver T. Beard conducted raids on saltworks in north east Florida.[5]

Higginson described his Civil War experiences in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870),[33] He contributed to the preservation of Negro spirituals by copying dialect verses and music he heard sung around the regiment's campfires. In his book, Drawn With the Sword, historian James M. McPherson cited Higginson as an example of a white officer in a black regiment who did not share the "[p]owerful racial prejudices" of others during the time period.[34]

Religious activism

After the Civil War, Higginson became active in the Free Religious Association (FRA) and in 1870 delivered the speech The Sympathy of Religions, which was later published and circulated. The address argued that all religions shared essential truths and a common exhortation toward benevolence. Division among the faiths was ultimately artificial, he said: "Every step in the progress of each brings it nearer to all the rest. For us, the door out of superstition and sin may be called Christianity; that is an historical name only, the accident of a birthplace. But other nations find other outlets; they must pass through their own doors."[35] He pushed the FRA to tolerate even those who did not accept the liberal principles the Association espoused, asking, "Are we as large as our theory? ... Are we as ready to tolerate ... the Evangelical man as the Mohammedan?" Although his own relationship to evangelical Protestants remained strained, he saw the exclusion of any religious mindset as fundamentally dangerous to the organization.[36] Higginson spoke at the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893 and praised the great strides that had been made in the mutual understanding of the world's great religions, describing the Parliament as the culmination of the FRA's greatest ambitions.[36]

Later years and death

After the Civil War, he devoted most of his time to literature.[37] His writings show a deep love of nature, art and humanity. In his Common Sense About Women (1881) and his Women and Men (1888), he advocated equality of opportunity and equality of rights for men and women.[2]

In 1874, Higginson was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.[38]

In 1891, Higginson became one of the founders of the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (SAFRF). He edited its public appeal "To the Friends of Russian Freedom". Later, in 1907 Higginson was the vice-president of the SAFRF.

In 1905, he joined with Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.[39] Higginson was an Advisory Editor for the second attempt at the Massachusetts Magazine.

Grave of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson died May 9, 1911. Although his death record states that he was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is actually buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the intersection of Riverview, Lawn, and Prospect paths.[40][41]

Beliefs

Higginson's deep conviction in the evils of slavery stemmed in part from his mother's influence. He greatly admired abolitionists, who, despite persecution, showed courage and commitment to the worthy cause.

William Lloyd Garrison

The writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child were particularly influential to Higginson's abolitionist enthusiasm during the early 1840s. Higginson claimed that Child's book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, first convinced him to speak against slavery.[42]

Homeopathy

Higginson was a strong advocate of homeopathy. In 1863, he wrote to his wife Mary Channing Higginson: "and also Ms. Laura Towne, the homeopathic physician of the department, chief teacher and probably the most energetic person this side of civilisation [sic]: a person of splendid health and astonishing capacity.... I think she has done more for me than anyone else by prescribing homeopathic arsenic as a tonic, one powder every day on rising, and it has already, I think (3 doses) affected me."[43]

Free-Soil Party poster

Political parties and ideology

In 1850, Higginson was the Free-Soil Party candidate for Congress and lost.[44] Subsequently, he was successively a Republican, an Independent and a Democrat.[2] He described having had an interest in his early youth in Brook Farm and Fourierism.[45]

Emily Dickinson

Relationship with Emily Dickinson

Letter from Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson is remembered as a correspondent and literary mentor to the poet Emily Dickinson.

In April 1862, Higginson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, titled "Letter to a Young Contributor," in which he advised budding young writers to step up. Emily Dickinson, a 32-year-old woman from Amherst, Massachusetts, sent a letter to Higginson, enclosing four poems and asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" (Letter 260) He was not – his reply included gentle "surgery" (that is, criticism) of Dickinson's raw, odd verse, questions about Dickinson's personal and literary background, and a request for more poems.

Higginson's next reply contained high praise, causing Dickinson to reply that it "gave no drunkenness" only because she had "tasted rum before"; she still, though, had "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue" (Letter 265). In the same letter, Higginson warned her against publishing her poetry because of its unconventional form and style.

Gradually, Higginson became Dickinson's mentor and "preceptor," and he visited her twice, in 1870 and 1873, at her home in Amherst. Higginson never felt that he fully understood Dickinson. "The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me," he wrote, "and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy." ("Emily Dickinson's Letters," Atlantic Monthly, October 1891) After Dickinson's death, Higginson collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd in publishing volumes of her poetry – heavily edited in favor of conventional punctuation, diction, and rhyme. In White Heat (Knopf, 2008), an account of Higginson's friendship with Dickinson, author Brenda Wineapple credits Higginson with more editorial sensitivity than literary historians have previously noted. Higginson's prominence within intellectual circles helped to promote Dickinson's poetry, which remained strange and startling even in its altered form.

Selected list of works

                   His works included:[2]

·         "A Ride Through Kanzas" (1856)

·         "Going to Mount Katahdin", Putnam's Monthly (September 1856), vol. VIII, pp. 242–256.[46]

·         "The Story of Denmark Vesey," The Atlantic Monthly (June 1861) Denmark Vesey was a free Black pastor who was hanged in 1822 after being convicted of planning a major slave revolt that was discovered before it could be realized.

·         Outdoor Papers (1863)

·         The Works of Epictetus (1866), a translation based on that by Elizabeth Carter

·         Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation (1868) (Twelve biographies of women, of which Higginson wrote two: Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller Ossoli)

·         Malbone: an Oldport Romance (1869)

·         Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870)[5]

·         Atlantic Essays (1871)

·         Oldport Days (1873)

·         A Book of American Explorers (1877)

·         Common Sense About Women (1881)

·         Margaret Fuller Ossoli[5] (in American Men of Letters series, 1884)

·         A Larger History of the United States of America to the Close of President Jackson's Administration (1885)

·         The Monarch of Dreams (1886)

·         Travellers and Outlaws (1889)

·         The Afternoon Landscape (1889), poems and translations

·         Life of Francis Higginson (in Makers of America, 1891)

·         Concerning All of Us (1892)

·         The Procession of the Flowers and Kindred Papers (1897)

·         Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic (1898)

·         Cheerful Yesterdays (1898)[5]

·         Old Cambridge (1899)

·         Contemporaries (1899). This book includes a revised version of the chapter on Lydia Maria Child in Eminent Women of the Age.

·         Henry Wadsworth Longfellow[5] (in American Men of Letters series, 1902)

·         John Greenleaf Whittier[5] (in "English Men of Letters" series, 1902)

·         A Readers History of American Literature (1903), the Lowell Institute lectures for 1903, edited by Henry W. Boynton

·         "Books Unread," in The Atlantic Monthly (March 1904), reprinted in Rabinowitz, Harold, and Kaplan, Rob, eds., A Passion for Books, New York: Times Books, 1999, pp. 89–93.

·         Part of a Man's Life (1905)

·         Life and Times of Stephen Higginson (1907)

·         Carlyle's Laugh and Other Surprises (1909)

Notes

1.     Ash, Stephen V., Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

2.     Chisholm 1911.

3.     Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1892). "Higginson, Stephen". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.

4.     Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson – The Story of His Life (Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914) pp.2–3

5.     Wilson, Susan. Literary Trail of Greater Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000: 119.

6.     Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 38.

7.     Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 45.

8.     Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 77–78.

9.     Frederick T. McGill, Jr., Channing of Concord: A Life of William Ellery Channing II, Rutgers University Press, 1967.

10. The family tree of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

11. Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1999: 70.

12. Owen, Barbara. "History of the First Religious Society"  First Religious Society (Unitarian Universalist), Newburyport, MA. Accessed on August 14, 2010.

13. Beck, Janet Kemper. Creating the John Brown Legend: Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harpers Ferry. McFarland, April 7, 2009, p85-87

14. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 93–94.

15. Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1999: 70–71. ISBN 1-57003-244-0.

16. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 97.

17. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, "A Ride Through Kanzas". Letters to the New York Tribune, 1856 (via archive.org)

18. Sanborn, F.B. "Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Tributes)" The Massachusetts Magazine, Vol. IV (1911), No. 3, p. 142 (via archive.org)

19. Manual for the Use of the General Court. Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1880. p. 362.

20. Manual for the Use of the General Court. Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1881. p. 378. hdl:2452/40659.

21. Million, Joelle, Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement. Praeger, 2003.  pp. 136–37, 173.

22. Wendell Phillips, Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Clarina I. Howard Nichols, Theodore Parker (1854). "Woman's Rights Tracts". Boston: Robert F. Wallcut – via Internet Archive.

23. "Women and the Alphabet, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson". www1.assumption.edu.

24. Meyer, 2000, pp. 266–82.

25. Million, 2003, p. 195.

26. Stone, Lucy; Susan B. Anthony Collection (Library of Congress) DLC; National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress) DLC (March 6, 2019). "The Woman's Right's Almanac for 1858. Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of it". Worcester, Mass.: Z. Baker & Co. – via Internet Archive.

27. The Woman's Rights Almanac for 1858, Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of It. Worcester, Mass: Z. Baker & Co.; Boston: R. F. Walcutt. [1857]

28. "The Elective Franchise for Woman," National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 27, 1858, p. 3.

29. New York Times, May 15, 1858, p. 4.

30. Dubois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869, Cornell University Press, (1978), p. 168.

31. Merk, Lois Bannister, "Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1958, Revised, 1961, pp. 16–17.

32. "The Color of Bravery: United States Colored Troops in the Civil War." Battlefields.org.

33. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1900). Army Life in a Black Regiment. A new edition with notes and a supplementary chapter. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

34. McPherson, James M. (April 18, 1996). Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. Oxford University Press. p. 91.

35. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (June 2, 1870). The Sympathy of Religions. First printed in The Radical (Boston, 1871).

36. Schmidt, Leigh Eric (2005). Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 134–135.

37. Alexander K. McClure, ed. (1902). Famous American Statesmen & Orators. Vol. VI. New York: F. F. Lovell Publishing Company. p. 222.

38. "MemberListH". American Antiquarian Society.

39. Nichols, Richard E. (August 20, 2000). "THE MAGNIFICENT ACTIVIST The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson". The New York Times. His radicalism never dimmed; in 1906, at the age of 83, he joined with Jack London and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

40. Wilson, Susan. Literary Trail of Greater Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000: 117.

41. "Massachusetts, Deaths, 1841–1915," Vol.1911/26 Death: Pg.402. State Archives, Boston.

42. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 51.

43. Christopher Looby, ed. (2000). The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. University of Chicago Press. 

44. Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 106–107.

45. Higginson, Thomas W. "Views on Socialism". p. 9. I grew up in the Brook Farm and Fourierite period and have always been interested in all tendencies in that direction.

46. Geller, William W., "Mount Katahdin — March 1853: the Mysteries of an Ascent" (2016). Maine History Documents. 119. Page 10 identifies Higginson as the anonymous author of "Going to Katahdin", omitting "Mount", but endnote 13 on page 19 makes clear that it is the same article as "Going to Mount Katahdin".

References

·          This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Higginson, Thomas Wentworth". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 455.

Higginson and daughter, 1882

Further reading

·         Bauch, Marc A. Extending the Canon: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and African-American Spirituals. Munich, Germany: Grin, 2013.

·         Edelstein, Tilden G. Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

·         Kytle, Ethan J. "An American Romantic Goes to War," The New York Times, April 15, 2011.

·         Meyer, Howard N. Colonel of the Black Regiment: The Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1967.

·         Meyer, Howard N., ed. The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823–1911. DaCapo Press, 2000.

·         Wells, Anna Mary. Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

·         Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, New York, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 247–256.

·         Wineapple, Brenda, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Historiography

·         Muccigrosso, Robert, ed. Research Guide to American Historical Biography (1988) 5:2543-46

Primary sources

·         Meyer, Howard N. (ed.) The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2000.

·         Masur, Louis P. (ed.) "... the real war will never get in the books": Selections from Writers During the Civil War. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.  Pages 181–195 include four of Higginson's writings: (1) Letter to Louisa Higginson; (2) "The Ordeal by Battle," in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1861); (3) "Regular and Volunteer Officers," in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1864); (4) "Leaves from an Officer’s Journal," in The Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1864, Dec. 1864, Jan. 1865).

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

·         The Works of Epictetus by Higginson at the Internet Archive

·         Negro Spirituals text with biography, images and sound files from American Studies at the University of Virginia.

·         American National Biography Online:Thomas Wentworth Higginson

·         Works by Thomas Wentworth Higginson at Project Gutenberg

·         Works by or about Thomas Wentworth Higginson at Internet Archive

·         Works by Thomas Wentworth Higginson at LibriVox

·         Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Correspondence from the Carlton and Territa Lowenberg Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries' Archives & Special Collections.

·         A Ride Through Kanzas from the Antislavery Literature Project

·         Biography, Works and Photos at the Worcester Writers' Project Archived September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine

·         Thomas Wentworth Higginson Correspondence (MS Am 1162.10), Houghton Library, Harvard University

·         Higginson House

·         Thomas Wentworth Higginson Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

·         Articles by Higginson in The Atlantic

·         "Views on Socialism"

Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), by Colonel Higginson

ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK
REGIMENT

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson

(1823-1911)

1869

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

CONTENTS

Chapter 1.   Introductory

Chapter 2.   Camp Diary

Chapter 3.   Up the St. Mary's

Chapter 4.   Up the St. John's

Chapter 5.   Out on Picket

Chapter 6.   A Night in the Water

Chapter 7.   Up the Edisto

Chapter 8.   The Baby of the Regiment

Chapter 9.   Negro Spirituals

Chapter 10.   Life at Camp Shaw

Chapter 11.   Florida Again?

Chapter 12.     The Negro as a Soldier

Chapter 13.   Conclusion

APPENDIX

Appendix A

Appendix B The First Black Soldiers

Appendix C General Saxton's Instructions

Appendix D The Struggle for Pay

Appendix E Farewell Address of Lt. Col. Trowbridge

United States Colored Troops (USCT) Fort Lincoln

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

These pages record some of the adventures of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the United States during the late civil war. It was, indeed, the first colored regiment of any kind so mustered, except a portion of the troops raised by Major-General Butler at New Orleans. These scarcely belonged to the same class, however, being recruited from the free colored population of that city, a comparatively self-reliant and educated race. "The darkest of them," said General Butler, "were about the complexion of the late Mr. Webster."

The First South Carolina, on the other hand, contained scarcely a freeman, had not one mulatto in ten, and a far smaller proportion who could read or write when enlisted. The only contemporary regiment of a similar character was the "First Kansas Colored," which began recruiting a little earlier, though it was not mustered in the usual basis of military seniority till later. [See Appendix] These were the only colored regiments recruited during the year 1862. The Second South Carolina and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts followed early in 1863.

This is the way in which I came to the command of this regiment. One day in November, 1862, I was sitting at dinner with my lieutenants, John Goodell and Luther Bigelow, in the barracks of the Fifty-First Massachusetts, Colonel Sprague, when the following letter was put into my hands:

USCT Standard

BEAUFORT, S. C., November 5, 1862.

MY DEAR SIR. - I am organizing the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, with every prospect of success. Your name has been spoken of, in connection with the command of this regiment, by some friends in whose judgment I have confidence. I take great pleasure in offering you the position of Colonel in it, and hope that you may be induced to accept. I shall not fill the place until I hear from you, or sufficient time shall have passed for me to receive your reply. Should you accept, I enclose a pass for Port Royal, of which I trust you will feel disposed to avail yourself at once.

I am, with sincere regard, yours truly,

R. SAXTON, Brig.-Genl, Mil. Gov.

Brigadier General Rufus Saxton

Had an invitation reached me to take command of a regiment of Kalmuck Tartars, it could hardly have been more unexpected. I had always looked for the arming of the blacks, and had always felt a wish to be associated with them; had read the scanty accounts of General Hunter's abortive regiment, and had heard rumors of General Saxton's renewed efforts. But the prevalent tone of public sentiment was still opposed to any such attempts; the government kept very shy of the experiment, and it did not seem possible that the time had come when it could be fairly tried.

For myself, I was at the head of a fine company of my own raising, and in a regiment to which I was already much attached. It did not seem desirable to exchange a certainty for an uncertainty; for who knew but General Saxton might yet be thwarted in his efforts by the pro-slavery influence that had still so much weight at head-quarters? It would be intolerable to go out to South Carolina, and find myself, after all, at the head of a mere plantation-guard or a day-school in uniform.

I therefore obtained from the War Department, through Governor Andrew, permission to go and report to General Saxton, without at once resigning my captaincy. Fortunately it took but a few days in South Carolina to make it clear that all was right, and the return steamer took back a resignation of a Massachusetts commission. Thenceforth my lot was cast altogether with the black troops, except when regiments or detachments of white soldiers were also under my command, during the two years following.

These details would not be worth mentioning except as they show this fact: that I did not seek the command of colored troops, but it sought me. And this fact again is only important to my story for this reason, that under these circumstances I naturally viewed the new recruits rather as subjects for discipline than for philanthropy. I had been expecting a war for six years, ever since the Kansas troubles, and my mind had dwelt on military matters more or less during all that time. The best Massachusetts regiments already exhibited a high standard of drill and discipline, and unless these men could be brought tolerably near that standard, the fact of their extreme blackness would afford me, even as a philanthropist, no satisfaction. Fortunately, I felt perfect confidence that they could be so trained, having happily known, by experience, the qualities of their race, and knowing also that they had home and household and freedom to fight for, besides that abstraction of "the Union." Trouble might perhaps be expected from white officials, though this turned out far less than might have been feared; but there was no trouble to come from the men, I thought, and none ever came. On the other hand, it was a vast experiment of indirect philanthropy, and one on which the result of the war and the destiny of the negro race might rest; and this was enough to tax all one's powers. I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well, not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.

USCT Field artillery battery

In view of all this, it was clear that good discipline must come first; after that, of course, the men must be helped and elevated in all ways as much as possible.

Of discipline there was great need, that is, of order and regular instruction. Some of the men had already been under fire, but they were very ignorant of drill and camp duty. The officers, being appointed from a dozen different States, and more than as many regiments, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, had all that diversity of methods which so confused our army in those early days. The first need, therefore, was of an unbroken interval of training. During this period, which fortunately lasted nearly two months, I rarely left the camp, and got occasional leisure moments for a fragmentary journal, to send home, recording the many odd or novel aspects of the new experience.

Camp-life was a wonderfully strange sensation to almost all volunteer officers, and mine lay among eight hundred men suddenly transformed from slaves into soldiers, and representing a race affectionate, enthusiastic, grotesque, and dramatic beyond all others. Being such, they naturally gave material for description. There is nothing like a diary for freshness, at least so I think, and I shall keep to the diary through the days of camp-life, and throw the later experience into another form. Indeed, that matter takes care of itself; diaries and letter-writing stop when field-service begins.

USCT Regimental band

I am under pretty heavy bonds to tell the truth, and only the truth; for those who look back to the newspaper correspondence of that period will see that this particular regiment lived for months in a glare of publicity, such as tests any regiment severely, and certainly prevents all subsequent romancing in its historian. As the scene of the only effort on the Atlantic coast to arm the negro, our camp attracted a continuous stream of visitors, military and civil. A battalion of black soldiers, a spectacle since so common, seemed then the most daring of innovations, and the whole demeanor of this particular regiment was watched with microscopic scrutiny by friends and foes. I felt sometimes as if we were a plant trying to take root, but constantly pulled up to see if we were growing.

Engravings Harper’s Weekly

The slightest camp incidents sometimes came back to us, magnified and distorted, in letters of anxious inquiry from remote parts of the Union. It was no pleasant thing to live under such constant surveillance; but it guaranteed the honesty of any success, while fearfully multiplying the penalties had there been a failure. A single mutiny, such as has happened in the infancy of a hundred regiments, a single miniature Bull Run, a stampede of desertions, and it would have been all over with us; the party of distrust would have got the upper hand, and there might not have been, during the whole contest, another effort to arm the negro.

I may now proceed, without farther preparation to the Diary.

Company dress formation Beaufort S.C.

CHAPTER II

CAMP DIARY

CAMP SAXTON, near Beaufort, S. C., November 24, 1862.

Yesterday afternoon we were steaming over a summer sea, the deck level as a parlor-floor, no land in sight, no sail, until at last appeared one light-house, said to be Cape Romaine, and then a line of trees and two distant vessels and nothing more. The sun set, a great illuminated bubble, submerged in one vast bank of rosy suffusion; it grew dark; after tea all were on deck, the people sang hymns; then the moon set, a moon two days old, a curved pencil of light, reclining backwards on a radiant couch which seemed to rise from the waves to receive it; it sank slowly, and the last tip wavered and went down like the mast of a vessel of the skies. Towards morning the boat stopped, and when I came on deck, before six,

"The watch-lights glittered on the land,  

        The ship-lights on the sea."

Hilton Head lay on one side, the gunboats on the other; all that was raw and bare in the low buildings of the new settlement was softened into picturesqueness by the early light. Stars were still overhead, gulls wheeled and shrieked, and the broad river rippled duskily towards Beaufort.

The shores were low and wooded, like any New England shore; there were a few gunboats, twenty schooners, and some steamers, among them the famous "Planter," which Robert Small, the slave, presented to the nation. The river-banks were soft and graceful, though low, and as we steamed up to Beaufort on the flood-tide this morning, it seemed almost as fair as the smooth and lovely canals which Stedman traversed to meet his negro soldiers in Surinam. The air was cool as at home, yet the foliage seemed green, glimpses of stiff tropical vegetation appeared along the banks, with great clumps of shrubs, whose pale seed-vessels looked like tardy blossoms. Then we saw on a picturesque point an old plantation, with stately magnolia avenue, decaying house, and tiny church amid the woods, reminding me of Virginia; behind it stood a neat encampment of white tents, "and there," said my companion, "is your future regiment."

USCT formation Beaufort, South Carolina

Three miles farther brought us to the pretty town of Beaufort, with its stately houses amid Southern foliage. Reporting to General Saxton, I had the luck to encounter a company of my destined command, marched in to be mustered into the United States service. They were unarmed, and all looked as thoroughly black as the most faithful philanthropist could desire; there did not seem to be so much as a mulatto among them. Their coloring suited me, all but the legs, which were clad in a lively scarlet, as intolerable to my eyes as if I had been a turkey. I saw them mustered; General Saxton talked to them a little, in his direct, manly way; they gave close attention, though their faces looked impenetrable. Then I conversed with some of them. The first to whom I spoke had been wounded in a small expedition after lumber, from which a party had just returned, and in which they had been under fire and had done very well. I said, pointing to his lame arm,

"Did you think that was more than you bargained for, my man?"

His answer came promptly and stoutly,

"I been a-tinking, Mas'r, dot's jess what I went for."

I thought this did well enough for my very first interchange of dialogue with my recruits.

November 27, 1862.

Thanksgiving-Day; it is the first moment I have had for writing during these three days, which have installed me into a new mode of life so thoroughly that they seem three years. Scarcely pausing in New York or in Beaufort, there seems to have been for me but one step from the camp of a Massachusetts regiment to this, and that step over leagues of waves.

It is a holiday wherever General Saxton's proclamation reaches. The chilly sunshine and the pale blue river seems like New England, but those alone. The air is full of noisy drumming, and of gunshots; for the prize-shooting is our great celebration of the day, and the drumming is chronic. My young barbarians are all at play. I look out from the broken windows of this forlorn plantation-house, through avenues of great live-oaks, with their hard, shining leaves, and their branches hung with a universal drapery of soft, long moss, like fringe-trees struck with grayness. Below, the sandy soil, scantly covered with coarse grass, bristles with sharp palmettoes and aloes; all the vegetation is stiff, shining, semi-tropical, with nothing soft or delicate in its texture. Numerous plantation-buildings totter around, all slovenly and unattractive, while the interspaces are filled with all manner of wreck and refuse, pigs, fowls, dogs, and omnipresent Ethiopian infancy. All this is the universal Southern panorama; but five minutes' walk beyond the hovels and the live-oaks will bring one to something so un-Southern that the whole Southern coast at this moment trembles at the suggestion of such a thing, the camp of a regiment of freed slaves.

One adapts one's self so readily to new surroundings that already the full zest of the novelty seems passing away from my perceptions, and I write these lines in an eager effort to retain all I can. Already I am growing used to the experience, at first so novel, of living among five hundred men, and scarce a white face to be seen, of seeing them go through all their daily processes, eating, frolicking, talking, just as if they were white.

Each day at dress-parade I stand with the customary folding of the arms before a regimental line of countenances so black that I can hardly tell whether the men stand steadily or not; black is every hand which moves in ready cadence as I vociferate, "Battalion! Shoulder arms!" nor is it till the line of white officers moves forward, as parade is dismissed, that I am reminded that my own face is not the color of coal.

White officers USCT

The first few days on duty with a new regiment must be devoted almost wholly to tightening reins; in this process one deals chiefly with the officers, and I have as yet had but little personal intercourse with the men. They concern me chiefly in bulk, as so many consumers of rations, wearers of uniforms, bearers of muskets. But as the machine comes into shape, I am beginning to decipher the individual parts. At first, of course, they all looked just alike; the variety comes afterwards, and they are just as distinguishable, the officers say, as so many whites. Most of them are wholly raw, but there are many who have already been for months in camp in the abortive "Hunter Regiment," yet in that loose kind of way which, like average militia training, is a doubtful advantage. I notice that some companies, too, look darker than others, though all are purer African than I expected. This is said to be partly a geographical difference between the South Carolina and Florida men. When the Rebels evacuated this region they probably took with them the house-servants, including most of the mixed blood, so that the residuum seems very black. But the men brought from Fernandina the other day average lighter in complexion, and look more intelligent, and they certainly take wonderfully to the drill.

It needs but a few days to show the absurdity of distrusting the military availability of these people. They have quite as much average comprehension as whites of the need of the thing, as much courage (I doubt not), as much previous knowledge of the gun, and, above all, a readiness of ear and of imitation, which, for purposes of drill, counterbalances any defect of mental training. To learn the drill, one does not want a set of college professors; one wants a squad of eager, active, pliant school-boys; and the more childlike these pupils are the better. There is no trouble about the drill; they will surpass whites in that. As to camp-life, they have little to sacrifice; they are better fed, housed, and clothed than ever in their lives before, and they appear to have few inconvenient vices. They are simple, docile, and affectionate almost to the point of absurdity. The same men who stood fire in open field with perfect coolness, on the late expedition, have come to me blubbering in the most irresistibly ludicrous manner on being transferred from one company in the regiment to another.

In noticing the squad-drills I perceive that the men learn less laboriously than whites that "double, double, toil and trouble," which is the elementary vexation of the drill-master, that they more rarely mistake their left for their right, and are more grave and sedate while under instruction. The extremes of jollity and sobriety, being greater with them, are less liable to be intermingled; these companies can be driven with a looser rein than my former one, for they restrain themselves; but the moment they are dismissed from drill every tongue is relaxed and every ivory tooth visible. This morning I wandered about where the different companies were target-shooting, and their glee was contagious. Such exulting shouts of "Ki! ole man," when some steady old turkey-shooter brought his gun down for an instant's aim, and then unerringly hit the mark; and then, when some unwary youth fired his piece into the ground at half-cock such guffawing and delight, such rolling over and over on the grass, such dances of ecstasy, as made the "Ethiopian minstrelsy" of the stage appear a feeble imitation.

Evening. Better still was a scene on which I stumbled to-night. Strolling in the cool moonlight, I was attracted by a brilliant light beneath the trees, and cautiously approached it. A circle of thirty or forty soldiers sat around a roaring fire, while one old uncle, Cato by name, was narrating an interminable tale, to the insatiable delight of his audience. I came up into the dusky background, perceived only by a few, and he still continued. It was a narrative, dramatized to the last degree, of his adventures in escaping from his master to the Union vessels; and even I, who have heard the stories of Harriet Tubman, and such wonderful slave-comedians, never witnessed such a piece of acting. When I came upon the scene he had just come unexpectedly upon a plantation-house, and, putting a bold face upon it, had walked up to the door.

"Den I go up to de white man, berry humble, and say, would he please gib ole man a mouthful for eat?

"He say he must hab de valeration ob half a dollar.

"Den I look berry sorry, and turn for go away.

"Den he say I might gib him dat hatchet I had.

"Den I say" (this in a tragic vein) "dat I must hab dat hatchet for defend myself from de dogs!"

[Immense applause, and one appreciating auditor says, chuckling, "Dat was your arms, ole man," which brings down the house again.]

"Den he say de Yankee pickets was near by, and I must be very keerful.

"Den I say, 'Good Lord, Mas'r, am dey?'"

Words cannot express the complete dissimulation with which these accents of terror were uttered, this being precisely the piece of information he wished to obtain.

Then he narrated his devices to get into the house at night and obtain some food, how a dog flew at him, how the whole household, black and white, rose in pursuit, how he scrambled under a hedge and over a high fence, etc., all in a style of which Gough alone among orators can give the faintest impression, so thoroughly dramatized was every syllable.

Then he described his reaching the river-side at last, and trying to decide whether certain vessels held friends or foes.

"Den I see guns on board, and sure sartin he Union boat, and I pop my head up. Den I been-a-tink [think] Seceshkey hab guns too, and my head go down again. Den I hide in de bush till morning. Den I open my bundle, and take ole white shut and tie him on ole pole and wave him, and ebry time de wind blow, I been-a-tremble, and drap down in de bushes," because, being between two fires, he doubted whether friend or foe would see his signal first. And so on, with a succession of tricks beyond Moliere, of acts of caution, foresight, patient cunning, which were listened to with infinite gusto and perfect comprehension by every listener.

And all this to a bivouac of negro soldiers, with the brilliant fire lighting up their red trousers and gleaming from their shining black faces, eyes and teeth all white with tumultuous glee. Overhead, the mighty limbs of a great live-oak, with the weird moss swaying in the smoke, and the high moon gleaming faintly through.

Yet to-morrow strangers will remark on the hopeless, impenetrable stupidity in the daylight faces of many of these very men, the solid mask under which Nature has concealed all this wealth of mother-wit. This very comedian is one to whom one might point, as he hoed lazily in a cotton-field, as a being the light of whose brain had utterly gone out; and this scene seems like coming by night upon some conclave of black beetles, and finding them engaged, with green-room and foot-lights, in enacting "Poor Pillicoddy." This is their university; every young Sambo before me, as he turned over the sweet potatoes and peanuts which were roasting in the ashes, listened with reverence to the wiles of the ancient Ulysses, and meditated the same. It is Nature's compensation; oppression simply crushes the upper faculties of the head, and crowds everything into the perceptive organs. Cato, thou reasonest well! When I get into any serious scrape, in an enemy's country, may I be lucky enough to have you at my elbow, to pull me out of it!

The men seem to have enjoyed the novel event of Thanksgiving-Day; they have had company and regimental prize-shootings, a minimum of speeches and a maximum of dinner. Bill of fare: two beef-cattle and a thousand oranges. The oranges cost a cent apiece, and the cattle were Secesh, bestowed by General Saxby, as they all call him.

Unloading supplies

                                                       December 1, 1862.

How absurd is the impression bequeathed by Slavery in regard to these Southern blacks, that they are sluggish and inefficient in labor! Last night, after a hard day's work (our guns and the remainder of our tents being just issued), an order came from Beaufort that we should be ready in the evening to unload a steamboat's cargo of boards, being some of those captured by them a few weeks since, and now assigned for their use. I wondered if the men would grumble at the night-work; but the steamboat arrived by seven, and it was bright moonlight when they went at it. Never have I beheld such a jolly scene of labor. Tugging these wet and heavy boards over a bridge of boats ashore, then across the slimy beach at low tide, then up a steep bank, and all in one great uproar of merriment for two hours. Running most of the time, chattering all the time, snatching the boards from each other's backs as if they were some coveted treasure, getting up eager rivalries between different companies, pouring great choruses of ridicule on the heads of all shirkers, they made the whole scene so enlivening that I gladly stayed out in the moonlight for the whole time to watch it. And all this without any urging or any promised reward, but simply as the most natural way of doing the thing. The steamboat captain declared that they unloaded the ten thousand feet of boards quicker than any white gang could have done it; and they felt it so little, that, when, later in the night, I reproached one whom I found sitting by a campfire, cooking a surreptitious opossum, telling him that he ought to be asleep after such a job of work, he answered, with the broadest grin, "O no, Gunnel, da's no work at all, Gunnel; dat only jess enough for stretch we."

                                                   December 2, 1862.

I believe I have not yet enumerated the probable drawbacks to the success of this regiment, if any. We are exposed to no direct annoyance from the white regiments, being out of their way; and we have as yet no discomforts or privations which we do not share with them. I do not as yet see the slightest obstacle, in the nature of the blacks, to making them good soldiers, but rather the contrary. They take readily to drill, and do not object to discipline; they are not especially dull or inattentive; they seem fully to understand the importance of the contest, and of their share in it. They show no jealousy or suspicion towards their officers.

They do show these feelings, however, towards the Government itself; and no one can wonder. Here lies the drawback to rapid recruiting. Were this a wholly new regiment, it would have been full to overflowing, I am satisfied, ere now. The trouble is in the legacy of bitter distrust bequeathed by the abortive regiment of General Hunter, into which they were driven like cattle, kept for several months in camp, and then turned off without a shilling, by order of the War Department. The formation of that regiment was, on the whole, a great injury to this one; and the men who came from it, though the best soldiers we have in other respects, are the least sanguine and cheerful; while those who now refuse to enlist have a great influence in deterring others. Our soldiers are constantly twitted by their families and friends with their prospect of risking their lives in the service, and being paid nothing; and it is in vain that we read them the instructions of the Secretary of War to General Saxton, promising them the full pay of soldiers. They only half believe it.*

*With what utter humiliation were we, their officers, obliged to confess to them, eighteen months afterwards, that it was their distrust which was wise, and our faith in the pledges of the United States Government which was foolishness!

Another drawback is that some of the white soldiers delight in frightening the women on the plantations with doleful tales of plans for putting us in the front rank in all battles, and such silly talk,—the object being perhaps, to prevent our being employed on active service at all. All these considerations they feel precisely as white men would,—no less, no more; and it is the comparative freedom from such unfavorable influences which makes the Florida men seem more bold and manly, as they undoubtedly do. To-day General Saxton has returned from Fernandina with seventy-six recruits, and the eagerness of the captains to secure them was a sight to see. Yet they cannot deny that some of the very best men in the regiment are South Carolinians.

                                             December 3, 1862.—7 P.M.

What a life is this I lead! It is a dark, mild, drizzling evening, and as the foggy air breeds sand-flies, so it calls out melodies and strange antics from this mysterious race of grown-up children with whom my lot is cast. All over the camp the lights glimmer in the tents, and as I sit at my desk in the open doorway, there come mingled sounds of stir and glee. Boys laugh and shout,—a feeble flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slave-masters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half pow-wow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a "shout." These fires are usually enclosed in a little booth, made neatly of palm-leaves and covered in at top, a regular native African hut, in short, such as is pictured in books, and such as I once got up from dried palm-leaves for a fair at home. This hut is now crammed with men, singing at the top of their voices, in one of their quaint, monotonous, endless, negro-Methodist chants, with obscure syllables recurring constantly, and slight variations interwoven, all accompanied with a regular drumming of the feet and clapping of the hands, like castanets. Then the excitement spreads: inside and outside the enclosure men begin to quiver and dance, others join, a circle forms, winding monotonously round some one in the centre; some "heel and toe" tumultuously, others merely tremble and stagger on, others stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes; spectators applaud special strokes of skill; my approach only enlivens the scene; the circle enlarges, louder grows the singing, rousing shouts of encouragement come in, half bacchanalian, half devout, "Wake 'em, brudder!" "Stan' up to 'em, brudder!"—and still the ceaseless drumming and clapping, in perfect cadence, goes steadily on. Suddenly there comes a sort of snap, and the spell breaks, amid general sighing and laughter. And this not rarely and occasionally, but night after night, while in other parts of the camp the soberest prayers and exhortations are proceeding sedately.

A simple and lovable people, whose graces seem to come by nature, and whose vices by training. Some of the best superintendents confirm the first tales of innocence, and Dr. Zachos told me last night that on his plantation, a sequestered one, "they had absolutely no vices."

Nor have these men of mine yet shown any worth mentioning; since I took command I have heard of no man intoxicated, and there has been but one small quarrel. I suppose that scarcely a white regiment in the army shows so little swearing. Take the "Progressive Friends" and put them in red trousers, and I verily believe they would fill a guard-house sooner than these men. If camp regulations are violated, it seems to be usually through heedlessness. They love passionately three things besides their spiritual incantations; namely, sugar, home, and tobacco. This last affection brings tears to their eyes, almost, when they speak of their urgent need of pay; they speak of their last-remembered quid as if it were some deceased relative, too early lost, and to be mourned forever. As for sugar, no white man can drink coffee after they have sweetened it to their liking.

I see that the pride which military life creates may cause the plantation trickeries to diminish. For instance, these men make the most admirable sentinels. It is far harder to pass the camp lines at night than in the camp from which I came; and I have seen none of that disposition to connive at the offences of members of one's own company which is so troublesome among white soldiers. Nor are they lazy, either about work or drill; in all respects they seem better material for soldiers than I had dared to hope.

There is one company in particular, all Florida men, which I certainly think the finest-looking company I ever saw, white or black; they range admirably in size, have remarkable erectness and ease of carriage, and really march splendidly. Not a visitor but notices them; yet they have been under drill only a fortnight, and a part only two days. They have all been slaves, and very few are even mulattoes.

                                                 December 4, 1862.

"Dwelling in tents, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." This condition is certainly mine,—and with a multitude of patriarchs beside, not to mention Caesar and Pompey, Hercules and Bacchus.

A moving life, tented at night, this experience has been mine in civil society, if society be civil before the luxurious forest fires of Maine and the Adirondack, or upon the lonely prairies of Kansas. But a stationary tent life, deliberately going to housekeeping under canvas, I have never had before, though in our barrack life at "Camp Wool" I often wished for it.

The accommodations here are about as liberal as my quarters there, two wall-tents being placed end to end, for office and bedroom, and separated at will by a "fly" of canvas. There is a good board floor and mop-board, effectually excluding dampness and draughts, and everything but sand, which on windy days penetrates everywhere. The office furniture consists of a good desk or secretary, a very clumsy and disastrous settee, and a remarkable chair. The desk is a bequest of the slaveholders, and the settee of the slaves, being ecclesiastical in its origin, and appertaining to the little old church or "praise-house," now used for commissary purposes. The chair is a composite structure: I found a cane seat on a dust-heap, which a black sergeant combined with two legs from a broken bedstead and two more from an oak-bough. I sit on it with a pride of conscious invention, mitigated by profound insecurity. Bedroom furniture, a couch made of gun-boxes covered with condemned blankets, another settee, two pails, a tin cup, tin basin (we prize any tin or wooden ware as savages prize iron), and a valise, regulation size. Seriously considered, nothing more appears needful, unless ambition might crave another chair for company, and, perhaps, something for a wash-stand higher than a settee.

To-day it rains hard, and the wind quivers through the closed canvas, and makes one feel at sea. All the talk of the camp outside is fused into a cheerful and indistinguishable murmur, pierced through at every moment by the wail of the hovering plover. Sometimes a face, black or white, peers through the entrance with some message. Since the light readily penetrates, though the rain cannot, the tent conveys a feeling of charmed security, as if an invisible boundary checked the pattering drops and held the moaning wind. The front tent I share, as yet, with my adjutant; in the inner apartment I reign supreme, bounded in a nutshell, with no bad dreams.

In all pleasant weather the outer "fly" is open, and men pass and repass, a chattering throng. I think of Emerson's Saadi, "As thou sittest at thy door, on the desert's yellow floor,"—for these bare sand-plains, gray above, are always yellow when upturned, and there seems a tinge of Orientalism in all our life.

Thrice a day we go to the plantation-houses for our meals, camp-arrangements being yet very imperfect. The officers board in different messes, the adjutant and I still clinging to the household of William Washington,—William the quiet and the courteous, the pattern of house-servants, William the noiseless, the observing, the discriminating, who knows everything that can be got, and how to cook it. William and his tidy, lady-like little spouse Hetty—a pair of wedded lovers, if ever I saw one—set our table in their one room, half-way between an un glazed window and a large wood-fire, such as is often welcome. Thanks to the adjutant, we are provided with the social magnificence of napkins; while (lest pride take too high a flight) our table-cloth consists of two "New York Tribunes" and a "Leslie's Pictorial." Every steamer brings us a clean table-cloth. Here are we forever supplied with pork and oysters and sweet potatoes and rice and hominy and corn-bread and milk; also mysterious griddle-cakes of corn and pumpkin; also preserves made of pumpkin-chips, and other fanciful productions of Ethiop art. Mr. E. promised the plantation-superintendents who should come down here "all the luxuries of home," and we certainly have much apparent, if little real variety. Once William produced with some palpitation something fricasseed, which he boldly termed chicken; it was very small, and seemed in some undeveloped condition of ante-natal toughness. After the meal he frankly avowed it for a squirrel.

                                                             December 5, 1862.

Give these people their tongues, their feet, and their leisure, and they are happy. At every twilight the air is full of singing, talking, and clapping of hands in unison. One of their favorite songs is full of plaintive cadences; it is not, I think, a Methodist tune, and I wonder where they obtained a chant of such beauty.

"I can't stay behind, my Lord, I can't stay behind!

O, my father is gone, my father is gone,

My father is gone into heaven, my Lord!

I can't stay behind!

Dere's room enough, room enough,

Room enough in de heaven for de sojer:

Can't stay behind!"

It always excites them to have us looking on, yet they sing these songs at all times and seasons. I have heard this very song dimly droning on near midnight, and, tracing it into the recesses of a cook-house, have found an old fellow coiled away among the pots and provisions, chanting away with his "Can't stay behind, sinner," till I made him leave his song behind.

This evening, after working themselves up to the highest pitch, a party suddenly rushed off, got a barrel, and mounted some man upon it, who said, "Gib anoder song, boys, and I'se gib you a speech." After some hesitation and sundry shouts of "Rise de sing, somebody," and "Stan' up for Jesus, brud-der," irreverently put in by the juveniles, they got upon the John Brown song, always a favorite, adding a jubilant verse which I had never before heard,—"We'll beat Beauregard on de clare battlefield." Then came the promised speech, and then no less than seven other speeches by as many men, on a variety of barrels, each orator being affectionately tugged to the pedestal and set on end by his special constituency. Every speech was good, without exception; with the queerest oddities of phrase and pronunciation, there was an invariable enthusiasm, a pungency of statement, and an understanding of the points at issue, which made them all rather thrilling. Those long-winded slaves in "Among the Pines" seemed rather fictitious and literary in comparison. The most eloquent, perhaps, was Corporal Price Lambkin, just arrived from Fernandina, who evidently had a previous reputation among them. His historical references were very interesting. He reminded them that he had predicted this war ever since Fremont's time, to which some of the crowd assented; he gave a very intelligent account of that Presidential campaign, and then described most impressively the secret anxiety of the slaves in Florida to know all about President Lincoln's election, and told how they all refused to work on the fourth of March, expecting their freedom to date from that day. He finally brought out one of the few really impressive appeals for the American flag that I have ever heard. "Our mas'rs dey hab lib under de flag, dey got dere wealth under it, and ebryting beautiful for dere chilen. Under it dey hab grind us up, and put us in dere pocket for money. But de fus' minute dey tink dat ole flag mean freedom for we colored people, dey pull it right down, and run up de rag ob dere own." (Immense applause). "But we'll neber desert de ole flag, boys, neber; we hab lib under it for eighteen hundred sixty-two years, and we'll die for it now." With which overpowering discharge of chronology-at-long-range, this most effective of stump-speeches closed. I see already with relief that there will be small demand in this regiment for harangues from the officers; give the men an empty barrel for a stump, and they will do their own exhortation.

USCT troops Harper’s Weekly

                                                          December 11, 1862.

Haroun Alraschid, wandering in disguise through his imperial streets, scarcely happened upon a greater variety of groups than I, in my evening strolls among our own camp-fires.

Beside some of these fires the men are cleaning their guns or rehearsing their drill,—beside others, smoking in silence their very scanty supply of the beloved tobacco,—beside others, telling stories and shouting with laughter over the broadest mimicry, in which they excel, and in which the officers come in for a full share. The everlasting "shout" is always within hearing, with its mixture of piety and polka, and its castanet-like clapping of the hands. Then there are quieter prayer-meetings, with pious invocations and slow psalms, "deaconed out" from memory by the leader, two lines at a time, in a sort of wailing chant. Elsewhere, there are conversazioni around fires, with a woman for queen of the circle,—her Nubian face, gay headdress, gilt necklace, and white teeth, all resplendent in the glowing light. Sometimes the woman is spelling slow monosyllables out of a primer, a feat which always commands all ears,—they rightly recognizing a mighty spell, equal to the overthrowing of monarchs, in the magic assonance of cat, hat, pat, bat, and the rest of it. Elsewhere, it is some solitary old cook, some aged Uncle Tiff, with enormous spectacles, who is perusing a hymn-book by the light of a pine splinter, in his deserted cooking booth of palmetto leaves. By another fire there is an actual dance, red-legged soldiers doing right-and-left, and "now-lead-de-lady-ober," to the music of a violin which is rather artistically played, and which may have guided the steps, in other days, of Barnwells and Hugers. And yonder is a stump-orator perched on his barrel, pouring out his exhortations to fidelity in war and in religion. To-night for the first time I have heard an harangue in a different strain, quite saucy, sceptical, and defiant, appealing to them in a sort of French materialistic style, and claiming some personal experience of warfare. "You don't know notin' about it, boys. You tink you's brave enough; how you tink, if you stan' clar in de open field,—here you, and dar de Secesh? You's got to hab de right ting inside o' you. You must hab it 'served [preserved] in you, like dese yer sour plums dey 'serve in de barr'l; you's got to harden it down inside o' you, or it's notin'." Then he hit hard at the religionists: "When a man's got de sperit ob de Lord in him, it weakens him all out, can't hoe de corn." He had a great deal of broad sense in his speech; but presently some others began praying vociferously close by, as if to drown this free-thinker, when at last he exclaimed, "I mean to fight de war through, an' die a good sojer wid de last kick, dat's my prayer!" and suddenly jumped off the barrel. I was quite interested at discovering this reverse side of the temperament, the devotional side preponderates so enormously, and the greatest scamps kneel and groan in their prayer-meetings with such entire zest. It shows that there is some individuality developed among them, and that they will not become too exclusively pietistic.

Their love of the spelling-book is perfectly inexhaustible,—they stumbling on by themselves, or the blind leading the blind, with the same pathetic patience which they carry into everything. The chaplain is getting up a schoolhouse, where he will soon teach them as regularly as he can. But the alphabet must always be a very incidental business in a camp.

                                                              December 14.

Passages from prayers in the camp:—

"Let me so lib dat when I die I shall hab manners, dat I shall know what to say when I see my Heabenly Lord."

"Let me lib wid de musket in one hand an' de Bible in de oder,—dat if I die at de muzzle ob de musket, die in de water, die on de land, I may know I hab de bressed Jesus in my hand, an' hab no fear."

"I hab lef my wife in de land o' bondage; my little ones dey say eb'ry night, Whar is my fader? But when I die, when de bressed mornin' rises, when I shall stan' in de glory, wid one foot on de water an' one foot on de land, den, O Lord, I shall see my wife an' my little chil'en once more."

These sentences I noted down, as best I could, beside the glimmering camp-fire last night. The same person was the hero of a singular little contre-temps at a funeral in the afternoon. It was our first funeral. The man had died in hospital, and we had chosen a picturesque burial-place above the river, near the old church, and beside a little nameless cemetery, used by generations of slaves. It was a regular military funeral, the coffin being draped with the American flag, the escort marching behind, and three volleys fired over the grave. During the services there was singing, the chaplain deaconing out the hymn in their favorite way. This ended, he announced his text,—"This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and delivered him out of all his trouble." Instantly, to my great amazement, the cracked voice of the chorister was uplifted, intoning the text, as if it were the first verse of another hymn. So calmly was it done, so imperturbable were all the black countenances, that I half began to conjecture that the chaplain himself intended it for a hymn, though I could imagine no prospective rhyme for trouble unless it were approximated by debbil, which is, indeed, a favorite reference, both with the men and with his Reverence. But the chaplain, peacefully awaiting, gently repeated his text after the chant, and to my great relief the old chorister waived all further recitative, and let the funeral discourse proceed.

Their memories are a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography; and most of the great events of the past, down to the period of the American Revolution, they instinctively attribute to Moses. There is a fine bold confidence in all their citations, however, and the record never loses piquancy in their hands, though strict accuracy may suffer. Thus, one of my captains, last Sunday, heard a colored exhorter at Beaufort proclaim, "Paul may plant, and may polish wid water, but it won't do," in which the sainted Apollos would hardly have recognized himself.

Just now one of the soldiers came to me to say that he was about to be married to a girl in Beaufort, and would I lend him a dollar and seventy-five cents to buy the wedding outfit? It seemed as if matrimony on such moderate terms ought to be encouraged in these days; and so I responded to the appeal.

December 16.

To-day a young recruit appeared here, who had been the slave of Colonel Sammis, one of the leading Florida refugees. Two white companions came with him, who also appeared to be retainers of the Colonel, and I asked them to dine. Being likewise refugees, they had stories to tell, and were quite agreeable: one was English born, the other Floridian, a dark, sallow Southerner, very well bred. After they had gone, the Colonel himself appeared, I told him that I had been entertaining his white friends, and after a while he quietly let out the remark,—

"Yes, one of those white friends of whom you speak is a boy raised on one of my plantations; he has travelled with me to the North, and passed for white, and he always keeps away from the negroes."

Certainly no such suspicion had ever crossed my mind.

I have noticed one man in the regiment who would easily pass for white,—a little sickly drummer, aged fifty at least, with brown eyes and reddish hair, who is said to be the son of one of our commodores. I have seen perhaps a dozen persons as fair, or fairer, among fugitive slaves, but they were usually young children. It touched me far more to see this man, who had spent more than half a lifetime in this low estate, and for whom it now seemed too late to be anything but a "nigger." This offensive word, by the way, is almost as common with them as at the North, and far more common than with well-bred slaveholders. They have meekly accepted it. "Want to go out to de nigger houses, Sah," is the universal impulse of sociability, when they wish to cross the lines. "He hab twenty house-servants, an' two hundred head o' nigger," is a still more degrading form of phrase, in which the epithet is limited to the field-hands, and they estimated like so many cattle. This want of self-respect of course interferes with the authority of the non-commissioned officers, which is always difficult to sustain, even in white regiments. "He needn't try to play de white man ober me," was the protest of a soldier against his corporal the other day. To counteract this I have often to remind them that they do not obey their officers because they are white, but because they are their officers; and guard duty is an admirable school for this, because they readily understand that the sergeant or corporal of the guard has for the time more authority than any commissioned officer who is not on duty.

Corporal Charles Mudd

It is necessary also for their superiors to treat the non-commissioned officers with careful courtesy, and I often caution the line officers never to call them "Sam" or "Will," nor omit the proper handle to their names. The value of the habitual courtesies of the regular army is exceedingly apparent with these men: an officer of polished manners can wind them round his finger, while white soldiers seem rather to prefer a certain roughness. The demeanor of my men to each other is very courteous, and yet I see none of that sort of upstart conceit which is sometimes offensive among free negroes at the North, the dandy-barber strut. This is an agreeable surprise, for I feared that freedom and regimentals would produce precisely that.

They seem the world's perpetual children, docile, gay, and lovable, in the midst of this war for freedom on which they have intelligently entered. Last night, before "taps," there was the greatest noise in camp that I had ever heard, and I feared some riot. On going out, I found the most tumultuous sham-fight proceeding in total darkness, two companies playing like boys, beating tin cups for drums. When some of them saw me they seemed a little dismayed, and came and said, beseechingly,—"Gunnel, Sah, you hab no objection to we playin', Sah?"—which objection I disclaimed; but soon they all subsided, rather to my regret, and scattered merrily. Afterward I found that some other officer had told them that I considered the affair too noisy, so that I felt a mild self-reproach when one said, "Cunnel, wish you had let we play a little longer, Sah." Still I was not sorry, on the whole; for these sham-fights between companies would in some regiments lead to real ones, and there is a latent jealousy here between the Florida and South Carolina men, which sometimes makes me anxious.

The officers are more kind and patient with the men than I should expect, since the former are mostly young, and drilling tries the temper; but they are aided by hearty satisfaction in the results already attained. I have never yet heard a doubt expressed among the officers as to the superiority of these men to white troops in aptitude for drill and discipline, because of their imitativeness and docility, and the pride they take in the service. One captain said to me to-day, "I have this afternoon taught my men to load-in-nine-times, and they do it better than we did it in my former company in three months." I can personally testify that one of our best lieutenants, an Englishman, taught a part of his company the essential movements of the "school for skirmishers" in a single lesson of two hours, so that they did them very passably, though I feel bound to discourage such haste. However, I "formed square" on the third battalion drill. Three fourths of drill consist of attention, imitation, and a good ear for time; in the other fourth, which consists of the application of principles, as, for instance, performing by the left flank some movement before learned by the right, they are perhaps slower than better educated men. Having belonged to five different drill-clubs before entering the army, I certainly ought to know something of the resources of human awkwardness, and I can honestly say that they astonish me by the facility with which they do things. I expected much harder work in this respect.

The habit of carrying burdens on the head gives them erectness of figure, even where physically disabled. I have seen a woman, with a brimming water-pail balanced on her head, or perhaps a cup, saucer, and spoon, stop suddenly, turn round, stoop to pick up a missile, rise again, fling it, light a pipe, and go through many evolutions with either hand or both, without spilling a drop. The pipe, by the way, gives an odd look to a well-dressed young girl on Sunday, but one often sees that spectacle. The passion for tobacco among our men continues quite absorbing, and I have piteous appeals for some arrangement by which they can buy it on credit, as we have yet no sutler. Their imploring, "Cunnel, we can't lib widout it, Sah," goes to my heart; and as they cannot read, I cannot even have the melancholy satisfaction of supplying them with the excellent anti-tobacco tracts of Mr. Trask.

                                                              December 19.

Last night the water froze in the adjutant's tent, but not in mine. To-day has been mild and beautiful. The blacks say they do not feel the cold so much as the white officers do, and perhaps it is so, though their health evidently suffers more from dampness. On the other hand, while drilling on very warm days, they have seemed to suffer more from the heat than their officers. But they dearly love fire, and at night will always have it, if possible, even on the minutest scale,—a mere handful of splinters, that seems hardly more efficacious than a friction-match. Probably this is a natural habit for the short-lived coolness of an out-door country; and then there is something delightful in this rich pine, which burns like a tar-barrel. It was, perhaps, encouraged by the masters, as the only cheap luxury the slaves had at hand.

As one grows more acquainted with the men, their individualities emerge; and I find, first their faces, then their characters, to be as distinct as those of whites. It is very interesting the desire they show to do their duty, and to improve as soldiers; they evidently think about it, and see the importance of the thing; they say to me that we white men cannot stay and be their leaders always and that they must learn to depend on themselves, or else relapse into their former condition.

Beside the superb branch of uneatable bitter oranges which decks my tent-pole, I have to-day hung up a long bough of finger-sponge, which floated to the river-bank. As winter advances, butterflies gradually disappear: one species (a Vanessa) lingers; three others have vanished since I came. Mocking-birds are abundant, but rarely sing; once or twice they have reminded me of the red thrush, but are inferior, as I have always thought. The colored people all say that it will be much cooler; but my officers do not think so, perhaps because last winter was so unusually mild,—with only one frost, they say.

                                                                 December 20.

Philoprogenitiveness is an important organ for an officer of colored troops; and I happen to be well provided with it. It seems to be the theory of all military usages, in fact, that soldiers are to be treated like children; and these singular persons, who never know their own age till they are past middle life, and then choose a birthday with such precision,—"Fifty year old, Sah, de fus' last April,"—prolong the privilege of childhood.

I am perplexed nightly for countersigns,—their range of proper names is so distressingly limited, and they make such amazing work of every new one. At first, to be sure, they did not quite recognize the need of any variation: one night some officer asked a sentinel whether he had the countersign yet, and was indignantly answered, "Should tink I hab 'em, hab 'em for a fortnight"; which seems a long epoch for that magic word to hold out. To-night I thought I would have "Fredericksburg," in honor of Burnside's reported victory, using the rumor quickly, for fear of a contradiction. Later, in comes a captain, gets the countersign for his own use, but presently returns, the sentinel having pronounced it incorrect. On inquiry, it appears that the sergeant of the guard, being weak in geography, thought best to substitute the more familiar word, "Crockery-ware"; which was, with perfect gravity, confided to all the sentinels, and accepted without question. O life! what is the fun of fiction beside thee?

I should think they would suffer and complain these cold nights; but they say nothing, though there is a good deal of coughing. I should fancy that the scarlet trousers must do something to keep them warm, and wonder that they dislike them so much, when they are so much like their beloved fires. They certainly multiply firelight in any case. I often notice that an infinitesimal flame, with one soldier standing by it, looks like quite a respectable conflagration, and it seems as if a group of them must dispel dampness.

                                                                December 21.

To a regimental commander no book can be so fascinating as the consolidated Morning Report, which is ready about nine, and tells how many in each company are sick, absent, on duty, and so on. It is one's newspaper and daily mail; I never grow tired of it. If a single recruit has come in, I am always eager to see how he looks on paper.

To-night the officers are rather depressed by rumors of Burnside's being defeated, after all. I am fortunately equable and undepressible; and it is very convenient that the men know too little of the events of the war to feel excitement or fear. They know General Saxton and me,—"de General" and "de Gunnel,"—and seem to ask no further questions. We are the war. It saves a great deal of trouble, while it lasts, this childlike confidence; nevertheless, it is our business to educate them to manhood, and I see as yet no obstacle.

As for the rumor, the world will no doubt roll round, whether Burnside is defeated or succeeds.

                                                     Christmas Day.

    "We'll fight for liberty

  Till de Lord shall call us home;

    We'll soon be free

  Till de Lord shall call us home."

This is the hymn which the slaves at Georgetown, South Carolina, were whipped for singing when President Lincoln was elected. So said a little drummer-boy, as he sat at my tent's edge last night and told me his story; and he showed all his white teeth as he added, "Dey tink 'de Lord' meant for say de Yankees."

Last night, at dress-parade, the adjutant read General Saxton's Proclamation for the New Year's Celebration. I think they understood it, for there was cheering in all the company-streets afterwards. Christmas is the great festival of the year for this people; but, with New Year's coming after, we could have no adequate programme for to-day, and so celebrated Christmas Eve with pattern simplicity. We omitted, namely, the mystic curfew which we call "taps," and let them sit up and burn their fires, and have their little prayer-meetings as late as they desired; and all night, as I waked at intervals, I could hear them praying and "shouting" and clattering with hands and heels. It seemed to make them very happy, and appeared to be at least an innocent Christmas dissipation, as compared with some of the convivialities of the "superior race" hereabouts.

Dutch Gap

                                                          December 26.

The day passed with no greater excitement for the men than target-shooting, which they enjoyed. I had the private delight of the arrival of our much-desired surgeon and his nephew, the captain, with letters and news from home. They also bring the good tidings that General Saxton is not to be removed, as had been reported.

Two different stands of colors have arrived for us, and will be presented at New Year's,—one from friends in New York, and the other from a lady in Connecticut. I see that "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly" of December 20th has a highly imaginative picture of the muster-in of our first company, and also of a skirmish on the late expedition.

I must not forget the prayer overheard last night by one of the captains: "O Lord! when I tink ob dis Kismas and las' year de Kismas. Las' Kismas he in de Secesh, and notin' to eat but grits, and no salt in 'em. Dis year in de camp, and too much victual!" This "too much" is a favorite phrase out of their grateful hearts, and did not in this case denote an excess of dinner,—as might be supposed,—but of thanksgiving.

                                                                December 29.

Our new surgeon has begun his work most efficiently: he and the chaplain have converted an old gin-house into a comfortable hospital, with ten nice beds and straw pallets. He is now, with a hearty professional faith, looking round for somebody to put into it. I am afraid the regiment will accommodate him; for, although he declares that these men do not sham sickness, as he expected, their catarrh is an unpleasant reality. They feel the dampness very much, and make such a coughing at dress-parade, that I have urged him to administer a dose of cough-mixture, all round, just before that pageant. Are the colored race tough? is my present anxiety; and it is odd that physical insufficiency, the only discouragement not thrown in our way by the newspapers, is the only discouragement which finds any place in our minds. They are used to sleeping indoors in winter, herded before fires, and so they feel the change. Still, the regiment is as healthy as the average, and experience will teach us something.*

* A second winter's experience removed all this solicitude, for they learned to take care of themselves. During the first February the sick-list averaged about ninety, during the second about thirty, this being the worst month in the year for blacks.

                                                                    December 30.

On the first of January we are to have a slight collation, ten oxen or so, barbecued,—or not properly barbecued, but roasted whole. Touching the length of time required to "do" an ox, no two housekeepers appear to agree. Accounts vary from two hours to twenty-four. We shall happily have enough to try all gradations of roasting, and suit all tastes, from Miss A.'s to mine. But fancy me proffering a spare-rib, well done, to some fair lady! What ever are we to do for spoons and forks and plates? Each soldier has his own, and is sternly held responsible for it by "Army Regulations." But how provide for the multitude? Is it customary, I ask you, to help to tenderloin with one's fingers? Fortunately, the Major is to see to that department. Great are the advantages of military discipline: for anything perplexing, detail a subordinate.

                                                      New Year's Eve.

My housekeeping at home is not, perhaps, on any very extravagant scale. Buying beefsteak, I usually go to the extent of two or three pounds. Yet when, this morning at daybreak, the quartermaster called to inquire how many cattle I would have killed for roasting, I turned over in bed, and answered composedly, "Ten,—and keep three to be fatted."

Fatted, quotha! Not one of the beasts at present appears to possess an ounce of superfluous flesh. Never were seen such lean kine. As they swing on vast spits, composed of young trees, the firelight glimmers through their ribs, as if they were great lanterns. But no matter, they are cooking,—nay, they are cooked.

One at least is taken off to cool, and will be replaced tomorrow to warm up. It was roasted three hours, and well done, for I tasted it. It is so long since I tasted fresh beef that forgetfulness is possible; but I fancied this to be successful. I tried to imagine that I liked the Homeric repast, and certainly the whole thing has been far more agreeable than was to be expected. The doubt now is, whether I have made a sufficient provision for my household. I should have roughly guessed that ten beeves would feed as many million people, it has such a stupendous sound; but General Saxton predicts a small social party of five thousand, and we fear that meat will run short, unless they prefer bone. One of the cattle is so small, we are hoping it may turn out veal.

For drink we aim at the simple luxury of molasses-and-water, a barrel per company, ten in all. Liberal housekeepers may like to know that for a barrel of water we allow three gallons of molasses, half a pound of ginger, and a quart of vinegar,—this last being a new ingredient for my untutored palate, though all the rest are amazed at my ignorance. Hard bread, with more molasses, and a dessert of tobacco, complete the festive repast, destined to cheer, but not inebriate.

On this last point, of inebriation, this is certainly a wonderful camp. For us it is absolutely omitted from the list of vices. I have never heard of a glass of liquor in the camp, nor of any effort either to bring it in or to keep it out. A total absence of the circulating medium might explain the abstinence,—not that it seems to have that effect with white soldiers,—but it would not explain the silence. The craving for tobacco is constant, and not to be allayed, like that of a mother for her children; but I have never heard whiskey even wished for, save on Christmas-Day, and then only by one man, and he spoke with a hopeless ideal sighing, as one alludes to the Golden Age. I am amazed at this total omission of the most inconvenient of all camp appetites. It certainly is not the result of exhortation, for there has been no occasion for any, and even the pledge would scarcely seem efficacious where hardly anybody can write.

I do not think there is a great visible eagerness for tomorrow's festival: it is not their way to be very jubilant over anything this side of the New Jerusalem. They know also that those in this Department are nominally free already, and that the practical freedom has to be maintained, in any event, by military success. But they will enjoy it greatly, and we shall have a multitude of people.

                                             January 1, 1863 (evening).

A happy New Year to civilized people,—mere white folks. Our festival has come and gone, with perfect success, and our good General has been altogether satisfied. Last night the great fires were kept smoldering in the pit, and the beeves were cooked more or less, chiefly more,—during which time they had to be carefully watched, and the great spits turned by main force. Happy were the merry fellows who were permitted to sit up all night, and watch the glimmering flames that threw a thousand fantastic shadows among the great gnarled oaks. And such a chattering as I was sure to hear whenever I awoke that night!

My first greeting to-day was from one of the most stylish sergeants, who approached me with the following little speech, evidently the result of some elaboration:—

"I tink myself happy, dis New Year's Day, for salute my own Cunnel. Dis day las' year I was servant to a Gunnel ob Secesh; but now I hab de privilege for salute my own Cunnel."

That officer, with the utmost sincerity, reciprocated the sentiment.

About ten o'clock the people began to collect by land, and also by water,—in steamers sent by General Saxton for the purpose; and from that time all the avenues of approach were thronged. The multitude were chiefly colored women, with gay handkerchiefs on their heads, and a sprinkling of men, with that peculiarly respectable look which these people always have on Sundays and holidays. There were many white visitors also,—ladies on horseback and in carriages, superintendents and teachers, officers, and cavalry-men. Our companies were marched to the neighborhood of the platform, and allowed to sit or stand, as at the Sunday services; the platform was occupied by ladies and dignitaries, and by the band of the Eighth Maine, which kindly volunteered for the occasion; the colored people filled up all the vacant openings in the beautiful grove around, and there was a cordon of mounted visitors beyond. Above, the great live-oak branches and their trailing moss; beyond the people, a glimpse of the blue river.

"Emancipation Day in South Carolina" - the Color-Sergeant of the 1st South Carolina (Colored) addressing the regiment, after having been presented with the Stars and Stripes, at Smith's plantation, Port Royal, January 1, 1863

The services began at half past eleven o'clock, with prayer by our chaplain, Mr. Fowler, who is always, on such occasions, simple, reverential, and impressive. Then the President's Proclamation was read by Dr. W. H. Brisbane, a thing infinitely appropriate, a South Carolinian addressing South Carolinians; for he was reared among these very islands, and here long since emancipated his own slaves. Then the colors were presented to us by the Rev. Mr. French, a chaplain who brought them from the donors in New York. All this was according to the programme.

Then followed an incident so simple, so touching, so utterly unexpected and startling, that I can scarcely believe it on recalling, though it gave the keynote to the whole day. The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women's voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow.—

  My Country, 'tis of thee,

  Sweet land of liberty,

  Of thee I sing!"

People looked at each other, and then at us on the platform, to see whence came this interruption, not set down in the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang on, verse after verse; others of the colored people joined in; some whites on the platform began, but I motioned them to silence. I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it; and when I came to speak of it, after it was ended, tears were everywhere. If you could have heard how quaint and innocent it was!

Old Tiff and his children might have sung it; and close before me was a little slave-boy, almost white, who seemed to belong to the party, and even he must join in. Just think of it!—the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people, and here, while mere spectators stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out in their lay, as if they were by their own hearths at home! When they stopped, there was nothing to do for it but to speak, and I went on; but the life of the whole day was in those unknown people's song.

Receiving the flags, I gave them into the hands of two fine-looking men, jet black, as color-guard, and they also spoke, and very effectively,—Sergeant Prince Rivers and Corporal Robert Sutton. The regiment sang "Marching Along," and then General Saxton spoke, in his own simple, manly way, and Mrs. Francis D. Gage spoke very sensibly to the women, and Judge Stickney, from Florida, added something; then some gentleman sang an ode, and the regiment the John Brown song, and then they went to their beef and molasses. Everything was very orderly, and they seemed to have a very gay time. Most of the visitors had far to go, and so dispersed before dress-parade, though the band stayed to enliven it. In the evening we had letters from home, and General Saxton had a reception at his house, from which I excused myself; and so ended one of the most enthusiastic and happy gatherings I ever knew. The day was perfect, and there was nothing but success.

General John C. Fremont

I forgot to say, that, in the midst of the services, it was announced that General Fremont was appointed Commander-in-Chief,—an announcement which was received with immense cheering, as would have been almost anything else, I verily believe, at that moment of high tide. It was shouted across by the pickets above,—a way in which we often receive news, but not always trustworthy.

                                                               January 3, 1863.

Once, and once only, thus far, the water has frozen in my tent; and the next morning showed a dense white frost outside. We have still mocking-birds and crickets and rosebuds, and occasional noonday baths in the river, though the butterflies have vanished, as I remember to have observed in Fayal, after December. I have been here nearly six weeks without a rainy day; one or two slight showers there have been, once interrupting a drill, but never dress-parade. For climate, by day, we might be among the isles of Greece,—though it may be my constant familiarity with the names of her sages which suggests that impression. For instance, a voice just now called, near my tent,—"Cato, whar's Plato?" The men have somehow got the impression that it is essential to the validity of a marriage that they should come to me for permission, just as they used to go to the master; and I rather encourage these little confidences, because it is so entertaining to hear them. "Now, Cunnel," said a faltering swam the other day, "I want for get me one good lady," which I approved, especially the limitation as to number. Afterwards I asked one of the bridegroom's friends whether he thought it a good match. "O yes, Cunnel," said he, in all the cordiality of friendship, "John's gwine for marry Venus." I trust the goddess will prove herself a better lady than she appeared during her previous career upon this planet. But this naturally suggests the isles of Greece again.

                                                                     January 7.

On first arriving, I found a good deal of anxiety among the officers as to the increase of desertions, that being the rock on which the "Hunter Regiment" split. Now this evil is very nearly stopped, and we are every day recovering the older absentees. One of the very best things that have happened to us was the half-accidental shooting of a man who had escaped from the guard-house, and was wounded by a squad sent in pursuit. He has since died; and this very eve-rung another man, who escaped with him, came and opened the door of my tent, after being five days in the woods, almost without food. His clothes were in rags, and he was nearly starved, poor foolish fellow, so that we can almost dispense with further punishment. Severe penalties would be wasted on these people, accustomed as they have been to the most violent passions on the part of white men; but a mild inexorableness tells on them, just as it does on any other children. It is something utterly new to me, and it is thus far perfectly efficacious. They have a great deal of pride as soldiers, and a very little of severity goes a great way, if it be firm and consistent. This is very encouraging.

The single question which I asked of some of the plantation superintendents, on the voyage, was, "Do these people appreciate justice?" If they did it was evident that all the rest would be easy. When a race is degraded beyond that point it must be very hard to deal with them; they must mistake all kindness for indulgence, all strictness for cruelty. With these freed slaves there is no such trouble, not a particle: let an officer be only just and firm, with a cordial, kindly nature, and he has no sort of difficulty. The plantation superintendents and teachers have the same experience, they say; but we have an immense advantage in the military organization, which helps in two ways: it increases their self-respect, and it gives us an admirable machinery for discipline, thus improving both the fulcrum and the lever.

The wounded man died in the hospital, and the general verdict seemed to be, "Him brought it on heself." Another soldier died of pneumonia on the same day, and we had the funerals in the evening. It was very impressive. A dense mist came up, with a moon behind it, and we had only the light of pine-splinters, as the procession wound along beneath the mighty, moss-hung branches of the ancient grove. The groups around the grave, the dark faces, the red garments, the scattered lights, the misty boughs, were weird and strange. The men sang one of their own wild chants. Two crickets sang also, one on either side, and did not cease their little monotone, even when the three volleys were fired above the graves. Just before the coffins were lowered, an old man whispered to me that I must have their position altered,—the heads must be towards the west; so it was done,—though they are in a place so veiled in woods that either rising or setting sun will find it hard to spy them.

We have now a good regimental hospital, admirably arranged in a deserted gin-house,—a fine well of our own digging, within the camp lines,—a full allowance of tents, all floored,—a wooden cook-house to every company, with sometimes a palmetto mess-house beside,—a substantial wooden guard-house, with a fireplace five feet "in de clar," where the men off duty can dry themselves and sleep comfortably in bunks afterwards. We have also a great circular school-tent, made of condemned canvas, thirty feet in diameter, and looking like some of the Indian lodges I saw in Kansas. We now meditate a regimental bakery. Our aggregate has increased from four hundred and ninety to seven hundred and forty, besides a hundred recruits now waiting at St. Augustine, and we have practised through all the main movements in battalion drill.

Affairs being thus prosperous, and yesterday having been six weeks since my last and only visit to Beaufort, I rode in, glanced at several camps, and dined with the General. It seemed absolutely like re-entering the world; and I did not fully estimate my past seclusion till it occurred to me, as a strange and novel phenomenon, that the soldiers at the other camps were white.                                                         

                                                                 January 8.

This morning I went to Beaufort again, on necessary business, and by good luck happened upon a review and drill of the white regiments. The thing that struck me most was that same absence of uniformity, in minor points, that I noticed at first in my own officers. The best regiments in the Department are represented among my captains and lieutenants, and very well represented too; yet it has cost much labor to bring them to any uniformity in their drill. There is no need of this; for the prescribed "Tactics" approach perfection; it is never left discretionary in what place an officer shall stand, or in what words he shall give his order. All variation would seem to imply negligence. Yet even West Point occasionally varies from the "Tactics,"—as, for instance, in requiring the line officers to face down the line, when each is giving the order to his company. In our strictest Massachusetts regiments this is not done.

It needs an artist's eye to make a perfect drill-master. Yet the small points are not merely a matter of punctilio; for, the more perfectly a battalion is drilled on the parade-ground the more quietly it can be handled in action. Moreover, the great need of uniformity is this: that, in the field, soldiers of different companies, and even of different regiments, are liable to be intermingled, and a diversity of orders may throw everything into confusion. Confusion means Bull Run.

I wished my men at the review to-day; for, amidst all the rattling and noise of artillery and the galloping of cavalry, there was only one infantry movement that we have not practised, and that was done by only one regiment, and apparently considered quite a novelty, though it is easily taught,

—forming square by Casey's method: forward on centre. It is really just as easy to drill a regiment as a company,

—perhaps easier, because one has more time to think; but it is just as essential to be sharp and decisive, perfectly clearheaded, and to put life into the men. A regiment seems small when one has learned how to handle it, a mere handful of men; and I have no doubt that a brigade or a division would soon appear equally small. But to handle either judiciously, ah, that is another affair!

So of governing; it is as easy to govern a regiment as a school or a factory, and needs like qualities, system, promptness, patience, tact; moreover, in a regiment one has the aid of the admirable machinery of the army, so that I see very ordinary men who succeed very tolerably.

Reports of a six months' armistice are rife here, and the thought is deplored by all. I cannot believe it; yet sometimes one feels very anxious about the ultimate fate of these poor people. After the experience of Hungary, one sees that revolutions may go backward; and the habit of injustice seems so deeply impressed upon the whites, that it is hard to believe in the possibility of anything better. I dare not yet hope that the promise of the President's Proclamation will be kept. For myself I can be indifferent, for the experience here has been its own daily and hourly reward; and the adaptedness of the freed slaves for drill and discipline is now thoroughly demonstrated, and must soon be universally acknowledged. But it would be terrible to see this regiment disbanded or defrauded.

                                                                    January 12.

Many things glide by without time to narrate them. On Saturday we had a mail with the President's Second Message of Emancipation, and the next day it was read to the men. The words themselves did not stir them very much, because they have been often told that they were free, especially on New Year's Day, and, being unversed in politics, they do not understand, as well as we do, the importance of each additional guaranty. But the chaplain spoke to them afterwards very effectively, as usual; and then I proposed to them to hold up their hands and pledge themselves to be faithful to those still in bondage. They entered heartily into this, and the scene was quite impressive, beneath the great oak-branches. I heard afterwards that only one man refused to raise his hand, saying bluntly that his wife was out of slavery with him, and he did not care to fight. The other soldiers of his company were very indignant, and shoved him about among them while marching back to their quarters, calling him "Coward." I was glad of their exhibition of feeling, though it is very possible that the one who had thus the moral courage to stand alone among his comrades might be more reliable, on a pinch, than some who yielded a more ready assent. But the whole response, on their part, was very hearty, and will be a good thing to which to hold them hereafter, at any time of discouragement or demoralization,—which was my chief reason for proposing it. With their simple natures it is a great thing to tie them to some definite committal; they never forget a marked occurrence, and never seem disposed to evade a pledge.

It is this capacity of honor and fidelity which gives me such entire faith in them as soldiers. Without it all their religious demonstration would be mere sentimentality. For instance, every one who visits the camp is struck with their bearing as sentinels. They exhibit, in this capacity, not an upstart conceit, but a steady, conscientious devotion to duty. They would stop their idolized General Saxton, if he attempted to cross their beat contrary to orders: I have seen them. No feeble or incompetent race could do this. The officers tell many amusing instances of this fidelity, but I think mine the best.

It was very dark the other night, an unusual thing here, and the rain fell in torrents; so I put on my India-rubber suit, and went the rounds of the sentinels, incognito, to test them. I can only say that I shall never try such an experiment again and have cautioned my officers against it. Tis a wonder I escaped with life and limb,—such a charging of bayonets and clicking of gun-locks. Sometimes I tempted them by refusing to give any countersign, but offering them a piece of tobacco, which they could not accept without allowing me nearer than the prescribed bayonet's distance. Tobacco is more than gold to them, and it was touching to watch the struggle in their minds; but they always did their duty at last, and I never could persuade them. One man, as if wishing to crush all his inward vacillation at one fell stroke, told me stoutly that he never used tobacco, though I found next day that he loved it as much as any one of them. It seemed wrong thus to tamper with their fidelity; yet it was a vital matter to me to know how far it could be trusted, out of my sight. It was so intensely dark that not more than one or two knew me, even after I had talked with the very next sentinel, especially as they had never seen me in India-rubber clothing, and I can always disguise my voice. It was easy to distinguish those who did make the discovery; they were always conscious and simpering when their turn came; while the others were stout and irreverent till I revealed myself, and then rather cowed and anxious, fearing to have offended.

It rained harder and harder, and when I had nearly made the rounds I had had enough of it, and, simply giving the countersign to the challenging sentinel, undertook to pass within the lines.

"Halt!" exclaimed this dusky man and brother, bringing down his bayonet, "de countersign not correck."

Now the magic word, in this case, was "Vicksburg," in honor of a rumored victory. But as I knew that these hard names became quite transformed upon their lips, "Carthage" being familiarized into Cartridge, and "Concord" into Corn-cob, how could I possibly tell what shade of pronunciation my friend might prefer for this particular proper name?

"Vicksburg," I repeated, blandly, but authoritatively, endeavoring, as zealously as one of Christy's Minstrels, to assimilate my speech to any supposed predilection of the Ethiop vocal organs.

"Halt dar! Countersign not correck," was the only answer.

The bayonet still maintained a position which, in a military point of view, was impressive.

I tried persuasion, orthography, threats, tobacco, all in vain. I could not pass in. Of course my pride was up; for was I to defer to an untutored African on a point of pronunciation? Classic shades of Harvard, forbid! Affecting scornful indifference, I tried to edge away, proposing to myself to enter the camp at some other point, where my elocution would be better appreciated. Not a step could I stir.

"Halt!" shouted my gentleman again, still holding me at his bayonet's point, and I wincing and halting.

I explained to him the extreme absurdity of this proceeding, called his attention to the state of the weather, which, indeed, spoke for itself so loudly that we could hardly hear each other speak, and requested permission to withdraw. The bayonet, with mute eloquence, refused the application.

There flashed into my mind, with more enjoyment in the retrospect than I had experienced at the time, an adventure on a lecturing tour in other years, when I had spent an hour in trying to scramble into a country tavern, after bed-time, on the coldest night of winter. On that occasion I ultimately found myself stuck midway in the window, with my head in a temperature of 80 degrees, and my heels in a temperature of -10 degrees, with a heavy windowsash pinioning the small of my back. However, I had got safe out of that dilemma, and it was time to put an end to this one,

"Call the corporal of the guard," said I at last, with dignity, unwilling to make a night of it or to yield my incognito.

"Corporal ob de guard!" he shouted, lustily,—"Post Number Two!" while I could hear another sentinel chuckling with laughter. This last was a special guard, placed over a tent, with a prisoner in charge. Presently he broke silence.

"Who am dat?" he asked, in a stage whisper. "Am he a buckra [white man]?"

"Dunno whether he been a buckra or not," responded, doggedly, my Cerberus in uniform; "but I's bound to keep him here till de corporal ob de guard come."

Yet, when that dignitary arrived, and I revealed myself, poor Number Two appeared utterly transfixed with terror, and seemed to look for nothing less than immediate execution. Of course I praised his fidelity, and the next day complimented him before the guard, and mentioned him to his captain; and the whole affair was very good for them all. Hereafter, if Satan himself should approach them in darkness and storm, they will take him for "de Cunnel," and treat him with special severity.

                                                                      January 13.

In many ways the childish nature of this people shows itself. I have just had to make a change of officers in a company which has constantly complained, and with good reason, of neglect and improper treatment. Two excellent officers have been assigned to them; and yet they sent a deputation to me in the evening, in a state of utter wretchedness. "We's bery grieved dis evening, Cunnel; 'pears like we couldn't bear it, to lose de Cap'n and de Lieutenant, all two togeder." Argument was useless; and I could only fall back on the general theory, that I knew what was best for them, which had much more effect; and I also could cite the instance of another company, which had been much improved by a new captain, as they readily admitted. So with the promise that the new officers should not be "savage to we," which was the one thing they deprecated, I assuaged their woes. Twenty-four hours have passed, and I hear them singing most merrily all down that company street.

I often notice how their griefs may be dispelled, like those of children, merely by permission to utter them: if they can tell their sorrows, they go away happy, even without asking to have anything done about them. I observe also a peculiar dislike of all intermediate control: they always wish to pass by the company officer, and deal with me personally for everything. General Saxton notices the same thing with the people on the plantations as regards himself. I suppose this proceeds partly from the old habit of appealing to the master against the overseer. Kind words would cost the master nothing, and he could easily put off any non-fulfilment upon the overseer. Moreover, the negroes have acquired such constitutional distrust of white people, that it is perhaps as much as they can do to trust more than one person at a tune. Meanwhile this constant personal intercourse is out of the question in a well-ordered regiment; and the remedy for it is to introduce by degrees more and more of system, so that their immediate officers will become all-sufficient for the daily routine.

It is perfectly true (as I find everybody takes for granted) that the first essential for an officer of colored troops is to gain their confidence. But it is equally true, though many persons do not appreciate it, that the admirable methods and proprieties of the regular army are equally available for all troops, and that the sublimest philanthropist, if he does not appreciate this, is unfit to command them.

Another childlike attribute in these men, which is less agreeable, is a sort of blunt insensibility to giving physical pain. If they are cruel to animals, for instance, it always reminds me of children pulling off flies' legs, in a sort of pitiless, untaught, experimental way. Yet I should not fear any wanton outrage from them. After all their wrongs, they are not really revengeful; and I would far rather enter a captured city with them than with white troops, for they would be more subordinate. But for mere physical suffering they would have no fine sympathies. The cruel things they have seen and undergone have helped to blunt them; and if I ordered them to put to death a dozen prisoners, I think they would do it without remonstrance.

Yet their religious spirit grows more beautiful to me in living longer with them; it is certainly far more so than at first, when it seemed rather a matter of phrase and habit. It influences them both on the negative and the positive side. That is, it cultivates the feminine virtues first,—makes them patient, meek, resigned. This is very evident in the hospital; there is nothing of the restless, defiant habit of white invalids. Perhaps, if they had more of this, they would resist disease better. Imbued from childhood with the habit of submission, drinking in through every pore that other-world trust which is the one spirit of their songs, they can endure everything. This I expected; but I am relieved to find that their religion strengthens them on the positive side also,—gives zeal, energy, daring. They could easily be made fanatics, if I chose; but I do not choose. Their whole mood is essentially Mohammedan, perhaps, in its strength and its weakness; and I feel the same degree of sympathy that I should if I had a Turkish command,—that is, a sort of sympathetic admiration, not tending towards agreement, but towards co-operation. Their philosophizing is often the highest form of mysticism; and our dear surgeon declares that they are all natural transcendentalists. The white camps seem rough and secular, after this; and I hear our men talk about "a religious army," "a Gospel army," in their prayer-meetings. They are certainly evangelizing the chaplain, who was rather a heretic at the beginning; at least, this is his own admission. We have recruits on their way from St. Augustine, where the negroes are chiefly Roman Catholics; and it will be interesting to see how their type of character combines with that elder creed. It is time for rest; and I have just looked out into the night, where the eternal stars shut down, in concave protection, over the yet glimmering camp, and Orion hangs above my tent-door, giving to me the sense of strength and assurance which these simple children obtain from their Moses and the Prophets. Yet external Nature does its share in their training; witness that most poetic of all their songs, which always reminds me of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in the "Scottish Border Minstrelsy,"—

  I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;

          Lay dis body down.

  I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

          To lay dis body down.

  I'll walk in de graveyard, I'll walk through de graveyard,

          To lay dis body down.

  I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

          Lay dis body down.

  I go to de Judgment in de evening ob de day

          When I lay dis body down;

  And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

          When I lay dis body down.

                                                                     January 14.

In speaking of the military qualities of the blacks, I should add, that the only point where I am disappointed is one I have never seen raised by the most incredulous newspaper critics,—namely, their physical condition. To be sure they often look magnificently to my gymnasium-trained eye; and I always like to observe them when bathing,—such splendid muscular development, set off by that smooth coating of adipose tissue which makes them, like the South-Sea Islanders appear even more muscular than they are. Their skins are also of finer grain than those of whites, the surgeons say, and certainly are smoother and far more free from hair. But their weakness is pulmonary; pneumonia and pleurisy are their besetting ailments; they are easily made ill,—and easily cured, if promptly treated: childish organizations again. Guard-duty injures them more than whites, apparently; and double-quick movements, in choking dust, set them coughing badly. But then it is to be remembered that this is their sickly season, from January to March, and that their healthy season will come in summer, when the whites break down. Still my conviction of the physical superiority of more highly civilized races is strengthened on the whole, not weakened, by observing them. As to availability for military drill and duty in other respects, the only question I ever hear debated among the officers is, whether they are equal or superior to whites. I have never heard it suggested that they were inferior, although I expected frequently to hear such complaints from hasty or unsuccessful officers.

Of one thing I am sure, that their best qualities will be wasted by merely keeping them for garrison duty. They seem peculiarly fitted for offensive operations, and especially for partisan warfare; they have so much dash and such abundant resources, combined with such an Indian-like knowledge of the country and its ways. These traits have been often illustrated in expeditions sent after deserters. For instance, I despatched one of my best lieutenants and my best sergeant with a squad of men to search a certain plantation, where there were two separate negro villages. They went by night, and the force was divided. The lieutenant took one set of huts, the sergeant the other. Before the lieutenant had reached his first house, every man in the village was in the woods, innocent and guilty alike. But the sergeant's mode of operation was thus described by a corporal from a white regiment who happened to be in one of the negro houses. He said that not a sound was heard until suddenly a red leg appeared in the open doorway, and a voice outside said, "Rally." Going to the door, he observed a similar pair of red legs before every hut, and not a person was allowed to go out, until the quarters had been thoroughly searched, and the three deserters found. This was managed by Sergeant Prince Rivers, our color-sergeant, who is provost-sergeant also, and has entire charge of the prisoners and of the daily policing of the camp. He is a man of distinguished appearance, and in old times was the crack coachman of Beaufort, in which capacity he once drove Beauregard from this plantation to Charleston, I believe. They tell me that he was once allowed to present a petition to the Governor of South Carolina in behalf of slaves, for the redress of certain grievances; and that a placard, offering two thousand dollars for his recapture, is still to be seen by the wayside between here and Charleston. He was a sergeant in the old "Hunter Regiment," and was taken by General Hunter to New York last spring, where the chevrons on his arm brought a mob upon him in Broadway, whom he kept off till the police interfered. There is not a white officer in this regiment who has more administrative ability, or more absolute authority over the men; they do not love him, but his mere presence has controlling power over them. He writes well enough to prepare for me a daily report of his duties in the camp; if his education reached a higher point, I see no reason why he should not command the Army of the Potomac. He is jet-black, or rather, I should say, wine-black; his complexion, like that of others of my darkest men, having a sort of rich, clear depth, without a trace of sootiness, and to my eye very handsome. His features are tolerably regular, and full of command, and his figure superior to that of any of our white officers,—being six feet high, perfectly proportioned, and of apparently inexhaustible strength and activity. His gait is like a panther's; I never saw such a tread. No anti-slavery novel has described a man of such marked ability. He makes Toussaint perfectly intelligible; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king.

                                                                       January 15.

This morning is like May. Yesterday I saw bluebirds and a butterfly; so this whiter of a fortnight is over. I fancy there is a trifle less coughing in the camp. We hear of other stations in the Department where the mortality, chiefly from yellow fever, has been frightful. Dr. —— is rubbing his hands professionally over the fearful tales of the surgeon of a New York regiment, just from Key West, who has had two hundred cases of the fever. "I suppose he is a skilful, highly educated man," said I. "Yes," he responded with enthusiasm. "Why, he had seventy deaths!"—as if that proved his superiority past question.

                                                      January 19.

"And first, sitting proud as a lung on his throne, At the    head of them all rode Sir Richard Tyrone."

But I fancy that Sir Richard felt not much better satisfied with his following than I to-day. J. R. L. [Lowell]  said once that nothing was quite so good as turtle-soup, except mock-turtle; and I have heard officers declare that nothing was so stirring as real war, except some exciting parade. To-day, for the first time, I marched the whole regiment through Beaufort and back,—the first appearance of such a novelty on any stage. They did march splendidly; this all admit. M——'s prediction was fulfilled: "Will not —— be in bliss? A thousand men, every one as black as a coal!" I confess it. To look back on twenty broad double-ranks of men (for they marched by platoons),—every polished musket having a black face beside it, and every face set steadily to the front,—a regiment of freed slaves marching on into the future,—it was something to remember; and when they returned through the same streets, marching by the flank, with guns at a "support," and each man covering his file-leader handsomely, the effect on the eye was almost as fine. The band of the Eighth Maine joined us at the entrance of the town, and escorted us in. Sergeant Rivers said ecstatically afterwards, in describing the affair, "And when dat band wheel in before us, and march on,—my God! I quit dis world altogeder." I wonder if he pictured to himself the many dusky regiments, now unformed, which I seemed to see marching up behind us, gathering shape out of the dim air.

I had cautioned the men, before leaving camp, not to be staring about them as they marched, but to look straight to the front, every man; and they did it with their accustomed fidelity, aided by the sort of spontaneous eye-for-effect which is in all their melodramatic natures. One of them was heard to say exultingly afterwards, "We didn't look to de right nor to de leff. I didn't see notin' in Beaufort. Eb'ry step was worth a half a dollar." And they all marched as if it were so. They knew well that they were marching through throngs of officers and soldiers who had drilled as many months as we had drilled weeks, and whose eyes would readily spy out every defect. And I must say, that, on the whole, with a few trivial exceptions, those spectators behaved in a manly and courteous manner, and I do not care to write down all the handsome things that were said. Whether said or not, they were deserved; and there is no danger that our men will not take sufficient satisfaction in their good appearance. I was especially amused at one of our recruits, who did not march in the ranks, and who said, after watching the astonishment of some white soldiers, "De buckra sojers look like a man who been-a-steal a sheep,"—that is, I suppose, sheepish.

After passing and repassing through the town, we marched to the parade-ground, and went through an hour's drill, forming squares and reducing them, and doing other things which look hard on paper, and are perfectly easy in fact; and we were to have been reviewed by General Saxton, but he had been unexpectedly called to Ladies Island, and did not see us at all, which was the only thing to mar the men's enjoyment. Then we marched back to camp (three miles), the men singing the "John Brown Song," and all manner of things,—as happy creatures as one can well conceive.

It is worth mentioning, before I close, that we have just received an article about "Negro Troops," from the London Spectator, which is so admirably true to our experience that it seems as if written by one of us. I am confident that there never has been, in any American newspaper, a treatment of the subject so discriminating and so wise.

Major-General David D. Hunter

                                                                     January 21.

To-day brought a visit from Major-General Hunter and his staff, by General Saxton's invitation,—the former having just arrived in the Department. I expected them at dress-parade, but they came during battalion drill, rather to my dismay, and we were caught in our old clothes. It was our first review, and I dare say we did tolerably; but of course it seemed to me that the men never appeared so ill before,—just as one always thinks a party at one's own house a failure, even if the guests seem to enjoy it, because one is so keenly sensitive to every little thing that goes wrong. After review and drill, General Hunter made the men a little speech, at my request, and told them that he wished there were fifty thousand of them. General Saxton spoke to them afterwards, and said that fifty thousand muskets were on their way for colored troops. The men cheered both the generals lustily; and they were complimentary afterwards, though I knew that the regiment could not have appeared nearly so well as on its visit to Beaufort. I suppose I felt like some anxious mamma whose children have accidentally appeared at dancing-school in their old clothes.

General Hunter promises us all we want,—pay when the funds arrive, Springfield rifled muskets, and blue trousers. Moreover, he has graciously consented that we should go on an expedition along the coast, to pick up cotton, lumber, and, above all, recruits. I declined an offer like this just after my arrival, because the regiment was not drilled or disciplined, not even the officers; but it is all we wish for now.

  What care I how black I be?

  Forty pounds will marry me.

quoth Mother Goose. Forty rounds will marry us to the American Army, past divorcing, if we can only use them well. Our success or failure may make or mar the prospects of colored troops. But it is well to remember in advance that military success is really less satisfactory than any other, because it may depend on a moment's turn of events, and that may be determined by some trivial thing, neither to be anticipated nor controlled. Napoleon ought to have won at Waterloo by all reasonable calculations; but who cares? All that one can expect is, to do one's best, and to take with equanimity the fortune of war.

CHAPTER III

UP THE ST. MARY’S

If Sergeant Rivers was a natural king among my dusky soldiers, Corporal Robert Sutton was the natural prime-minister. If not in all respects the ablest, he was the wisest man in our ranks. As large, as powerful, and as black as our good-looking Color-Sergeant, but more heavily built and with less personal beauty, he had a more massive brain and a far more meditative and systematic intellect. Not yet grounded even in the spelling-book, his modes of thought were nevertheless strong, lucid, and accurate; and he yearned and pined for intellectual companionship beyond all ignorant men whom I have ever met. I believe that he would have talked all day and all night, for days together, to any officer who could instruct him, until his companions, at least, fell asleep exhausted. His comprehension of the whole problem of Slavery was more thorough and far-reaching than that of any Abolitionist, so far as its social and military aspects went; in that direction I could teach him nothing, and he taught me much. But it was his methods of thought which always impressed me chiefly: superficial brilliancy he left to others, and grasped at the solid truth.

Of course his interest in the war and in the regiment was unbounded; he did not take to drill with especial readiness, but he was insatiable of it, and grudged every moment of relaxation. Indeed, he never had any such moments; his mind was at work all the time, even when he was singing hymns, of which he had endless store. He was not, however, one of our leading religionists, but his moral code was solid and reliable, like his mental processes. Ignorant as he was, the "years that bring the philosophic mind" had yet been his, and most of my young officers seemed boys beside him. He was a Florida man, and had been chiefly employed in lumbering and piloting on the St. Mary's River, which divides Florida from Georgia. Down this stream he had escaped in a "dug-out," and after thus finding the way, had returned (as had not a few of my men in other cases) to bring away wife and child. "I wouldn't have left my child, Cunnel," he said, with an emphasis that sounded the depths of his strong nature. And up this same river he was always imploring to be allowed to guide an expedition.

Many other men had rival propositions to urge, for they gained self-confidence from drill and guard-duty, and were growing impatient of inaction. "Ought to go to work, Sa,—don't believe in we lyin' in camp eatin' up de perwisions." Such were the quaint complaints, which I heard with joy. Looking over my note-books of that period, I find them filled with topographical memoranda, jotted down by a flickering candle, from the evening talk of the men,—notes of vulnerable points along the coast, charts of rivers, locations of pickets. I prized these conversations not more for what I thus learned of the country than for what I learned of the men. One could thus measure their various degrees of accuracy and their average military instinct; and I must say that in every respect, save the accurate estimate of distances, they stood the test well. But no project took my fancy so much, after all, as that of the delegate from the St. Mary's River.

The best peg on which to hang an expedition in the Department of the South, in those days, was the promise of lumber. Dwelling in the very land of Southern pine, the Department authorities had to send North for it, at a vast expense. There was reported to be plenty in the enemy's country, but somehow the colored soldiers were the only ones who had been lucky enough to obtain any, thus far, and the supply brought in by our men, after flooring the tents of the white regiments and our own, was running low. An expedition of white troops, four companies, with two steamers and two schooners, had lately returned empty-handed, after a week's foraging; and now it was our turn. They said the mills were all burned; but should we go up the St. Mary's, Corporal Sutton was prepared to offer more lumber than we had transportation to carry. This made the crowning charm of his suggestion. But there is never any danger of erring on the side of secrecy, in a military department; and I resolved to avoid all undue publicity for our plans, by not finally deciding on any until we should get outside the bar. This was happily approved by my superior officers, Major-General Hunter and Brigadier-General Saxton; and I was accordingly permitted to take three steamers, with four hundred and sixty-two officers and men, and two or three invited guests, and go down the coast on my own responsibility. We were, in short, to win our spurs; and if, as among the Araucanians, our spurs were made of lumber, so much the better. The whole history of the Department of the South had been defined as "a military picnic," and now we were to take our share of the entertainment.

Union transport ships

It seemed a pleasant share, when, after the usual vexations and delays, we found ourselves (January 23, 1863) gliding down the full waters of Beaufort River, the three vessels having sailed at different hours, with orders to rendezvous at St. Simon's Island, on the coast of Georgia. Until then, the flagship, so to speak, was to be the "Ben De Ford," Captain Hallet,—this being by far the largest vessel, and carrying most of the men. Major Strong was in command upon the "John Adams," an army gunboat, carrying a thirty-pound Parrott gun, two ten-pound Parrotts, and an eight-inch howitzer. Captain Trowbridge (since promoted Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment) had charge of the famous "Planter," brought away from the Rebels by Robert Small; she carried a ten-pound Parrott gun, and two howitzers. The John Adams was our main reliance. She was an old East Boston ferry-boat, a "double-ender," admirable for river-work, but unfit for sea-service. She drew seven feet of water; the Planter drew only four; but the latter was very slow, and being obliged to go to St. Simon's by an inner passage, would delay us from the beginning. She delayed us so much, before the end, that we virtually parted company, and her career was almost entirely separated from our own.

Union gunboat

From boyhood I have had a fancy for boats, and have seldom been without a share, usually more or less fractional, in a rather indeterminate number of punts and wherries. But when, for the first time, I found myself at sea as Commodore of a fleet of armed steamers,—for even the Ben De Ford boasted a six-pounder or so,—it seemed rather an unexpected promotion. But it is a characteristic of army life, that one adapts one's self, as coolly as in a dream, to the most novel responsibilities. One sits on court-martial, for instance, and decides on the life of a fellow-creature, without being asked any inconvenient questions as to previous knowledge of Blackstone; and after such an experience, shall one shrink from wrecking a steamer or two in the cause of the nation? So I placidly accepted my naval establishment, as if it were a new form of boat-club, and looked over the charts, balancing between one river and another, as if deciding whether to pull up or down Lake Quinsigamond. If military life ever contemplated the exercise of the virtue of humility under any circumstances this would perhaps have been a good opportunity to begin its practice. But as the "Regulations" clearly contemplated nothing of the kind, and as I had never met with any precedent which looked in that direction, I had learned to check promptly all such weak proclivities.

Captain Hallett proved the most frank and manly of sailors, and did everything for our comfort. He was soon warm in his praises of the demeanor of our men, which was very pleasant to hear, as this was the first time that colored soldiers in any number had been conveyed on board a transport, and I know of no place where a white volunteer appears to so much disadvantage. His mind craves occupation, his body is intensely uncomfortable, the daily emergency is not great enough to call out his heroic qualities, and he is apt to be surly, discontented, and impatient even of sanitary rules. The Southern black soldier, on the other hand, is seldom sea-sick (at least, such is my experience), and, if properly managed, is equally contented, whether idle or busy; he is, moreover, so docile that all needful rules are executed with cheerful acquiescence, and the quarters can therefore be kept clean and wholesome. Very forlorn faces were soon visible among the officers in the cabin, but I rarely saw such among the men.

Union Wharf

Pleasant still seemed our enterprise, as we anchored at early morning in the quiet waters of St. Simon's Sound, and saw the light fall softly on the beach and the low bluffs, on the picturesque plantation-houses which nestled there, and the graceful naval vessels that lay at anchor before us. When we afterwards landed the air had that peculiar Mediterranean translucency which Southern islands wear; and the plantation we visited had the loveliest tropical garden, though tangled and desolate, which I have ever seen in the South. The deserted house was embowered In great blossoming shrubs, and filled with hyacinthine odors, among which predominated that of the little Chickasaw roses which everywhere bloomed and trailed around. There were fig-trees and date-palms, crape-myrtles and wax-myrtles, Mexican agaves and English ivies, japonicas, bananas, oranges, lemons, oleanders, jonquils, great cactuses, and wild Florida lilies. This was not the plantation which Mrs. Kemble has since made historic, although that was on the same island; and I could not waste much sentiment over it, for it had belonged to a Northern renegade, Thomas Butler King. Yet I felt then, as I have felt a hundred times since, an emotion of heart-sickness at this desecration of a homestead,—and especially when, looking from a bare upper window of the empty house upon a range of broad, flat, sunny roofs, such as children love to play on, I thought how that place might have been loved by yet Innocent hearts, and I mourned anew the sacrilege of war.

Admiral Samuel F. Dupont

I had visited the flag-ship Wabash ere we left Port Royal Harbor, and had obtained a very kind letter of introduction from Admiral Dupont, that stately and courtly potentate, elegant as one's ideal French marquis; and under these credentials I received polite attention from the naval officers at St. Simon's,—Acting Volunteer Lieutenant Budd, of the gunboat Potomska, and Acting Master Moses, of the barque Fernandina. They made valuable suggestions in regard to the different rivers along the coast, and gave vivid descriptions of the last previous trip up the St. Mary's undertaken by Captain Stevens, U.S.N., in the gunboat Ottawa, when he had to fight his way past batteries at every bluff in descending the narrow and rapid stream. I was warned that no resistance would be offered to the ascent, but only to our return; and was further cautioned against the mistake, then common, of underrating the courage of the Rebels. "It proved impossible to dislodge those fellows from the banks," my informant said; "they had dug rifle-pits, and swarmed like hornets, and when fairly silenced in one direction they were sure to open upon us from another." All this sounded alarming, but it was nine months since the event had happened; and although nothing had gone up the river meanwhile, I counted on less resistance now. And something must be risked anywhere.

We were delayed all that day in waiting for our consort, and improved our time by verifying certain rumors about a quantity of new railroad-iron which was said to be concealed in the abandoned Rebel forts on St. Simon's and Jekyll Islands, and which would have much value at Port Royal, if we could unearth it. Some of our men had worked upon these very batteries, so that they could easily guide us; and by the additional discovery of a large flat-boat we were enabled to go to work in earnest upon the removal of the treasure. These iron bars, surmounted by a dozen feet of sand, formed an invulnerable roof for the magazines and bomb-proofs of the fort, and the men enjoyed demolishing them far more than they had relished their construction. Though the day was the 24th of January, 1863, the sun was very oppressive upon the sands; but all were in the highest spirits, and worked with the greatest zeal. The men seemed to regard these massive bars as their first trophies; and if the rails had been wreathed with roses, they could not have been got out in more holiday style. Nearly a hundred were obtained that day, besides a quantity of five-inch plank with which to barricade the very conspicuous pilot-houses of the John Adams. Still another day we were delayed, and could still keep at this work, not neglecting some foraging on the island from which horses, cattle, and agricultural implements were to be removed, and the few remaining colored families transferred to Fernandina. I had now become quite anxious about the missing steamboat, as the inner passage, by which alone she could arrive, was exposed at certain points to fire from Rebel batteries, and it would have been unpleasant to begin with a disaster. I remember that, as I stood on deck, in the still and misty evening, listening with strained senses for some sound of approach, I heard a low continuous noise from the distance, more wild and desolate than anything in my memory can parallel. It came from within the vast girdle of mist, and seemed like the cry of a myriad of lost souls upon the horizon's verge; it was Dante become audible: and yet it was but the accumulated cries of innumerable seafowl at the entrance of the outer bay.

Steamboat Planter

Late that night the Planter arrived. We left St. Simon's on the following morning, reached Fort Clinch by four o'clock, and there transferring two hundred men to the very scanty quarters of the John Adams, allowed the larger transport to go into Fernandina, while the two other vessels were to ascend the St. Mary's River, unless (as proved inevitable in the end) the defects in the boiler of the Planter should oblige her to remain behind. That night I proposed to make a sort of trial-trip up stream, as far as Township landing, some fifteen miles, there to pay our respects to Captain Clark's company of cavalry, whose camp was reported to lie near by. This was included in Corporal Sutton's programme, and seemed to me more inviting, and far more useful to the men, than any amount of mere foraging. The thing really desirable appeared to be to get them under fire as soon as possible, and to teach them, by a few small successes, the application of what they had learned in camp.

I had ascertained that the camp of this company lay five miles from the landing, and was accessible by two roads, one of which was a lumber-path, not commonly used, but which Corporal Sutton had helped to construct, and along which he could easily guide us. The plan was to go by night, surround the house and negro cabins at the landing (to prevent an alarm from being given), then to take the side path, and if all went well, to surprise the camp; but if they got notice of our approach, through their pickets, we should, at worst, have a fight, in which the best man must win.

The moon was bright, and the river swift, but easy of navigation thus far. Just below Township I landed a small advance force, to surround the houses silently. With them went Corporal Sutton; and when, after rounding the point, I went on shore with a larger body of men, he met me with a silent chuckle of delight, and with the information that there was a negro in a neighboring cabin who had just come from the Rebel camp, and could give the latest information. While he hunted up this valuable auxiliary, I mustered my detachment, winnowing out the men who had coughs (not a few), and sending them ignominiously on board again: a process I had regularly to perform, during this first season of catarrh, on all occasions where quiet was needed. The only exception tolerated at this time was in the case of one man who offered a solemn pledge, that, if unable to restrain his cough, he would lie down on the ground, scrape a little hole, and cough into it unheard. The ingenuity of this proposition was irresistible, and the eager patient was allowed to pass muster.

It was after midnight when we set off upon our excursion. I had about a hundred men, marching by the flank, with a small advanced guard, and also a few flankers, where the ground permitted. I put my Florida company at the head of the column, and had by my side Captain Metcalf, an excellent officer, and Sergeant Mclntyre, his first sergeant. We plunged presently in pine woods, whose resinous smell

Emancipation Proclamation

I can still remember. Corporal Sutton marched near me, with his captured negro guide, whose first fear and sullenness had yielded to the magic news of the President's Proclamation, then just issued, of which Governor Andrew had sent me a large printed supply;—we seldom found men who could read it, but they all seemed to feel more secure when they held it in their hands. We marched on through the woods, with no sound but the peeping of the frogs in a neighboring marsh, and the occasional yelping of a dog, as we passed the hut of some "cracker." This yelping always made Corporal Sutton uneasy; dogs are the detective officers of Slavery's police.

We had halted once or twice to close up the ranks, and had marched some two miles, seeing and hearing nothing more. I had got all I could out of our new guide, and was striding on, rapt in pleasing contemplation. All had gone so smoothly that I had merely to fancy the rest as being equally smooth. Already I fancied our little detachment bursting out of the woods, in swift surprise, upon the Rebel quarters,—already the opposing commander, after hastily firing a charge or two from his revolver (of course above my head), had yielded at discretion, and was gracefully tendering, in a stage attitude, his unavailing sword,—when suddenly—

There was a trampling of feet among the advanced guard as they came confusedly to a halt, and almost at the same instant a more ominous sound, as of galloping horses in the path before us. The moonlight outside the woods gave that dimness of atmosphere within which is more bewildering than darkness, because the eyes cannot adapt themselves to it so well. Yet I fancied, and others aver, that they saw the leader of an approaching party mounted on a white horse and reining up in the pathway; others, again, declare that he drew a pistol from the holster and took aim; others heard the words, "Charge in upon them! Surround them!" But all this was confused by the opening rifle-shots of our advanced guard, and, as clear observation was impossible, I made the men fix their bayonets and kneel in the cover on each side the pathway, and I saw with delight the brave fellows, with Sergeant Mclntyre at their head, settling down in the grass as coolly and warily as if wild turkeys were the only game. Perhaps at the first shot a man fell at my elbow. I felt it no more than if a tree had fallen,—I was so busy watching my own men and the enemy, and planning what to do next. Some of our soldiers, misunderstanding the order, "Fix bayonets," were actually charging with them, dashing off into the dim woods, with nothing to charge at but the vanishing tail of an imaginary horse,—for we could really see nothing. This zeal I noted with pleasure, and also with anxiety, as our greatest danger was from confusion and scattering; and for infantry to pursue cavalry would be a novel enterprise. Captain Metcalf stood by me well in keeping the men steady, as did Assistant Surgeon Minor, and Lieutenant, now Captain, Jackson. How the men in the rear were behaving I could not tell,—not so coolly, I afterwards found, because they were more entirely bewildered, supposing, until the shots came, that the column had simply halted for a moment's rest, as had been done once or twice before. They did not know who or where their assailants might be, and the fall of the man beside me created a hasty rumor that I was killed, so that it was on the whole an alarming experience for them. They kept together very tolerably, however, while our assailants, dividing, rode along on each side through the open pine-barren, firing into our ranks, but mostly over the heads of the men. My soldiers in turn fired rapidly,—too rapidly, being yet beginners,—and it was evident that, dim as it was, both sides had opportunity to do some execution.

I could hardly tell whether the fight had lasted ten minutes or an hour, when, as the enemy's fire had evidently ceased or slackened, I gave the order to cease firing. But it was very difficult at first to make them desist: the taste of gunpowder was too intoxicating. One of them was heard to mutter, indignantly, "Why de Cunnel order Cease firing, when de Secesh blazin' away at de rate ob ten dollar a day?" Every incidental occurrence seemed somehow to engrave itself upon my perceptions, without interrupting the main course of thought. Thus I know, that, in one of the pauses of the affair, there came wailing through the woods a cracked female voice, as if calling back some stray husband who had run out to join in the affray, "John, John, are you going to leave me, John? Are you going to let me and the children be killed, John?" I suppose the poor thing's fears of gunpowder were very genuine; but it was such a wailing squeak, and so infinitely ludicrous, and John was probably ensconced so very safely in some hollow tree, that I could see some of the men showing all their white teeth in the very midst of the fight. But soon this sound, with all others, had ceased, and left us in peaceful possession of the field.

I have made the more of this little affair because it was the first stand-up fight in which my men had been engaged, though they had been under fire, in an irregular way, in their small early expeditions. To me personally the event was of the greatest value: it had given us all an opportunity to test each other, and our abstract surmises were changed into positive knowledge. Hereafter it was of small importance what nonsense might be talked or written about colored troops; so long as mine did not flinch, it made no difference to me. My brave young officers, themselves mostly new to danger, viewed the matter much as I did; and yet we were under bonds of life and death to form a correct opinion, which was more than could be said of the Northern editors, and our verdict was proportionately of greater value.

I was convinced from appearances that we had been victorious, so far, though I could not suppose that this would be the last of it. We knew neither the numbers of the enemy, nor their plans, nor their present condition: whether they had surprised us or whether we had surprised them was all a mystery. Corporal Sutton was urgent to go on and complete the enterprise. All my impulses said the same thing; but then I had the most explicit injunctions from General Saxton to risk as little as possible in this first enterprise, because of the fatal effect on public sentiment of even an honorable defeat. We had now an honorable victory, so far as it went; the officers and men around me were in good spirits, but the rest of the column might be nervous; and it seemed so important to make the first fight an entire success, that I thought it wiser to let well alone; nor have I ever changed this opinion. For one's self, Montrose's verse may be well applied, "To win or lose it all." But one has no right to deal thus lightly with the fortunes of a race, and that was the weight which I always felt as resting on our action. If my raw infantry force had stood unflinchingly a night-surprise from "de boss cavalry," as they reverentially termed them, I felt that a good beginning had been made. All hope of surprising the enemy's camp was now at an end; I was willing and ready to fight the cavalry over again, but it seemed wiser that we, not they, should select the ground.

Attending to the wounded, therefore, and making as we best could stretchers for those who were to be carried, including the remains of the man killed at the first discharge (Private William Parsons of Company G), and others who seemed at the point of death, we marched through the woods to the landing,—expecting at every moment to be involved in another fight. This not occurring, I was more than ever satisfied that we had won a victory; for it was obvious that a mounted force would not allow a detachment of infantry to march two miles through open woods by night without renewing the fight, unless they themselves had suffered a good deal. On arrival at the landing, seeing that there was to be no immediate affray, I sent most of the men on board, and called for volunteers to remain on shore with me and hold the plantation-house till morning. They eagerly offered; and I was glad to see them, when posted as sentinels by Lieutenants Hyde and Jackson, who stayed with me, pace their beats as steadily and challenge as coolly as veterans, though of course there was some powder wasted on imaginary foes. Greatly to my surprise, however, we had no other enemies to encounter. We did not yet know that we had killed the first lieutenant of the cavalry, and that our opponents had retreated to the woods in dismay, without daring to return to their camp. This at least was the account we heard from prisoners afterwards, and was evidently the tale current in the neighborhood, though the statements published in Southern newspapers did not correspond. Admitting the death of Lieutenant Jones, the Tallahassee Floridian of February 14th stated that "Captain Clark, finding the enemy in strong force, fell back with his command to camp, and removed his ordnance and commissary and other stores, with twelve negroes on their way to the enemy, captured on that day."

In the morning, my invaluable surgeon, Dr. Rogers, sent me his report of killed and wounded; and I have been since permitted to make the following extracts from his notes: "One man killed instantly by ball through the heart, and seven wounded, one of whom will die. Braver men never lived. One man with two bullet-holes through the large muscles of the shoulders and neck brought off from the scene of action, two miles distant, two muskets; and not a murmur has escaped his lips. Another, Robert Sutton, with three wounds,—one of which, being on the skull, may cost him his life,—would not report himself till compelled to do so by his officers. While dressing his wounds, he quietly talked of what they had done, and of what they yet could do. To-day I have had the Colonel order him to obey me. He is perfectly quiet and cool, but takes this whole affair with the religious bearing of a man who realizes that freedom is sweeter than life. Yet another soldier did not report himself at all, but remained all night on guard, and possibly I should not have known of his having had a buck-shot in his shoulder, if some duty requiring a sound shoulder had not been required of him to-day." This last, it may be added, had persuaded a comrade to dig out the buck-shot, for fear of being ordered on the sick-list. And one of those who were carried to the vessel—a man wounded through the lungs—asked only if I were safe, the contrary having been reported. An officer may be pardoned some enthusiasm for such men as these.

The anxious night having passed away without an attack, another problem opened with the morning. For the first time, my officers and men found themselves in possession of an enemy's abode; and though there was but little temptation to plunder, I knew that I must here begin to draw the line. I had long since resolved to prohibit absolutely all indiscriminate pilfering and wanton outrage, and to allow nothing to be taken or destroyed but by proper authority. The men, to my great satisfaction, entered into this view at once, and so did (perhaps a shade less readily, in some cases) the officers. The greatest trouble was with the steamboat hands, and I resolved to let them go ashore as little as possible. Most articles of furniture were already, however, before our visit, gone from the plantation-house, which was now used only as a picket-station. The only valuable article was a pianoforte, for which a regular packing-box lay invitingly ready outside. I had made up my mind, in accordance with the orders given to naval commanders in that department,* to burn all picket-stations, and all villages from which I should be covertly attacked, and nothing else; and as this house was destined to the flames, I should have left the piano in it, but for the seductions of that box. With such a receptacle all ready, even to the cover, it would have seemed like flying in the face of Providence not to put the piano in. I ordered it removed, therefore, and afterwards presented it to the school for colored children at Fernandina. This I mention because it was the only article of property I ever took, or knowingly suffered to be taken, in the enemy's country, save for legitimate military uses, from first to last; nor would I have taken this, but for the thought of the school, and, as aforesaid, the temptation of the box. If any other officer has been more rigid, with equal opportunities, let him cast the first stone.

* "It is my desire to avoid the destruction of private property, unless used for picket or guard-stations, or for other military purposes, by the enemy.... Of course, if fired upon from any place, it is your duty, if possible, to destroy it." Letter of ADMIRAL DUPONT, commanding South Atlantic Squadron, to LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER HUGHES of United States Gunboat Mohawk, Fernandina Harbor.

I think the zest with which the men finally set fire to the house at my order was enhanced by this previous abstemiousness; but there is a fearful fascination in the use of fire, which every child knows in the abstract, and which I found to hold true in the practice. On our way down river we had opportunity to test this again.

The ruined town of St. Mary's had at that time a bad reputation, among both naval and military men. Lying but a short distance above Fernandina, on the Georgia side, it was occasionally visited by our gunboats. I was informed that the only residents of the town were three old women, who were apparently kept there as spies,—that, on our approach, the aged crones would come out and wave white handkerchiefs,—that they would receive us hospitably, profess to be profoundly loyal, and exhibit a portrait of Washington,—that they would solemnly assure us that no Rebel pickets had been there for many weeks,—but that in the adjoining yard we should find fresh horse-tracks, and that we should be fired upon by guerillas the moment we left the wharf. My officers had been much excited by these tales; and I had assured them that, if this programme were literally carried out, we would straightway return and burn the town, or what was left of it, for our share. It was essential to show my officers and men that, while rigid against irregular outrage, we could still be inexorable against the enemy.

We had previously planned to stop at this town, on our way down river, for some valuable lumber which we had espied on a wharf; and gliding down the swift current, shelling a few bluffs as we passed, we soon reached it. Punctual as the figures in a panorama appeared the old ladies with their white handkerchiefs. Taking possession of the town, much of which had previously been destroyed by the gunboats, and stationing the color-guard, to their infinite delight, in the cupola of the most conspicuous house, I deployed skirmishers along the exposed suburb, and set a detail of men at work on the lumber. After a stately and decorous interview with the queens of society of St. Mary's,—is it Scott who says that nothing improves the manners like piracy?—I peacefully withdrew the men when the work was done. There were faces of disappointment among the officers,—for all felt a spirit of mischief after the last night's adventure,—when, just as we had fairly swung out into the stream and were under way, there came, like the sudden burst of a tropical tornado, a regular little hail-storm of bullets into the open end of the boat, driving every gunner in an instant from his post, and surprising even those who were looking to be surprised. The shock was but for a second; and though the bullets had pattered precisely like the sound of hail upon the iron cannon, yet nobody was hurt. With very respectable promptness, order was restored, our own shells were flying into the woods from which the attack proceeded, and we were steaming up to the wharf again, according to promise.

Who shall describe the theatrical attitudes assumed by the old ladies as they reappeared at the front-door,—being luckily out of direct range,—and set the handkerchiefs in wilder motion than ever? They brandished them, they twirled them after the manner of the domestic mop, they clasped their hands, handkerchiefs included. Meanwhile their friends in the wood popped away steadily at us, with small effect; and occasionally an invisible field-piece thundered feebly from another quarter, with equally invisible results. Reaching the wharf, one company, under Lieutenant (now Captain) Danil-son, was promptly deployed in search of our assailants, who soon grew silent. Not so the old ladies, when I announced to them my purpose, and added, with extreme regret, that, as the wind was high, I should burn only that half of the town which lay to leeward of their house, which did not, after all, amount to much. Between gratitude for this degree of mercy, and imploring appeals for greater, the treacherous old ladies manoeuvred with clasped hands and demonstrative handkerchiefs around me, impairing the effect of their eloquence by constantly addressing me as "Mr. Captain"; for I have observed, that, while the sternest officer is greatly propitiated by attributing to him a rank a little higher than his own, yet no one is ever mollified by an error in the opposite direction. I tried, however, to disregard such low considerations, and to strike the correct mean between the sublime patriot and the unsanctified incendiary, while I could find no refuge from weak contrition save in greater and greater depths of courtesy; and so melodramatic became our interview that some of the soldiers still maintain that "dem dar ole Secesh women been a-gwine for kiss de Cunnel," before we ended. But of this monstrous accusation I wish to register an explicit denial, once for all.

Colonel Hawley, of the Seventh Connecticut

Dropping down to Fernandina unmolested after this affair, we were kindly received by the military and naval commanders,—Colonel Hawley, of the Seventh Connecticut (now Brigadier-General Hawley), and Lieutenant-Commander Hughes, of the gunboat Mohawk. It turned out very opportunely that both of these officers had special errands to suggest still farther up the St. Mary's, and precisely in the region where I wished to go. Colonel Hawley showed me a letter from the War Department, requesting him to ascertain the possibility of obtaining a supply of brick for Fort Clinch from the brickyard which had furnished the original materials, but which had not been visited since the perilous river-trip of the Ottawa. Lieutenant Hughes wished to obtain information for the Admiral respecting a Rebel steamer,—the Berosa,—said to be lying somewhere up the river, and awaiting her chance to run the blockade. I jumped at the opportunity. Berosa and brickyard,—both were near Wood-stock, the former home of Corporal Sutton; he was ready and eager to pilot us up the river; the moon would be just right that evening, setting at 3h. 19m. A.M.; and our boat was precisely the one to undertake the expedition. Its double-headed shape was just what was needed in that swift and crooked stream; the exposed pilot-houses had been tolerably barricaded with the thick planks from St. Simon's; and we further obtained some sand-bags from Fort Clinch, through the aid of Captain Sears, the officer in charge, who had originally suggested the expedition after brick. In return for this aid, the Planter was sent back to the wharf at St. Mary's, to bring away a considerable supply of the same precious article, which we had observed near the wharf. Meanwhile the John Adams was coaling from naval supplies, through the kindness of Lieutenant Hughes; and the Ben De Ford was taking in the lumber which we had yesterday brought down. It was a great disappointment to be unable to take the latter vessel up the river; but I was unwillingly convinced that, though the depth of water might be sufficient, yet her length would be unmanageable in the swift current and sharp turns. The Planter must also be sent on a separate cruise, as her weak and disabled machinery made her useless for my purpose. Two hundred men were therefore transferred, as before, to the narrow hold of the John Adams, in addition to the company permanently stationed on board to work the guns. At seven o'clock on the evening of January 29th, beneath a lovely moon, we steamed up the river.

Never shall I forget the mystery and excitement of that night. I know nothing in life more fascinating than the nocturnal ascent of an unknown river, leading far into an enemy's country, where one glides in the dim moonlight between dark hills and meadows, each turn of the channel making it seem like an inland lake, and cutting you off as by a barrier from all behind,—with no sign of human life, but an occasional picket-fire left glimmering beneath the bank, or the yelp of a dog from some low-lying plantation. On such occasions every nerve is strained to its utmost tension; all dreams of romance appear to promise immediate fulfilment; all lights on board the vessel are obscured, loud voices are hushed; you fancy a thousand men on shore, and yet see nothing; the lonely river, unaccustomed to furrowing keels, lapses by the vessel with a treacherous sound; and all the senses are merged in a sort of anxious trance. Three tunes I have had in full perfection this fascinating experience; but that night was the first, and its zest was the keenest. It will come back to me in dreams, if I live a thousand years.

I feared no attack during our ascent,—that danger was for our return; but I feared the intricate navigation of the river, though I did not fully know, till the actual experience, how dangerous it was. We passed without trouble far above the scene of our first fight,—the Battle of the Hundred Pines, as my officers had baptized it; and ever, as we ascended, the banks grew steeper, the current swifter, the channel more tortuous and more encumbered with projecting branches and drifting wood. No piloting less skilful than that of Corporal Sutton and his mate, James Bezzard, could have carried us through, I thought; and no side-wheel steamer less strong than a ferry-boat could have borne the crash and force with which we struck the wooded banks of the river. But the powerful paddles, built to break the Northern ice, could crush the Southern pine as well; and we came safely out of entanglements that at first seemed formidable. We had the tide with us, which makes steering far more difficult; and, in the sharp angles of the river, there was often no resource but to run the bow boldly on shore, let the stern swing round, and then reverse the motion. As the reversing machinery was generally out of order, the engineer stupid or frightened, and the captain excited, this involved moments of tolerably concentrated anxiety. Eight times we grounded in the upper waters, and once lay aground for half an hour; but at last we dropped anchor before the little town of Woodstock, after moonset and an hour before daybreak, just as I had planned, and so quietly that scarcely a dog barked, and not a soul in the town, as we afterwards found, knew of our arrival.

As silently as possible, the great flat-boat which we had brought from St. Simon's was filled with men. Major Strong was sent on shore with two companies,—those of Captain James and Captain Metcalf,—with instructions to surround the town quietly, allow no one to leave it, molest no one, and hold as temporary prisoners every man whom he found. I watched them push off into the darkness, got the remaining force ready to land, and then paced the deck for an hour in silent watchfulness, waiting for rifle-shots. Not a sound came from the shore, save the barking of dogs and the morning crow of cocks; the time seemed interminable; but when daylight came, I landed, and found a pair of scarlet trousers pacing on their beat before every house in the village, and a small squad of prisoners, stunted and forlorn as Falstaff's ragged regiment, already hi hand. I observed with delight the good demeanor of my men towards these forlorn Anglo-Saxons, and towards the more tumultuous women. Even one soldier, who threatened to throw an old termagant into the river, took care to append the courteous epithet "Madam."

I took a survey of the premises. The chief house, a pretty one with picturesque outbuildings, was that of Mrs. A., who owned the mills and lumber-wharves adjoining. The wealth of these wharves had not been exaggerated. There was lumber enough to freight half a dozen steamers, and I half regretted that I had agreed to take down a freight of bricks instead. Further researches made me grateful that I had already explained to my men the difference between public foraging and private plunder. Along the river-bank I found building after building crowded with costly furniture, all neatly packed, just as it was sent up from St. Mary's when that town was abandoned. Pianos were a drug; china, glass-ware, mahogany, pictures, all were here. And here were my men, who knew that their own labor had earned for their masters these luxuries, or such as these; their own wives and children were still sleeping on the floor, perhaps, at Beaufort or Fernandina; and yet they submitted, almost without a murmur, to the enforced abstinence. Bed and bedding for our hospitals they might take from those store-rooms,—such as the surgeon selected,—also an old flag which we found in a corner, and an old field-piece (which the regiment still possesses),—but after this the doors were closed and left unmolested. It cost a struggle to some of the men, whose wives were destitute, I know; but their pride was very easily touched, and when this abstinence was once recognized as a rule, they claimed it as an honor, in this and all succeeding expeditions. I flatter myself that, if they had once been set upon wholesale plundering, they would have done it as thoroughly as their betters; but I have always been infinitely grateful, both for the credit and for the discipline of the regiment,—as well as for the men's subsequent lives,—that the opposite method was adopted.

When the morning was a little advanced, I called on Mrs. A., who received me in quite a stately way at her own door with "To what am I indebted for the honor of this visit, Sir?" The foreign name of the family, and the tropical look of the buildings, made it seem (as, indeed, did all the rest of the adventure) like a chapter out of "Amyas Leigh"; but as I had happened to hear that the lady herself was a Philadelphian, and her deceased husband a New-Yorker, I could not feel even that modicum of reverence due to sincere Southerners. However, I wished to present my credentials; so, calling up my companion, I said that I believed she had been previously acquainted with Corporal Robert Sutton? I never saw a finer bit of unutterable indignation than came over the face of my hostess, as she slowly recognized him. She drew herself up, and dropped out the monosyllables of her answer as if they were so many drops of nitric acid. "Ah," quoth my lady, "we called him Bob!"

It was a group for a painter. The whole drama of the war seemed to reverse itself in an instant, and my tall, well-dressed, imposing, philosophic Corporal dropped down the immeasurable depth into a mere plantation "Bob" again. So at least in my imagination; not to that person himself. Too essentially dignified in his nature to be moved by words where substantial realities were in question, he simply turned from the lady, touched his hat to me, and asked if I would wish to see the slave-jail, as he had the keys in his possession.

If he fancied that I was in danger of being overcome by blandishments, and needed to be recalled to realities, it was a master-stroke.

I must say that, when the door of that villanous edifice was thrown open before me, I felt glad that my main interview with its lady proprietor had passed before I saw it. It was a small building, like a Northern corn-barn, and seemed to have as prominent and as legitimate a place among the outbuildings of the establishment. In the middle of the door was a large staple with a rusty chain, like an ox-chain, for fastening a victim down. When the door had been opened after the death of the late proprietor, my informant said, a man was found padlocked in that chain. We found also three pairs of stocks of various construction, two of which had smaller as well as larger holes, evidently for the feet of women or children. In a building near by we found something far more complicated, which was perfectly unintelligible till the men explained all its parts: a machine so contrived that a person once imprisoned in it could neither sit, stand, nor lie, but must support the body half raised, in a position scarcely endurable. I have since bitterly reproached myself for leaving this piece of ingenuity behind; but it would have cost much labor to remove it, and to bring away the other trophies seemed then enough. I remember the unutterable loathing with which I leaned against the door of that prison-house; I had thought myself seasoned to any conceivable horrors of Slavery, but it seemed as if the visible presence of that den of sin would choke me. Of course it would have been burned to the ground by us, but that this would have involved the sacrifice of every other building and all the piles of lumber, and for the moment it seemed as if the sacrifice would be righteous. But I forbore, and only took as trophies the instruments of torture and the keys of the jail.

We found but few colored people in this vicinity; some we brought away with us, and an old man and woman preferred to remain. All the white males whom we found I took as hostages, in order to shield us, if possible, from attack on our way down river, explaining to them that they would be put on shore when the dangerous points were passed. I knew that their wives could easily send notice of this fact to the Rebel forces along the river. My hostages were a forlorn-looking set of "crackers," far inferior to our soldiers in physique, and yet quite equal, the latter declared, to the average material of the Southern armies. None were in uniform, but this proved nothing as to their being soldiers. One of them, a mere boy, was captured at his own door, with gun in hand. It was a fowling-piece, which he used only, as his mother plaintively assured me, "to shoot little birds with." As the guileless youth had for this purpose loaded the gun with eighteen buck-shot, we thought it justifiable to confiscate both the weapon and the owner, in mercy to the birds.

We took from this place, for the use of the army, a flock of some thirty sheep, forty bushels of rice, some other provisions, tools, oars, and a little lumber, leaving all possible space for the bricks which we expected to obtain just below. I should have gone farther up the river, but for a dangerous boom which kept back a great number of logs in a large brook that here fell into the St. Mary's; the stream ran with force, and if the Rebels had wit enough to do it, they might in ten minutes so choke the river with drift-wood as infinitely to enhance our troubles. So we dropped down stream a mile or two, found the very brickyard from which Fort Clinch had been constructed,—still stored with bricks, and seemingly unprotected. Here Sergeant Rivers again planted his standard, and the men toiled eagerly, for several hours, in loading our boat to the utmost with the bricks. Meanwhile we questioned black and white witnesses, and learned for the first tune that the Rebels admitted a repulse at Township Landing, and that Lieutenant Jones and ten of their number were killed,—though this I fancy to have been an exaggeration. They also declared that the mysterious steamer Berosa was lying at the head of the river, but was a broken-down and worthless affair, and would never get to sea. The result has since proved this; for the vessel subsequently ran the blockade and foundered near shore, the crew barely escaping with their lives. I had the pleasure, as it happened, of being the first person to forward this information to Admiral Dupont, when it came through the pickets, many months after,—thus concluding my report on the Berosa.

Before the work at the yard was over the pickets reported mounted men in the woods near by, as had previously been the report at Woodstock. This admonished us to lose no time; and as we left the wharf, immediate arrangements were made to have the gun crews all in readiness, and to keep the rest of the men below, since their musketry would be of little use now, and I did not propose to risk a life unnecessarily. The chief obstacle to this was their own eagerness; penned down on one side, they popped up on the other; their officers, too, were eager to see what was going on, and were almost as hard to cork down as the men. Add to this, that the vessel was now very crowded, and that I had to be chiefly on the hurricane-deck with the pilots. Captain Clifton, master of the vessel, was brave to excess, and as much excited as the men; he could no more be kept in the little pilot-house than they below; and when we had passed one or two bluffs, with no sign of an enemy, he grew more and more irrepressible, and exposed himself conspicuously on the upper deck. Perhaps we all were a little lulled by apparent safety; for myself, I lay down for a moment on a settee in a state-room, having been on my feet, almost without cessation, for twenty-four hours.

Suddenly there swept down from a bluff above us, on the Georgia side, a mingling of shout and roar and rattle as of a tornado let loose; and as a storm of bullets came pelting against the sides of the vessel, and through a window, there went up a shrill answering shout from our own men. It took but an instant for me to reach the gun-deck. After all my efforts the men had swarmed once more from below, and already, crowding at both ends of the boat, were loading and firing with inconceivable rapidity, shouting to each other, "Nebber gib it up!" and of course having no steady aim, as the vessel glided and whirled in the swift current. Meanwhile the officers in charge of the large guns had their crews in order, and our shells began to fly over the bluffs, which, as we now saw, should have been shelled in advance, only that we had to economize ammunition. The other soldiers I drove below, almost by main force, with the aid of their officers, who behaved exceedingly well, giving the men leave to fire from the open port-holes which lined the lower deck, almost at the water's level. In the very midst of the melee Major Strong came from the upper deck, with a face of horror, and whispered to me, "Captain Clifton was killed at the first shot by my side."

St. Mary’s River and Fernandina Harbor

If he had said that the vessel was on fire the shock would hardly have been greater. Of course, the military commander on board a steamer is almost as helpless as an unarmed man, so far as the risks of water go. A seaman must command there. In the hazardous voyage of last night, I had learned, though unjustly, to distrust every official on board the steamboat except this excitable, brave, warm-hearted sailor; and now, among these added dangers, to lose him! The responsibility for his life also thrilled me; he was not among my soldiers, and yet he was killed. I thought of his wife and children, of whom he had spoken; but one learns to think rapidly in war, and, cautioning the Major to silence, I went up to the hurricane-deck and drew in the helpless body, that it should be safe from further desecration, and then looked to see where we were.

We were now gliding past a safe reach of marsh, while our assailants were riding by cross-paths to attack us at the next bluff. It was Reed's Bluff where we were first attacked, and Scrubby Bluff, I think, was next. They were shelled in advance, but swarmed manfully to the banks again as we swept round one of the sharp angles of the stream beneath their fire. My men were now pretty well imprisoned below in the hot and crowded hold, and actually fought each other, the officers afterwards said, for places at the open port-holes, from which to aim. Others implored to be landed, exclaiming that they "supposed de Cunnel knew best," but it was "mighty mean" to be shut up down below, when they might be "fightin' de Secesh in de clar field." This clear field, and no favor, was what they thenceforward sighed for. But in such difficult navigation it would have been madness to think of landing, although one daring Rebel actually sprang upon the large boat which we towed astern, where he was shot down by one of our sergeants. This boat was soon after swamped and abandoned, then taken and repaired by the Rebels at a later date, and finally, by a piece of dramatic completeness, was seized by a party of fugitive slaves, who escaped in it to our lines, and some of whom enlisted in my own regiment.

It has always been rather a mystery to me why the Rebels did not fell a few trees across the stream at some of the many sharp angles where we might so easily have been thus imprisoned. This, however, they did not attempt, and with the skilful pilotage of our trusty Corporal,—philosophic as Socrates through all the din, and occasionally relieving his mind by taking a shot with his rifle through the high portholes of the pilot-house,—we glided safely on. The steamer did not ground once on the descent, and the mate in command, Mr. Smith, did his duty very well. The plank sheathing of the pilot-house was penetrated by few bullets, though struck by so many outside that it was visited as a curiosity after our return; and even among the gun-crews, though they had no protection, not a man was hurt. As we approached some wooded bluff, usually on the Georgia side, we could see galloping along the hillside what seemed a regiment of mounted riflemen, and could see our shell scatter them ere we approached. Shelling did not, however, prevent a rather fierce fusilade from our old friends of Captain dark's company at Waterman's Bluff, near Township Landing; but even this did no serious damage, and this was the last.

It was of course impossible, while thus running the gauntlet, to put our hostages ashore, and I could only explain to them that they must thank their own friends for their inevitable detention. I was by no means proud of their forlorn appearance, and besought Colonel Hawley to take them off my hands; but he was sending no flags of truce at that time, and liked their looks no better than I did. So I took them to Port Royal, where they were afterwards sent safely across the lines. Our men were pleased at taking them back with us, as they had already said, regretfully, "S'pose we leave dem Secesh at Fernandina, General Saxby won't see 'em,"—as if they were some new natural curiosity, which indeed they were. One soldier further suggested the expediency of keeping them permanently in camp, to be used as marks for the guns of the relieved guard every morning. But this was rather an ebullition of fancy than a sober proposition.

Against these levities I must put a piece of more tragic eloquence, which I took down by night on the steamer's deck from the thrilling harangue of Corporal Adam Allston, one of our most gifted prophets, whose influence over the men was unbounded. "When I heard," he said, "de bombshell a-screamin' troo de woods like de Judgment Day, I said to myself, 'If my head was took off to-night, dey couldn't put my soul in de torments, perceps [except] God was my enemy!' And when de rifle-bullets came whizzin' across de deck, I cried aloud, 'God help my congregation! Boys, load and fire!'"

Fernandina

I must pass briefly over the few remaining days of our cruise. At Fernandina we met the Planter, which had been successful on her separate expedition, and had destroyed extensive salt-works at Crooked River, under charge of the energetic Captain Trowbridge, efficiently aided by Captain Rogers. Our commodities being in part delivered at Fernandina, our decks being full, coal nearly out, and time up, we called once more at St. Simon's Sound, bringing away the remainder of our railroad-iron, with some which the naval officers had previously disinterred, and then steamed back to Beaufort. Arriving there at sunrise (February 2, 1863), I made my way with Dr. Rogers to General Saxton's bedroom, and laid before him the keys and shackles of the slave-prison, with my report of the good conduct of the men,—as Dr. Rogers remarked, a message from heaven and another from hell.

Slight as this expedition now seems among the vast events of the war, the future student of the newspapers of that day will find that it occupied no little space in their columns, so intense was the interest which then attached to the novel experiment of employing black troops. So obvious, too, was the value, during this raid, of their local knowledge and their enthusiasm, that it was impossible not to find in its successes new suggestions for the war. Certainly I would not have consented to repeat the enterprise with the bravest white troops, leaving Corporal Sutton and his mates behind, for I should have expected to fail. For a year after our raid the Upper St. Mary's remained unvisited, till in 1864 the large force with which we held Florida secured peace upon its banks; then Mrs. A. took the oath of allegiance, the Government bought her remaining lumber, and the John Adams again ascended with a detachment of my men under Lieutenant Parker, and brought a portion of it to Fernandina. By a strange turn of fortune, Corporal Sutton (now Sergeant) was at this time in jail at Hilton Head, under sentence of court-martial for an alleged act of mutiny,—an affair in which the general voice of our officers sustained him and condemned his accusers, so that he soon received a full pardon, and was restored in honor to his place in the regiment, which he has ever since held.

Nothing can ever exaggerate the fascinations of war, whether on the largest or smallest scale. When we settled down into camp-life again, it seemed like a butterfly's folding its wings to re-enter the chrysalis. None of us could listen to the crack of a gun without recalling instantly the sharp shots that spilled down from the bluffs of the St. Mary's, or hear a sudden trampling of horsemen by night without recalling the sounds which startled us on the Field of the Hundred Pines. The memory of our raid was preserved in the camp by many legends of adventure, growing vaster and more incredible as time wore on,—and by the morning appeals to the surgeon of some veteran invalids, who could now cut off all reproofs and suspicions with "Doctor, I's been a sickly pusson eber since de expeditious." But to me the most vivid remembrancer was the flock of sheep which we had "lifted." The Post Quartermaster discreetly gave us the charge of them, and they rilled a gap in the landscape and in the larder,—which last had before presented one unvaried round of impenetrable beef. Mr. Obabiah Oldbuck, when he decided to adopt a pastoral life, and assumed the provisional name of Thyrsis, never looked upon his flocks and herds with more unalloyed contentment than I upon that fleecy family. I had been familiar, in Kansas, with the metaphor by which the sentiments of an owner were credited to his property, and had heard of a proslavery colt and an antislavery cow. The fact that these sheep were but recently converted from "Se-cesh" sentiments was their crowning charm. Methought they frisked and fattened in the joy of their deliverance from the shadow of Mrs. A.'s slave-jail, and gladly contemplated translation into mutton-broth for sick or wounded soldiers. The very slaves who once, perchance, were sold at auction with yon aged patriarch of the flock, had now asserted their humanity, and would devour him as hospital rations. Meanwhile our shepherd bore a sharp bayonet without a crook, and I felt myself a peer of Ulysses and Rob Roy,—those sheep-stealers of less elevated aims,—when I met in my daily rides these wandering trophies of our wider wanderings.

CHAPTER III

UP THE ST. JOHN’S

There was not much stirring in the Department of the South early in 1863, and the St. Mary's expedition had afforded a new sensation. Of course the few officers of colored troops, and a larger number who wished to become such, were urgent for further experiments in the same line; and the Florida tax-commissioners were urgent likewise. I well remember the morning when, after some preliminary correspondence, I steamed down from Beaufort, S. C., to Hilton Head, with General Saxton, Judge S., and one or two others, to have an interview on the matter with Major-General Hunter, then commanding the Department.

Hilton Head, in those days, seemed always like some foreign military station in the tropics. The long, low, white buildings, with piazzas and verandas on the water-side; the general impression of heat and lassitude, existence appearing to pulsate only with the sea-breeze; the sandy, almost impassable streets; and the firm, level beach, on which everybody walked who could get there: all these suggested Jamaica or the East Indies. Then the head-quarters at the end of the beach, the Zouave sentinels, the successive anterooms, the lounging aids, the good-natured and easy General,—easy by habit and energetic by impulse,—all had a certain air of Southern languor, rather picturesque, but perhaps not altogether bracing. General Hunter received us, that day, with his usual kindliness; there was a good deal of pleasant chat; Miles O'Reilly was called in to read his latest verses; and then we came to the matter in hand.

Jacksonville, on the St. John's River, in Florida, had been already twice taken and twice evacuated; having been occupied by Brigadier-General Wright, in March, 1862, and by Brigadier-General Brannan, in October of the same year. The second evacuation was by Major-General Hunter's own order, on the avowed ground that a garrison of five thousand was needed to hold the place, and that this force could not be spared. The present proposition was to take and hold it with a brigade of less than a thousand men, carrying, however, arms and uniforms for twice that number, and a month's rations. The claim was, that there were fewer rebel troops in the Department than formerly, and that the St. Mary's expedition had shown the advantage possessed by colored troops, in local knowledge, and in the confidence of the loyal blacks. It was also urged, that it was worth while to risk something, in the effort to hold Florida, and perhaps bring it back into the Union.

My chief aim in the negotiation was to get the men into action, and that of the Florida Commissioners to get them into Florida. Thus far coinciding, we could heartily co-operate; and though General Hunter made some reasonable objections, they were yielded more readily than I had feared; and finally, before half our logical ammunition was exhausted, the desired permission was given, and the thing might be considered as done.

We were now to leave, as we supposed forever, the camp which had thus far been our home. Our vast amount of surplus baggage made a heavy job in the loading, inasmuch as we had no wharf, and everything had to be put on board by means of flat-boats. It was completed by twenty-four hours of steady work; and after some of the usual uncomfortable delays which wait on military expeditions, we were at last afloat.

I had tried to keep the plan as secret as possible, and had requested to have no definite orders, until we should be on board ship. But this larger expedition was less within my own hands than was the St. Mary's affair, and the great reliance for concealment was on certain counter reports, ingeniously set afloat by some of the Florida men. These reports rapidly swelled into the most enormous tales, and by the time they reached the New York newspapers, the expedition was "a great volcano about bursting, whose lava will burn, flow, and destroy," "the sudden appearance in arms of no less than five thousand negroes," "a liberating host," "not the phantom, but the reality, of servile insurrection." What the undertaking actually was may be best seen in the instructions which guided it.*

                  * HEAD-QUARTERS, BEAUFORT, S. C.,

                                         March 5, 1863.

COLONEL,—You will please proceed with your command, the First and Second Regiments South Carolina Volunteers, which are now embarked upon the steamers John Adams, Boston, and Burn-side, to Fernandina, Florida.

Relying upon your military skill and judgment. I shall give you no special directions as to your procedure after you leave Fernandina. I expect, however, that you will occupy Jacksonville, Florida, and intrench yourselves there.

The main objects of your expedition are to carry the proclamation of freedom to the enslaved; to call all loyal men into the service of the United States; to occupy as much of the State of Florida as possible with the forces under your command; and to neglect no means consistent with the usages of civilized warfare to weaken, harass, and annoy those who are in rebellion against the Government of the United States.

Trusting that the blessing of our Heavenly Father will rest upon your noble enterprise,

                                   I am yours, sincerely,

                                                   R. SAXTON,

Brig.-Gen., Mil. Gov. Dept. of the South. Colonel Higginson, Comdg. Expeditionary Corps.

In due time, after touching at Fernandina, we reached the difficult bar of the St. John's, and were piloted safely over. Admiral Dupont had furnished a courteous letter of introduction.* and we were cordially received by Commander Duncan of the Norwich, and Lieutenant Watson, commanding the Uncas. Like all officers on blockade duty, they were impatient of their enforced inaction, and gladly seized the opportunity for a different service. It was some time since they had ascended as high as Jacksonville, for their orders were strict, one vessel's coal was low, the other was in infirm condition, and there were rumors of cotton-clads and torpedoes. But they gladly agreed to escort us up the river, so soon as our own armed gunboat, the John Adams, should arrive,—she being unaccountably delayed.

                          FLAG SHIP WABASH,

   PORT ROYAL HARBOR, S. C., March 6, 1863.

SIR,—I am informed by Major-General Hunter that he is sending Colonel Higginson on an important mission in the southerly part of his Department.

I have not been made acquainted with the objects of this mission, but any assistance that you can offer Colonel Higginson, which will not interfere with your other duties, you are authorized to give.

                Respectfully your obedient servant,

                                            S. F. DUPONT,

                        Rear-Adm. Comdg. S. Atl. Block. Squad.

To the Senior Officer at the different Blockading Stations on the Coast of Georgia and Florida.

We waited twenty-four hours for her, at the sultry mouth of that glassy river, watching the great pelicans which floated lazily on its tide, or sometimes shooting one, to admire the great pouch, into which one of the soldiers could insert his foot, as into a boot. "He hold one quart," said the admiring experimentalist. "Hi! boy," retorted another quickly, "neber you bring dat quart measure in my peck o' corn." The protest came very promptly, and was certainly fair; for the strange receptacle would have held nearly a gallon.

We went on shore, too, and were shown a rather pathetic little garden, which the naval officers had laid out, indulging a dream of vegetables. They lingered over the little microscopic sprouts, pointing them out tenderly, as if they were cradled babies. I have often noticed this touching weakness, in gentlemen of that profession, on lonely stations.

We wandered among the bluffs, too, in the little deserted hamlet called "Pilot Town." The ever-shifting sand had in some cases almost buried the small houses, and had swept around others a circular drift, at a few yards' distance, overtopping then: eaves, and leaving each the untouched citadel of this natural redoubt. There was also a dismantled lighthouse, an object which always seems the most dreary symbol of the barbarism of war, when one considers the national beneficence which reared and kindled it. Despite the service rendered by this once brilliant light, there were many wrecks which had been strown upon the beach, victims of the most formidable of the Southern river-bars. As I stood with my foot on the half-buried ribs of one of these vessels,—so distinctly traced that one might almost fancy them human,—the old pilot, my companion, told me the story of the wreck. The vessel had formerly been in the Cuba trade; and her owner, an American merchant residing in Havana, had christened her for his young daughter. I asked the name, and was startled to recognize that of a favorite young cousin of mine, besides the bones of whose representative I was thus strangely standing, upon this lonely shore.

It was well to have something to relieve the anxiety naturally felt at the delay of the John Adams,—anxiety both for her safety and for the success of our enterprise, The Rebels had repeatedly threatened to burn the whole of Jacksonville, in case of another attack, as they had previously burned its mills and its great hotel. It seemed as if the news of our arrival must surely have travelled thirty miles by this time. All day we watched every smoke that rose among the wooded hills, and consulted the compass and the map, to see if that sign announced the doom of our expected home. At the very last moment of the tide, just in time to cross the bar that day, the missing vessel arrived; all anxieties vanished; I transferred my quarters on board, and at two the next morning we steamed up the river.

Again there was the dreamy delight of ascending an unknown stream, beneath a sinking moon, into a region where peril made fascination. Since the time of the first explorers, I suppose that those Southern waters have known no sensations so dreamy and so bewitching as those which this war has brought forth. I recall, in this case, the faintest sensations of our voyage, as Ponce de Leon may have recalled those of his wandering search, in the same soft zone, for the secret of the mystic fountain. I remember how, during that night, I looked for the first time through a powerful night-glass. It had always seemed a thing wholly inconceivable, that a mere lens could change darkness into light; and as I turned the instrument on the preceding gunboat, and actually discerned the man at the wheel and the others standing about him,—all relapsing into vague gloom again at the withdrawal of the glass,—it gave a feeling of childish delight. Yet it seemed only in keeping with the whole enchantment of the scene; and had I been some Aladdin, convoyed by genii or giants, I could hardly have felt more wholly a denizen of some world of romance.

But the river was of difficult navigation; and we began to feel sometimes, beneath the keel, that ominous, sliding, grating, treacherous arrest of motion which makes the heart shudder, as the vessel does. There was some solicitude about torpedoes, also,—a peril which became a formidable thing, one year later, in the very channel where we found none. Soon one of our consorts grounded, then another, every vessel taking its turn, I believe, and then in turn getting off, until the Norwich lay hopelessly stranded, for that tide at least, a few miles below Jacksonville, and out of sight of the city, so that she could not even add to our dignity by her visible presence from afar.

This was rather a serious matter, as the Norwich was our main naval reliance, the Uncas being a small steamer of less than two hundred tons, and in such poor condition that Commander Duncan, on finding himself aground, at first quite declined to trust his consort any farther alone. But, having got thus far, it was plainly my duty to risk the remainder with or without naval assistance; and this being so, the courageous officer did not long object, but allowed his dashing subordinate to steam up with us to the city. This left us one naval and one army gunboat; and, fortunately, the Burn-side, being a black propeller, always passed for an armed vessel among the Rebels, and we rather encouraged that pleasing illusion.

We had aimed to reach Jacksonville at daybreak; but these mishaps delayed us, and we had several hours of fresh, early sunshine, lighting up the green shores of that lovely river, wooded to the water's edge, with sometimes an emerald meadow, opening a vista to some picturesque house,—all utterly unlike anything we had yet seen in the South, and suggesting rather the Penobscot or Kennebec. Here and there we glided by the ruins of some saw-mill burned by the Rebels on General Wright's approach; but nothing else spoke of war, except, perhaps, the silence. It was a delicious day, and a scene of fascination. Our Florida men were wild with delight; and when we rounded the point below the city, and saw from afar its long streets, its brick warehouses, its white cottages, and its overshadowing trees,—all peaceful and undisturbed by flames,—it seemed, in the men's favorite phrase, "too much good," and all discipline was merged, for the moment, in a buzz of ecstasy.

The city was still there for us, at any rate; though none knew what perils might be concealed behind those quiet buildings. Yet there were children playing on the wharves; careless men, here and there, lounged down to look at us, hands in pockets; a few women came to their doors, and gazed listlessly upon us, shading their eyes with their hands. We drew momently nearer, in silence and with breathless attention. The gunners were at their posts, and the men in line. It was eight o'clock. We were now directly opposite the town: yet no sign of danger was seen; not a rifle-shot was heard; not a shell rose hissing in the air. The Uncas rounded to, and dropped anchor in the stream; by previous agreement, I steamed to an upper pier of the town, Colonel Montgomery to a lower one; the little boat-howitzers were run out upon the wharves, and presently to the angles of the chief streets; and the pretty town was our own without a shot. In spite of our detention, the surprise had been complete, and not a soul in Jacksonville had dreamed of our coming.

The day passed quickly, in eager preparations for defence; the people could or would give us no definite information about the Rebel camp, which was, however, known to be near, and our force did not permit our going out to surprise it. The night following was the most anxious I ever spent. We were all tired out; the companies were under arms, in various parts of the town, to be ready for an attack at any moment. My temporary quarters were beneath the loveliest grove of linden-trees, and as I reclined, half-dozing, the mocking-birds sang all night like nightingales,—their notes seeming to trickle down through the sweet air from amid the blossoming boughs. Day brought relief and the sense of due possession, and we could see what we had won.

Union occupied Jacksonville 1864

Jacksonville was now a United States post again: the only post on the main-land in the Department of the South. Before the war it had three or four thousand inhabitants, and a rapidly growing lumber-trade, for which abundant facilities were evidently provided. The wharves were capacious, and the blocks of brick warehouses along the lower street were utterly unlike anything we had yet seen in that region, as were the neatness and thrift everywhere visible. It had been built up by Northern enterprise, and much of the property was owned by loyal men. It had been a great resort for invalids, though the Rebels had burned the large hotel which once accommodated them. Mills had also been burned; but the dwelling-houses were almost all in good condition. The quarters for the men were admirable; and I took official possession of the handsome brick house of Colonel Sunder-land, the established head-quarters through every occupation, whose accommodating flag-staff had literally and repeatedly changed its colors. The seceded Colonel, reputed author of the State ordinance of Secession, was a New-Yorker by birth, and we found his law-card, issued when in practice in Easton, Washington County, New York. He certainly had good taste in planning the inside of a house, though time had impaired its condition. There was a neat office with ample bookcases and no books, a billiard-table with no balls, gas-fixtures without gas, and a bathing-room without water. There was a separate building for servants' quarters, and a kitchen with every convenience, even to a few jars of lingering pickles. On the whole, there was an air of substance and comfort about the town, quite alien from the picturesque decadence of Beaufort.

Jacksonville wharf, 1864

The town rose gradually from the river, and was bounded on the rear by a long, sluggish creek, beyond which lay a stretch of woods, affording an excellent covert for the enemy, but without great facilities for attack, as there were but two or three fords and bridges. This brook could easily be held against a small force, but could at any time and at almost any point be readily crossed by a large one. North of the town the land rose a little, between the river and the sources of the brook, and then sank to a plain, which had been partially cleared by a previous garrison. For so small a force as ours, however, this clearing must be extended nearer to the town; otherwise our lines would be too long for our numbers.

This deficiency in numbers at once became a source of serious anxiety. While planning the expedition, it had seemed so important to get the men a foothold in Florida that I was willing to risk everything for it. But this important post once in our possession, it began to show some analogies to the proverbial elephant in the lottery. To hold it permanently with nine hundred men was not, perhaps, impossible, with the aid of a gunboat (I had left many of my own regiment sick and on duty in Beaufort, and Colonel Montgomery had as yet less than one hundred and fifty); but to hold it, and also to make forays up the river, certainly required a larger number. We came in part to recruit, but had found scarcely an able-bodied negro in the city; all had been removed farther up, and we must certainly contrive to follow them. I was very unwilling to have, as yet, any white troops under my command, with the blacks. Finally, however, being informed by Judge S. of a conversation with Colonel Hawley, commanding at Fernandina, in which the latter had offered to send four companies and a light battery to swell our force,—in view of the aid given to his position by this more advanced post, I decided to authorize the energetic Judge to go back to Fernandina and renew the negotiation, as the John Adams must go thither at any rate for coal.

Meanwhile all definite display of our force was avoided; dress-parades were omitted; the companies were so distributed as to tell for the utmost; and judicious use was made, here and there, of empty tents. The gunboats and transports moved impressively up and down the river, from time to time. The disposition of pickets was varied each night to perplex the enemy, and some advantage taken of his distrust, which might be assumed as equalling our own. The citizens were duly impressed by our supply of ammunition, which was really enormous, and all these things soon took effect. A loyal woman, who came into town, said that the Rebel scouts, stopping at her house, reported that there were "sixteen hundred negroes all over the woods, and the town full of them besides." "It was of no use to go in. General Finnegan had driven them into a bad place once, and should not do it again." "They had lost their captain and their best surgeon in the first skirmish, and if the Savannah people wanted the negroes driven away, they might come and do it themselves." Unfortunately, we knew that they could easily come from Savannah at any time, as there was railroad communication nearly all the way; and every time we heard the steam-whistle, the men were convinced of their arrival. Thus we never could approach to any certainty as to their numbers, while they could observe, from the bluffs, every steamboat that ascended the river.

To render our weak force still more available, we barricaded the approaches to the chief streets by constructing barriers or felling trees. It went to my heart to sacrifice, for this purpose, several of my beautiful lindens; but it was no time for aesthetics. As the giants lay on the ground, still scenting the air with their abundant bloom, I used to rein up my horse and watch the children playing hide-and-seek amongst their branches, or some quiet cow grazing at the foliage. Nothing impresses the mind in war like some occasional object or association that belongs apparently to peace alone.

Among all these solicitudes, it was a great thing that one particular anxiety vanished in a day. On the former expedition the men were upon trial as to their courage; now they were to endure another test, as to their demeanor as victors. Here were five hundred citizens, nearly all white, at the mercy of their former slaves. To some of these whites it was the last crowning humiliation, and they were, or professed to be, in perpetual fear. On the other hand, the most intelligent and lady-like woman I saw, the wife of a Rebel captain, rather surprised me by saying that it seemed pleasanter to have these men stationed there, whom they had known all their lives, and who had generally borne a good character, than to be in the power of entire strangers. Certainly the men deserved the confidence, for there was scarcely an exception to their good behavior. I think they thoroughly felt that their honor and dignity were concerned in the matter, and took too much pride in their character as soldiers,—to say nothing of higher motives,—to tarnish it by any misdeeds. They watched their officers vigilantly and even suspiciously, to detect any disposition towards compromise; and so long as we pursued a just course it was evident that they could be relied on. Yet the spot was pointed out to me where two of our leading men had seen their brothers hanged by Lynch law; many of them had private wrongs to avenge; and they all had utter disbelief in all pretended loyalty, especially on the part of the women.

One citizen alone was brought to me in a sort of escort of honor by Corporal Prince Lambkin,—one of the color-guard, and one of our ablest men,—the same who had once made a speech in camp, reminding his hearers that they had lived under the American flag for eighteen hundred and sixty-two years, and ought to live and die under it. Corporal Lambkin now introduced his man, a German, with the highest compliment in his power, "He hab true colored-man heart." Surrounded by mean, cajoling, insinuating white men and women who were all that and worse, I was quite ready to appreciate the quality he thus proclaimed. A colored-man heart, in the Rebel States, is a fair synonyme for a loyal heart, and it is about the only such synonyme. In this case, I found afterwards that the man in question, a small grocer, had been an object of suspicion to the whites from his readiness to lend money to the negroes, or sell to them on credit; in which, perhaps, there may have been some mixture of self-interest with benevolence.

I resort to a note-book of that period, well thumbed and pocket-worn, which sometimes received a fragment of the day's experience.

                                                           March 16, 1863.

"Of course, droll things are constantly occurring. Every white man, woman, and child is flattering, seductive, and professes Union sentiment; every black ditto believes that every white ditto is a scoundrel, and ought to be shot, but for good order and military discipline. The Provost Marshal and I steer between them as blandly as we can. Such scenes as succeed each other! Rush of indignant Africans. A white man, in woman's clothes, has been seen to enter a certain house,—undoubtedly a spy. Further evidence discloses the Roman Catholic priest, a peaceful little Frenchman, in his professional apparel.—Anxious female enters. Some sentinel has shot her cow by mistake for a Rebel. The United States cannot think of paying the desired thirty dollars. Let her go to the Post-Quartermaster and select a cow from his herd. If there is none to suit her (and, indeed, not one of them gave a drop of milk,—neither did hers), let her wait till the next lot comes in,—that is all.—Yesterday's operations gave the following total yield: Thirty 'contrabands,' eighteen horses, eleven cattle, ten saddles and bridles, and one new army-wagon. At this rate we shall soon be self-supporting cavalry.

"Where complaints are made of the soldiers, it almost always turns out that the women have insulted them most grossly, swearing at them, and the like. One unpleasant old Dutch woman came in, bursting with wrath, and told the whole narrative of her blameless life, diversified with sobs:—

"'Last January I ran off two of my black people from St. Mary's to Fernandina,' (sob,)—'then I moved down there myself, and at Lake City I lost six women and a boy,' (sob,)—'then I stopped at Baldwin for one of the wenches to be confined,' (sob,)—'then I brought them all here to live in a Christian country' (sob, sob). "Then the blockheads' [blockades, that is, gunboats] 'came, and they all ran off with the blockheads,' (sob, sob, sob,) 'and left me, an old lady of forty-six, obliged to work for a living.' (Chaos of sobs, without cessation.)

"But when I found what the old sinner had said to the soldiers I rather wondered at their self-control in not throttling her."

Meanwhile skirmishing went on daily in the outskirts of the town. There was a fight on the very first day, when our men killed, as before hinted, a Rebel surgeon, which was oddly metamorphosed in the Southern newspapers into their killing one of ours, which certainly never happened. Every day, after this, they appeared in small mounted squads in the neighborhood, and exchanged shots with our pickets, to which the gunboats would contribute their louder share, their aim being rather embarrassed by the woods and hills. We made reconnoissances, too, to learn the country in different directions, and were apt to be fired upon during these. Along the farther side of what we called the "Debatable Land" there was a line of cottages, hardly superior to negro huts, and almost all empty, where the Rebel pickets resorted, and from whose windows they fired. By degrees all these nests were broken up and destroyed, though it cost some trouble to do it, and the hottest skirmishing usually took place around them.

Among these little affairs was one which we called "Company K's Skirmish," because it brought out the fact that this company, which was composed entirely of South Carolina men, and had never shone in drill or discipline, stood near the head of the regiment for coolness and courage,—the defect of discipline showing itself only in their extreme unwillingness to halt when once let loose. It was at this time that the small comedy of the Goose occurred,—an anecdote which Wendell Phillips has since made his own.

One of the advancing line of skirmishers, usually an active fellow enough, was observed to move clumsily and irregularly. It soon appeared that he had encountered a fine specimen of the domestic goose, which had surrendered at discretion. Not wishing to lose it, he could yet find no way to hold it but between his legs; and so he went on, loading, firing, advancing, halting, always with the goose writhing and struggling and hissing in this natural pair of stocks. Both happily came off unwounded, and retired in good order at the signal, or some time after it; but I have hardly a cooler thing to put on record.

Meanwhile, another fellow left the field less exultingly; for, after a thoroughly courageous share in the skirmish, he came blubbering to his captain, and said,—"Cappen, make Caesar gib me my cane." It seemed that, during some interval of the fighting, he had helped himself to an armful of Rebel sugar-cane, such as they all delighted in chewing. The Roman hero, during another pause, had confiscated the treasure; whence these tears of the returning warrior. I never could accustom myself to these extraordinary interminglings of manly and childish attributes.

Our most untiring scout during this period was the chaplain of my regiment,—the most restless and daring spirit we had, and now exulting in full liberty of action. He it was who was daily permitted to stray singly where no other officer would have been allowed to go, so irresistible was his appeal, "You know I am only a chaplain." Methinks I see our regimental saint, with pistols in belt and a Ballard rifle slung on shoulder, putting spurs to his steed, and cantering away down some questionable wood-path, or returning with some tale of Rebel haunt discovered, or store of foraging. He would track an enemy like an Indian, or exhort him, when apprehended, like an early Christian. Some of our devout soldiers shook their heads sometimes over the chaplain's little eccentricities. "Woffor Mr. Chapman made a preacher for?" said one of them, as usual transforming his title into a patronymic. "He's de fightingest more Yankee I eber see in all my days."

And the criticism was very natural, though they could not deny that, when the hour for Sunday service came, Mr. F. commanded the respect and attention of all. That hour never came, however, on our first Sunday in Jacksonville; we were too busy and the men too scattered; so the chaplain made his accustomed foray beyond the lines instead.

"Is it not Sunday?" slyly asked an unregenerate lieutenant. "Nay," quoth his Reverence, waxing fervid; "it is the Day of Judgment"

This reminds me of a raid up the river, conducted by one of our senior captains, an enthusiast whose gray beard and prophetic manner always took me back to the Fifth-Monarchy men. He was most successful that day, bringing back horses, cattle, provisions, and prisoners; and one of the latter complained bitterly to me of being held, stating that Captain R. had promised him speedy liberty. But that doughty official spurned the imputation of such weak blandishments, in this day of triumphant retribution.

"Promise him!" said he, "I promised him nothing but the Day of Judgment and Periods of Damnation!"

Often since have I rolled beneath my tongue this savory and solemn sentence, and I do not believe that since the days of the Long Parliament there has been a more resounding anathema.

In Colonel Montgomery's hands these up-river raids reached the dignity of a fine art. His conceptions of foraging were rather more Western and liberal than mine, and on these excursions he fully indemnified himself for any undue abstinence demanded of him when in camp. I remember being on the wharf, with some naval officers, when he came down from his first trip. The steamer seemed an animated hen-coop. Live poultry hung from the foremast shrouds, dead ones from the mainmast, geese hissed from the binnacle, a pig paced the quarter-deck, and a duck's wings were seen fluttering from a line which was wont to sustain duck trousers. The naval heroes, mindful of their own short rations, and taking high views of one's duties in a conquered country, looked at me reproachfully, as who should say, "Shall these things be?" In a moment or two the returning foragers had landed.

"Captain ——," said Montgomery, courteously, "would you allow me to send a remarkably fine turkey for your use on board ship?"

"Lieutenant ——," said Major Corwin, "may I ask your acceptance of a pair of ducks for your mess?"

Never did I behold more cordial relations between army and navy than sprang into existence at those sentences. So true it is, as Charles Lamb says, that a single present of game may diffuse kindly sentiments through a whole community. These little trips were called "rest"; there was no other rest during those ten days. An immense amount of picket and fatigue duty had to be done. Two redoubts were to be built to command the Northern Valley; all the intervening grove, which now afforded lurking-ground for a daring enemy, must be cleared away; and a few houses must be reluctantly razed for the same purpose. The fort on the left was named Fort Higginson, and that built by my own regiment, in return, Fort Montgomery. The former was necessarily a hasty work, and is now, I believe, in ruins; the latter was far more elaborately constructed, on lines well traced by the Fourth New Hampshire during the previous occupation. It did great credit to Captain Trowbridge, of my regiment (formerly of the New York Volunteer Engineers), who had charge of its construction.

How like a dream seems now that period of daily skirmishes and nightly watchfulness! The fatigue was so constant that the days hurried by. I felt the need of some occasional change of ideas, and having just received from the North Mr. Brook's beautiful translation of Jean Paul's "Titan," I used to retire to my bedroom for some ten minutes every afternoon, and read a chapter or two. It was more refreshing than a nap, and will always be to me one of the most fascinating books in the world, with this added association. After all, what concerned me was not so much the fear of an attempt to drive us out and retake the city,—for that would be against the whole policy of the Rebels in that region,—as of an effort to fulfil their threats and burn it, by some nocturnal dash. The most valuable buildings belonged to Union men, and the upper part of the town, built chiefly of resinous pine, was combustible to the last degree. In case of fire, if the wind blew towards the river, we might lose steamers and all. I remember regulating my degree of disrobing by the direction of the wind; if it blew from the river, it was safe to make one's self quite comfortable; if otherwise, it was best to conform to Suwarrow's idea of luxury, and take off one spur.

So passed our busy life for ten days. There were no tidings of reinforcements, and I hardly knew whether I wished for them,—or rather, I desired them as a choice of evils; for our men were giving out from overwork, and the recruiting excursions, for which we had mainly come, were hardly possible. At the utmost, I had asked for the addition of four companies and a light battery. Judge of my surprise when two infantry regiments successively arrived! I must resort to a scrap from the diary. Perhaps diaries are apt to be thought tedious; but I would rather read a page of one, whatever the events described, than any more deliberate narrative,—it gives glimpses so much more real and vivid.

                   "HEAD-QUARTERS, JACKSONVILLE,

                                "March 20, 1863, Midnight.

"For the last twenty-four hours we have been sending women and children out of town, in answer to a demand by flag of truce, with a threat of bombardment. [N. B. I advised them not to go, and the majority declined doing so.] It was designed, no doubt, to intimidate; and in our ignorance of the force actually outside, we have had to recognize the possibility of danger, and work hard at our defences. At any time, by going into the outskirts, we can have a skirmish, which is nothing but fun; but when night closes in over a small and weary garrison, there sometimes steals into my mind, like a chill, that most sickening of all sensations, the anxiety of a commander. This was the night generally set for an attack, if any, though I am pretty well satisfied that they have not strength to dare it, and the worst they could probably do is to burn the town. But to-night, instead of enemies, appear friends,—our devoted civic ally, Judge S., and a whole Connecticut regiment, the Sixth, under Major Meeker; and though the latter are aground, twelve miles below, yet they enable one to breathe more freely. I only wish they were black; but now I have to show, not only that blacks can fight, but that they and white soldiers can act in harmony together."

That evening the enemy came up for a reconnoissance, in the deepest darkness, and there were alarms all night. The next day the Sixth Connecticut got afloat, and came up the river; and two days after, to my continued amazement, arrived a part of the Eighth Maine, under Lieutenant-Colonel Twichell. This increased my command to four regiments, or parts of regiments, half white and half black. Skirmishing had almost ceased,—our defences being tolerably complete, and looking from without much more effective than they really were. We were safe from any attack by a small force, and hoped that the enemy could not spare a large one from Charleston or Savannah. All looked bright without, and gave leisure for some small anxieties within.

It was the first time in the war (so far as I know) that white and black soldiers had served together on regular duty. Jealousy was still felt towards even the officers of colored regiments, and any difficult contingency would be apt to bring it out. The white soldiers, just from ship-board, felt a natural desire to stray about the town; and no attack from an enemy would be so disastrous as the slightest collision between them and the black provost-guard. I shudder, even now, to think of the train of consequences, bearing on the whole course of subsequent national events, which one such mishap might then have produced. It is almost impossible for us now to remember in what a delicate balance then hung the whole question of negro enlistments, and consequently of Slavery. Fortunately for my own serenity, I had great faith in the intrinsic power of military discipline, and also knew that a common service would soon produce mutual respect among good soldiers; and so it proved. But the first twelve hours of this mixed command were to me a more anxious period than any outward alarms had created.

Let us resort to the note-book again.

St. Helena Island S.C.

"JACKSONVILLE, March 22, 1863.

"It is Sunday; the bell is ringing for church, and Rev. Mr. F., from Beaufort, is to preach. This afternoon our good quartermaster establishes a Sunday-school for our little colony of 'contrabands,' now numbering seventy.

                                                          Sunday Afternoon.

"The bewildering report is confirmed; and in addition to the Sixth Connecticut, which came yesterday, appears part of the Eighth Maine. The remainder, with its colonel, will be here to-morrow, and, report says, Major-General Hunter. Now my hope is that we may go to some point higher up the river, which we can hold for ourselves. There are two other points [Magnolia and Pilatka], which, in themselves, are as favorable as this, and, for getting recruits, better. So I shall hope to be allowed to go. To take posts, and then let white troops garrison them,—that is my programme.

"What makes the thing more puzzling is, that the Eighth Maine has only brought ten days' rations, so that they evidently are not to stay here; and yet where they go, or why they come, is a puzzle. Meanwhile we can sleep sound o' nights; and if the black and white babies do not quarrel and pull hair, we shall do very well."

Colonel Rust, on arriving, said frankly that he knew nothing of the plans prevailing in the Department, but that General Hunter was certainly coming soon to act for himself; that it had been reported at the North, and even at Port Royal, that we had all been captured and shot (and, indeed, I had afterwards the pleasure of reading my own obituary in a Northern Democratic journal), and that we certainly needed reinforcements; that he himself had been sent with orders to carry out, so far as possible, the original plans of the expedition; that he regarded himself as only a visitor, and should remain chiefly on shipboard,—which he did. He would relieve the black provost-guard by a white one, if I approved,—which I certainly did. But he said that he felt bound to give the chief opportunities of action to the colored troops,—which I also approved, and which he carried out, not quite to the satisfaction of his own eager and daring officers.

I recall one of these enterprises, out of which we extracted a good deal of amusement; it was baptized the Battle of the Clothes-Lines. A white company was out scouting in the woods behind the town, with one of my best Florida men for a guide; and the captain sent back a message that he had discovered a Rebel camp with twenty-two tents, beyond a creek, about four miles away; the officers and men had been distinctly seen, and it would be quite possible to capture it. Colonel Rust at once sent me out with two hundred men to do the work, recalling the original scouts, and disregarding the appeals of his own eager officers. We marched through the open pine woods, on a delightful afternoon, and met the returning party. Poor fellows! I never shall forget the longing eyes they cast on us, as we marched forth to the field of glory, from which they were debarred. We went three or four miles out, sometimes halting to send forward a scout, while I made all the men lie down in the long, thin grass and beside the fallen trees, till one could not imagine that there was a person there. I remember how picturesque the effect was, when, at the signal, all rose again, like Roderick Dhu's men, and the green wood appeared suddenly populous with armed life. At a certain point forces were divided, and a detachment was sent round the head of the creek, to flank the unsuspecting enemy; while we of the main body, stealing with caution nearer and nearer, through ever denser woods, swooped down at last in triumph upon a solitary farmhouse,—where the family-washing had been hung out to dry! This was the "Rebel camp"!

It is due to Sergeant Greene, my invaluable guide, to say that he had from the beginning discouraged any high hopes of a crossing of bayonets. He had early explained that it was not he who claimed to have seen the tents and the Rebel soldiers, but one of the officers,—and had pointed out that our undisturbed approach was hardly reconcilable with the existence of a hostile camp so near. This impression had also pressed more and more upon my own mind, but it was our business to put the thing beyond a doubt. Probably the place may have been occasionally used for a picket-station, and we found fresh horse-tracks in the vicinity, and there was a quantity of iron bridle-bits in the house, of which no clear explanation could be given; so that the armed men may not have been wholly imaginary. But camp there was none. After enjoying to the utmost the fun of the thing, therefore, we borrowed the only horse on the premises, hung all the bits over his neck, and as I rode him back to camp, they clanked like broken chains. We were joined on the way by our dear and devoted surgeon, whom I had left behind as an invalid, but who had mounted his horse and ridden out alone to attend to our wounded, his green sash looking quite in harmony with the early spring verdure of those lovely woods. So came we back in triumph, enjoying the joke all the more because some one else was responsible. We mystified the little community at first, but soon let out the secret, and witticisms abounded for a day or two, the mildest of which was the assertion that the author of the alarm must have been "three sheets in the wind."

Another expedition was of more exciting character. For several days before the arrival of Colonel Rust a reconnaissance had been planned in the direction of the enemy's camp, and he finally consented to its being carried out. By the energy of Major Corwin, of the Second South Carolina Volunteers, aided by Mr. Holden, then a gunner on the Paul Jones, and afterwards made captain of the same regiment, one of the ten-pound Parrott guns had been mounted on a hand-car, for use on the railway. This it was now proposed to bring into service. I took a large detail of men from the two white regiments and from my own, and had instructions to march as far as the four-mile station on the railway, if possible, examine the country, and ascertain if the Rebel camp had been removed, as was reported, beyond that distance. I was forbidden going any farther from camp, or attacking the Rebel camp, as my force comprised half our garrison, and should the town meanwhile be attacked from some other direction, it would be in great danger.

I never shall forget the delight of that march through the open pine barren, with occasional patches of uncertain swamp. The Eighth Maine, under Lieutenant-Colonel Twichell, was on the right, the Sixth Connecticut, under Major Meeker, on the left, and my own men, under Major Strong, in the centre, having in charge the cannon, to which they had been trained. Mr. Heron, from the John Adams, acted as gunner. The mounted Rebel pickets retired before us through the woods, keeping usually beyond range of the skirmishers, who in a long line—white, black, white—were deployed transversely. For the first time I saw the two colors fairly alternate on the military chessboard; it had been the object of much labor and many dreams, and I liked the pattern at last. Nothing was said about the novel fact by anybody,—it all seemed to come as matter-of-course; there appeared to be no mutual distrust among the men, and as for the officers, doubtless "each crow thought its own young the whitest,"—I certainly did, although doing full justice to the eager courage of the Northern portion of my command. Especially I watched with pleasure the fresh delight of the Maine men, who had not, like the rest, been previously in action, and who strode rapidly on with their long legs, irresistibly recalling, as their gaunt, athletic frames and sunburnt faces appeared here and there among the pines, the lumber regions of their native State, with which I was not unfamiliar.

We passed through a former camp of the Rebels, from which everything had been lately removed; but when the utmost permitted limits of our reconnoissance were reached, there were still no signs of any other camp, and the Rebel cavalry still kept provokingly before us. Their evident object was to lure us on to their own stronghold, and had we fallen into the trap, it would perhaps have resembled, on a smaller scale, the Olustee of the following year. With a good deal of reluctance, however, I caused the recall to be sounded, and, after a slight halt, we began to retrace our steps.

Straining our eyes to look along the reach of level railway which stretched away through the pine barren, we began to see certain ominous puffs of smoke, which might indeed proceed from some fire in the woods, but were at once set down by the men as coming from the mysterious locomotive battery which the Rebels were said to have constructed. Gradually the smoke grew denser, and appeared to be moving up along the track, keeping pace with our motion, and about two miles distant. I watched it steadily through a field-glass from our own slowly moving battery: it seemed to move when we moved and to halt when we halted. Sometimes in the dun smoke I caught a glimpse of something blacker, raised high in the air like the threatening head of some great gliding serpent. Suddenly there came a sharp puff of lighter smoke that seemed like a forked tongue, and then a hollow report, and we could see a great black projectile hurled into the air, and falling a quarter of a mile away from us, in the woods. I did not at once learn that this first shot killed two of the Maine men, and wounded two more. This was fired wide, but the numerous shots which followed were admirably aimed, and seldom failed to fall or explode close to our own smaller battery.

It was the first time that the men had been seriously exposed to artillery fire,—a danger more exciting to the ignorant mind than any other, as this very war has shown.* So I watched them anxiously. Fortunately there were deep trenches on each side the railway, with many stout, projecting roots, forming very tolerable bomb-proofs for those who happened to be near them. The enemy's gun was a sixty-four-pound Blakely, as we afterward found, whose enormous projectile moved very slowly and gave ample time to cover,—insomuch, that, while the fragments of shell fell all around and amongst us, not a man was hurt. This soon gave the men the most buoyant confidence, and they shouted with childish delight over every explosion.

*Take this for example: "The effect was electrical. The Rebels were the best men in Ford's command, being Lieutenant-Colonel Showalter's Californians, and they are brave men. They had dismounted and sent their horses to the rear, and were undoubtedly determined upon a desperate fight, and their superior numbers made them confident of success. But they never fought with artillery, and a cannon has more terror for them than ten thousand rifles and all the wild Camanches on the plains of Texas. At first glimpse of the shining brass monsters there was a visible wavering in the determined front of the enemy, and as the shells came screaming over their heads the scare was complete. They broke ranks, fled for their horses, scrambled on the first that came to hand, and skedaddled in the direction of Brownsville."New York Evening Post, September 25, 1864.

The moment a shell had burst or fallen unburst, our little gun was invariably fired in return, and that with some precision, so far as we could judge, its range also being nearly as great. For some reason they showed no disposition to overtake us, in which attempt their locomotive would have given them an immense advantage over our heavy hand-car, and their cavalry force over our infantry. Nevertheless, I rather hoped that they would attempt it, for then an effort might have been made to cut them off in the rear by taking up some rails. As it was, this was out of the question, though they moved slowly, as we moved, keeping always about two miles away. When they finally ceased firing we took up the rails beyond us before withdrawing, and thus kept the enemy from approaching so near the city again. But I shall never forget that Dantean monster, rearing its black head amid the distant smoke, nor the solicitude with which I watched for the puff which meant danger, and looked round to see if my chickens were all under cover. The greatest peril, after all, was from the possible dismounting of our gun, in which case we should have been very apt to lose it, if the enemy had showed any dash. There may be other such tilts of railway artillery on record during the war; but if so, I have not happened to read of them, and so have dwelt the longer on this.

This was doubtless the same locomotive battery which had previously fired more than once upon the town,—running up within two miles and then withdrawing, while it was deemed inexpedient to destroy the railroad, on our part, lest it might be needed by ourselves in turn. One night, too, the Rebel threat had been fulfilled, and they had shelled the town with the same battery. They had the range well, and every shot fell near the post headquarters. It was exciting to see the great Blakely shell, showing a light as it rose, and moving slowly towards us like a comet, then exploding and scattering its formidable fragments. Yet, strange to say, no serious harm was done to life or limb, and the most formidable casualty was that of a citizen who complained that a shell had passed through the wall of his bedroom, and carried off his mosquito curtain in its transit.

Little knew we how soon these small entertainments would be over. Colonel Montgomery had gone up the river with his two companies, perhaps to remain permanently; and I was soon to follow. On Friday, March 27th, I wrote home: "The Burnside has gone to Beaufort for rations, and the John Adams to Fernandina for coal; we expect both back by Sunday, and on Monday I hope to get the regiment off to a point farther up,—Magnolia, thirty-five miles, or Pilatka, seventy-five,—either of which would be a good post for us. General Hunter is expected every day, and it is strange he has not come." The very next day came an official order recalling the whole expedition, and for the third time evacuating Jacksonville.

A council of military and naval officers was at once called (though there was but one thing to be done), and the latter were even more disappointed and amazed than the former. This was especially the case with the senior naval officer, Captain Steedman, a South-Carolinian by birth, but who had proved himself as patriotic as he was courteous and able, and whose presence and advice had been of the greatest value to me. He and all of us felt keenly the wrongfulness of breaking the pledges which we had been authorized to make to these people, and of leaving them to the mercy of the Rebels once more. Most of the people themselves took the same view, and eagerly begged to accompany us on our departure. They were allowed to bring their clothing and furniture also, and at once developed that insane mania for aged and valueless trumpery which always seizes upon the human race, I believe, in moments of danger. With the greatest difficulty we selected between the essential and the non-essential, and our few transports were at length loaded to the very water's edge on the morning of March 29th,—Colonel Montgomery having by this time returned from up-river, with sixteen prisoners, and the fruits of foraging in plenty.

And upon that last morning occurred an act on the part of some of the garrison most deeply to be regretted, and not to be excused by the natural indignation at their recall,—an act which, through the unfortunate eloquence of one newspaper correspondent, rang through the nation,—the attempt to burn the town. I fortunately need not dwell much upon it, as I was not at the time in command of the post,—as the white soldiers frankly took upon themselves the whole responsibility,—and as all the fires were made in the wooden part of the city, which was occupied by them, while none were made in the brick part, where the colored soldiers were quartered. It was fortunate for our reputation that the newspaper accounts generally agreed in exculpating us from all share in the matter;* and the single exception, which one correspondent asserted, I could never verify, and do not believe to have existed. It was stated by Colonel Rust, in his official report, that some twenty-five buildings in all were burned, and I doubt if the actual number was greater; but this was probably owing in part to a change of wind, and did not diminish the discredit of the transaction. It made our sorrow at departure no less, though it infinitely enhanced the impressiveness of the scene.

     *"The colored regiments had nothing at all to do with it;

they behaved with propriety throughout" Boston Journal

Correspondence. ("Carleton.")

"The negro troops took no part whatever in the perpetration of this Vandalism."New York Tribune Correspondence. ("N. P.")

"We know not whether we are most rejoiced or saddened to observe, by the general concurrence of accounts, that the negro soldiers had nothing to do with the barbarous act" Boston Journal Editorial, April 10, 1863.

The excitement of the departure was intense. The embarkation was so laborious that it seemed as if the flames must be upon us before we could get on board, and it was also generally expected that the Rebel skirmishers would be down among the houses, wherever practicable, to annoy us to the utmost, as had been the case at the previous evacuation. They were, indeed, there, as we afterwards heard, but did not venture to molest us. The sight and roar of the flames, and the rolling clouds of smoke, brought home to the impressible minds of the black soldiers all their favorite imagery of the Judgment-Day; and those who were not too much depressed by disappointment were excited by the spectacle, and sang and exhorted without ceasing.

With heavy hearts their officers floated down the lovely river, which we had ascended with hopes so buoyant; and from that day to this, the reasons for our recall have never been made public. It was commonly attributed to proslavery advisers, acting on the rather impulsive nature of Major-General Hunter, with a view to cut short the career of the colored troops, and stop their recruiting. But it may have been simply the scarcity of troops in the Department, and the renewed conviction at head-quarters that we were too few to hold the post alone. The latter theory was strengthened by the fact that, when General Seymour reoccupied Jacksonville, the following year, he took with him twenty thousand men instead of one thousand,—and the sanguinary battle of Olustee found him with too few.

CHAPTER V

OUT ON PICKET

One can hardly imagine a body of men more disconsolate than a regiment suddenly transferred from an adventurous life in the enemy's country to the quiet of a sheltered camp, on safe and familiar ground. The men under my command were deeply dejected when, on a most appropriate day,—the First of April, 1863,—they found themselves unaccountably recalled from Florida, that region of delights which had seemed theirs by the right of conquest. My dusky soldiers, who based their whole walk and conversation strictly on the ancient Israelites, felt that the prophecies were all set at naught, and that they were on the wrong side of the Red Sea; indeed, I fear they regarded even me as a sort of reversed Moses, whose Pisgah fronted in the wrong direction. Had they foreseen how the next occupation of the Promised Land was destined to result, they might have acquiesced with more of their wonted cheerfulness. As it was, we were very glad to receive, after a few days of discontented repose on the very ground where we had once been so happy, an order to go out on picket at Port Royal Ferry, with the understanding that we might remain there for some time. This picket station was regarded as a sort of military picnic by the regiments stationed at Beaufort, South Carolina; it meant blackberries and oysters, wild roses and magnolias, flowery lanes instead of sandy barrens, and a sort of guerilla existence in place of the camp routine. To the colored soldiers especially, with their love of country life, and their extensive personal acquaintance on the plantations, it seemed quite like a Christmas festival. Besides, they would be in sight of the enemy, and who knew but there might, by the blessing of Providence, be a raid or a skirmish? If they could not remain on the St. John's River, it was something to dwell on the Coosaw. In the end they enjoyed it as much as they expected, and though we "went out" several times subsequently, until it became an old story, the enjoyment never waned. And as even the march from the camp to the picket lines was something that could not possibly have been the same for any white regiment in the service, it is worth while to begin at the beginning and describe it.

A regiment ordered on picket was expected to have reveille at daybreak, and to be in line for departure by sunrise. This delighted our men, who always took a childlike pleasure in being out of bed at any unreasonable hour; and by the time I had emerged, the tents were nearly all struck, and the great wagons were lumbering into camp to receive them, with whatever else was to be transported. The first rays of the sun must fall upon the line of these wagons, moving away across the wide parade-ground, followed by the column of men, who would soon outstrip them. But on the occasion which I especially describe the sun was shrouded, and, when once upon the sandy plain, neither camp nor town nor river could be seen in the dimness; and when I rode forward and looked back there was only visible the long, moving, shadowy column, seeming rather awful in its snake-like advance. There was a swaying of flags and multitudinous weapons that might have been camels' necks for all one could see, and the whole thing might have been a caravan upon the desert. Soon we debouched upon the "Shell Road," the wagon-train drew on one side into the fog, and by the time the sun appeared the music ceased, the men took the "route step," and the fun began.

The "route step" is an abandonment of all military strictness, and nothing is required of the men but to keep four abreast, and not lag behind. They are not required to keep step, though, with the rhythmical ear of our soldiers, they almost always instinctively did so; talking and singing are allowed, and of this privilege, at least, they eagerly availed themselves. On this day they were at the top of exhilaration. There was one broad grin from one end of the column to the other; it might soon have been a caravan of elephants instead of camels, for the ivory and the blackness; the chatter and the laughter almost drowned the tramp of feet and the clatter of equipments.

At cross-roads and plantation gates the colored people thronged to see us pass; every one found a friend and a greeting. "How you do, aunty?" "Huddy (how d'ye), Budder Benjamin?" "How you find yourself dis mor-nin', Tittawisa (Sister Louisa)?" Such saluations rang out to everybody, known or unknown. In return, venerable, kerchiefed matrons courtesied laboriously to every one, with an unfailing "Bress de Lord, budder." Grave little boys, blacker than ink, shook hands with our laughing and utterly unmanageable drummers, who greeted them with this sure word of prophecy, "Dem's de drummers for de nex' war!"

Pretty mulatto girls ogled and coquetted, and made eyes, as Thackeray would say, at half the young fellows in the battalion. Meantime the singing was brisk along the whole column, and when I sometimes reined up to see them pass, the chant of each company, entering my ear, drove out from the other ear the strain of the preceding. Such an odd mixture of things, military and missionary, as the successive waves of song drifted byl First, "John Brown," of course; then, "What make old Satan for follow me so?" then, "Marching Along"; then, "Hold your light on Canaan's shore"; then, "When this cruel war is over" (a new favorite, sung by a few); yielding presently to a grand burst of the favorite marching song among them all, and one at which every step instinctively quickened, so light and jubilant its rhythm,—

  All true children gwine in de wilderness,

  Gwine in de wilderness, gwine in de wilderness,

  True believers gwine in de wilderness,

  To take away de sins ob de world,"—

ending in a "Hoigh!" after each verse,—a sort of Irish yell. For all the songs, but especially for their own wild hymns, they constantly improvised simple verses, with the same odd mingling,—the little facts of to-day's march being interwoven with the depths of theological gloom, and the same jubilant chorus annexed to all; thus,—

  We're gwin to de Ferry,

          De bell done ringing;

  Gwine to de landing,

          De bell done ringing;

  Trust, believer

          O, de bell done ringing;

  Satan's behind me,

          De bell done ringing;

  'T is a misty morning,

          De bell done ringing;

  O de road am sandy,

          De bell done ringing;

  Hell been open,

          De bell done ringing;—

and so on indefinitely.

The little drum-corps kept in advance, a jolly crew, their drums slung on their backs, and the drum-sticks perhaps balanced on their heads. With them went the officers' servant-boys, more uproarious still, always ready to lend their shrill treble to any song.

Mansion of former Confederate General

At the head of the whole force there walked, by some self-imposed pre-eminence, a respectable elderly female, one of the company laundresses, whose vigorous stride we never could quite overtake, and who had an enormous bundle balanced on her head, while she waved in her hand, like a sword, a long-handled tin dipper. Such a picturesque medley of fun, war, and music I believe no white regiment in the service could have shown; and yet there was no straggling, and a single tap of the drum would at any moment bring order out of this seeming chaos. So we marched our seven miles out upon the smooth and shaded road,—beneath jasmine clusters, and great pine-cones dropping, and great bunches of misletoe still in bloom among the branches. Arrived at the station, the scene soon became busy and more confused; wagons were being unloaded, tents pitched, water brought, wood cut, fires made, while the "field and staff" could take possession of the abandoned quarters of their predecessors, and we could look round in the lovely summer morning to "survey our empire and behold our home."

The only thoroughfare by land between Beaufort and Charleston is the "Shell Road," a beautiful avenue, which, about nine miles from Beaufort, strikes a ferry across the Coosaw River. War abolished the ferry, and made the river the permanent barrier between the opposing picket lines. For ten miles, right and left, these lines extended, marked by well-worn footpaths, following the endless windings of the stream; and they never varied until nearly the end of the war. Upon their maintenance depended our whole foothold on the Sea Islands; and upon that again finally depended the whole campaign of Sherman. But for the services of the colored troops, which finally formed the main garrison of the Department of the South, the Great March would never have been performed.

Former slaves of a Confederate General

There was thus a region ten or twelve miles square of which I had exclusive military command. It was level, but otherwise broken and bewildering to the last degree. No road traversed it, properly speaking, but the Shell Road. All the rest was a wild medley of cypress swamp, pine barren, muddy creek, and cultivated plantation, intersected by interminable lanes and bridle-paths, through which we must ride day and night, and which our horses soon knew better than ourselves. The regiment was distributed at different stations, the main force being under my immediate command, at a plantation close by the Shell Road, two miles from the ferry, and seven miles from Beaufort. Our first picket duty was just at the time of the first attack on Charleston, under Dupont and Hunter; and it was generally supposed that the Confederates would make an effort to recapture the Sea Islands. My orders were to watch the enemy closely, keep informed as to his position and movements, attempt no advance, and, in case any were attempted from the other side, to delay it as long as possible, sending instant notice to head-quarters. As to the delay, that could be easily guaranteed. There were causeways on the Shell Road which a single battery could hold against a large force; and the plantations were everywhere so intersected by hedges and dikes that they seemed expressly planned for defence. Although creeks wound in and out everywhere, yet these were only navigable at high tide, and at all other times were impassable marshes. There were but few posts where the enemy were within rifle range, and their occasional attacks at those points were soon stopped by our enforcement of a pithy order from General Hunter, "Give them as good as they send." So that, with every opportunity for being kept on the alert, there was small prospect of serious danger; and all promised an easy life, with only enough of care to make it pleasant. The picket station was therefore always a coveted post among the regiments, combining some undeniable importance with a kind of relaxation; and as we were there three months on our first tour of duty, and returned there several times afterwards, we got well acquainted with it. The whole region always reminded me of the descriptions of La Vende'e, and I always expected to meet Henri Larochejaquelein riding in the woods.

Headquarters of the 1st Mass Cavalry Edisto Island S.C.

How can I ever describe the charm and picturesqueness of that summer life? Our house possessed four spacious rooms and a piazza; around it were grouped sheds and tents; the camp was a little way off on one side, the negro-quarters of the plantation on the other; and all was immersed in a dense mass of waving and murmuring locust-blossoms. The spring days were always lovely, while the evenings were always conveniently damp; so that we never shut the windows by day, nor omitted our cheerful fire by night. Indoors, the main head-quarters seemed like the camp of some party of young engineers in time of peace, only with a little female society added, and a good many martial associations thrown in. A large, low, dilapidated room, with an immense fireplace, and with window-panes chiefly broken, so that the sashes were still open even when closed,—such was our home. The walls were scrawled with capital charcoal sketches by R. of the Fourth New Hampshire, and with a good map of the island and its wood-paths by C. of the First Massachusetts Cavalry. The room had the picturesqueness which comes everywhere from the natural grouping of articles of daily use,—swords, belts, pistols, rifles, field-glasses, spurs, canteens, gauntlets,—while wreaths of gray moss above the windows, and a pelican's wing three feet long over the high mantel-piece, indicated more deliberate decoration. This, and the whole atmosphere of the place, spoke of the refining presence of agreeable women; and it was pleasant when they held their little court in the evening, and pleasant all day, with the different visitors who were always streaming in and out,—officers and soldiers on various business; turbaned women from the plantations, coming with complaints or questionings; fugitives from the main-land to be interrogated; visitors riding up on horseback, their hands full of jasmine and wild roses; and the sweet sunny air all perfumed with magnolias and the Southern pine. From the neighboring camp there was a perpetual low hum. Louder voices and laughter re-echoed, amid the sharp sounds of the axe, from the pine woods; and sometimes, when the relieved pickets were discharging their pieces, there came the hollow sound of dropping rifle-shots, as in skirmishing,—perhaps the most unmistakable and fascinating association that war bequeaths to the memory of the ear.

Our domestic arrangements were of the oddest description. From the time when we began housekeeping by taking down the front-door to complete therewith a little office for the surgeon on the piazza, everything seemed upside down. I slept on a shelf in the corner of the parlor, bequeathed me by Major F., my jovial predecessor, and, if I waked at any time, could put my head through the broken window, arouse my orderly, and ride off to see if I could catch a picket asleep. We used to spell the word picquet, because that was understood to be the correct thing, in that Department at least; and they used to say at post head-quarters that as soon as the officer in command of the outposts grew negligent, and was guilty of a k, he was ordered in immediately. Then the arrangements for ablution were peculiar. We fitted up a bathing-place in a brook, which somehow got appropriated at once by the company laundresses; but I had my revenge, for I took to bathing in the family washtub. After all, however, the kitchen department had the advantage, for they used my solitary napkin to wipe the mess-table. As for food, we found it impossible to get chickens, save in the immature shape of eggs; fresh pork was prohibited by the surgeon, and other fresh meat came rarely. We could, indeed, hunt for wild turkeys, and even deer, but such hunting was found only to increase the appetite, without corresponding supply. Still we had our luxuries,—large, delicious drum-fish, and alligator steaks,—like a more substantial fried halibut,—which might have afforded the theme for Charles Lamb's dissertation on Roast Pig, and by whose aid "for the first time in our lives we tested crackling"

Camp cook

The post bakery yielded admirable bread; and for vegetables and fruit we had very poor sweet potatoes, and (in their season) an unlimited supply of the largest blackberries. For beverage, we had the vapid milk of that region, in which, if you let it stand, the water sinks instead of the cream's rising; and the delicious sugar-cane syrup, which we had brought from Florida, and which we drank at all hours. Old Floridians say that no one is justified in drinking whiskey, while he can get cane-juice; it is sweet and spirited, without cloying, foams like ale, and there were little spots on the ceiling of the dining-room where our lively beverage had popped out its cork. We kept it in a whiskey-bottle; and as whiskey itself was absolutely prohibited among us, it was amusing to see the surprise of our military visitors when this innocent substitute was brought in. They usually liked it in the end, but, like the old Frenchwoman over her glass of water, wished that it were a sin to give it a relish. As the foaming beakers of molasses and water were handed round, the guests would make with them the courteous little gestures of polite imbiding, and would then quaff the beverage, some with gusto, others with a slight afterlook of dismay. But it was a delicious and cooling drink while it lasted; and at all events was the best and the worst we had.

We used to have reveille at six, and breakfast about seven; then the mounted couriers began to arrive from half a dozen different directions, with written reports of what had happened during the night,—a boat seen, a picket fired upon, a battery erecting. These must be consolidated and forwarded to head-quarters, with the daily report of the command,—so many sick, so many on detached service, and all the rest. This was our morning newspaper, our Herald and Tribune; I never got tired of it. Then the couriers must be furnished with countersign and instructions, and sent off again. Then we scattered to our various rides, all disguised as duty; one to inspect pickets, one to visit a sick soldier, one to build a bridge or clear a road, and still another to head-quarters for ammunition or commissary stores. Galloping through green lanes, miles of triumphal arches of wild roses,—roses pale and large and fragrant, mingled with great boughs of the white cornel, fantastic masses, snowy surprises,—such were our rides, ranging from eight to fifteen and even twenty miles. Back to a late dinner with our various experiences, and perhaps specimens to match,—a thunder-snake, eight feet long; a live opossum, with a young clinging to the natural pouch; an armful of great white, scentless pond-lilies. After dinner, to the tangled garden for rosebuds or early magnolias, whose cloying fragrance will always bring back to me the full zest of those summer days; then dress-parade and a little drill as the day grew cool. In the evening, tea; and then the piazza or the fireside, as the case might be,—chess, cards,—perhaps a little music by aid of the assistant surgeon's melodeon, a few pages of Jean Paul's "Titan," almost my only book, and carefully husbanded,—perhaps a mail, with its infinite felicities. Such was our day.

Night brought its own fascinations, more solitary and profound. The darker they were, the more clearly it was our duty to visit the pickets. The paths that had grown so familiar by day seemed a wholly new labyrinth by night; and every added shade of darkness seemed to shift and complicate them all anew, till at last man's skill grew utterly baffled, and the clew must be left to the instinct of the horse. Riding beneath the solemn starlight, or soft, gray mist, or densest blackness, the frogs croaking, the strange "chuckwuts-widow" droning his ominous note above my head, the mocking-bird dreaming in music, the great Southern fireflies rising to the tree-tops, or hovering close to the ground like glowworms, till the horse raised his hoofs to avoid them; through pine woods and cypress swamps, or past sullen brooks, or white tents, or the dimly seen huts of sleeping negroes; down to the glimmering shore, where black statues leaned against trees or stood alert in the pathways;—never, in all the days of my life, shall I forget the magic of those haunted nights.

We had nocturnal boat service, too, for it was a part of our instructions to obtain all possible information about the enemy's position; and we accordingly, as usual in such cases, incurred a great many risks that harmed nobody, and picked up much information which did nobody any good. The centre of these nightly reconnoissances, for a long time, was the wreck of the George Washington, the story of whose disaster is perhaps worth telling.

Till about the time when we went on picket, it had been the occasional habit of the smaller gunboats to make the circuit of Port Royal Island,—a practice which was deemed very essential to the safety of our position, but which the Rebels effectually stopped, a few days after our arrival, by destroying the army gunboat George Washington with a single shot from a light battery. I was roused soon after daybreak by the firing, and a courier soon came dashing in with the particulars. Forwarding these hastily to Beaufort (for we had then no telegraph), I was soon at the scene of action, five miles away. Approaching, I met on the picket paths man after man who had escaped from the wreck across a half-mile of almost impassable marsh. Never did I see such objects,—some stripped to their shirts, some fully clothed, but all having every garment literally pasted to them—bodies with mud. Across the river, the Rebels were retiring, having done their work, but were still shelling, from greater and greater distances, the wood through which I rode. Arrived at the spot nearest the wreck (a point opposite to what we called the Brickyard Station), I saw the burning vessel aground beyond a long stretch of marsh, out of which the forlorn creatures were still floundering. Here and there in the mud and reeds we could see the laboring heads, slowly advancing, and could hear excruciating cries from wounded men in the more distant depths. It was the strangest mixture of war and Dante and Robinson Crusoe. Our energetic chaplain coming up, I sent him with four men, under a flag of truce, to the place whence the worst cries proceeded, while I went to another part of the marsh. During that morning we got them all out, our last achievement being the rescue of the pilot, an immense negro with a wooden leg,—an article so particularly unavailable for mud travelling, that it would have almost seemed better, as one of the men suggested, to cut the traces, and leave it behind.

A naval gunboat, too, which had originally accompanied this vessel, and should never have left it, now came back and took off the survivors, though there had been several deaths from scalding and shell. It proved that the wreck was not aground after all, but at anchor, having foolishly lingered till after daybreak, and having thus given time for the enemy to bring down then: guns. The first shot had struck the boiler, and set the vessel on fire; after which the officer in command had raised a white flag, and then escaped with his men to our shore; and it was for this flight in the wrong direction that they were shelled in the marshes by the Rebels. The case furnished in this respect some parallel to that of the Kearsage and Alabama, and it was afterwards cited, I believe, officially or unofficially, to show that the Rebels had claimed the right to punish, in this case, the course of action which they approved in Semmes. I know that they always asserted thenceforward that the detachment on board the George Washington had become rightful prisoners of war, and were justly fired upon when they tried to escape.

This was at the tune of the first attack on Charleston, and the noise of this cannonading spread rapidly thither, and brought four regiments to reinforce Beaufort in a hurry, under the impression that the town was already taken, and that they must save what remnants they could. General Saxton, too, had made such capital plans for defending the post that he could not bear not to have it attacked; so, while the Rebels brought down a force to keep us from taking the guns off the wreck, I was also supplied with a section or two of regular artillery, and some additional infantry, with which to keep them from it; and we tried to "make believe very hard," and rival the Charleston expedition on our own island. Indeed, our affair came to about as much,—nearly nothing,—and lasted decidedly longer; for both sides nibbled away at the guns, by night, for weeks afterward, though I believe the mud finally got them,—at least, we did not. We tried in vain to get the use of a steamboat or floating derrick of any kind; for it needed more mechanical ingenuity than we possessed to transfer anything so heavy to our small boats by night, while by day we did not go near the wreck in anything larger than a "dug-out."

One of these nocturnal visits to the wreck I recall with peculiar gusto, because it brought back that contest with catarrh and coughing among my own warriors which had so ludicrously beset me in Florida. It was always fascinating to be on those forbidden waters by night, stealing out with muffled oars through the creeks and reeds, our eyes always strained for other voyagers, our ears listening breathlessly to all the marsh sounds,—blackflsh splashing, and little wakened reed-birds that fled wailing away over the dim river, equally safe on either side. But it always appeared to the watchful senses that we were making noise enough to be heard at Fort Sumter; and somehow the victims of catarrh seemed always the most eager for any enterprise requiring peculiar caution. In this case I thought I had sifted them before-hand; but as soon as we were afloat, one poor boy near me began to wheeze, and I turned upon him in exasperation. He saw his danger, and meekly said, "I won't cough, Gunnel!" and he kept his word. For two mortal hours he sat grasping his gun, with never a chirrup. But two unfortunates in the bow of the boat developed symptoms which I could not suppress; so, putting in at a picket station, with some risk I dumped them in mud knee-deep, and embarked a substitute, who after the first five minutes absolutely coughed louder than both the others united. Handkerchiefs, blankets, over-coats, suffocation in its direst forms, were tried in vain, but apparently the Rebel pickets slept through it all, and we exploded the wreck in safety. I think they were asleep, for certainly across the level marshes there came a nasal sound, as of the "Con-thieveracy" in its slumbers. It may have been a bull-frog, but it sounded like a human snore.

Picket life was of course the place to feel the charm of natural beauty on the Sea Islands. We had a world of profuse and tangled vegetation around us, such as would have been a dream of delight to me, but for the constant sense of responsibility and care which came between. Amid this preoccupation, Nature seemed but a mirage, and not the close and intimate associate I had before known. I pressed no flowers, collected no insects or birds' eggs, made no notes on natural objects, reversing in these respects all previous habits. Yet now, in the retrospect, there seems to have been infused into me through every pore the voluptuous charm of the season and the place; and the slightest corresponding sound or odor now calls back the memory of those delicious days. Being afterwards on picket at almost every season, I tasted the sensations of all; and though I hardly then thought of such a result, the associations of beauty will remain forever.

In February, for instance,—though this was during a later period of picket service,—the woods were usually draped with that "net of shining haze" which marks our Northern May; and the house was embowered in wild-plum-blossoms, small, white, profuse, and tenanted by murmuring bees. There were peach-blossoms, too, and the yellow jasmine was opening its multitudinous buds, climbing over tall trees, and waving from bough to bough. There were fresh young ferns and white bloodroot in the edges of woods, matched by snowdrops in the garden, beneath budded myrtle and Petisporum. In this wilderness the birds were busy; the two main songsters being the mocking-bird and the cardinal-grosbeak, which monopolized all the parts of our more varied Northern orchestra save the tender and liquid notes, which in South Carolina seemed unattempted except by some stray blue-bird. Jays were as loud and busy as at the North in autumn; there were sparrows and wrens; and sometimes I noticed the shy and whimsical chewink.

From this early spring-time onward, there seemed no great difference in atmospheric sensations, and only a succession of bloom. After two months one's notions of the season grew bewildered, just as very early rising bewilders the day. In the army one is perhaps roused after a bivouac, marches before daybreak, halts, fights, somebody is killed, a long day's life has been lived, and after all it is not seven o'clock, and breakfast is not ready. So when we had lived in summer so long as hardly to remember winter, it suddenly occurred to us that it was not yet June. One escapes at the South that mixture of hunger and avarice which is felt in the Northern summer, counting each hour's joy with the sad consciousness that an hour is gone. The compensating loss is in missing those soft, sweet, liquid sensations of the Northern spring, that burst of life and joy, those days of heaven that even April brings; and this absence of childhood in the year creates a feeling of hardness in the season, like that I have suggested in the melody of the Southern birds. It seemed to me also that the woods had not those pure, clean, innocent odors which so abound in the New England forest in early spring; but there was something luscious, voluptuous, almost oppressively fragrant about the magnolias, as if they belonged not to Hebe, but to Magdalen.

Such immense and lustrous butterflies I had never seen but in dreams; and not even dreams had prepared me for sand-flies. Almost too small to be seen, they inflicted a bite which appeared larger than themselves,—a positive wound, more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving more annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while tears rolled profusely down my face, from mere muscular irritation. Had I stirred a finger, the whole battalion would have been slapping its cheeks. Such enemies were, however, a valuable aid to discipline, on the whole, as they abounded in the guard-house, and made that institution an object of unusual abhorrence among the men.

The presence of ladies and the homelike air of everything, made the picket station a very popular resort while we were there. It was the one agreeable ride from Beaufort, and we often had a dozen people unexpectedly to dinner. On such occasions there was sometimes mounting in hot haste, and an eager search among the outlying plantations for additional chickens and eggs, or through the company kitchens for some of those villanous tin cans which everywhere marked the progress of our army. In those cans, so far as my observation went, all fruits relapsed into a common acidulation, and all meats into a similarity of tastelessness; while the "condensed milk" was best described by the men, who often unconsciously stumbled on a better joke than they knew, and always spoke of it as condemned milk.

Plantation slave cabins Hilton Head, S.C.

We had our own excursions too,—to the Barnwell plantations, with their beautiful avenues and great live-oaks, the perfection of Southern beauty,—to Hall's Island, debatable ground, close under the enemy's fire, where half-wild cattle were to be shot, under military precautions, like Scottish moss-trooping,—or to the ferry, where it was fascinating to the female mind to scan the Rebel pickets through a field-glass. Our horses liked the by-ways far better than the level hardness of the Shell Road, especially those we had brought from Florida, which enjoyed the wilderness as if they had belonged to Marion's men. They delighted to feel the long sedge brush their flanks, or to gallop down the narrow wood-paths, leaping the fallen trees, and scaring the bright little lizards which shot across our track like live rays broken from the sunbeams. We had an abundance of horses, mostly captured and left in our hands by some convenient delay of the post quartermaster. We had also two side-saddles, which, not being munitions of war, could not properly (as we explained) be transferred like other captured articles to the general stock; otherwise the P. Q. M. (a married man) would have showed no unnecessary delay in their case. For miscellaneous accommodation was there not an ambulance,—that most inestimable of army conveniences, equally ready to carry the merry to a feast or the wounded from a fray. "Ambulance" was one of those words, rather numerous, which Ethiopian lips were not framed by Nature to articulate. Only the highest stages of colored culture could compass it; on the tongue of the many it was transformed mystically as "amulet," or ambitiously as "epaulet," or in culinary fashion as "omelet." But it was our experience that an ambulance under any name jolted equally hard.

Besides these divertisements, we had more laborious vocations,—a good deal of fatigue, and genuine though small alarms. The men went on duty every third day at furthest, and the officers nearly as often,—most of the tours of duty lasting twenty-four hours, though the stream was considered to watch itself tolerably well by daylight. This kind of responsibility suited the men; and we had already found, as the whole army afterwards acknowledged, that the constitutional watchfulness and distrustfulness of the colored race made them admirable sentinels. Soon after we went on picket, the commanding general sent an aid, with a cavalry escort, to visit all the stations, without my knowledge. They spent the whole night, and the officer reported that he could not get within thirty yards of any post without a challenge. This was a pleasant assurance for me; since our position seemed so secure, compared with Jacksonville, that I had feared some relaxation of vigilance, while yet the safety of all depended on our thorough discharge of duty.

Jacksonville had also seasoned the men so well that they were no longer nervous, and did not waste much powder on false alarms. The Rebels made no formal attacks, and rarely attempted to capture pickets. Sometimes they came stealing through the creeks in "dugouts," as we did on their side of the water, and occasionally an officer of ours was fired upon while making his rounds by night. Often some boat or scow would go adrift, and sometimes a mere dark mass of river-weed would be floated by the tide past the successive stations, eliciting a challenge and perhaps a shot from each. I remember the vivid way in which one of the men stated to his officer the manner in which a faithful picket should do his duty, after challenging, in case a boat came in sight. "Fus' ting I shoot, and den I shoot, and den I shoot again. Den I creep-creep up near de boat, and see who dey in 'em; and s'pose anybody pop up he head, den I shoot again. S'pose I fire my forty rounds. I tink he hear at de camp and send more mans,"—which seemed a reasonable presumption. This soldier's name was Paul Jones, a daring fellow, quite worthy of his namesake.

In time, however, they learned quieter methods, and would wade far out in the water, there standing motionless at last, hoping to surround and capture these floating boats, though, to their great disappointment, the prize usually proved empty. On one occasion they tried a still profounder strategy; for an officer visiting the pickets after midnight, and hearing in the stillness a portentous snore from the end of the causeway (our most important station), straightway hurried to the point of danger, with wrath in his soul. But the sergeant of the squad came out to meet him, imploring silence, and explaining that they had seen or suspected a boat hovering near, and were feigning sleep in order to lure and capture those who would entrap them.

The one military performance at the picket station of which my men were utterly intolerant was an occasional flag of truce, for which this was the appointed locality. These farces, for which it was our duty to furnish the stock actors, always struck them as being utterly despicable, and unworthy the serious business of war. They felt, I suppose, what Mr. Pickwick felt, when he heard his counsel remark to the counsel for the plaintiff, that it was a very fine morning. It goaded their souls to see the young officers from the two opposing armies salute each other courteously, and interchange cigars. They despised the object of such negotiations, which was usually to send over to the enemy some family of Rebel women who had made themselves quite intolerable on our side, but were not above collecting a subscription among the Union officers, before departure, to replenish their wardrobes. The men never showed disrespect to these women by word or deed, but they hated them from the bottom of their souls. Besides, there was a grievance behind all this.

The Rebel order remained unrevoked which consigned the new colored troops and their officers to a felon's death, if captured; and we all felt that we fought with ropes round our necks. "Dere's no flags ob truce for us," the men would contemptuously say. "When de Secesh fight de Fus' Souf" (First South Carolina), "he fight in earnest." Indeed, I myself took it as rather a compliment when the commander on the other side—though an old acquaintance of mine in Massachusetts and in Kansas—at first refused to negotiate through me or my officers,—a refusal which was kept up, greatly to the enemy's inconvenience, until our men finally captured some of the opposing pickets, and their friends had to waive all scruples in order to send them supplies. After this there was no trouble, and I think that the first Rebel officer in South Carolina who officially met any officer of colored troops under a flag of truce was Captain John C. Calhoun. In Florida we had been so recognized long before; but that was when they wished to frighten us out of Jacksonville.

Such was our life on picket at Port Royal,—a thing whose memory is now fast melting into such stuff as dreams are made of. We stayed there more than two months at that tune; the first attack on Charleston exploded with one puff, and had its end; General Hunter was ordered North, and the busy Gilmore reigned in his stead; and in June, when the blackberries were all eaten, we were summoned, nothing loath, to other scenes and encampments new.

CHAPTER VI

A NIGHT IN THE WATER

Yes, that was a pleasant life on picket, in the delicious early summer of the South, and among the endless flowery forests of that blossoming isle. In the retrospect I seem to see myself adrift upon a horse's back amid a sea of roses. The various outposts were within a six-mile radius, and it was one long, delightful gallop, day and night. I have a faint impression that the moon shone steadily every night for two months; and yet I remember certain periods of such dense darkness that in riding through the wood-paths it was really unsafe to go beyond a walk, for fear of branches above and roots below; and one of my officers was once shot at by a Rebel scout who stood unperceived at his horse's bridle.

To those doing outpost-duty on an island, however large, the main-land has all the fascination of forbidden fruit, and on a scale bounded only by the horizon. Emerson says that every house looks ideal until we enter it,—and it is certainly so, if it be just the other side of the hostile lines. Every grove in that blue distance appears enchanted ground, and yonder loitering gray-back leading his horse to water in the farthest distance, makes one thrill with a desire to hail him, to shoot at him, to capture him, to do anything to bridge this inexorable dumb space that lies between. A boyish feeling, no doubt, and one that time diminishes, without effacing; yet it is a feeling which lies at the bottom of many rash actions in war, and of some brilliant ones. For one, I could never quite outgrow it, though restricted by duty from doing many foolish things in consequence, and also restrained by reverence for certain confidential advisers whom I had always at hand, and who considered it their mission to keep me always on short rations of personal adventure. Indeed, most of that sort of entertainment in the army devolves upon scouts detailed for the purpose, volunteer aides-de-camp and newspaper-reporters,—other officers being expected to be about business more prosaic.

All the excitements of war are quadrupled by darkness; and as I rode along our outer lines at night, and watched the glimmering flames which at regular intervals starred the opposite river-shore, the longing was irresistible to cross the barrier of dusk, and see whether it were men or ghosts who hovered round those dying embers. I had yielded to these impulses in boat-adventures by night,—for it was a part of my instructions to obtain all possible information about the Rebel outposts,—and fascinating indeed it was to glide along, noiselessly paddling, with a dusky guide, through the endless intricacies of those Southern marshes, scaring the reed-birds, which wailed and fled away into the darkness, and penetrating several miles into the ulterior, between hostile fires, where discovery might be death. Yet there were drawbacks as to these enterprises, since it is not easy for a boat to cross still water, even on the darkest night, without being seen by watchful eyes; and, moreover, the extremes of high and low tide transform so completely the whole condition of those rivers that it needs very nice calculation to do one's work at precisely the right tune. To vary the experiment, I had often thought of trying a personal reconnoissance by swimming, at a certain point, whenever circumstances should make it an object.

The opportunity at last arrived, and I shall never forget the glee with which, after several postponements, I finally rode forth, a little before midnight, on a night which seemed made for the purpose. I had, of course, kept my own secret, and was entirely alone. The great Southern fireflies were out, not haunting the low ground merely, like ours, but rising to the loftiest tree-tops with weird illumination, and anon hovering so low that my horse often stepped the higher to avoid them. The dewy Cherokee roses brushed my face, the solemn "Chuckwill's-widow" croaked her incantation, and the rabbits raced phantom-like across the shadowy road. Slowly in the darkness I followed the well-known path to the spot where our most advanced outposts were stationed, holding a causeway which thrust itself far out across the separating river,—thus fronting a similar causeway on the other side, while a channel of perhaps three hundred yards, once traversed by a ferry-boat, rolled between. At low tide this channel was the whole river, with broad, oozy marshes on each side; at high tide the marshes were submerged, and the stream was a mile wide. This was the point which I had selected. To ascertain the numbers and position of the picket on the opposite causeway was my first object, as it was a matter on which no two of our officers agreed.

To this point, therefore, I rode, and dismounting, after being duly challenged by the sentinel at the causeway-head, walked down the long and lonely path. The tide was well up, though still on the flood, as I desired; and each visible tuft of marsh-grass might, but for its motionlessness, have been a prowling boat. Dark as the night had appeared, the water was pale, smooth, and phosphorescent, and I remember that the phrase "wan water," so familiar in the Scottish ballards, struck me just then as peculiarly appropriate, though its real meaning is quite different. A gentle breeze, from which I had hoped for a ripple, had utterly died away, and it was a warm, breathless Southern night. There was no sound but the faint swash of the coming tide, the noises of the reed-birds in the marshes, and the occasional leap of a fish; and it seemed to my overstrained ear as if every footstep of my own must be heard for miles. However, I could have no more postponements, and the thing must be tried now or never.

Reaching the farther end of the causeway, I found my men couched, like black statues, behind the slight earthwork there constructed. I expected that my proposed immersion would rather bewilder them, but knew that they would say nothing, as usual. As for the lieutenant on that post, he was a steady, matter-of-fact, perfectly disciplined Englishman, who wore a Crimean medal, and never asked a superfluous question in his life. If I had casually remarked to him, "Mr. Hooper, the General has ordered me on a brief personal reconnoissance to the Planet Jupiter, and I wish you to take care of my watch, lest it should be damaged by the Precession of the Equinoxes," he would have responded with a brief "All right, Sir," and a quick military gesture, and have put the thing in his pocket. As it was, I simply gave him the watch, and remarked that I was going to take a swim.

I do not remember ever to have experienced a greater sense of exhilaration than when I slipped noiselessly into the placid water, and struck out into the smooth, eddying current for the opposite shore. The night was so still and lovely, my black statues looked so dream-like at their posts behind the low earthwork, the opposite arm of the causeway stretched so invitingly from the Rebel main, the horizon glimmered so low around me,—for it always appears lower to a swimmer than even to an oarsman,—that I seemed floating in some concave globe, some magic crystal, of which I was the enchanted centre. With each little ripple of my steady progress all things hovered and changed; the stars danced and nodded above; where the stars ended the great Southern fireflies began; and closer than the fireflies, there clung round me a halo of phosphorescent sparkles from the soft salt water.

Had I told any one of my purpose, I should have had warnings and remonstrances enough. The few negroes who did not believe in alligators believed in sharks; the sceptics as to sharks were orthodox in respect to alligators; while those who rejected both had private prejudices as to snapping-turtles. The surgeon would have threatened intermittent fever, the first assistant rheumatism, and the second assistant congestive chills; non-swimmers would have predicted exhaustion, and swimmers cramp; and all this before coming within bullet-range of any hospitalities on the other shore. But I knew the folly of most alarms about reptiles and fishes; man's imagination peoples the water with many things which do not belong there, or prefer to keep out of his way, if they do; fevers and congestions were the surgeon's business, and I always kept people to their own department; cramp and exhaustion were dangers I could measure, as I had often done; bullets were a more substantial danger, and I must take the chance,—if a loon could dive at the flash, why not I? If I were once ashore, I should have to cope with the Rebels on their own ground, which they knew better than I; but the water was my ground, where I, too, had been at home from boyhood.

I swam as swiftly and softly as I could, although it seemed as if water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it caused that undefinable shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially comes over one by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping and contest against chocking, that seemed to me a perfect convulsion; for I suppose the tendency to choke and sneeze is always enhanced by the circumstance that one's life may depend on keeping still, just as yawning becomes irresistible where to yawn would be social ruin, and just as one is sure to sleep in church, if one sits in a conspicuous pew. At other times, some unguarded motion would create a splashing which seemed, in the tension of my senses, to be loud enough to be heard at Richmond, although it really mattered not, since there are fishes in those rivers which make as much noise on special occasions as if they were misguided young whales.

As I drew near the opposite shore, the dark causeway projected more and more distinctly, to my fancy at least, and I swam more softly still, utterly uncertain as to how far, in the stillness of air and water, my phosphorescent course could be traced by eye or ear. A slight ripple would have saved me from observation, I was more than ever sure, and I would have whistled for a fair wind as eagerly as any sailor, but that my breath was worth to me more than anything it was likely to bring. The water became smoother and smoother, and nothing broke the dim surface except a few clumps of rushes and my unfortunate head. The outside of this member gradually assumed to its inside a gigantic magnitude; it had always annoyed me at the hatter's from a merely animal bigness, with no commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of the Aztec children, of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm. Plotinus was less ashamed of his whole body than I of this inconsiderate and stupid appendage. To be sure, I might swim for a certain distance under water. But that accomplishment I had reserved for a retreat, for I knew that the longer I stayed down the more surely I should have to snort like a walrus when I came up again, and to approach an enemy with such a demonstration was not to be thought of.

Suddenly a dog barked. We had certain information that a pack of hounds was kept at a Rebel station a few miles off, on purpose to hunt runaways, and I had heard from the negroes almost fabulous accounts of the instinct of these animals. I knew that, although water baffled their scent, they yet could recognize in some manner the approach of any person across water as readily as by land; and of the vigilance of all dogs by night every traveller among Southern plantations has ample demonstration. I was now so near that I could dimly see the figures of men moving to and fro upon the end of the causeway, and could hear the dull knock, when one struck his foot against a piece of limber.

As my first object was to ascertain whether there were sentinels at that time at that precise point, I saw that I was approaching the end of my experiment Could I have once reached the causeway unnoticed, I could have lurked in the water beneath its projecting timbers, and perhaps made my way along the main shore, as I had known fugitive slaves to do, while coming from that side. Or had there been any ripple on the water, to confuse the aroused and watchful eyes, I could have made a circuit and approached the causeway at another point, though I had already satisfied myself that there was only a narrow channel on each side of it, even at high tide, and not, as on our side, a broad expanse of water. Indeed, this knowledge alone was worth all the trouble I had taken, and to attempt much more than this, in the face of a curiosity already roused, would have been a waste of future opportunities. I could try again, with the benefit of this new knowledge, on a point where the statements of the negroes had always been contradictory.

Resolving, however, to continue the observation a very little longer, since the water felt much warmer than I had expected, and there was no sense of chill or fatigue, I grasped at some wisps of straw or rushes that floated near, gathering them round my face a little, and then drifting nearer the wharf in what seemed a sort of eddy was able, without creating further alarm, to make some additional observations on points which it is not best now to particularize. Then, turning my back upon the mysterious shore which had thus far lured me, I sank softly below the surface, and swam as far as I could under water.

During this unseen retreat, I heard, of course, all manner of gurglings and hollow reverberations, and could fancy as many rifle-shots as I pleased. But on rising to the surface all seemed quiet, and even I did not create as much noise as I should have expected. I was now at a safe distance, since the enemy were always chary of showing their boats, and always tried to convince us they had none. What with absorbed attention first, and this submersion afterwards, I had lost all my bearings but the stars, having been long out of sight of my original point of departure. However, the difficulties of the return were nothing; making a slight allowance for the floodtide, which could not yet have turned, I should soon regain the place I had left. So I struck out freshly against the smooth water, feeling just a little stiffened by the exertion, and with an occasional chill running up the back of the neck, but with no nips from sharks, no nudges from alligators, and not a symptom of fever-and-ague.

Time I could not, of course, measure,—one never can in a novel position; but, after a reasonable amount of swimming, I began to look, with a natural interest, for the pier which I had quitted. I noticed, with some solicitude, that the woods along the friendly shore made one continuous shadow, and that the line of low bushes on the long causeway could scarcely be relieved against them, yet I knew where they ought to be, and the more doubtful I felt about it, the more I put down my doubts, as if they were unreasonable children. One can scarcely conceive of the alteration made in familiar objects by bringing the eye as low as the horizon, especially by night; to distinguish foreshortening is impossible, and every low near object is equivalent to one higher and more remote. Still I had the stars; and soon my eye, more practised, was enabled to select one precise line of bushes as that which marked the causeway, and for which I must direct my course.

As I swam steadily, but with some sense of fatigue, towards this phantom-line, I found it difficult to keep my faith steady and my progress true; everything appeared to shift and waver, in the uncertain light. The distant trees seemed not trees, but bushes, and the bushes seemed not exactly bushes, but might, after all, be distant trees. Could I be so confident that, out of all that low stretch of shore, I could select the one precise point where the friendly causeway stretched its long arm to receive me from the water? How easily (some tempter whispered at my ear) might one swerve a little, on either side, and be compelled to flounder over half a mile of oozy marsh on an ebbing tide, before reaching our own shore and that hospitable volley of bullets with which it would probably greet me! Had I not already (thus the tempter continued) been swimming rather unaccountably far, supposing me on a straight track for that inviting spot where my sentinels and my drapery were awaiting my return?

Suddenly I felt a sensation as of fine ribbons drawn softly across my person, and I found myself among some rushes. But what business had rushes there, or I among them? I knew that there was not a solitary spot of shoal in the deep channel where I supposed myself swimming, and it was plain in an instant that I had somehow missed my course, and must be getting among the marshes. I felt confident, to be sure, that I could not have widely erred, but was guiding my course for the proper side of tie river. But whether I had drifted above or below the causeway I had not the slightest clew to tell.

I pushed steadily forward, with some increasing sense of lassitude, passing one marshy islet after another, all seeming strangely out of place, and sometimes just reaching with my foot a soft tremulous shoal which gave scarce the shadow of a support, though even that shadow rested my feet. At one of these moments of stillness it suddenly occurred to my perception (what nothing but this slight contact could have assured me, in the darkness) that I was in a powerful current, and that this current set the wrong way. Instantly a flood of new intelligence came. Either I had unconsciously turned and was rapidly nearing the Rebel shore,—a suspicion which a glance at the stars corrected,—or else it was the tide itself which had turned, and which was sweeping me down the river with all its force, and was also sucking away at every moment the narrowing water from that treacherous expanse of mud out of whose horrible miry embrace I had lately helped to rescue a shipwrecked crew.

Either alternative was rather formidable. I can distinctly remember that for about one half-minute the whole vast universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary things could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted? It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight glimpse of the same sensation, and then, too, strangely enough, while swimming,—in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared plunge my mortal body. Keats hints at the same sudden emotion, in a wild poem written among the Scottish mountains. It was not the distinctive sensation which drowning men are said to have, that spasmodic passing in review of one's whole personal history. I had no well-defined anxiety, felt no fear, was moved to no prayer, did not give a thought to home or friends; only it swept over me, as with a sudden tempest, that, if I meant to get back to my own camp, I must keep my wits about me. I must not dwell on any other alternative, any more than a boy who climbs a precipice must look down. Imagination had no business here. That way madness lay. There was a shore somewhere before me, and I must get to it, by the ordinary means, before the ebb laid bare the flats, or swept me below the lower bends of the stream. That was all.

Suddenly a light gleamed for an instant before me, as if from a house in a grove of great trees upon a bank; and I knew that it came from the window of a ruined plantation-building, where our most advanced outposts had their headquarters. The flash revealed to me every point of the situation. I saw at once where I was, and how I got there: that the tide had turned while I was swimming, and with a much briefer interval of slack-water than I had been led to suppose,—that I had been swept a good way down stream, and was far beyond all possibility of regaining the point I had left.

Could I, however, retain my strength to swim one or two hundred yards farther, of which I had no doubt,—and if the water did not ebb too rapidly, of which I had more fear,—then I was quite safe. Every stroke took me more and more out of the power of the current, and there might even be an eddy to aid me. I could not afford to be carried down much farther, for there the channel made a sweep toward the wrong side of the river; but there was now no reason why I should not reach land. I could dismiss all fear, indeed, except that of being fired upon by our own sentinels, many of whom were then new recruits, and with the usual disposition to shoot first and investigate afterwards.

I found myself swimming in shallow and shallower water, and the flats seemed almost bare when I neared the shore, where the great gnarled branches of the liveoaks hung far over the muddy bank. Floating on my back for noiselessness, I paddled rapidly in with my hands, expecting momentarily to hear the challenge of the picket, and the ominous click so likely to follow. I knew that some one should be pacing to and fro, along that beat, but could not tell at what point he might be at that precise moment. Besides, there was a faint possibility that some chatty corporal might have carried the news of my bath thus far along the line, and they might be partially prepared for this unexpected visitor. Suddenly, like another flash, came the quick, quaint challenge,—

"Halt! Who's go dar?"

"F-f-friend with the c-c-countersign," retorted I, with chilly, but conciliatory energy, rising at full length out of the shallow water, to show myself a man and a brother.

"Ac-vance, friend, and give de countersign," responded the literal soldier, who at such a tune would have accosted: a spirit of light or goblin damned with no other formula.

I advanced and gave it, he recognized my voice at once. | And then and there, as I stood, a dripping ghost, beneath the f trees before him, the unconscionable fellow, wishing to exhaust upon me the utmost resources of military hospitality, deliberately presented arms!

Now a soldier on picket, or at night, usually presents arms to nobody; but a sentinel on camp-guard by day is expected to perform that ceremony to anything in human shape that has two rows of buttons. Here was a human shape, but so utterly buttonless that it exhibited not even a rag to which a button could by any earthly possibility be appended, button-less even potentially; and my blameless Ethiopian presented arms to even this. Where, then, are the theories of Carlyle, the axioms of "Sartor Resartus," the inability of humanity to conceive "a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords"? Cautioning my adherent, however, as to the proprieties suitable for such occasions thenceforward, I left him watching the river with renewed vigilance, and awaiting the next merman who should report himself.

Finding my way to the building, I hunted up a sergeant and a blanket, got a fire kindled in the dismantled chimney, and sat before it in my single garment, like a moist but undismayed Choctaw, until horse and clothing could be brought round from the causeway. It seemed strange that the morning had not yet dawned, after the uncounted periods that must have elapsed; but when the wardrobe arrived I looked at my watch and found that my night in the water had lasted precisely one hour.

Galloping home, I turned in with alacrity, and without a drop of whiskey, and waked a few hours after in excellent condition. The rapid changes of which that Department has seen so many—and, perhaps, to so little purpose—soon transferred us to a different scene. I have been on other scouts since then, and by various processes, but never with a zest so novel as was afforded by that night's experience. The thing soon got wind in the regiment, and led to only one ill consequence, so far as I know. It rather suppressed a way I had of lecturing the officers on the importance of reducing their personal baggage to a minimum. They got a trick of congratulating me, very respectfully, on the thoroughness with which I had once conformed my practice to my precepts.

CHAPTER VII

UP THE EDISTO

In reading military history, one finds the main interest to lie, undoubtedly, in the great campaigns, where a man, a regiment, a brigade, is but a pawn in the game. But there is a charm also in the more free and adventurous life of partisan warfare, where, if the total sphere be humbler, yet the individual has more relative importance, and the sense of action is more personal and keen. This is the reason given by the eccentric Revolutionary biographer, Weems, for writing the Life of Washington first, and then that of Marion. And there were, certainly, hi the early adventures of the colored troops in the Department of the South, some of the same elements of picturesqueness that belonged to Marion's band, on the same soil, with the added feature that the blacks were fighting for their personal liberties, of which Marion had helped to deprive them.

Major-General Quincy A. Gillmore

It is stated by Major-General Gillmore, in his "Siege of Charleston," as one of the three points in his preliminary strategy, that an expedition was sent up the Edisto River to destroy a bridge on the Charleston and Savannah Railway. As one of the early raids of the colored troops, this expedition may deserve narration, though it was, in a strategic point of view, a disappointment. It has already been told, briefly and on the whole with truth, by Greeley and others, but I will venture on a more complete account.

The project dated back earlier than General Gillmore's siege, and had originally no connection with that movement. It had been formed by Captain Trowbridge and myself in camp, and was based on facts learned from the men. General Saxton and Colonel W. W. H. Davis, the successive post-commanders, had both favored it. It had been also approved by General Hunter, before his sudden removal, though he regarded the bridge as a secondary affair, because there was another railway communication between the two cities. But as my main object was to obtain permission to go, I tried to make the most of all results which might follow, while it was very clear that the raid would harass and confuse the enemy, and be the means of bringing away many of the slaves. General Hunter had, therefore, accepted the project mainly as a stroke for freedom and black recruits; and General Gillmore, because anything that looked toward action found favor in his eyes, and because it would be convenient to him at that time to effect a diversion, if nothing more.

It must be remembered that, after the first capture of Port Royal, the outlying plantations along the whole Southern coast were abandoned, and the slaves withdrawn into the interior. It was necessary to ascend some river for thirty miles in order to reach the black population at all. This ascent could only be made by night, as it was a slow process, and the smoke of a steamboat could be seen for a great distance. The streams were usually shallow, winding, and muddy, and the difficulties of navigation were such as to require a full moon and a flood tide. It was really no easy matter to bring everything to bear, especially as every projected raid must be kept a secret so far as possible. However, we were now somewhat familiar with such undertakings, half military, half naval, and the thing to be done on the Edisto was precisely what we had proved to be practicable on the St. Mary's and the St. John's,—to drop anchor before the enemy's door some morning at daybreak, without his having dreamed of our approach.

Since a raid made by Colonel Montgomery up the Combahee, two months before, the vigilance of the Rebels had increased. But we had information that upon the South Edisto, or Pon-Pon River, the rice plantations were still being actively worked by a large number of negroes, in reliance on obstructions placed at the mouth of that narrow stream, where it joins the main river, some twenty miles from the coast. This point was known to be further protected by a battery of unknown strength, at Wiltown Bluff, a commanding and defensible situation. The obstructions consisted of a row of strong wooden piles across the river; but we convinced ourselves that these must now be much decayed, and that Captain Trowbridge, an excellent engineer officer, could remove them by the proper apparatus. Our proposition was to man the John Adams, an armed ferry-boat, which had before done us much service,—and which has now reverted to the pursuits of peace, it is said, on the East Boston line,—to ascend in this to Wiltown Bluff, silence the battery, and clear a passage through the obstructions. Leaving the John Adams to protect this point, we could then ascend the smaller stream with two light-draft boats, and perhaps burn the bridge, which was ten miles higher, before the enemy could bring sufficient force to make our position at Wiltown Bluff untenable.

The expedition was organized essentially upon this plan. The smaller boats were the Enoch Dean,—a river steamboat, which carried a ten-pound Parrott gun, and a small howitzer,—and a little mosquito of a tug, the Governor Milton, upon which, with the greatest difficulty, we found room for two twelve-pound Armstrong guns, with their gunners, forming a section of the First Connecticut Battery, under Lieutenant Clinton, aided by a squad from my own regiment, under Captain James. The John Adams carried, I if I remember rightly, two Parrott guns (of twenty and ten | pounds calibre) and a howitzer or two. The whole force of men did not exceed two hundred and fifty.

We left Beaufort, S. C., on the afternoon of July 9th, 1863. In former narrations I have sufficiently described the charm of a moonlight ascent into a hostile country, upon an unknown stream, the dark and silent banks, the rippling water, the wail of the reed-birds, the anxious watch, the breathless listening, the veiled lights, the whispered orders. To this was now to be added the vexation of an insufficient pilotage, for our negro guide knew only the upper river, and, as it finally proved, not even that, while, to take us over the bar which obstructed the main stream, we must borrow a pilot from Captain Dutch, whose gunboat blockaded that point. This active naval officer, however, whose boat expeditions had penetrated all the lower branches of those rivers, could supply our want, and we borrowed from him not only a pilot, but a surgeon, to replace our own, who had been prevented by an accident from coming with us. Thus accompanied, we steamed over the bar in safety, had a peaceful ascent, passed the island of Jehossee,—the fine estate of Governor Aiken, then left undisturbed by both sides,—and fired our first shell into the camp at Wiltown Bluff at four o'clock in the morning.

The battery—whether fixed or movable we knew not—met us with a promptness that proved very short lived. After three shots it was silent, but we could not tell why. The bluff was wooded, and we could see but little. The only course was to land, under cover of the guns. As the firing ceased and the smoke cleared away, I looked across the rice-fields which lay beneath the bluff. The first sunbeams glowed upon their emerald levels, and on the blossoming hedges along the rectangular dikes.

Recently freed slaves Aiken’s Landing Va.

What were those black dots which everywhere appeared? Those moist meadows had become alive with human heads, and along each narrow path came a straggling file of men and women, all on a run for the river-side. I went ashore with a boat-load of troops at once. The landing was difficult and marshy. The astonished negroes tugged us up the bank, and gazed on us as if we had been Cortez and Columbus.

Arrival at Union Army lines

They kept arriving by land much faster than we could come by water; every moment increased the crowd, the jostling, the mutual clinging, on that miry foothold. What a scene it was! With the wild faces, eager figures, strange garments, it seemed, as one of the poor things reverently suggested, "like notin' but de judgment day." Presently they began to come from the houses also, with their little bundles on their heads; then with larger bundles. Old women, trotting on the narrow paths, would kneel to pray a little prayer, still balancing the bundle; and then would suddenly spring up, urged by the accumulating procession behind, and would move on till irresistibly compelled by thankfulness to dip down for another invocation.

Free at last

Reaching us, every human being must grasp our hands, amid exclamations of "Bress you, mas'r," and "Bress de Lord," at the rate of four of the latter ascriptions to one of the former.

Women brought children on their shoulders; small black boys learned on their back little brothers equally inky, and, gravely depositing them, shook hands. Never had I seen human beings so clad, or rather so unclad, in such amazing squalid-ness and destitution of garments.

I recall one small urchin without a rag of clothing save the basque waist of a lady's dress, bristling with whalebones, and worn wrong side before, beneath which his smooth ebony legs emerged like those of an ostrich from its plumage. How weak is imagination, how cold is memory, that I ever cease, for a day of my life, to see before me the picture of that astounding scene!

Yet at the time we were perforce a little impatient of all this piety, protestation, and hand-pressing; for the vital thing was to ascertain what force had been stationed at the bluff, and whether it was yet withdrawn. The slaves, on the other hand, were too much absorbed in their prospective freedom to aid us in taking any further steps to secure it. Captain Trowbridge, who had by this time landed at a different point, got quite into despair over the seeming deafness of the people to all questions. "How many soldiers are there on the bluff?" he asked of the first-comer.

"Mas'r," said the man, stuttering terribly, "I c-c-c—"

"Tell me how many soldiers there are!" roared Trowbridge, in his mighty voice, and all but shaking the poor old thing, in his thirst for information.

"O mas'r," recommenced in terror the incapacitated wit-ness, "I c-c-carpenter!" holding up eagerly a little stump of a hatchet, his sole treasure, as if his profession ought to excuse from all military opinions.

I wish that it were possible to present all this scene from the point of view of the slaves themselves. It can be most nearly done, perhaps, by quoting the description given of a similar scene on the Combahee River, by a very aged man, who had been brought down on the previous raid, already mentioned. I wrote it down in tent, long after, while the old man recited the tale, with much gesticulation, at the door; and it is by far the best glimpse I have ever had, through a negro's eyes, at these wonderful birthdays of freedom.

"De people was all a hoein', mas'r," said the old man. "Dey was a hoein' in the rice-field, when de gunboats come. Den ebry man drap dem hoe, and leff de rice. De mas'r he stand and call, 'Run to de wood for hide! Yankee come, sell you to Cuba! run for hide!' Ebry man he run, and, my God! run all toder way!

"Mas'r stand in de wood, peep, peep, faid for truss [afraid to trust]. He say, 'Run to de wood!' and ebry man run by him, straight to de boat.

"De brack sojer so presumptious, dey come right ashore, hold up dere head. Fus' ting I know, dere was a barn, ten tousand bushel rough rice, all in a blaze, den mas'r's great house, all cracklin' up de roof. Didn't I keer for see 'em blaze? Lor, mas'r, didn't care notin' at all, was gwine to de boat."

Dore's Don Quixote could not surpass the sublime absorption in which the gaunt old man, with arm uplifted, described this stage of affairs, till he ended in a shrewd chuckle, worthy of Sancho Panza. Then he resumed.

"De brack sojers so presumptious!" This he repeated three times, slowly shaking his head in an ecstasy of admiration. It flashed upon me that the apparition of a black soldier must amaze those still in bondage, much as a butterfly just from the chrysalis might astound his fellow-grubs. I inwardly vowed that my soldiers, at least, should be as "presumptious" as I could make them. Then he went on.

"Ole woman and I go down to de boat; den dey say behind us, 'Rebels comin'l Rebels comin'!' Ole woman say, 'Come ahead, come plenty ahead!' I hab notin' on but my shirt and pantaloon; ole woman one single frock he hab on, and one handkerchief on he head; I leff all-two my blanket and run for de Rebel come, and den dey didn't come, didn't truss for come.

"Ise eighty-eight year old, mas'r. My ole Mas'r Lowndes keep all de ages in a big book, and when we come to age ob sense we mark em down ebry year, so I know. Too ole for come? Mas'r joking. Neber too ole for leave de land o' bondage. I old, but great good for chil'en, gib tousand tank ebry day. Young people can go through, force [forcibly], mas'r, but de ole folk mus' go slow."

Such emotions as these, no doubt, were inspired by our arrival, but we could only hear their hasty utterance in passing; our duty being, with the small force already landed, to take possession of the bluff. Ascending, with proper precautions, the wooded hill, we soon found ourselves in the deserted camp of a light battery, amid scattered equipments and suggestions of a very unattractive breakfast. As soon as possible, skirmishers were thrown out through the woods to the farther edge of the bluff, while a party searched the houses, finding the usual large supply of furniture and pictures,—brought up for safety from below,—but no soldiers. Captain Trowbridge then got the John Adams beside the row of piles, and went to work for their removal.

Again I had the exciting sensation of being within the hostile lines,—the eager explorations, the doubts, the watchfulness, the listening for every sound of coming hoofs. Presently a horse's tread was heard in earnest, but it was a squad of our own men bringing in two captured cavalry soldiers. One of these, a sturdy fellow, submitted quietly to his lot, only begging that, whenever we should evacuate the bluff, a note should be left behind stating that he was a prisoner. The other, a very young man, and a member of the "Rebel Troop," a sort of Cadet corps among the Charleston youths, came to me in great wrath, complaining that the corporal of our squad had kicked him after he had surrendered. His air of offended pride was very rueful, and it did indeed seem a pathetic reversal of fortunes for the two races. To be sure, the youth was a scion of one of the foremost families of South Carolina, and when I considered the wrongs which the black race had encountered from those of his blood, first and last, it seemed as if the most scrupulous Recording Angel might tolerate one final kick to square the account. But I reproved the corporal, who respectfully disclaimed the charge, and said the kick was an incident of the scuffle. It certainly was not their habit to show such poor malice; they thought too well of themselves.

His demeanor seemed less lofty, but rather piteous, when he implored me not to put him on board any vessel which was to ascend the upper stream, and hinted, by awful implications, the danger of such ascent. This meant torpedoes, a peril which we treated, in those days, with rather mistaken contempt. But we found none on the Edisto, and it may be that it was only a foolish attempt to alarm us.

Meanwhile, Trowbridge was toiling away at the row of piles, which proved easier to draw out than to saw asunder, either work being hard enough. It took far longer than we had hoped, and we saw noon approach and the tide rapidly fall, taking with it, inch by inch, our hopes of effecting a surprise at the bridge. During this time, and indeed all day, the detachments on shore, under Captains Whitney and Sampson, were having occasional skirmishes with the enemy, while the colored people were swarming to the shore, or running to and fro like ants, with the poor treasures of their houses. Our busy Quartermaster, Mr. Bingham—who died afterwards from the overwork of that sultry day—was transporting the refugees on board the steamer, or hunting up bales of cotton, or directing the burning of rice-houses, in accordance with our orders. No dwelling-houses were destroyed or plundered by our men,—Sherman's "bummers" not having yet arrived,—though I asked no questions as to what the plantation negroes might bring in their great bundles. One piece of property, I must admit, seemed a lawful capture,—a United States dress-sword, of the old pattern, which had belonged to the Rebel general who afterwards gave the order to bury Colonel Shaw "with his niggers." That I have retained, not without some satisfaction, to this day.

A passage having been cleared at last, and the tide having turned by noon, we lost no time in attempting the ascent, leaving the bluff to be held by the John Adams, and by the small force on shore. We were scarcely above the obstructions, however, when the little tug went aground, and the Enoch Dean, ascending a mile farther, had an encounter with a battery on the right,—perhaps our old enemy,—and drove it back. Soon after, she also ran aground, a misfortune of which our opponent strangely took no advantage; and, on getting off, I thought it best to drop down to the bluff again, as the tide was still hopelessly low. None can tell, save those who have tried them, the vexations of those muddy Southern streams, navigable only during a few hours of flood-tide.

After waiting an hour, the two small vessels again tried the ascent. The enemy on the right had disappeared; but we could now see, far off on our left, another light battery moving parallel with the river, apparently to meet us at some upper bend. But for the present we were safe, with the low rice-fields on each side of us; and the scene was so peaceful, it seemed as if all danger were done. For the first time, we saw in South Carolina blossoming river-banks and low emerald meadows, that seemed like New England. Everywhere there were the same rectangular fields, smooth canals, and bushy dikes. A few negroes stole out to us in dugouts, and breathlessly told us how others had been hurried away by the overseers. We glided safely on, mile after mile. The day was unutterably hot, but all else seemed propitious. The men had their combustibles all ready to fire the bridge, and our hopes were unbounded.

But by degrees the channel grew more tortuous and difficult, and while the little Milton glided smoothly over everything, the Enoch Dean, my own boat, repeatedly grounded. On every occasion of especial need, too, something went wrong in her machinery,—her engine being constructed on some wholly new patent, of which, I should hope, this trial would prove entirely sufficient. The black pilot, who was not a soldier, grew more and more bewildered, and declared that it was the channel, not his brain, which had gone wrong; the captain, a little elderly man, sat wringing his hands in the pilot-box; and the engineer appeared to be mingling his groans with those of the diseased engine. Meanwhile I, in equal ignorance of machinery and channel, had to give orders only justified by minute acquaintance with both. So I navigated on general principles, until they grounded us on a mud-bank, just below a wooded point, and some two miles from the bridge of our destination. It was with a pang that I waved to Major Strong, who was on the other side of the channel in a tug, not to risk approaching us, but to steam on and finish the work, if he could.

Short was his triumph. Gliding round the point, he found himself instantly engaged with a light battery of four or six guns, doubtless the same we had seen in the distance. The Milton was within two hundred and fifty yards. The Connecticut men fought then: guns well, aided by the blacks, and it was exasperating for us to hear the shots, while we could see nothing and do nothing. The scanty ammunition of our bow gun was exhausted, and the gun in the stern was useless, from the position in which we lay. In vain we moved the men from side to side, rocking the vessel, to dislodge it. The heat was terrific that August afternoon; I remember I found myself constantly changing places, on the scorched deck, to keep my feet from being blistered. At last the officer in charge of the gun, a hardy lumberman from Maine, got the stern of the vessel so far round that he obtained the range of the battery through the cabin windows, "but it would be necessary," he cooly added, on reporting to me this fact, "to shoot away the corner of the cabin." I knew that this apartment was newly painted and gilded, and the idol of the poor captain's heart; but it was plain that even the thought of his own upholstery could not make the poor soul more wretched than he was. So I bade Captain Dolly blaze away, and thus we took our hand in the little game, though at a sacrifice.

It was of no use. Down drifted out little consort round the point, her engine disabled and her engineer killed, as we afterwards found, though then we could only look and wonder. Still pluckily firing, she floated by upon the tide, which had now just turned; and when, with a last desperate effort, we got off, our engine had one of its impracticable fits, and we could only follow her. The day was waning, and all its range of possibility had lain within the limits of that one tide.

All our previous expeditions had been so successful it now seemed hard to turn back; the river-banks and rice-fields, so beautiful before, seemed only a vexation now. But the swift current bore us on, and after our Parthian shots had died away, a new discharge of artillery opened upon us, from our first antagonist of the morning, which still kept the other side of the stream. It had taken up a strong position on another bluff, almost out of range of the John Adams, but within easy range of us. The sharpest contest of the day was before us. Happily the engine and engineer were now behaving well, and we were steering in a channel already traversed, and of which the dangerous points were known. But we had a long, straight reach of river before us, heading directly toward the battery, which, having once got our range, had only to keep it, while we could do nothing in return. The Rebels certainly served then: guns well. For the first time I discovered that there were certain compensating advantages in a slightly built craft, as compared with one more substantial; the missiles never lodged in the vessel, but crashed through some thin partition as if it were paper, to explode beyond us, or fall harmless in the water. Splintering, the chief source of wounds and death in wooden ships, was thus entirely avoided; the danger was that our machinery might be disabled, or that shots might strike below the water-line and sink us.

This, however, did not happen. Fifteen projectiles, as we afterwards computed, passed through the vessel or cut the rigging. Yet few casualties occurred, and those instantly fatal. As my orderly stood leaning on a comrade's shoulder, the head of the latter was shot off. At last I myself felt a sudden blow in the side, as if from some prize-fighter, doubling me up for a moment, while I sank upon a seat. It proved afterwards to have been produced by the grazing of a ball, which, without tearing a garment, had yet made a large part of my side black and blue, leaving a sensation of paralysis which made it difficult to stand. Supporting myself on Captain Rogers, I tried to comprehend what had happened, and I remember being impressed by an odd feeling that I had now got my share, and should henceforth be a great deal safer than any of the rest. I am told that this often follows one's first experience of a wound.

But this immediate contest, sharp as it was, proved brief; a turn in the river enabled us to use our stern gun, and we soon glided into the comparative shelter of Wiltown Bluff. There, however, we were to encounter the danger of shipwreck, superadded to that of fight. When the passage through the piles was first cleared, it had been marked by stakes, lest the rising tide should cover the remaining piles, and make it difficult to run the passage. But when we again reached it, the stakes had somehow been knocked away, the piles were just covered by the swift current, and the little tug-boat was aground upon them. She came off easily, however, with our aid, and, when we in turn essayed the passage, we grounded also, but more firmly. We getting off at last, and making the passage, the tug again became lodged, when nearly past danger, and all our efforts proved powerless to pull her through. I therefore dropped down below, and sent the John Adams to her aid, while I superintended the final recall of the pickets, and the embarkation of the remaining refugees.

While thus engaged, I felt little solicitude about the boats above. It was certain that the John Adams could safely go close to the piles on the lower side, that she was very strong, and that the other was very light. Still, it was natural to cast some anxious glances up the river, and it was with surprise that I presently saw a canoe descending, which contained Major Strong. Coming on board, he told me with some excitement that the tug could not possibly be got off, and he wished for orders.

It was no time to consider whether it was not his place to have given orders, instead of going half a mile to seek them. I was by this time so far exhausted that everything seemed to pass by me as by one in a dream; but I got into a boat, pushed up stream, met presently the John Adams returning, and was informed by the officer in charge of the Connecticut battery that he had abandoned the tug, and—worse news yet—that his guns had been thrown overboard. It seemed to me then, and has always seemed, that this sacrifice was utterly needless, because, although the captain of the John Adams had refused to risk his vessel by going near enough to receive the guns, he should have been compelled to do so. Though the thing was done without my knowledge, and beyond my reach, yet, as commander of the expedition, I was technically responsible. It was hard to blame a lieutenant when his senior had shrunk from a decision, and left him alone; nor was it easy to blame Major Strong, whom I knew to be a man of personal courage though without much decision of character. He was subsequently tried by court-martial and acquitted, after which he resigned, and was lost at sea on his way home.

The tug, being thus abandoned, must of course be burned to prevent her falling into the enemy's hands. Major Strong went with prompt fearlessness to do this, at my order; after which he remained on the Enoch Dean, and I went on board the John Adams, being compelled to succumb at last, and transfer all remaining responsibility to Captain Trowbridge. Exhausted as I was, I could still observe, in a vague way, the scene around me. Every available corner of the boat seemed like some vast auction-room of second-hand goods. Great piles of bedding and bundles lay on every side, with black heads emerging and black forms reclining in every stage of squalidness. Some seemed ill, or wounded, or asleep, others were chattering eagerly among themselves, singing, praying, or soliloquizing on joys to come. "Bress de Lord," I heard one woman say, "I spec' I got salt victual now,—notin' but fresh victual dese six months, but Ise get salt victual now,"—thus reversing, under pressure of the salt-embargo, the usual anticipations of voyagers.

Trowbridge told me, long after, that, on seeking a fan for my benefit, he could find but one on board. That was in the hands of a fat old "aunty," who had just embarked, and sat on an enormous bundle of her goods, in everybody's way, fanning herself vehemently, and ejaculating, as her gasping breath would permit, "Oh! Do, Jesus! Oh! Do, Jesus!" when the captain abruptly disarmed her of the fan, and left her continuing her pious exercises.

Thus we glided down the river in the waning light. Once more we encountered a battery, making five in all; I could hear the guns of the assailants, and could not distinguish the explosion of their shells from the answering throb of our own guns. The kind Quartermaster kept bringing me news of what occurred, like Rebecca in Front-de-Boeuf s castle, but discreetly withholding any actual casualties. Then all faded into safety and sleep; and we reached Beaufort in the morning, after thirty-six hours of absence. A kind friend, who acted in South Carolina a nobler part amid tragedies than in any of her early stage triumphs, met us with an ambulance at the wharf, and the prisoners, the wounded, and the dead were duly attended.

The reader will not care for any personal record of convalescence; though, among the general military laudations of whiskey, it is worth while to say that one life was saved, in the opinion of my surgeons, by an habitual abstinence from it, leaving no food for peritoneal inflammation to feed upon. The able-bodied men who had joined us were, sent to aid General Gillmore in the trenches, while their families were established in huts and tents on St. Helena Island. A year after, greatly to the delight of the regiment, in taking possession of a battery which they had helped to capture on James Island, they found in their hands the selfsame guns which they had seen thrown overboard from the Governor Milton. They then felt that their account with the enemy was squared, and could proceed to further operations.

USCT liberating slaves in North Carolina

Before the war, how great a thing seemed the rescue of even one man from slavery; and since the war has emancipated all, how little seems the liberation of two hundred! But no one then knew how the contest might end; and when I think of that morning sunlight, those emerald fields, those thronging numbers, the old women with their prayers, and the little boys with them: living burdens, I know that the day was worth all it cost, and more.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BABY OF THE REGIMENT

We were in our winter camp on Port Royal Island. It was a lovely November morning, soft and spring-like; the mocking-birds were singing, and the cotton-fields still white with fleecy pods. Morning drill was over, the men were cleaning their guns and singing very happily; the officers were in their tents, reading still more happily their letters just arrived from home. Suddenly I heard a knock at my tent-door, and the latch clicked. It was the only latch in camp, and I was very proud of it, and the officers always clicked it as loudly as possible, in order to gratify my feelings. The door opened, and the Quartermaster thrust in the most beaming face I ever saw.

"Colonel," said he, "there are great news for the regiment. My wife and baby are coming by the next steamer!"

"Baby!" said I, in amazement. "Q. M., you are beside yourself." (We always called the Quartermaster Q. M. for shortness.) "There was a pass sent to your wife, but nothing was ever said about a baby. Baby indeed!"

"But the baby was included in the pass," replied the triumphant father-of-a-family. "You don't suppose my wife would come down here without her baby! Besides, the pass itself permits her to bring necessary baggage, and is not a baby six months old necessary baggage?"

"But, my dear fellow," said I, rather anxiously, "how can you make the little thing comfortable in a tent, amidst these rigors of a South Carolina winter, when it is uncomfortably hot for drill at noon, and ice forms by your bedside at night?"

"Trust me for that," said the delighted papa, and went off whistling. I could hear him telling the same news to three others, at least, before he got to his own tent.

That day the preparations began, and soon his abode was a wonder of comfort. There were posts and rafters, and a raised floor, and a great chimney, and a door with hinges,—every luxury except a latch, and that he could not have, for mine was the last that could be purchased. One of the regimental carpenters was employed to make a cradle, and another to make a bedstead high enough for the cradle to go under. Then there must be a bit of red carpet beside the bedstead, and thus the progress of splendor went on. The wife of one of the colored sergeants was engaged to act as nursery-maid. She was a very respectable young woman; the only objection to her being that she smoked a pipe. But we thought that perhaps Baby might not dislike tobacco; and if she did, she would have excellent opportunities to break the pipe in pieces.

In due time the steamer arrived, and Baby and her mother were among the passengers. The little recruit was soon settled in her new cradle, and slept in it as if she had never known any other. The sergeant's wife soon had her on exhibition through the neighborhood, and from that time forward she was quite a queen among us. She had sweet blue eyes and pretty brown hair, with round, dimpled cheeks, and that perfect dignity which is so beautiful in a baby. She hardly ever cried, and was not at all timid. She would go to anybody, and yet did not encourage any romping from any but the most intimate friends. She always wore a warm long-sleeved scarlet cloak with a hood, and in this costume was carried or "toted," as the soldiers said, all about the camp. At "guard-mounting" in the morning, when the men who are to go on guard duty for the day are drawn up to be inspected, Baby was always there, to help inspect them. She did not say much, but she eyed them very closely, and seemed fully to appreciate their bright buttons. Then the Officer-of-the-Day, who appears at guard-mounting with his sword and sash, and comes afterwards to the Colonel's tent for orders, would come and speak to Baby on his way, and receive her orders first. When the time came for drill she was usually present to watch the troops; and when the drum beat for dinner she liked to see the long row of men in each company march up to the cookhouse, in single file, each with tin cup and plate.

During the day, in pleasant weather, she might be seen in her nurse's arms, about the company streets, the centre of an admiring circle, her scarlet costume looking very pretty amidst the shining black cheeks and neat blue uniforms of the soldiers. At "dress-parade," just before sunset, she was always an attendant. As I stood before the regiment, I could see the little spot of red out of the corner of my eye, at one end of the long line of men; and I looked with so much interest for her small person, that, instead of saying at the proper time, "Attention, Battalion! Shoulder arms!"—it is a wonder that I did not say, "Shoulder babies!"

Our little lady was very impartial, and distributed her kind looks to everybody. She had not the slightest prejudice against color, and did not care in the least whether her particular friends were black or white. Her especial favorites, I think, were the drummer-boys, who were not my favorites by any means, for they were a roguish set of scamps, and gave more trouble than all the grown men in the regiment. I think Annie liked them because they were small, and made a noise, and had red caps like her hood, and red facings on their jackets, and also because they occasionally stood on their heads for her amusement. After dress-parade the whole drum-corps would march to the great flag-staff, and wait till just sunset-time, when they would beat "the retreat," and then the flag would be hauled down,—a great festival for Annie. Sometimes the Sergeant-Major would wrap her in the great folds of the flag, after it was taken down, and she would peep out very prettily from amidst the stars and stripes, like a new-born Goddess of Liberty.

About once a month, some inspecting officer was sent to the camp by the general in command, to see to the condition of everything in the regiment, from bayonets to buttons. It was usually a long and tiresome process, and, when everything else was done, I used to tell the officer that I had one thing more for him to inspect, which was peculiar to our regiment. Then I would send for Baby to be exhibited, and I never saw an inspecting officer, old or young, who did not look pleased at the sudden appearance of the little, fresh, smiling creature,—a flower in the midst of war. And Annie in her turn would look at them, with the true baby dignity La her face,—that deep, earnest look which babies often have, and which people think so wonderful when Raphael paints it, although they might often see just the same expression in the faces of their own darlings at home.

Meanwhile Annie seemed to like the camp style of housekeeping very much. Her father's tent was double, and he used the front apartment for his office, and the inner room for parlor and bedroom; while the nurse had a separate tent and wash-room behind all. I remember that, the first time I went there in the evening, it was to borrow some writing-paper; and while Baby's mother was hunting for it in the front tent, I heard a great cooing and murmuring in the inner room. I asked if Annie was still awake, and her mother told me to go in and see. Pushing aside the canvas door, I entered. No sign of anybody was to be seen; but a variety of soft little happy noises seemed to come from some unseen corner. Mrs. C. came quietly in, pulled away the counterpane of her own bed, and drew out the rough cradle where lay the little damsel, perfectly happy, and wider awake than anything but a baby possibly can be. She looked as if the seclusion of a dozen family bedsteads would not be enough to discourage her spirits, and I saw that camp life was likely to suit her very well.

A tent can be kept very warm, for it is merely a house with a thinner wall than usual; and I do not think that Baby felt the cold much more than if she had been at home that winter. The great trouble is, that a tent-chimney, not being built very high, is apt to smoke when the wind is in a certain direction; and when that happens it is hardly possible to stay inside. So we used to build the chimneys of some tents on the east side, and those of others on the west, and thus some of the tents were always comfortable. I have seen Baby's mother running in a hard rain, with little Red-Riding-Hood in her arms, to take refuge with the Adjutant's wife, when every other abode was full of smoke; and I must admit that there were one or two windy days that season when nobody could really keep warm, and Annie had to remain ignominiously in her cradle, with as many clothes on as possible, for almost the whole time.

The Quartermaster's tent was very attractive to us in the evening. I remember that once, on passing near it after nightfall, I heard our Major's fine voice singing Methodist hymns within, and Mrs. C.'s sweet tones chiming in. So I peeped through the outer door. The fire was burning very pleasantly in the inner tent, and the scrap of new red carpet made the floor look quite magnificent. The Major sat on a box, our surgeon on a stool; "Q. M." and his wife, and the Adjutant's wife, and one of the captains, were all sitting on the bed, singing as well as they knew how; and the baby was under the bed. Baby had retired for the night, was overshadowed, suppressed, sat upon; the singing went on, and she had wandered away into her own land of dreams, nearer to heaven, perhaps, than any pitch their voices could attain. I went in, and joined the party. Presently the music stopped, and another officer was sent for, to sing some particular song. At this pause the invisible innocent waked a little, and began to cluck and coo.

"It's the kitten," exclaimed somebody.

"It's my baby!" exclaimed Mrs. C. triumphantly, in that tone of unfailing personal pride which belongs to young mothers.

The people all got up from the bed for a moment, while Annie was pulled from beneath, wide awake and placid as usual; and she sat in one lap or another during the rest of the concert, sometimes winking at the candle, but usually listening to the songs, with a calm and critical expression, as if she could make as much noise as any of them, whenever she saw fit to try. Not a sound did she make, however, except one little soft sneeze, which led to an immediate flood-tide of red shawl, covering every part of her but the forehead. But I soon hinted that the concert had better be ended, because I knew from observation that the small damsel had Carefully watched a regimental inspection and a brigade drill on that day, and that an interval of repose was certainly necessary.

Annie did not long remain the only baby in camp. One day, on going out to the stables to look at a horse, I heard a sound of baby-talk, addressed by some man to a child near by, and, looking round the corner of a tent, I saw that one of the hostlers had something black and round, lying on the sloping side of a tent, with which he was playing very eagerly. It proved to be his baby, a plump, shiny thing, younger than Annie; and I never saw a merrier picture than the happy father frolicking with his child, while the mother stood quietly by. This was Baby Number Two, and she stayed in camp several weeks, the two innocents meeting each other every day, in the placid indifference that belonged to their years; both were happy little healthy things, and it never seemed to cross their minds that there was any difference in their complexions. As I said before, Annie was not troubled by any prejudice in regard to color, nor do I suppose that the other little maiden was.

Annie enjoyed the tent-life very much; but when we were Sent out on picket soon after, she enjoyed it still more. Our head-quarters were at a deserted plantation house, with one large parlor, a dining-room, and a few bedrooms. Baby's father and mother had a room up stairs, with a stove whose pipe went straight out at the window. This was quite comfortable, though half the windows were broken, and there was no glass and no glazier to mend them. The windows of the large parlor were in much the same condition, though we had an immense fireplace, where we had a bright fire whenever it was cold, and always in the evening. The walls of this room were very dirty, and it took our ladies several days to cover all the unsightly places with wreaths and hangings of evergreen. In the performance Baby took an active part. Her duties consisted in sitting in a great nest of evergreen, pulling and fingering the fragrant leaves, and occasionally giving a little cry of glee when she had accomplished some piece of decided mischief.

There was less entertainment to be found in the camp itself at this time; but the household at head-quarters was larger than Baby had been accustomed to. We had a great deal of company, moreover, and she had quite a gay life of it. She usually made her appearance in the large parlor soon after breakfast; and to dance her for a few moments in our arms was one of the first daily duties of each one. Then the morning reports began to arrive from the different outposts,—a mounted officer or courier coming in from each place, dismounting at the door, and clattering in with jingling arms and spurs, each a new excitement for Annie. She usually got some attention from any officer who came, receiving with her wonted dignity any daring caress. When the messengers had ceased to be interesting, there were always the horses to look at, held or tethered under the trees beside the sunny piazza. After the various couriers had been received, other messengers would be despatched to the town, seven miles away, and Baby had all the excitement of their mounting and departure. Her father was often one of the riders, and would sometimes seize Annie for a good-by kiss, place her on the saddle before him, gallop her round the house once or twice, and then give her back to her nurse's arms again. She was perfectly fearless, and such boisterous attentions never frightened her, nor did they ever interfere with her sweet, infantine self-possession.

After the riding-parties had gone, there was the piazza still for entertainment, with a sentinel pacing up and down before it; but Annie did not enjoy the sentinel, though his breastplate and buttons shone like gold, so much as the hammock which always hung swinging between the pillars. It was a pretty hammock, with great open meshes; and she delighted to lie in it, and have the netting closed above her, so that she could only be seen through the apertures. I can see her now, the fresh little rosy thing, in her blue and scarlet wrappings, with one round and dimpled arm thrust forth through the netting, and the other grasping an armful of blushing roses and fragrant magnolias. She looked like those pretty French bas-reliefs of Cupids imprisoned in baskets, and peeping through. That hammock was a very useful appendage; it was a couch for us, a cradle for Baby, a nest for the kittens; and we had, moreover, a little hen, which tried to roost there every night.

When the mornings were colder, and the stove up stairs smoked the wrong way, Baby was brought down in a very incomplete state of toilet, and finished her dressing by the great fire. We found her bare shoulders very becoming, and she was very much interested in her own little pink toes. After a very slow dressing, she had a still slower breakfast out of a tin cup of warm milk, of which she generally spilt a good deal, as she had much to do in watching everybody who came into the room, and seeing that there was no mischief done. Then she would be placed on the floor, on our only piece of carpet, and the kittens would be brought in for her to play with.

We had, at different times, a variety of pets, of whom Annie did not take much notice. Sometimes we had young partridges, caught by the drummer-boys in trap-cages. The children called them "Bob and Chloe," because the first notes of the male and female sound like those names. One day I brought home an opossum, with her blind bare little young clinging to the droll pouch where their mothers keep them. Sometimes we had pretty green lizards, their color darkening or deepening, like that of chameleons, in light or shade. But the only pets that took Baby's fancy were the kittens. They perfectly delighted her, from the first moment she saw them; they were the only things younger than herself that she had ever beheld, and the only things softer than themselves that her small hands had grasped. It was astonishing to see how much the kittens would endure from her. They could scarcely be touched by any one else without mewing; but when Annie seized one by the head and the other by the tail, and rubbed them violently together, they did not make a sound. I suppose that a baby's grasp is really soft, even if it seems ferocious, and so it gives less pain than one would think. At any rate, the little animals had the best of it very soon; for they entirely outstripped Annie in learning to walk, and they could soon scramble away beyond her reach, while she sat in a sort of dumb despair, unable to comprehend why anything so much smaller than herself should be so much nimbler. Meanwhile, the kittens would sit up and look at her with the most provoking indifference, just out of arm's length, until some of us would take pity on the young lady, and toss her furry playthings back to her again. "Little baby," she learned to call them; and these were the very first words she spoke.

Baby had evidently a natural turn for war, further cultivated by an intimate knowledge of drills and parades. The nearer she came to actual conflict the better she seemed to like it, peaceful as her own little ways might be. Twice, at least, while she was with us on picket, we had alarms from the Rebel troops, who would bring down cannon to the opposite side of the Ferry, about two miles beyond us, and throw shot and shell over upon our side. Then the officer at the Ferry would think that there was to be an attack made, and couriers would be sent, riding to and fro, and the men would all be called to arms in a hurry, and the ladies at headquarters would all put on their best bonnets and come down stairs, and the ambulance would be made ready to carry them to a place of safety before the expected fight. On such occasions Baby was in all her glory. She shouted with delight at being suddenly uncribbed and thrust into her little scarlet cloak, and brought down stairs, at an utterly unusual and improper hour, to a piazza with lights and people and horses and general excitement. She crowed and gurgled and made gestures with her little fists, and screamed out what seemed to be her advice on the military situation, as freely as if she had been a newspaper editor. Except that it was rather difficult to understand her precise direction, I do not know but the whole Rebel force might have been captured through her plans. And at any rate, I should much rather obey her orders than those of some generals whom I have known; for she at least meant no harm, and would lead one into no mischief.

However, at last the danger, such as it was, would be all over, and the ladies would be induced to go peacefully to bed again; and Annie would retreat with them to her ignoble cradle, very much disappointed, and looking vainly back at the more martial scene below. The next morning she would seem to have forgotten all about it, and would spill her bread and milk by the fire as if nothing had happened.

I suppose we hardly knew, at the time, how large a part of the sunshine of our daily lives was contributed by dear little Annie. Yet, when I now look back on that pleasant Southern home, she seems as essential a part of it as the mocking-birds or the magnolias, and I cannot convince myself that in returning to it I should not find her there. But Annie went back, with the spring, to her Northern birthplace, and then passed away from this earth before her little feet had fairly learned to tread its paths; and when I meet her next it must be in some world where there is triumph without armies, and where innocence is trained in scenes of peace. I know, however, that her little life, short as it seemed, was a blessing to us all, giving a perpetual image of serenity and sweetness, recalling the lovely atmosphere of far-off homes, and holding us by unsuspected ties to whatsoever things were pure.

CHAPTER IX

NEGRO SPIRITUALS

The war brought to some of us, besides its direct experiences, many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer had been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always more quaint, and often as essentially poetic.

This interest was rather increased by the fact that I had for many years heard of this class of songs under the name of "Negro Spirituals," and had even heard some of them sung by friends from South Carolina. I could now gather on their own soil these strange plants, which I had before seen as in museums alone. True, the individual songs rarely coincided; there was a line here, a chorus there,—just enough to fix the class, but this was unmistakable. It was not strange that they differed, for the range seemed almost endless, and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida seemed to have nothing but the generic character in common, until all were mingled in the united stock of camp-melodies.

Often in the starlit evening, I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river, or on the plover-haunted barrens, and, entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a "shout," chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain. Writing down in the darkness, as I best could,—perhaps with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket,—the words of the song, I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by. Or, summoning one of the men at some period of leisure,—Corporal Robert Sutton, for instance, whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest,—I have completed the new specimen by supplying the absent parts. The music I could only retain by ear, and though the more common strains were repeated often enough to fix their impression, there were others that occurred only once or twice.

The words will be here given, as nearly as possible, in the original dialect; and if the spelling seems sometimes inconsistent, or the misspelling insufficient, it is because I could get no nearer. I wished to avoid what seems to me the only error of Lowell's "Biglow Papers" in respect to dialect, the occasional use of an extreme misspelling, which merely confuses the eye, without taking us any closer to the peculiarity of sound.

The favorite song in camp was the following, sung with no accompaniment but the measured clapping of hands and the clatter of many feet. It was sung perhaps twice as often as any other. This was partly due to the fact that it properly consisted of a chorus alone, with which the verses of other songs might be combined at random.

I. HOLD YOUR LIGHT.

  Hold your light, Brudder Robert,

            Hold your light,

  Hold your light on Canaan's shore.

  "What make ole Satan for follow me so?

  Satan ain't got notin' for do wid me.

            Hold your light,

            Hold your light,

  Hold your light on Canaan's shore.

This would be sung for half an hour at a time, perhaps each person present being named in turn. It seemed the simplest primitive type of "spiritual." The next in popularity was almost as elementary, and, like this, named successively each one of the circle. It was, however, much more resounding and convivial in its music.

II. BOUND TO GO.

  Jordan River, I'm bound to go,

    Bound to go, bound to go,—

  Jordan River, I'm bound to go,

    And bid 'em fare ye well.

  My Brudder Robert, I'm bound to go,

    Bound to go," &c.

  My Sister Lucy, I'm bound to go,

    Bound to go, &c.

Sometimes it was "tink 'em" (think them) "fare ye well." The ye was so detached that I thought at first it was "very" or "vary well."

Another picturesque song, which seemed immensely popular, was at first very bewildering to me. I could not make out the first words of the chorus, and called it the "Roman-dar," being reminded of some Romaic song which I had formerly heard. That association quite fell in with the Orientalism of the new tent-life.

III. ROOM IN THERE.

  O, my mudder is gone! my mudder is gone!

  My mudder is gone into heaven, my Lord!

            I can't stay behind!

  Dere's room in dar, room in dar,

  Room in dar, in de heaven, my Lord!

            I can't stay behind!

  Can't stay behind, my dear,

           I can't stay behind!

  O, my fader is gone! &c.

  O, de angels are gone! &c.

  O, I'se been on de road! I'se been on de road!

  I'se been on de road into heaven, my Lord!

           I can't stay behind!

  O, room in dar, room in dar,

  Room in dar, in de heaven, my Lord!

           I can't stay behind!

By this time every man within hearing, from oldest to youngest, would be wriggling and shuffling, as if through some magic piper's bewitchment; for even those who at first affected contemptuous indifference would be drawn into the vortex erelong.

Next to these in popularity ranked a class of songs belonging emphatically to the Church Militant, and available for camp purposes with very little strain upon their symbolism. This, for instance, had a true companion-in-arms heartiness about it, not impaired by the feminine invocation at the end.

IV. HAIL MARY.

One more valiant soldier here,

One more valiant soldier here,

One more valiant soldier here,

        To help me bear de cross.

O hail, Mary, hail!

Hail, Mary, hail!

Hail, Mary, hail!

        To help me bear de cross.

I fancied that the original reading might have been "soul," instead of "soldier,"—with some other syllable inserted to fill out the metre,—and that the "Hail, Mary," might denote a Roman Catholic origin, as I had several men from St. Augustine who held in a dim way to that faith. It was a very ringing song, though not so grandly jubilant as the next, which was really impressive as the singers pealed it out, when marching or rowing or embarking.

V. MY ARMY CROSS OVER.

  My army cross over,

  My army cross over,

  O, Pharaoh's army drowndedl

  My army cross over.

  "We'll cross de mighty river,

       My army cross over;

  We'll cross de river Jordan,

       My army cross over;

  We'll cross de danger water,

       My army cross over;

  We'll cross de mighty Myo,

       My army cross over. (Thrice.)

    O, Pharaoh's army drowndedl

       My army cross over.

I could get no explanation of the "mighty Myo," except that one of the old men thought it meant the river of death. Perhaps it is an African word. In the Cameroon dialect, "Mawa" signifies "to die."

The next also has a military ring about it, and the first line is well matched by the music. The rest is conglomerate, and one or two lines show a more Northern origin. "Done" is a Virginia shibboleth, quite distinct from the "been" which replaces it in South Carolina. Yet one of their best choruses, without any fixed words, was, "De bell done ringing," for which, in proper South Carolina dialect, would have been substituted, "De bell been a-ring." This refrain may have gone South with our army.

VI. RIDE IN, KIND SAVIOUR.

  Ride in, kind Saviour!

         No man can hinder me.

  O, Jesus is a mighty man!

         No man, &c.

  We're marching through Virginny fields.

         No man, &c.

  O, Satan is a busy man,

         No man, &c.

  And he has his sword and shield,

         No man, &c.

  O, old Secesh done come and gone!

         No man can hinder me.

Sometimes they substituted "binder we," which was more spicy to the ear, and more in keeping with the usual head-over-heels arrangement of their pronouns.

Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, however quaint then: expression, and were in a minor key, both as to words and music. The attitude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life,—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination is always implied. In the following, for instance, we hear simply the patience.

VII. THIS WORLD ALMOST DONE.

  Brudder, keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin',

  Keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin',

  Keep your lamp trimmin' and a-burnin',

        For dis world most done.

  So keep your lamp, &c.

        Dis world most done.

But in the next, the final reward of patience is proclaimed as plaintively.

VIII. I WANT TO GO HOME.

  Dere's no rain to wet you,

    O, yes, I want to go home.

  Dere's no sun to burn you,

      O, yes, I want to go home;

  O, push along, believers,

      O, yes, &c.

  Dere's no hard trials,

      O, yes, &c.

  Dere's no whips a-crackin',

      O, yes, &c.

  My brudder on de wayside,

      O, yes, &c.

  O, push along, my brudder,

      O, yes, &c.

  Where dere's no stormy weather,

      O, yes, &c.

  Dere's no tribulation,

      O, yes, &c.

This next was a boat-song, and timed well with the tug of the oar.

IX. THE COMING DAY

  I want to go to Canaan,

  I want to go to Canaan,

  I want to go to Canaan,

    To meet 'em at de comin' day.

  O, remember, let me go to Canaan, (Thrice.)

    To meet "em, &c.

  O brudder, let me go to Canaan, (Thrice.)

    To meet 'em, &c.

My brudder, you—oh!—remember, (Thrice.)

    To meet 'em at de comin' day."

The following begins with a startling affirmation, yet the last line quite outdoes the first. This, too, was a capital boat-song.

X. ONE MORE RIVER.

  O, Jordan bank was a great old bank,

    Dere ain't but one more river to cross.

  We have some valiant soldier here,

    Dere ain't, &c.

  O, Jordan stream will never run dry,

    Dere ain't, &c.

  Dere's a hill on my leff, and he catch on my right,

    Dere ain't but one more river to cross.

I could get no explanation of this last riddle, except, "Dat mean, if you go on de leff, go to 'struction, and if you go on de right, go to God, for sure."

In others, more of spiritual conflict is implied, as in this next

XI. O THE DYING LAMB!

  I wants to go where Moses trod,

      O de dying Lamb!

  For Moses gone to de promised land,

      O de dying Lamb!

  To drink from springs dat never run dry,

      O, &c.

  Cry O my Lord!

      O, &c.

  Before I'll stay in hell one day,

      O, &c.

  I'm in hopes to pray my sins away,

      O, &c.

  Cry O my Lord!

      O, &c.

  Brudder Moses promised for be dar too,

      O, &c.

  To drink from streams dat never run dry,

      O de dying Lamb!

In the next, the conflict is at its height, and the lurid imagery of the Apocalypse is brought to bear. This book, with the books of Moses, constituted their Bible; all that lay between, even the narratives of the life of Jesus, they hardly cared to read or to hear.

XII. DOWN IN THE VALLEY.

  We'll run and never tire,

  We'll run and never tire,

  We'll run and never tire,

      Jesus set poor sinners free.

  Way down in de valley,

      Who will rise and go with me?

  You've heern talk of Jesus,

    Who set poor sinners free.

  De lightnin' and de flashin'

  De lightnin' and de flashin',

  De lightnin' and de flashin',

      Jesus set poor shiners free.

  I can't stand the fire. (Thrice.)

      Jesus set poor sinners free,

  De green trees a-flamin'. (Thrice.)

      Jesus set poor shiners free,

        Way down in de valley,

          Who will rise and go with me?

      You've heern talk of Jesus

          Who set poor shiners free.

"De valley" and "de lonesome valley" were familiar words in their religious experience. To descend into that region implied the same process with the "anxious-seat" of the camp-meeting. When a young girl was supposed to enter it, she bound a handkerchief by a peculiar knot over her head, and made it a point of honor not to change a single garment till the day of her baptism, so that she was sure of being in physical readiness for the cleansing rite, whatever her spiritual mood might be. More than once, in noticing a damsel thus mystically kerchiefed, I have asked some dusky attendant its meaning, and have received the unfailing answer,—framed with their usual indifference to the genders of pronouns—"He in de lonesome valley, sa."

The next gives the same dramatic conflict, while its detached and impersonal refrain gives it strikingly the character of the Scotch and Scandinavian ballads.

XIII. CRY HOLY.

  Cry holy, holy!

      Look at de people dat is born of God.

  And I run down de valley, and I run down to pray,

        Says, look at de people dat is born of God.

  When I get dar, Cappen Satan was dar,

        Says, look at, &c.

  Says, young man, young man, dere's no use for pray,

        Says, look at, &c.

  For Jesus is dead, and God gone away,

        Says, look at, &c.

  And I made him out a liar, and I went my way,

      Says, look at, &c.

        Sing holy, holy!

  O, Mary was a woman, and he had a one Son,

      Says, look at, &c.

  And de Jews and de Romans had him hung,

      Says, look at, &c.

          Cry holy, holy!

  And I tell you, sinner, you had better had pray,

      Says, look at, &c.

  For hell is a dark and dismal place,

    Says, look at, &c.

  And I tell you, sinner, and I wouldn't go dar!

    Says, look at, &c.

       Cry holy, holy!

Here is an infinitely quaint description of the length of the heavenly road:—

XIV. O'ER THE CROSSING.

  Vonder's my old mudder,

     Been a-waggin' at de hill so long.

  It's about time she'll cross over;

     Get home bimeby.

  Keep prayin', I do believe

     We're a long time waggin' o'er de crossin'.

  Keep prayin', I do believe

     We'll get home to heaven bimeby.

  Hear dat mournful thunder

     Roll from door to door,

  Calling home God's children;

     Get home bimeby.

  Little chil'en, I do believe

     We're a long time, &c.

  Little chil'en, I do believe

     We'll get home, &c.

  See dat forked lightnin'

     Flash from tree to tree,

  Callin' home God's chil'en;

     Get home bimeby.

  True believer, I do believe

     We're a long time, &c.

  O brudders, I do believe,

     We'll get home to heaven bimeby."

One of the most singular pictures of future joys, and with fine flavor of hospitality about it, was this:—

XV. WALK 'EM EASY.

 O, walk 'em easy round de heaven,

 Walk 'em easy round de heaven,

  Walk 'em easy round de heaven,

     Dat all de people may join de band.

  Walk 'em easy round de heaven. (Thrice.)

     O, shout glory till 'em join dat band!"

The chorus was usually the greater part of the song, and often came in paradoxically, thus:—

XVI. O YES, LORD.

  O, must I be like de foolish mans?

               O yes, Lord!

  Will build de house on de sandy hill.

               O yes, Lord!

  I'll build my house on Zion hill,

               O yes, Lord!

  No wind nor rain can blow me down,

               O yes, Lord!

The next is very graceful and lyrical, and with more variety of rhythm than usual:—

XVII. BOW LOW, MARY.

  Bow low, Mary, bow low, Martha,

       For Jesus come and lock de door,

       And carry de keys away.

  Sail, sail, over yonder,

  And view de promised land.

       For Jesus come, &c.

  Weep, O Mary, bow low, Martha,

       For Jesus come, &c.

  Sail, sail, my true believer;

  Sail, sail, over yonder;

  Mary, bow low, Martha, bow low,

       For Jesus come and lock de door

       And carry de keys away.

But of all the "spirituals" that which surprised me the most, I think,—perhaps because it was that in which external nature furnished the images most directly,—was this. With all my experience of their ideal ways of speech, I was startled when first I came on such a flower of poetry in that dark soil.

XVIII. I KNOW MOON-RISE.

  I know moon-rise, I know star-rise,

              Lay dis body down.

  I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

              To lay dis body down.

  I'll walk in de graveyard, I'll walk through de graveyard,

              To lay dis body down.

  I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

              Lay dis body down.

  I go to de judgment in de evenin' of de day,

             When I lay dis body down;

  And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

                 When I lay dis body down."

"I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms." Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered, was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively than in that line.

The next is one of the wildest and most striking of the whole series: there is a mystical effect and a passionate striving throughout the whole. The Scriptural struggle between Jacob and the angel, which is only dimly expressed in the words, seems all uttered in the music. I think it impressed my imagination more powerfully than any other of these songs.

XIX. WRESTLING JACOB.

  O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, day's a-breakin';

              I will not let thee go!

  O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob, day's a-breakin';

              He will not let me go!

  O, I hold my brudder wid a tremblin' hand

              I would not let him go!

  I hold my sister wid a tremblin' hand;

              I would not let her go!

  O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin' limb,

              He would not let him go!

  O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin' limb;

              De Lord will bless my soul.

  O wrestlin' Jacob, Jacob," &c.

Of "occasional hymns," properly so called, I noticed but one, a funeral hymn for an infant, which is sung plaintively over and over, without variety of words.

XX. THE BABY GONE HOME.

  De little baby gone home,

  De little baby gone home,

  De little baby gone along,

      For to climb up Jacob's ladder.

  And I wish I'd been dar,

  I wish I'd been dar,

  I wish I'd been dar, my Lord,

      For to climb up Jacob's ladder.

Still simpler is this, which is yet quite sweet and touching.

XXI. JESUS WITH US.

  He have been wid us, Jesus

    He still wid us, Jesus,

  He will be wid us, Jesus,

    Be wid us to the end.

The next seemed to be a favorite about Christmas time, when meditations on "de rollin' year" were frequent among them.

XXII. LORD, REMEMBER ME.

  O do, Lord, remember me!

      O do, Lord, remember me!

  O, do remember me, until de year roll round!

      Do, Lord, remember me!

  If you want to die like Jesus died,

      Lay in de grave,

  You would fold your arms and close your eyes

      And die wid a free good will.

  For Death is a simple ting,

      And he go from door to door,

  And he knock down some, and he cripple op some,

      And he leave some here to pray.

  O do, Lord remember me!

      O do, Lord, remember me!

  My old fader's gone till de year roll round;

      Do, Lord, remember me!

The next was sung in such an operatic and rollicking way that it was quite hard to fancy it a religious performance, which, however, it was. I heard it but once.

XXIII. EARLY IN THE MORNING.

  I meet little Rosa early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! early in de mornin';

  And I ax her, How you do, my darter?

      O Jerusalem! early in de mornin'.

  "I meet my mudder early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  And I ax her, How you do, my mudder?

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  "I meet Brudder Robert early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  And I ax him, How you do, my sonny?

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  "I meet Tittawisa early in de mornin',

      O Jerusalem! &c.

  And I ax her, How you do, my darter?

      O Jerusalem! etc.

"Tittawisa" means "Sister Louisa." In songs of this class the name of every person present successively appears.

Their best marching song, and one which was invaluable to lift their feet along, as they expressed it, was the following. There was a kind of spring and lilt to it, quite indescribable by words.

XXIV. GO IN THE WILDERNESS.

  Jesus call you. Go in de wilderness,

      Go in de wilderness, go in de wilderness,

  Jesus call you. Go in de wilderness

      To wait upon de Lord.

  Go wait upon de Lord,

  Go wait upon de Lord,

  Go wait upon de Lord, my God,

      He take away de sins of de world.

  Jesus a-waitin'. Go in de wilderness,

      Go, etc.

  All dem chil'en go in de wilderness

      To wait upon de Lord.

The next was one of those which I had heard in boyish days, brought North from Charleston. But the chorus alone was identical; the words were mainly different, and those here given are quaint enough.

XXV. BLOW YOUR TRUMPET, GABRIEL.

  O, blow your trumpet, Gabriel,

      Blow your trumpet louder;

  And I want dat trumpet to blow me home

      To my new Jerusalem.

  De prettiest ting dat ever I done

  Was to serve de Lord when I was young.

      So blow your trumpet, Gabriel, etc.

  O, Satan is a liar, and he conjure too,

  And if you don't mind, he'll conjure you.

      So blow your trumpet, Gabriel, etc.

  O, I was lost in de wilderness.

  King Jesus hand me de candle down.

      So blow your trumpet, Gabriel," etc.

The following contains one of those odd transformations of proper names with which their Scriptural citations were often enriched. It rivals their text, "Paul may plant, and may polish wid water," which I have elsewhere quoted, and in which the sainted Apollos would hardly have recognized himself.

XXVI. IN THE MORNING.

  In de mornin',

  In de mornin',

  Chil'en? Yes, my Lord!

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  If I had a-died when I was young,

  I never would had de race for run.

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  O Sam and Peter was fishin' in de sea,

  And dey drop de net and follow my Lord.

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  Dere's a silver spade for to dig my grave

  And a golden chain for to let me down.

  Don't you hear de trumpet sound?

  In de mornin', In de mornin',

  Chil'en? Yes, my Lord!

     Don't you hear de trumpet sound?"

These golden and silver fancies remind one of the King of Spain's daughter in "Mother Goose," and the golden apple, and the silver pear, which are doubtless themselves but the vestiges of some simple early composition like this. The next has a humbler and more domestic style of fancy.

XXVII. FARE YE WELL.

  My true believers, fare ye well,

  Fare ye well, fare ye well,

  Fare ye well, by de grace of God,

     For I'm going home.

  Massa Jesus give me a little broom

  For to sweep my heart clean,

  And I will try, by de grace of God,

     To win my way home.

Among the songs not available for marching, but requiring the concentrated enthusiasm of the camp, was "The Ship of Zion," of which they had three wholly distinct versions, all quite exuberant and tumultuous.

XXVIII. THE SHIP OF ZION.

  Come along, come along,

     And let us go home,

  O, glory, hallelujah?

  Dis de ole ship o' Zion,

     Halleloo! Halleloo!

  Dis de ole ship o' Zion,

     Hallelujah!

  She has landed many a tousand,

  She can land as many more.

     O, glory, hallelujah! &c.

  Do you tink she will be able

  For to take us all home?

     O, glory, hallelujah! &c.

  You can tell 'em I'm a comin',

     Halleloo! Halleloo!

  You can tell 'em I'm a comin',

     Hallelujah!

  Come along, come along," &c.

XXIX. THE SHIP OF ZION. (Second version.)

  Dis de good ole ship o' Zion,

  Dis de good ole ship o' Zion,

  Dis de good ole ship o' Zion,

    And she's makin' for de Promise Land.

  She hab angels for de sailors, (Thrice.)

     And she's, &c.

  And how you know dey's angels? (Thrice.)

     And she's, &c.

  Good Lord, Shall I be one? (Thrice.)

     And she's, &c.

  Dat ship is out a-sailin', sailin', sailin',

     And she's, &c.

  She's a-sailin' mighty steady, steady, steady,

     And she's, &c.

  She'll neither reel nor totter, totter, totter,

     And she's, &c.

  She's a-sailin' away cold Jordan, Jordan, Jordan,

     And she's, &c.

  King Jesus is de captain, captain, captain,

     And she's makin' for de Promise Land.

XXX. THE SHIP OF ZION. (Third version.)

  De Gospel ship is sailin',

     Hosann—sann.

  O, Jesus is de captain,

     Hosann—sann.

  De angels are de sailors,

     Hosann—sann.

  O, is your bundle ready?

     Hosann—sann.

  O, have you got your ticket?

     Hosann—sann.

This abbreviated chorus is given with unspeakable unction.

The three just given are modifications of an old camp-meeting melody; and the same may be true of the three following, although I cannot find them in the Methodist hymn-books. Each, however, has its characteristic modifications, which make it well worth giving. In the second verse of this next, for instance, "Saviour" evidently has become "soldier."

XXXI. SWEET MUSIC

  Sweet music in heaven,

    Just beginning for to roll.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

  Yes, late I heard my soldier say,

    Come, heavy soul, I am de way.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

  I'll go and tell to sinners round

    What a kind Saviour I have found.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

  My grief my burden long has been,

    Because I was not cease from sin.

  Don't you love God?

    Glory, hallelujah!

XXXII. GOOD NEWS.

  O, good news! O, good news!

  De angels brought de tidings down,

    Just comin' from de trone.

  As grief from out my soul shall fly,

    Just comin' from de trone;

  I'll shout salvation when I die,

    Good news, O, good news!

    Just comin' from de trone.

  Lord, I want to go to heaven when I die,

    Good news, O, good news! &c.

  De white folks call us a noisy crew,

    Good news, O, good news!

  But dis I know, we are happy too,

    Just comin' from de trone.

XXXIII. THE HEAVENLY ROAD.

  You may talk of my name as much as you please,

    And carry my name abroad,

  But I really do believe I'm a child of God

    As I walk in de heavenly road.

  O, won't you go wid me? (Thrice.)

    For to keep our garments clean.

  O Satan is a mighty busy ole man,

    And roll rocks in my way;

  But Jesus is my bosom friend,

    And roll 'em out of de way.

  O, won't you go wid me? (Thrice.)

    For to keep our garments clean.

  Come, my brudder, if you never did pray,

    I hope you may pray to-night;

  For I really believe I'm a child of God

    As I walk in de heavenly road.

  O, won't you, &c.

Some of the songs had played an historic part during the war. For singing the next, for instance, the negroes had been put in jail in Georgetown, S. C., at the outbreak of the Rebellion. "We'll soon be free" was too dangerous an assertion; and though the chant was an old one, it was no doubt sung with redoubled emphasis during the new events. "De Lord will call us home," was evidently thought to be a symbolical verse; for, as a little drummer-boy explained to me, showing all his white teeth as he sat in the moonlight by the door of my tent, "Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees."

XXXIV. WE'LL SOON BE FREE.

  We'll soon be free,

  We'll soon be free,

  We'll soon be free,

      When de Lord will call us home.

  My brudder, how long,

  My brudder, how long,

  My brudder, how long,

      'Fore we done sufferin' here?

  It won't be long (Thrice.)

      'Fore de Lord will call us home.

  We'll walk de miry road (Thrice.)

      Where pleasure never dies.

  We'll walk de golden street (Thrice.)

      Where pleasure never dies.

  My brudder, how long (Thrice.)

      'Fore we done sufferin' here?

  We'll soon be free (Thrice.)

      When Jesus sets me free.

  We'll fight for liberty (Thrice.)

      When de Lord will call us home."

The suspicion in this case was unfounded, but they had another song to which the Rebellion had actually given rise. This was composed by nobody knew whom,—though it was the most recent, doubtless, of all these "spirituals,"—and had been sung in secret to avoid detection. It is certainly plaintive enough. The peck of corn and pint of salt were slavery's rations.

XXXV. MANY THOUSAND GO.

  No more peck o' corn for me,

        No more, no more,—

  No more peck o' corn for me,

        Many tousand go.

  No more driver's lash for me, (Twice.)

        No more, &c.

  No more pint o' salt for me, (Twice.)

        No more, &c.

  No more hundred lash for me, (Twice.)

        No more, &c.

  No more mistress' call for me,

        No more, no more,—

  No more mistress' call for me,

        Many tousand go.

Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate date and know nothing of the mode of composition. Allan Ramsay says of the Scotch songs, that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang. And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way. On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song. One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. "Some good sperituals," he said, "are start jess out o' curiosity. I been a-raise a sing, myself, once."

My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out, not the poem alone, but the poet. I implored him to proceed.

"Once we boys," he said, "went for tote some rice and de nigger-driver he keep a-callin' on us; and I say, 'O, de ole nigger-driver!' Den anudder said, 'Fust ting my mammy tole me was, notin' so bad as nigger-driver.' Den I made a sing, just puttin' a word, and den anudder word."

Then he began singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus, as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before. I saw how easily a new "sing" took root among them.

                   XXXVI. THE DRIVER.

  O, de ole nigger-driver!

        O, gwine away!

  Fust ting my mammy tell me,

        O, gwine away!

  Tell me 'bout de nigger-driver,

        O, gwine away!

  Nigger-driver second devil,

        O, gwine away!

  Best ting for do he driver,

        O, gwine away!

  Knock he down and spoil he labor,

        O, gwine away!

It will be observed that, although this song is quite secular in its character, yet its author called it a "spiritual." I heard but two songs among them, at any time, to which they would not, perhaps, have given this generic name. One of these consisted simply in the endless repetition—after the manner of certain college songs—of the mysterious line,—

"Rain fall and wet Becky Lawton."

But who Becky Lawton was, and why she should or should not be wet, and whether the dryness was a reward or a penalty, none could say. I got the impression that, in either case, the event was posthumous, and that there was some tradition of grass not growing over the grave of a sinner; but even this was vague, and all else vaguer.

The other song I heard but once, on a morning when a squad of men came in from picket duty, and chanted it in the most rousing way. It had been a stormy and comfortless night, and the picket station was very exposed. It still rained in the morning when I strolled to the edge of the camp, looking out for the men, and wondering how they had stood it. Presently they came striding along the road, at a great pace, with their shining rubber blankets worn as cloaks around them, the rain streaming from these and from their equally shining faces, which were almost all upon the broad grin, as they pealed out this remarkable ditty:—

HANGMAN JOHNNY.

  O, dey call me Hangman Johnny!

         O, ho! O, ho!

  But I never hang nobody,

         O, hang, boys, hang!

  O dey, call me Hangman Johnny!

         O, ho! O, ho!

  But we'll all hang togedder,

         O, hang, boys, hang!

My presence apparently checked the performance of another verse, beginning, "De buckra 'list for money," apparently in reference to the controversy about the pay-question, then just beginning, and to the more mercenary aims they attributed to the white soldiers. But "Hangman Johnny" remained always a myth as inscrutable as "Becky Lawton."

As they learned all their songs by ear, they often strayed into wholly new versions, which sometimes became popular, and entirely banished the others. This was amusingly the case, for instance, with one phrase in the popular camp-song of "Marching Along," which was entirely new to them until our quartermaster taught it to them, at my request. The words, "Gird on the armor," were to them a stumbling-block, and no wonder, until some ingenious ear substituted, "Guide on de army," which was at once accepted, and became universal.

  "We'll guide on de army, and be marching along"

is now the established version on the Sea Islands.

These quaint religious songs were to the men more than a source of relaxation; they were a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven. I never overheard in camp a profane or vulgar song. With the trifling exceptions given, all had a religious motive, while the most secular melody could not have been more exciting. A few youths from Savannah, who were comparatively men of the world, had learned some of the "Ethiopian Minstrel" ditties, imported from the North. These took no hold upon the mass; and, on the other hand, they sang reluctantly, even on Sunday, the long and short metres of the hymn-books, always gladly yielding to the more potent excitement of their own "spirituals." By these they could sing themselves, as had their fathers before them, out of the contemplation of their own low estate, into the sublime scenery of the Apocalypse. I remember that this minor-keyed pathos used to seem to me almost too sad to dwell upon, while slavery seemed destined to last for generations; but now that their patience has had its perfect work, history cannot afford to lose this portion of its record. There is no parallel instance of an oppressed race thus sustained by the religious sentiment alone. These songs are but the vocal expression of the simplicity of their faith and the sublimity of their long resignation.

CHAPTER X

LIFE AT CAMP SHAW

The Edisto expedition cost me the health and strength of several years. I could say, long after, in the words of one of the men, "I'se been a sickly person, eber since de expeditious." Justice to a strong constitution and good habits compels me, however, to say that, up to the time of my injury, I was almost the only officer in the regiment who had not once been off duty from illness. But at last I had to yield, and went North for a month.

We heard much said, during the war, of wounded officers who stayed unreasonably long at home. I think there were more instances of those who went back too soon. Such at least was my case. On returning to the regiment I found a great accumulation of unfinished business; every member of the field and staff was prostrated by illness or absent on detailed service; two companies had been sent to Hilton Head on fatigue duty, and kept there unexpectedly long: and there was a visible demoralization among the rest, especially from the fact that their pay had just been cut down, in violation of the express pledges of the government. A few weeks of steady sway made all right again; and during those weeks I felt a perfect exhilaration of health, followed by a month or two of complete prostration, when the work was done. This passing, I returned to duty, buoyed up by the fallacious hope that the winter months would set me right again.

Port Royal Island

We had a new camp on Port Royal Island, very pleasantly situated, just out of Beaufort. It stretched nearly to the edge of a shelving bluff, fringed with pines and overlooking the river; below the bluff was a hard, narrow beach, where one might gallop a mile and bathe at the farther end. We could look up and down the curving stream, and watch the few vessels that came and went. Our first encampment had been lower down that same river, and we felt at home.

Colonel Robert G. Shaw 54th Mass.

The new camp was named Camp Shaw, in honor of the noble young officer who had lately fallen at Fort Wagner, under circumstances which had endeared him to all the men. As it happened, they had never seen him, nor was my regiment ever placed within immediate reach of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. This I always regretted, feeling very desirous to compare the military qualities of the Northern and Southern blacks. As it was, the Southern regiments with which the Massachusetts troops were brigaded were hardly a fair specimen of their kind, having been raised chiefly by drafting, and, for this and other causes, being afflicted with perpetual discontent and desertion.

55th Massachusetts Regiment, USCT

We had, of course, looked forward with great interest to the arrival of these new colored regiments, and I had ridden in from the picket-station to see the Fifty-Fourth. Apart from the peculiarity of its material, it was fresh from my own State, and I had relatives and acquaintances among its officers. Governor Andrew, who had formed it, was an old friend, and had begged me, on departure from Massachusetts, to keep him informed as to our experiment I had good reason to believe that my reports had helped to prepare the way for this new battalion, and I had sent him, at his request, some hints as to its formation.*

*COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS,

                    Executive Department,

                                           Boston, February 5, 1863.

To COL. T. W. HIGGINSON, Commanding 1st Regt. S. C. Vols., Port Royal Id., S. C.

COLONEL,—I am under obligations to you for your very interesting letter of January 19th, which I considered to be too important in its testimony to the efficiency of colored troops to be allowed to remain hidden on my files. I therefore placed some portions of it in the hands of Hon. Stephen M. Weld, of Jamaica Plain, for publication, and you will find enclosed the newspaper slip from the "Journal" of February 3d, in which it appeared. During a recent visit at Washington I have obtained permission from the Department of War to enlist colored troops as part of the Massachusetts quota, and I am about to begin to organize a colored infantry regiment, to be numbered the "54th Massachusetts Volunteers."

I shall be greatly obliged by any suggestions which your experience may afford concerning it, and I am determined that it shall serve as a model, in the high character of its officers and the thorough discipline of its men, for all subsequent corps of the like material.

Please present to General Saxton the assurances of my respectful regard.

I have the honor to be, respectfully and obediently yours,

                                                    JOHN A. ANDREW,

                                              Governor of Massachusetts.

In the streets of Beaufort I had met Colonel Shaw, riding with his lieutenant-colonel and successor, Edward Hallowell, and had gone back with them to share their first meal in camp. I should have known Shaw anywhere by his resemblance to his kindred, nor did it take long to perceive that he shared their habitual truthfulness and courage. Moreover, he and Hallowell had already got beyond the commonplaces of inexperience, in regard to colored troops, and, for a wonder, asked only sensible questions. For instance, he admitted the mere matter of courage to be settled, as regarded the colored troops, and his whole solicitude bore on this point, Would they do as well in line-of-battle as they had already done in more irregular service, and on picket and guard duty? Of this I had, of course, no doubt, nor, I think, had he; though I remember his saying something about the possibility of putting them between two fires in case of need, and so cutting off their retreat. I should never have thought of such a project, but I could not have expected bun to trust them as I did, until he had been actually under fire with them. That, doubtless, removed all his anxieties, if he really had any.

This interview had occurred on the 4th of June. Shaw and his regiment had very soon been ordered to Georgia, then to Morris Island; Fort Wagner had been assaulted, and he had been killed. Most of the men knew about the circumstances of his death, and many of them had subscribed towards a monument for him,—a project which originated with General Saxton, and which was finally embodied in the "Shaw School-house" at Charleston. So it gave us all pleasure to name this camp for him, as its predecessor had been named for General Saxton.

The new camp was soon brought into good order. The men had great ingenuity in building screens and shelters of light poles, filled in with the gray moss from the live-oaks. The officers had vestibules built in this way, before all their tents; the cooking-places were walled round in the same fashion; and some of the wide company-streets had sheltered sidewalks down the whole line of tents. The sergeant on duty at the entrance of the camp had a similar bower, and the architecture culminated in a "Praise-House" for school and prayer-meetings, some thirty feet in diameter. As for chimneys and flooring, they were provided with that magic and invisible facility which marks the second year of a regiment's life.

That officer is happy who, besides a constitutional love of adventure, has also a love for the details of camp life, and likes to bring them to perfection. Nothing but a hen with her chickens about her can symbolize the content I felt on getting my scattered companies together, after some temporary separation on picket or fatigue duty. Then we went to work upon the nest. The only way to keep a camp in order is to set about everything as if you expected to stay there forever; if you stay, you get the comfort of it; if ordered away in twenty-four hours, you forget all wasted labor in the excitement of departure. Thus viewed, a camp is a sort of model farm or bit of landscape gardening; there is always some small improvement to be made, a trench, a well, more shade against the sun, an increased vigilance in sweeping. Then it is pleasant to take care of the men, to see them happy, to hear them purr.

Then the duties of inspection and drill, suspended during active service, resume their importance with a month or two of quiet. It really costs unceasing labor to keep a regiment in perfect condition and ready for service. The work is made up of minute and endless details, like a bird's pruning her feathers or a cat's licking her kittens into their proper toilet. Here are eight hundred men, every one of whom, every Sunday morning at farthest, must be perfectly soigne in all personal proprieties; he must exhibit himself provided with every article of clothing, buttons, shoe-strings, hooks and eyes, company letter, regimental number, rifle, bayonet, bayonet-scabbard, cap-pouch, cartridge-box, cartridge-box belt, cartridge-box belt-plate, gun-sling, canteen, haversack, knapsack, packed according to rule, forty cartridges, forty percussion caps; and every one of these articles polished to the highest brightness or blackness as the case may be, and moreover hung or slung or tied or carried in precisely the correct manner.

What a vast and formidable housekeeping is here, my patriotic sisters! Consider, too, that every corner of the camp is to be kept absolutely clean and ready for exhibition at the shortest notice; hospital, stables, guard-house, cook-houses, company tents, must all be brought to perfection, and every square inch of this "farm of four acres" must look as smooth as an English lawn, twice a day. All this, beside the discipline and the drill and the regimental and company books, which must keep rigid account of all these details; consider all this, and then wonder no more that officers and men rejoice in being ordered on active service, where a few strokes of the pen will dispose of all this multiplicity of trappings as "expended in action" or "lost in service."

For one, the longer I remained in service, the better I appreciated the good sense of most of the regular army niceties. True, these things must all vanish when the time of action comes, but it is these things that have prepared you for action. Of course, if you dwell on them only, military life becomes millinery life alone. Kinglake says that the Russian Grand-Duke Constantine, contemplating his beautiful toy-regiments, said that he dreaded war, for he knew that it would spoil the troops. The simple fact is, that a soldier is like the weapon he carries; service implies soiling, but you must have it clean in advance, that when soiled it may be of some use.

The men had that year a Christmas present which they enjoyed to the utmost,—furnishing the detail, every other day, for provost-guard duty in Beaufort. It was the only military service which they had ever shared within the town, and it moreover gave a sense of self-respect to be keeping the peace of their own streets. I enjoyed seeing them put on duty those mornings; there was such a twinkle of delight in their eyes, though their features were immovable. As the "reliefs" went round, posting the guard, under charge of a corporal, one could watch the black sentinels successively dropped and the whites picked up,—gradually changing the complexion, like Lord Somebody's black stockings which became white stockings,—till at last there was only a squad of white soldiers obeying the "Support Arms! Forward, March!" of a black corporal.

Then, when once posted, they glorified their office, you may be sure. Discipline had grown rather free-and-easy in the town about that time, and it is said that the guard-house never was so full within human memory as after their first tour of duty. I remember hearing that one young reprobate, son of a leading Northern philanthropist in those parts, was much aggrieved at being taken to the lock-up merely because he was found drunk in the streets. "Why," said he, "the white corporals always showed me the way home." And I can testify that, after an evening party, some weeks later, I beard with pleasure the officers asking eagerly for the countersign. "Who has the countersign?" said they. "The darkeys are on guard to-night, and we must look out for our lives." Even after a Christmas party at General Saxton's, the guard at the door very properly refused to let the ambulance be brought round from the stable for the ladies because the driver had not the countersign.

One of the sergeants of the guard, on one of these occasions, made to one who questioned his authority an answer that could hardly have been improved. The questioner had just been arrested for some offence.

"Know what dat mean?" said the indignant sergeant, pointing to the chevrons on his own sleeve. "Dat mean Guv'ment." Volumes could not have said more, and the victim collapsed. The thing soon settled itself, and nobody remembered to notice whether the face beside the musket of a sentinel were white or black. It meant Government, all the same.

The men were also indulged with several raids on the mainland, under the direction of Captain J. E. Bryant, of the Eighth Maine, the most experienced scout in that region, who was endeavoring to raise by enlistment a regiment of colored troops.

Freed slaves La.

On one occasion Captains Whitney and Heasley, with their companies, penetrated nearly to Pocataligo, capturing some pickets and bringing away all the slaves of a plantation,—the latter operation being entirely under the charge of Sergeant Harry Williams (Co. K), without the presence of any white man. The whole command was attacked on the return by a rebel force, which turned out to be what was called in those regions a "dog-company," consisting of mounted riflemen with half a dozen trained bloodhounds. The men met these dogs with their bayonets, killed four or five of their old tormentors with great relish, and brought away the carcass of one. I had the creature skinned, and sent the skin to New York to be stuffed and mounted, meaning to exhibit it at the Sanitary Commission Fair in Boston; but it spoiled on the passage. These quadruped allies were not originally intended as "dogs of war," but simply to detect fugitive slaves, and the men were delighted at this confirmation of their tales of dog-companies, which some of the officers had always disbelieved.

Captain Bryant, during his scouting adventures, had learned to outwit these bloodhounds, and used his skill in eluding escape, during another expedition of the same kind. He was sent with Captain Metcalf's company far up the Combahee River to cut the telegraphic wires and intercept despatches. Our adventurous chaplain and a telegraphic operator went with the party. They ascended the river, cut the wires, and read the despatches for an hour or two. Unfortunately, the attached wire was too conspicuously hung, and was seen by a passenger on the railway train in passing. The train was stopped and a swift stampede followed; a squad of cavalry was sent in pursuit, and our chaplain, with Lieutenant Osborn, of Bryant's projected regiment, were captured; also one private,—the first of our men who had ever been taken prisoners. In spite of an agreement at Washington to the contrary, our chaplain was held as prisoner of war, the only spiritual adviser in uniform, so far as I know, who had that honor. I do not know but his reverence would have agreed with Scott's pirate-lieutenant, that it was better to live as plain Jack Bunce than die as Frederick Altamont; but I am very sure that he would rather have been kept prisoner to the close of the war, as a combatant, than have been released on parole as a non-resistant.

After his return, I remember, he gave the most animated accounts of the whole adventure, of which he had enjoyed every instant, from the first entrance on the enemy's soil to the final capture. I suppose we should all like to tap the telegraphic wires anywhere and read our neighbor's messages, if we could only throw round this process the dignity of a Sacred Cause. This was what our good chaplain had done, with the same conscientious zest with which he had conducted his Sunday foraging in Florida. But he told me that nothing so impressed him on the whole trip as the sudden transformation in the black soldier who was taken prisoner with him. The chaplain at once adopted the policy, natural to him, of talking boldly and even defiantly to his captors, and commanding instead of beseeching. He pursued the same policy always and gained by it, he thought. But the negro adopted the diametrically opposite policy, also congenial to his crushed race,—all the force seemed to go out of him, and he surrendered himself like a tortoise to be kicked and trodden upon at their will. This manly, well-trained soldier at once became a slave again, asked no questions, and, if any were asked, made meek and conciliatory answers. He did not know, nor did any of us know, whether he would be treated as a prisoner of war, or shot, or sent to a rice-plantation. He simply acted according to the traditions of his race, as did the chaplain on his side. In the end the soldier's cunning was vindicated by the result; he escaped, and rejoined us in six months, while the chaplain was imprisoned for a year.

The men came back very much exhausted from this expedition, and those who were in the chaplain's squad narrowly escaped with their lives. One brave fellow had actually not a morsel to eat for four days, and then could keep nothing on his stomach for two days more, so that his life was despaired of; and yet he brought all his equipments safe into camp. Some of these men had led such wandering lives, in woods and swamps, that to hunt them was like hunting an otter; shyness and concealment had grown to be their second nature.

After these little episodes came two months of peace. We were clean, comfortable, quiet, and consequently discontented. It was therefore with eagerness that we listened to a rumor of a new Florida expedition, in which we might possibly take a hand.

CHAPTER XI

FLORIDA AGAIN

Let me revert once more to my diary, for a specimen of the sharp changes and sudden disappointments that may come to troops in service. But for a case or two of varioloid in the regiment, we should have taken part in the battle of Olustee, and should have had (as was reported) the right of the line. At any rate we should have shared the hard knocks and the glory, which were distributed pretty freely to the colored troops then and there. The diary will give, better than can any continuous narrative, our ups and down of expectation in those days.

                                 "CAMP SHAW, BEAUFORT, S. C.,

                                              February 7, 1864.

"Great are the uncertainties of military orders! Since our recall from Jacksonville we have had no such surprises as came to us on Wednesday night. It was our third day of a new tour of duty at the picket station. We had just got nicely settled,—men well tented, with good floors, and in high spirits, officers at out-stations all happy, Mrs. —— coming to stay with her husband, we at head-quarters just in order, house cleaned, moss-garlands up, camellias and jessamines in the tin wash-basins, baby in bliss;—our usual run of visitors had just set in, two Beaufort captains and a surgeon had just risen from a late dinner after a flag of truce, General Saxton and his wife had driven away but an hour or two before, we were all sitting about busy, with a great fire blazing, Mrs. D. had just remarked triumphantly, 'Last time I had but a mouthful here, and now I shall be here three weeks'—when—

"In dropped, like a bombshell, a despatch announcing that we were to be relieved by the Eighth Maine, the next morning, as General Gillmore had sent an order that we should be ready for departure from Beaufort at any moment.

"Conjectures, orders, packing, sending couriers to out-stations, were the employments of the evening; the men received the news with cheers, and we all came in next morning."

                                                         "February 11, 1864.

"For three days we have watched the river, and every little steamboat that comes up for coal brings out spy-glasses and conjectures, and 'Dar's de Fourf New Hampshire,'—for when that comes, it is said, we go. Meanwhile we hear stirring news from Florida, and the men are very impatient to be off. It is remarkable how much more thoroughly they look at things as soldiers than last year, and how much less as home-bound men,—the South-Carolinians, I mean, for of course the Floridians would naturally wish to go to Florida.

"But in every way I see the gradual change in them, sometimes with a sigh, as parents watch their children growing up and miss the droll speeches and the confiding ignorance of childhood. Sometimes it comes over me with a pang that they are growing more like white men,—less naive and less grotesque. Still, I think there is enough of it to last, and that their joyous buoyancy, at least, will hold out while life does.

"As for our destination, our greatest fear is of finding ourselves posted at Hilton Head and going no farther. As a dashing Irish officer remarked the other day, 'If we are ordered away anywhere, I hope it will be either to go to Florida or else stay here!'"

"Sublime uncertainties again!

"After being ordered in from picket, under marching orders; after the subsequent ten days of uncertainty; after watching every steamboat that came up the river, to see if the Fourth New Hampshire was on board,—at last the regiment came.

"Then followed another break; there was no transportation to take us. At last a boat was notified.

"Then General Saxton, as anxious to keep us as was the regiment to go, played his last card in small-pox, telegraphing to department head-quarters that we had it dangerously in the regiment. (N. B. All varioloid, light at that, and besides, we always have it.)

"Then the order came to leave behind the sick and those who had been peculiarly exposed, and embark the rest next day.

"Great was the jubilee! The men were up, I verily believe, by three in the morning, and by eight the whole camp was demolished or put in wagons, and we were on our way. The soldiers of the Fourth New Hampshire swarmed in; every board was swept away by them; there had been a time when colored boards (if I may delicately so express myself) were repudiated by white soldiers, but that epoch had long since passed. I gave my new tent-frame, even the latch, to Colonel Bell; ditto Lieutenant-Colonel to Lieutenant-Colonel.

"Down we marched, the men singing 'John Brown' and 'Marching Along' and 'Gwine in de Wilderness'; women in tears and smiles lined the way. We halted opposite the dear General's; we cheered, he speeched, I speeched, we all embraced symbolically, and cheered some more. Then we went to work at the wharf; vast wagon-loads of tents, rations, ordnance, and what-not disappeared in the capacious maw of the Delaware. In the midst of it all came riding down General Saxton with a despatch from Hilton Head:—

"'If you think the amount of small-pox in the First South Carolina Volunteers sufficient, the order will be countermanded.'

"'What shall I say?' quoth the guilty General, perceiving how preposterously too late the negotiation was reopened.

"'Say, sir?' quoth I. 'Say that we are on board already and the small-pox left behind. Say we had only thirteen cases, chiefly varioloid, and ten almost well.'

"Our blood was up with a tremendous morning's work done, and, rather than turn back, we felt ready to hold down Major-General Gillmore, commanding department, and all his staff upon the wharf, and vaccinate them by main force.

"So General Saxton rode away, and we worked away. Just as the last wagon-load but one was being transferred to the omnivorous depths of the Delaware,—which I should think would have been filled ten times over with what we had put into it,—down rode the General with a fiendish joy in his bright eyes and held out a paper,—one of the familiar rescripts from headquarters.

"'The marching orders of the First South Carolina Volunteers are hereby countermanded.'

"'Major Trowbridge,' said I, 'will you give my compliments to Lieutenant Hooper, somewhere in the hold of that steamer, and direct him to set his men at work to bring out every individual article which they have carried hi.' And I sat down on a pile of boards.

"'You will return to your old camping-ground, Colonel,' said the General, placidly. 'Now,' he added with serene satisfaction, 'we will have some brigade drills!'

"Brigade drills! Since Mr. Pickwick, with his heartless tomato-sauce and warming-pans, there had been nothing so aggravating as to try to solace us, who were as good as on board ship and under way,—nay, in imagination as far up the St. John's as Pilatka at least,—with brigade drills! It was very kind and flattering in him to wish to keep us. But unhappily we had made up our minds to go.

"Never did officer ride at the head of a battalion of more wobegone, spiritless wretches than I led back from Beaufort that day. 'When I march down to de landin',' said one of the men afterwards, 'my knapsack full of feathers. Comin' back, he lead!' And the lead, instead of the feathers, rested on the heart of every one.

"As if the disappointment itself were not sufficient, we had to return to our pretty camp, accustomed to its drawing-room order, and find it a desert. Every board gone from the floors, the screens torn down from the poles, all the little conveniences scattered, and, to crown all, a cold breeze such as we had not known since New-Year's Day blowing across the camp and flooding everything with dust. I sincerely hope the regiment would never behave after a defeat as they behaved then. Every man seemed crushed, officers and soldiers alike; when they broke ranks, they went and lay down like sheep where their tents used to be, or wandered disconsolately about, looking for their stray belongings. The scene was so infinitely dolorous that it gradually put me in the highest spirits; the ludicrousness of the whole affair was so complete, there was nothing to do but laugh. The horrible dust blew till every officer had some black spot on his nose which paralyzed pathos. Of course the only way was to set them all at work as soon as possible; and work them we did,—I at the camp and the Major at the wharf,—loading and unloading wagons and just reversing all which the morning had done.

"The New Hampshire men were very considerate, and gave back most of what they had taken, though many of our men were really too delicate or proud to ask or even take what they had once given to soldiers or to the colored people. I had no such delicacy about my tent-frame, and by night things had resumed something of their old aspect, and cheerfulness was in part restored. Yet long after this I found one first sergeant absolutely in tears,—a Florida man, most of whose kindred were up the St. John's. It was very natural that the men from that region should feel thus bitterly, but it shows how much of the habit of soldiers they have all acquired, that the South Carolina men, who were leaving the neighborhood of their families for an indefinite time, were just as eager to go, and not one deserted, though they knew it for a week beforehand. No doubt my precarious health makes it now easier for me personally to remain here—easier on reflection at least—than for the others. At the same time Florida is fascinating, and offers not only adventure, but the command of a brigade. Certainly at the last moment there was not a sacrifice I would not have made rather than wrench myself and others away from the expedition. We are, of course, thrown back into the old uncertainty, and if the small-pox subsides (and it is really diminishing decidedly) we may yet come in at the wrong end of the Florida affair."

                                                            "February 19.

"Not a bit of it! This morning the General has ridden up radiant, has seen General Gillmore, who has decided not to order us to Florida at all, nor withdraw any of this garrison. Moreover, he says that all which is intended in Florida is done,—that there will be no advance to Tallahassee, and General Seymour will establish a camp of instruction in Jacksonville. Well, if that is all, it is a lucky escape."

We little dreamed that on that very day the march toward Olustee was beginning. The battle took place next day, and I add one more extract to show how the news reached Beaufort.

                                                            "February 23, 1864.

"There was the sound of revelry by night at a ball in Beaufort last night, in a new large building beautifully decorated. All the collected flags of the garrison hung round and over us, as if the stars and stripes were devised for an ornament alone. The array of uniforms was such that a civilian became a distinguished object, much more a lady. All would have gone according to the proverbial marriage-bell, I suppose, had there not been a slight palpable shadow over all of us from hearing vague stories of a lost battle in Florida, and from the thought that perhaps the very ambulances in which we rode to the ball were ours only until the wounded or the dead might tenant them.

"General Gillmore only came, I supposed, to put a good face upon the matter. He went away soon, and General Saxton went; then came a rumor that the Cosmopolitan had actually arrived with wounded, but still the dance went on. There was nothing unfeeling about it,—one gets used to things,—when suddenly, in the midst of the 'Lancers,' there came a perfect hush, the music ceasing, a few surgeons went hastily to and fro, as if conscience-stricken (I should think they might have been),—then there 'waved a mighty shadow in,' as in Uhland's 'Black Knight,' and as we all stood wondering we were 'ware of General Saxton, who strode hastily down the hall, his pale face very resolute, and looking almost sick with anxiety. He had just been on board the steamer; there were two hundred and fifty wounded men just arrived, and the ball must end. Not that there was anything for us to do; but the revel was mistimed, and must be ended; it was wicked to be dancing, with such a scene of suffering near by.

"Of course the ball was instantly broken up, though with some murmurings and some longings of appetite, on the part of some, toward the wasted supper.

"Later, I went on board the boat. Among the long lines of wounded, black and white intermingled, there was the wonderful quiet which usually prevails on such occasions. Not a sob nor a groan, except from those undergoing removal. It is not self-control, but chiefly the shock to the system produced by severe wounds, especially gunshot wounds, and which usually keeps the patient stiller at first than any later time.

"A company from my regiment waited on the wharf, in their accustomed dusky silence, and I longed to ask them what they thought of our Florida disappointment now? In view of what they saw, did they still wish we had been there? I confess that in presence of all that human suffering, I could not wish it. But I would not have suggested any such thought to them.

"I found our kind-hearted ladies, Mrs. Chamberlin and Mrs. Dewhurst, on board the steamer, but there was nothing for them to do, and we walked back to camp in the radiant moonlight; Mrs. Chamberlin more than ever strengthened in her blushing woman's philosophy, 'I don't care who wins the laurels, provided we don't!'"

                                                                "February 29.

"But for a few trivial cases of varioloid, we should certainly have been in that disastrous fight. We were confidently expected for several days at Jacksonville, and the commanding general told Colonel Hallowell that we, being the oldest colored regiment, would have the right of the line. This was certainly to miss danger and glory very closely."

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, 248 South 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

Wartime Letters of Seth Rogers, 33d USCT

Florida History Online

War-Time Letters From Seth Rogers, M.D. Surgeon of the First South Carolina Afterwards the Thirty-third U.S.C.T. 1862-1863.

Letters

Camp Saxon, Beaufort, S.C., December 27, 1862.

There is a little more of solid reality in this work of camp life than I have found in any previous experience. You remember my delight in the life of ship surgeon, when I had three hundred and fifty of the lowest Irish to care for. Multiply that delight by ten and you will approximate to what I get among these children of the tropics. A more childlike, jovial, devotional, musical, shrewd, amusing, set of beings never lived. Be true to them and they will be devoted to you. I leave all of my things in tent unguarded and at loose ends as I could never think of doing in a white regiment, and if I ever lose anything you shall be informed. Their religious devotion is more natural than any I ever witnessed. At this moment the air is full of melody from the tents, of prayer and hymns mingled with the hearty yah, yah, of the playful outsiders.

Last night I had too many business letters to get off in today’s mail to allow me time for writing half of what I wished, and since then I have lived so long that much has been lost in the ages.

I want, once and for all, to say that Col. Higginson is splendid - pardon the McClellan word - beyond even my anticipation, which, you know, has for years been quite exalted. I stood by General Saxton - who is a West Pointer - the other night, witnessing the dress parade and was delighted to hear him say that he knew of no other man who could have magically brought these blacks under the military discipline that makes our camp one of the most enviable. Should we by possibility ever increase to a brigade I can already foresee that our good Colonel is destined to be the Brigadier General.

I am about selecting my orderly from among the privates, just now a Lieutenant brought little “Charlie” before me; a boy of fourteen or fifteen, who saw his master shot at Hilton Head without weeping over it; who had some of his own teeth knocked out at the same time. He has always taken care of his master and knows so many things that I shall probably avail myself of his bright eyes and willing hands. We have had an old uncle “Tiff”, whom I should take if I had the time and strength to wait upon him when he should get too tired to wait upon me. He is a dear old man who prays day and night.

I have forgotten whether I have written that the mocking- bird sings by day and the cricket by night. To me it is South America over again. The live oak grows to enormous size. Today I made thirty of my longest paces across the diameter of the branches of one of these handsome trees. The beautiful gray moss pendent everywhere from its branches gave the most decided impression of fatherliness and age.

Co. H. kindly invited James [Captain James S. Rogers, Dr. Rogers’s nephew] and me to mess with him and the Adjutant, thus we have a pleasant little table under the supervision of “William and Hattie,” in an old home just outside of camp. I am yet sharing the young captain’s tent, but in a day or two shall have my own pitched. . . . We are not more than fifty rods from the shore. Our landing is remarkable for its old fort, built of shells and cement in 16—by Jean Paul de la Ribaudiere. Its preservation is almost equal to the monuments perpetuated by Roman cement. The chance for wild game here is excellent, and in anticipation I enjoy it much, while in reality I doubt whether I shall ever find time for such recreation, and actual profit to our stomachs. It is not very easy for us to get fresh meat here, but we shall not suffer, because oysters are plentiful and fresh.  [In 1562, an ill-fated French settlement was established there by Jean Ribaut (also Ribault);  in 1564 René de Laudonnière, Ribaut’s subordinate, established Fort Caroline at today’s Jacksonville, Florida. The latter settlement was destroyed by Spaniards under Pedro Menéndes de Avilés in 1565.]

Dr. John Milton Hawks, surgeon, United States Colored Infantry. Like Seth Rogers, Dr. Hawks was an avid abolitionist who volunteered for service in a war that he prayed would bring an end to slavery in the United States. The wife of Hawks, Esther Hill Hawks, was also a medical doctor and a life-long abolitionist. Courtesy of Florida State Archives.

Our Chaplain is a great worker, and has a good influence over the soldiers. . . . Mr. Fowler, who was, not long ago at Cambridge. [James H. Fowler, an ordained Unitarian minister, was a dedicated abolitionist before the war. He was educated at Dartmouth and Harvard Divinity School. His brother, Thomas D. Fowler, also an ordained Unitarian minister, became chaplain to another United States Colored Infantry regiment.]

My first assistant surgeon is Dr. Hawks [John Milton Hawks] of Manchester, N.H. He is a radical anti-slavery man, somewhat older than I, and has a large medical experience and in addition has been hospital surgeon at Beaufort during several months. He has been rigidly examined by three regimental surgeons from New England and they have given him a very flattering certificate of qualification. I consider myself fortunate in having a man so well fitted for the place. The men and officers like him and I fancy will take to him quite as much as to me. The second assistant is not yet decided upon, but will probably be a young man who has already been several months in the army. The hospital steward has also had experience. All this accumulation of army experience around me makes me feel particularly green, but I guess I can work up to the sticking point. It is ever so much easier for me than to go in with green hands.

December 31, 1862

I examine from sixty to eighty men every morning and make prescriptions for those who need them. Doing this and visiting those in the hospital, usually keeps me busy from breakfast to dinner, after that my assistants can “see care” ordinarily of everybody till next morning. My afternoons are almost equally busy in contriving ways to keep the soldiers from getting sick, improving my hospital, etc. We have to make everything as we go on. The hospital is the upper floor of an old cotton gin building. I had the machinery moved and bedsteads made, beds made and filled with the dry, course grass that the soldiers brought on their heads from the plains, and eight sick men were put in there last Tuesday. It was a hard day’s work, but the men were very sick and I had all the help that could work in the building. We have no such thing as pillows or sheets, but we have plenty of blankets, and the knapsacks answer nicely for pillows. Dr. Hawks had already got a good fire- place in the room and now everything is as systematic, and almost as comfortable, as in any hospital. . . . Some of our officers and men have been off and captured some oxen, and today all hands have been getting ready for a great barbecue, which we are to have tomorrow. They have killed ten oxen which are now being roasted whole over great pits containing live coals made from burning logs in them.

January 1, 1863

This is the evening of the most eventful day of my life. Our barbeque was a most wonderful success. Two steamboats came loaded with people from Beaufort, St. Helena Island and Hilton Head. Among the visitors were some of my new acquaintances, [including] my friend, Mr. Hall of the voyage Delaware. But the dearest friend I found among them was Miss [Charlotte] Forten, whom you remember. She is a teacher of the freed children on St. Helena Island. Gen Saxton and his father and others came from Beaufort, and several cavalry officers hovered around the outskirts of our multitude of black soldiers and civilians, and in the centre of all was the speakers’ stand where the General and our Colonel and some others, with the band, performed the ceremonies of the day. Several good speeches were made, but the most impressive scene was that which occurred at the presentation of the Dr. Cheever flag to our regiment. After the presentation speech had been made, and just as Col. Higginson advanced to take the flag and respond, a negro woman standing near began to sing “America”, and soon many voices of freedmen and women joined in the beautiful hymn, and sang it so touchingly that every one was thrilled beyond measure. Nothing could have been more unexpected or more inspiring. The President’s proclamation and General Saxton’s New Year’s greeting had been read, and this spontaneous outburst of love and loyalty to a country that has heretofore so terribly wronged these blacks, was the birth of a new hope in the honesty of her intention. I most earnestly trust they not hope in vain. [Charlotte Forten (1837-1914), a Philadelphia-born African American teacher whose parents and grandparents were avid abolitionists, was one of the first teachers to travel to the Sea Islands after Union forces were established there.]

Col. H. was so much inspired by the remarkable thought of, and singing of, the hymn that he made one of his most effective speeches. Then came Gen. Saxton with a most earnest and brotherly speech to the blacks and then Mrs. Frances D. Gage, and finally all joined in the John Brown hymn, and then to dinner. A hundred things of interest occurred which I have not time to relate. Everybody was happy in the bright sunshine, and in the great hope. The ten oxen were hearty relish and barrels of molasses and water and vinegar and ginger were drunk to wash them down. Mr. Hall, Miss Forten and some others took dinner with us. [Frances Dana Barker Gage was the mother of eight children, four of whom served in the Union army, and an avid abolition, temperance, and women’s rights activist. She served in the U.S. Sanitary Commission and as superintendent of a South Carolina freedmen’s school.]

January 2, 1863

I did not observe any reporters at our barbeque yesterday, but I presume some of the journals will contain enough to make it unnecessary for me to write more than my letter of yesterday. I will, however, reiterate the statement that it was the most eventful day of my life. To know what I mean you must stand in the midst of the disenthralled and feel the inspiration of their birth into freedom. For once I heartily cheered for stars and stripes. There is nothing in history more touching and beautiful than the spontaneous outburst of these freed men and women just at the moment when out gallant colonel was receiving the flag of the regiment. None of us had ever heard them sing America, and the most infinite depth and tenderness of “My country ‘tis of thee Sweet land of Liberty,” was inspiring to the last degree. I doubt if our Col. ever spoke so well and he justly attributed inspiration to the unexpected singing of the hymn.

Evening Jan. 3, 1863

We are having summer days and October nights, with the white frost covering the sand of our camp- ground in the morning.

I wish I could send you a photograph of my orderly. I had my choice of a boy from the regiment and selected Wiley Rohan, a shining black boy of fifteen, with handsome eyes, and teeth so perfect and beautiful that I always like to see his smiling face. He is very bright and tractable, with great fund of active willingness. I questioned him relative to the difference between an orderly and a servant, and found him entirely posted, but when I asked if he preferred I should get another boy, who had not enlisted, for my servant, to having extra compensation himself for doing the little things needful for me, he at once decided to fill the two positions. I doubt not we shall get greatly attached to each other. He knows all about managing a boat, has taken care of a horse and has also been taught to cook.

From what I have heretofore written I hope you have not inferred that our regiment is made up of saints. Now and then a soldier among us is not much superior in morals to members of a white regiment. The principle crime here is that of desertion. Today we have had a melancholy result of which will be likely to exert a salutary influence upon the regiment.

Serg’t Rivers [Prince Rivers], our Provost Sergeant, is as black as the ace of spades and a man of remarkable executive ability. He is the one from whom some Philadelphia soldiers attempted to strip the sergeants’ stripes and found wiser and safer to leave him alone. It is his duty here to keep the prisoners at work and yesterday afternoon he left them cutting wood outside the camp while he was at dress parade. Three escaped in spite of the two soldiers who were guarding them. It was already sunset when he started with an armed posse to search for them and as the Col. and I walked out a mile from the camp, it seemed to us impossible that search could avail anything in a country so level and so filled with woodland jungle. But about noon today the party returned with one prisoner in a cart, fatally wounded by a gunshot in the abdomen. The poor fellow would not halt at command and in consequence must linger out a few hours of mortal suffering. This sad contingency of military discipline seems to me just, but falling as it does upon a member of that race so long denied common justice by my own, I cannot help feeling a peculiar sadness about it. Serg’t Rivers is off again with twenty eight men, in search of the others. I most earnestly hope that if found they will surrender. The feeling through the regiment in regard to the fatal result is that the deserter received his just punishment.

Sunday, Jan. 4, 1863

The poor fellow who was shot yesterday died at sunset this evening. His desertion and its consequences made an impressive text for the religious services today. We had service in the grove, using our New Year’ platform for the pulpit and the officers, while the soldiers and women and children, under the live oaks with their pendant mosses, made the missionary pictures seem almost respectable. I doubt, however, whether the American Board of Foreign Missions ever instructed their missionaries to preach the radical doctrines of human brotherhood taught in our camp. Brotherhood in Christ and brotherhood on earth are not always the same in practice. . . .

My young orderly, who should be named Ariel, remarked today that he had all his life been accustomed to take his master’s family out in a boat, till one day he thought he would take his own family off in the same way. He is from Florida.

Jan. 6, 1863

For the first time in the six weeks Colonel H. has been in camp, he to-day went to Beaufort. He returns with a more civilized air and informs me that there are yet many people outside our camp. The rebel pickets above came down to the river bank this morning and announced that an armistice had been agreed upon for six months and therefore laid aside their guns and sat on the bank, fishing. Their statement is not credited because nobody believes the insanity of the nation has taken such a disastrous turn.

I am steadily becoming acquainted with very remarkable men whose lives in slavery and whose heroism in getting out of it, deepens my faith in negro character and intellect. The difference in physiognomy among them now seems to me quite as marked as among the whites and the physiognomy of their diseases is quite apparent to me.

Jan. 9, 1863

This morning, the adjutant and I, with eight oarsmen, went down to Hilton Head in our surf boat, The distance cannot be far from twelve miles and the trip is a charming one, though the shores are wanting in those rugged qualities which help to make the difference in character between the North and the South. Our black soldiers sang as they rowed - not the songs of common sailors - but hymns of praise mingled with those pathetic longings for a better world, so constant with these people. There are times when I could quite enjoy more earthly songs from them, even a touch of the wicked, but this generation must live and die in sadness. The sun can never shine for them as for a nation of freemen whose fathers were not slaves.

My special business in going to Hilton Head was to test the honesty of a certain medical purveyor, who does not incline to honor the requisitions of the surgeon of the 1st Reg. S.C.Vol’s. He has not yet heard of the popularity of black regiments, but Uncle Samuel will teach him that, as well as a few other things. But it will be too late for him to repent in this world when he shall have learned the lesson.

The “Flora” - General Saxton’s steamer - came down from Beaufort and we were towed by her to our camp. I met the General on the steamer and was delighted to find him in that mood over the purveyor’s second refusal, which will work out a line of retributive justice. He read to me a letter just received by him from Secretary Stanton [Edwin McMasters Stanton, Secretary of War], which authorizes me to draw direct from New York. So we shall be all right within two weeks, I hope. In addition to all my other duties, I should be quite like to prescribe for some of those pro-slavery scamps who disgrace the federal shoulder-straps. This particular case was polite enough to me, for which I was sorry. When Gen Hunter gets here there will be a bowing and scraping to the anti-slavery men that awaken wickedness in my heart.

I keep in capital working condition. My tent is up and I shall be in it as soon as I get time to “move.”

Jan. 10, 1863

I have been here two and a half weeks and still am occupying James’s tent, so little time have I far found for getting my own in readiness.

I am just now busy in trying to discover the causes of such an excess of pleurisy and pneumonia in our camp, as compared with white regiments. Thus far I can only get the reiteration of the fact that negroes are more subject to these diseases than are the whites. I should be very sorry to find that their nightly “praise meetings,” or “shouts,” acted an important role in the development of these diseases, yet, thus far our gravest cases are the most religious. It would be a sad but curious coincidence, if while the Colonel and young captain are diligently taking notes of the songs and hymns of the soldiers, the surgeon should note a marked fatality resulting from this sweet religious expression. We shall see. It is as difficult to inculcate temperance in religion here, among these sun-burned children, as to introduce it into a Methodist camp meeting. I hope we shall not have to shut in religious expression by military rules.

Speaking of coincidences, reminds me that I found the steward, this morning, putting up prescriptions in bits of the “Liberator”. I don’t believe Mr. Garrison’s editorials ever before came so near these black soldiers. I wondered if the powers would not have some magic power conveyed to them. South Carolina is getting a simultaneous doctoring of body and soul.

Sunday Evening, Jan. 11, 1863

At service today the President’s proclamation was read and the Colonel asked all who wanted to fight for liberty, to say “I”: The response would have satisfied greater enthusiasts then uncle Abraham.

I have lost more than one hour’s sleep since coming here, listening to the coughing of the soldiers in the night and trying to contrive plans to meet the more obvious causes. In a climate so damp and with change of temperature so great between midday and midnight, I have steadily felt the importance of some means by which the soldier’s A tents could, with their clothing, be more effectually dried and purified than is ordinarily done by the sun. To have a fire in a tent 7 x 8 for four men, without fireplace, stove or even an opening in the top, did not seem quite feasible, but we are trying in James’s and one other company, an experiment which is likely to prove a success. Remembering the antiseptic influence of wood smoke, and also the primitive cabins from which many of our people came, we have, this evening, had fires built in the centre of the tents, the floor boards in the middle being removed and a hole being dug in the sand for the fuel. The soldiers enjoy this scheme. After the smoke ceases, the beds of coals make the tents seem very cozy. The Colonel is not backward in favoring every hygienic measure that offers any good to the soldiers. A few days experiment with two companies will settle the question by comparison of sick lists.

Monday Evening, Jan. 12, 1863

Tonight I am seated in my own tent, and my orderly is patiently practicing on a copy of his name on the other side of my little hard pine table. I have a double tent, two joined, with a rough floor elevated about a foot from the sand and open at the sides so that the wind can whistle under, as well as over, my two rooms. These rooms are each nine feet square and parted by the folds of the two tents. I have room enough for a large family and it seems wrong that I should have so much, while those little 7 x 8 tents of the soldiers, literally steam with four bodies in them. But with the clothing allowed by Government, they could never be comfortable alone at night. On the whole, I like these little tents for soldiers better then those which receive a larger number. I see no way of isolating soldiers into decency. The unnatural life must, of course, have a few material comforts. On the other hand the out of door life compensates for many violations of wholesome laws. I find our officers universally gaining flesh. . . . Instead of a fireplace, I have found a little stove, with so much draft that I can have all the front open and thus get the light which makes a tent so pleasant and social. We have little, select euchre parties, now and then. It is to be regretted that the Colonel’s education does not extend beyond whist.

Jan. 13, 1863

. . . When I sit down at evening it always seems as if there could be but one subject to write upon, the music of these religious soldiers, who sing and pray steadily from supper time till “taps”, at 8:30 interrupted only by roll call at eight. The chaplain’s pagoda-like school house is the scene of earnest prayers and hymns at evening. I am sure the President is remembered more faithfully and gratefully in prayer by these Christian soldiers than by any other regiment in the army. It is one thing for a chaplain to pray for him, but quite another for the soldiers to kneel and implore blessings on his head and divine guidance for the officers placed over them, such prayers ought to make us true to them.

This afternoon, for the first time, our men are getting some money - not direct from the Government, but through that constant friend to them - Gen. Saxton, who waits for Government to refund it to him. The real drawback to enlistments is that the poor fellows who were in the Hunter regiment have never been paid a cent by the Government. Without reflection, one would suppose the offer of freedom quite sufficient for them to join us. But you must remember that not the least curse of slavery is ignorance and that the intellectual enjoyment of freedom cannot, by the present generation, be so fully appreciated as its material gifts and benefits. Just think how few there are, even in New England, who could bravely die for an Idea, you will see that the infinite love of freedom which inspires these people is not the same that fills the heart of a more favored race. . . .

Evening, Jan 14, 1863

My tent is so comfortable and attractive that I never felt more at home anywhere in my life. It is my castle and its walls are to me as good as granite. The Lord only knows how many good things we all the time lose by not having enough exposure to hindrance to sharpen our wits. I can now see plainly enough that the most delightful way to live at the sea-shore or among the mountains, in the summer, is to have at night only canvas walls between you and the bracing air and beautiful scenes you seek. Then just think of a tempest that shall make your frail tenement tremble like a bark at sea, and you in the sweet realization of how little space there is between you and the messengers of God.

Before breakfast this morning I stood on the shore and listened to the John Brown hymn, sung by a hundred of our recruits, as they came up the river on the steamer “Boston,” from St. Augustine, Fla. Our Lieut. Col. Billings went down last week for them and today we have received into our regiment all but five, whom I rejected in consequence of old age and other disabilities. It seemed hard to reject men who came to fight for their freedom, but these poor fellows are a hindrance in active service and we might be compelled to leave them to the mercy of those who know not that “It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

. . . I wish you could see how finely the Colonel appears in my dress coat. His was sent from Worcester quite a time before I left New England, but has never reached him. Very likely some miserable colonel of a poor white regiment appropriated it. I pity those who get so demoralized by association and wish they could have the benefit of our higher code. As I am less for ornament than for use here. I offered my coat to the Col. and was glad to find that Theodore [evidently Rogers’s tailor in Massachusetts] had applied his “celestial principle under the arms,” so that a Beaufort tailor could easily make an exact fit for the upper sphere. To sick soldiers it is unimportant whether I have one or two rows of buttons and my handsome straps fit just as well on my fatigue coat as on the other.

Jan. 15, 1863

Last night I wrote something about the beauties of tent life, tonight I might say something of its adventures. All night the wind blew furiously and all day the fine sand has drifted like snow. The rocking of the tent has been like a ship in a storm at sea and I heard one actually complaining of a sea sickness, in consequence. All day I have prayed for rain, and at this moment it is pouring like mad. Ah! Is it not charming to sit here and bid defiance to the raging storm. I can now fully understand what [Henry David] Thoreau meant when he enjoyed the wild apple that tasted as a squash bug smells, while he felt it a triumph to have eaten it. All the wild in me is called forth by this life and I enjoy it intensely, not because it is easy, but because it is triumphant. Had I time I could write volumes on the merits of Indian tanned buffalo robes in Dixie. The more the wind searches my tent at night the more closely my shaggy friend clings to me and protects me from harm. . . .

Between midnight and morning, while I was dreaming of a magnificent storm on the ocean, I was awakened by a pitiful outcry as if one was being murdered in the rear of my tent. Several voices joined and then the sentinel screamed for the corporal of the guard, and finally it all ended in a low laugh. I put my pistol back under my head and went to sleep again. Today I learned that the Commissary Serg’t had the nightmare and two or three others caught the fright and fancied Secesh after them.

My second assistant has come, Dr. Minor [Thomas S. Minor], a young man whom I was fearful we should not get. I feel peculiarly blessed in having assistants who are honest and trustworthy, but of such different practical attainments that, putting us three together, we make quite a strong team.

Jan 16, evening

All night the wind blew a gale, with an occasional dash of rain to increase the interest. While I slept better than usual I am sorry to say that three tents were blown down, one of which contained a sick man. The wind finally came from the N.W. and today we found our coats none too warm. The sky has been beautiful in the extreme, like that of early summer when the clouds are full of promise. At this moment the camp resounds with the John Brown hymn, sung as no white regiment can sing it, so full of harmony. I know you all think me over enthusiastic about these people, but every one of you would be equally so, if here. Every day deepens my conviction that if we are true to them they will be true to us. The Col. arrives at the same conclusion. When I think of their long suffering at the hands of the whites, and then of their readiness to forgive, I feel reverence for the race that I did not know before coming among them. You need not fancy that I find them perfect: it had not been my fortune to find mortals of that type - even in Worcester - but I do find them, as a people, religious, kind hearted, forgiving and as truth loving as the average of whites, more so than the Irish of the lowest rank.

Jan 17, Evening

Major John D. Strong, the man who, with sword drawn, pursued the white soldier who struck a black man while the 1st South Carolina Volunteers drilled at Beaufort. Strong was later promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 33rd USCI. USMHI.

This has been a triumphant day for our regiment. We have marched to Beaufort and back in such style as to turn jeers into admiration, and tonight our men are full of music and delight. The Colonel, not content with marching the whole length of the front street, actually stopped on the parade ground and drilled the regiment an hour or more and then they marched home to the music of their own voices. The different encampments at Beaufort had large delegations by the way-side, as we entered the town, and we were greeted with such language as pertains to vulgar negro haters. Our men were apparently indifferent to it and the officers could afford to wait in silence. I fell back to the rear with the major and was constantly delighted at the manly bearing of our soldiers. Not a head was turned to the right or left, not a word spoken. At length a white soldier struck a black man, not of our regiment, and the poor fellow appealing to us, we wheeled our horses upon the rabble, and Major Strong [John D. Strong], with drawn sword pursued the offender, with the point of that instrument a little nearer the fellow’s back than seemed wholesome. I have rarely seen one more thoroughly frightened. The effectiveness was magical, no more audible sneers. But wasn’t it good to march our regiment proudly in front of those mansions where two years ago chivalry were plotting something as strange, but quite unlike.

“With a rifle in their hands.” The 29th U. S. Colored Infantry Regiment from Connecticut in training at the Smith Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. Photograph by Sam A. Cooley, 1863. LC.

January 18, Sunday Evening

Such a transparent day and cool north wind makes even South Carolina endurable, while it lasts, I mean. When General [David] Hunter gets here we expect to nullify the state.

In white regiments, where the sick list is greater then ours, I hear of surgeons who have plenty of leisure. I suppose they are men who do not love their profession, or, possibly, men who fancy that all of the surgeon’s duty is performed when he has seen the sick and made his prescriptions. But in fact the surgeon’s duties in a regiment are like a woman’s work, never done. But to a good housewife there must be a sweet satisfaction in order and cleanliness, and in the long run it must be more economical.

In our camp most curious problems present themselves, as how to keep people from scurvy without vegetables and fresh meat; how to have a good fire in tents without a fireplace, stove or ventilation; how to make bread without yeast and without oven; how to treat the sick without medicines; how to amputate limbs without knives. All these and many other similarly knotty questions the surgeon of the First Regiment of S.C. Vol’s. has to consider, sometimes when he ought to be sleeping. This is not said complainingly. Our men rarely complain and those jeering white soldiers who saw their firm tread in the streets of Beaufort yesterday must have discovered the reason for their patience, this silent waiting. There was a Destiny in the silent, dignified bearing of our men yesterday. I never in my life, felt so proud, so strong, so large. I longed to lead a change upon those uncivil soldiers. Possibly that was wicked - can’t help it - “born so.” But I can afford to wait; the great mill is grinding slowly and surely.

Hurrah! Hurrah! The Quartermaster just in with dispatch from signal officer announcing arrival of “Arago” and a gun boat at Hilton Head and General Hunter has come.

Jan 20, 1863

Gen. Hunter is in earnest about arming the blacks, so we may confidently expect well-done to increase. The little opposition to our movement will fall to the ground so soon we can prove our worthiness by marked success. Remember, it requires not only time but deeds, to undo the hateful lesson this Republic has been so long teaching. The public heart has virus in it and nothing but the flow of arterial blood can purify it. The innocent must suffer for the guilty.

I am beginning to find a little leisure for noting verbatim some of the individual histories of these soldiers and shall endeavor to forward them to you. The Col. and young captain have transcribed many of their songs and hymns, but without the music of their peculiar voices, I confess the words do not much interest me. Now and then a fine, poetical expression, but as a rule, somewhat dry, like the human skull Serg’t Rivers brought me one day. Their autobiographies, on the contrary, if one has the time and patience to draw them out, are often so unique that I feel deeply interested in them.

At dress parade, tonight, the Col. had some of my sanitary measures embodied in a general order and read by the Adjutant. One of the most important details was that each tent is hereafter to have a fire in it every evening. We have tried it long enough in James’ company, to be satisfied of its utility. The men do not greatly mind the smoke and I have convinced the Col. that it is one of the best purifiers and antiseptics we could have.

Jan 21, Evening

Great days seem natural to us now. General Hunter has reviewed our regiment with Gen. Saxton, and the Colonel’s long mourned dress coat has come and I no longer weep in secret silence the sacrifice of mine. But we will leave coats for arms and ask you to congratulate the 1st S.C.V, on the distinction conferred by the General in visiting us before any of those in Beaufort. And was it not refreshing to hear the General in command say to our soldiers, when formed in hollow square, “Men, I am glad to see you so well, I wish we had a hundred thousand soldiers like you. Before Spring I hope we shall have fifty thousand. You are fighting for your liberty and the liberty of your families and friends. The man who is not willing to fight for his liberty is not fit to have it.” Probably I have not the exact phraseology, but it cannot differ materially. It was very impressive to us all, while the cheers that followed were stunning to us all. Then the dear, noble General Saxton, so long thwarted by pro-slavery opposition, stepped forward and informed the regiment that Gen. Hunter had this afternoon told him that fifty thousand Springfield rifles are coming to this department for the black soldiers. Then the Colonel introduced the surgeons to Gen’l Hunter and while taking him to our little hospital, I called his attention to the refusal of Purveyor to honor any requisitions: consequently, I take another requisition to Hilton Head, countersigned by General Hunter, and we shall see with what result.

Jan. 22. Evening

Early this morning I galloped to Beaufort, went to Hilton Head on the “Flora,” and at sunset was back with my instruments and a beginning of the medicines. My success was entire, not however, without considerable ungodliness on one side, possibly not a little on the other. But Gen. Hunter intends to be obeyed and, I fancy, the negro haters will find it out in good season. You know I always fancied retributive justice, so I especially enjoy Gen. Hunter’s presence. He is an awful retribution to many a traitorous scamp in the department. The rule of Brannon-ism is at an end, and we poor sinners must be forgiven a little exultation. I understand that our medical Purveyor is a relative of General Brannon. . . .

Steamer Ben Deford, Jan 23, 1863

I have refrained till now from informing you of a little expedition which for the last few days has been planning for us. I suppose there never was an expedition, however small, that got off at the time specified, nor one that was kept secret. So we are five days later than intended, and the floating rumors of our plans are enough in number to make it appear that we are to take Charleston and all other prominent Secesh places on the coast of Dixie. The “Planter,” the same that Robert Small ran out of Charleston, and the “John Adams,” each with a company of our soldiers and some large guns on board, started from camp at noon today, Major Strong on the John Adams. About four this afternoon we started with four companies including that of Cap’t R., Colonel, Surgeon and second assistant surgeon and at this moment we are outside the bar, off Hilton Head, sailing as quietly in the soft moonlight and warm atmosphere as if our intentions were of the most peaceful nature.

The “Planter,” a Confederate steamship which operated out of Charleston, South Carolina. In May 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved black man and pilot of the steamer, assisted by eight enslaved black crewmen, steamed out of the Charleston harbor and turned the “Planter” over to gunboats of the U.S. Blockading Squadron on patrol offshore. From that day forward, Smalls piloted the USS Planter for the Federal navy.

The “Ben Deford” is really a magnificent steamer for transporting troops. A turn among the soldiers just now, convinced me that we can have ventilation enough and warmth enough to prevent illness. It is a real pleasure to go and see them so quietly wrapped in their blankets, no quarreling, no profanity, and the whole responsibility rests upon our Colonel. He has absolute authority over these three steamers. Our men were all anxious to go, and many, belonging to companies not designated for the trip, went to Col. H. and begged to go. Some have been permitted to do so. It remains to see how they will fight.

St. Simon’s Bay, Jan 24

At nine this morning we entered this bay expecting to find the “John Adams” waiting for us, but she was not to be seen. We dropped anchor and the Col. and I went on board the gunboat “Potomska.” There we found a remarkable negro who resides on St. Simon’s Island and who informed us that he knew of a quantity of Railroad iron that was used in the construction of a fort, below, on the shore. So while waiting for the “John Adams,” the surf boats were manned and men enough taken ashore to secure about two thousand dollars worth of this new iron which is much needed at Hilton Head.

With Lieut. West [James B. West], I went up to the Hon. Thomas Butler King’s estate, and confiscated a nice bath tub and three new windows for my hospital, which has only shutters. At four this afternoon the John Adams” steamed down the bay.

Jan 25

Still lying at anchor in St. Simon’s Bay, waiting for the “Planter.” Judge [Lyman] Stickney of Florida is with us; an able defender of the oppressed and a gentleman. I was much pleased to learn that he is a native of Vermont. Surgeon [Joel] Richardson, formerly of the 9th. Maine, is also with us. We are to leave him at Fernandina. His health has become so frail he was compelled to resign. Last evening he presented me with a pair of shoulder straps for my fatigue coat, with the remark that it might become essential that I have then on. But I fancy that whoever of our regiment falls into the hands of the Rebels would scarcely be saved by straps and sash. I feel that there is a tacit understanding that we are not to surrender under any circumstances. . . . The captain of the steamer [Captain Hallett] is an odd genius. He is a Cape Cod man, whose profanity is so much a part of his nature that total abstinence might kill him. He swears vigorously for freedom and especially for the Massachusetts expression of it. Curses the sluggishness of government officials and swears the democrats ought to be sent to -- . Says he has worked fifteen months with this steamer at an expense of four hundred thousand dollars to the government, and he does not believe he has earned for it ten dollars that could not have been as well earned, if this, and some other steamers, had never been employed. Seven hundred and fifty dollars a day, exclusive of coal, counts up. Government ought to draft property as well as men, and then compensate when it gets through using it. Such a course would put an end to private speculation . . . .

January 26, 1863

The “Planter” got along last night and, with the “John Adams” has gone through the “inside passage,” while we are running outside to meet them at Fernandina Harbor.

Since coming aboard the steamer I have more opportunity than before with the line officers about their men. I find an almost universal attachment and confidence. We have a few mulattoes in the regiment and so far as I have conversed with officers, their testimony is very decidedly in favor of the blacks, both for physical and intellectual points. I was prepared for the former, but was surprised to find that the ruling spirits among the soldiers are found mainly among the blacks.

Steamer “John Adams,” St. Marys River, January 26, 1863

. . .  We are now in the heart of secesh and before morning shall have succeeded or failed in our purpose. At this moment the men are loading their muskets with a will that means fight. Our Colonel is cool and careful and I trust his judgment in this perilous undertaking. But if we should lose him!

This town was partly burned a few weeks ago by the gunboat “Neptune.” Some of her men went ashore when the white flag was shown, but the pickets fired on them, hence the destruction of the town. A woman has been waving her white handkerchief from one of the houses, but we do not care to do anything here. We are moving slowly and silently up the river, all lights above extinguished, save mine and I have put my rubber blanket up for a curtain at the window. The Colonel is too considerate of me, but takes Dr. Minor to land with the troops. I am sadly aware that I could not endure a rapid march of ten miles on foot, so I have reluctantly fitted out Dr. Minor with my orderly, pistol and sash, tourniquets, etc., and shall try to possess my soul in patience, if not peace. Our men show anything but fear as we pass between the double line of pickets.

Midnight

Oh! The terrible waiting! Before eleven P.M. one hundred and seventy-five men had been landed at Township plantation, ten miles above St. Mary’s, with the Colonel at their head. And now volley after volley of musketry off in the woods sets me making final preparations for the wounded.

Jan’y 27, 1863

I appropriated the mess-room and the officer’s berths to receive the wounded. Fortunately we had thought to bring candles along, no others on board.—It was not more than one hour before we were busy dressing gun shot wounds. One man was killed instantly by a ball through the heart and seven were wounded, one of whom will die. Braver men never lived. One man with two bullet holes through the large muscles of the shoulder and neck, brought off from the scene of action, Robert Sutton, with three wounds, one on the skull, which may cost him his life, would not report himself till compelled to do so by his officers. While dressing his wounds he quietly talked of what they had done and what they yet can do. Today I had the Col. order him to obey me. He is perfectly quiet and cool but takes this whole affair with the religious bravery of a man who realizes that freedom is sweeter than life. Yet another did not report at all, but kept all night on guard and perhaps I should not have known of his having had a buckshot in the shoulder if some duty requiring a sound shoulder had not been required of him today. The object of our raid was to surprise and capture a company of rebel cavalry pickets, but, as is usual in this war, the enemy seemed to know of the secret plan, and we only succeeded in making them skedaddle after a few rounds, and in bringing off five contrabands, a fine piano and divers other things. We also had the satisfaction of burning the plantation house and outbuildings, so they will not screen any more pickets. We steadily send shot and shell over the bluffs to prevent their picking off men from our boat, which is their habit. All this is very exciting and I enjoy it much. I just now volunteered to go up on a bluff and burn a picket house of rendezvous, but I believe the Col. thinks it unsafe for his friends to do what he himself is ever ready to do.

We reached St. Mary’s before noon. I believe I have before stated that the town was partially burned by the “Neptune,” yet there fifty or more houses remaining, including two large churches, a bank, etc. As we approached, the waving of white handkerchiefs began again, by the two maiden ladies (! !) residing in sight of the wharf. All the other houses were uninhabited. The women informed us that they were living entirely alone with their aged mother, that they were “St. Domingo ladies,” but had not owned slaves since England abolished slavery there. Their antecedents have been so doubtful that the Colonel thought it best to search their house very carefully in spite of their protestations, and entreaties and talk of honor, etc. etc. I was permitted to join him and one of the captains in the search and found it very interesting though we discovered no rebels. Of course we had a guard around the house, a guard of such color as greatly to annoy the inmates. They told me that they had not seen pickets at all and many other things which I knew to be false. But we politely left them, they avowing that they were ladies and thanking us for being gentlemen. As we were about to leave the wharf, bang, bang, bang, went secesh rifles from behind the houses and whistling went the balls over our heads. We were not long in sending shot and shell enough to protect our skirmishers and then the Col. did what I begged him to do this morning - put nearly all the town in flames, save the house of these women and two or three at the windward of it. I wanted to take the women down to Fernandina and burn every house, but the Col. thought it best to leave them, so there will still be a screen and sympathy left there for the rebels. But we left an immense fire and I trust the pickets will have to rescue the women from it.

Steamer Ben Deford, # 13 Fernandina, Fla., January 28, 1863

From Beaufort, the men of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers were transported to Union-occupied Fernandina to conduct raids up the St. Marys River. Map is courtesy of Erin Soles, Center for Instructional Research and Technology, University of North Florida.

While superintending the transfer of the wounded from the “John Adams” last night, I sent ashore for mattresses, but without success. This morning I had been ashore and procured a bale of fine hay from Quartermaster Seward, a gentleman who was my partner at euchre on the “Delaware” and who is now very prompt in doing what he can for us, so that now our men are about as comfortably placed as if they were in a hospital. Yesterday I saw how difficult it is to keep down vandalism when a town is to be burned. In this respect the blacks are much more easily controlled than the whites. Of course we have a right to appropriate what we need in the service of Uncle Sam, but I would be as severe as the Col. on individual appropriations. My only regret about burning the town is that we did not give those “unprotected ladies” the protection of our flag and then burn every house. I find the same feeling among officers here in Fernandina. If we are ever to put down this ungodly rebellion, we must act in the broadest principles of justice. If I offer my life in the defense of my country I shall not be slow nor economical in my demands upon my enemies. This is the true justice and wise humanity. Just now two companies were sent to St. Mary’s on the “Planter” to load brick: I let Dr. Miner go with them. That I did not go myself instead, was the bravest thing I have done since I came to Dixie.

Jan. 29, noon

I have just received a note from the Col, who is ashore, that sets our line officers to making ready in haste for another expedition. We are not yet done with St. Mary’s River and some of the upper settlements. The “Planter” has not yet returned, but has been using her artillery this morning shelling the pickets in the woods I presume. I shall get some surgeon to care for my men in absence.

Steamboat John Adams, Jan. 29, 1863

Again we are on our way into the heart of secesh [soldier’s slang for secessionist]. If we do not get blown to pieces before morning we shall get some distance above where any of our gunboats have been within a year. Tonight I have heard that a negro has come from the scene of the fight the other night, and he reports seven rebels killed, including the daring Cap’t Clark. Cap’t Clifton of this boat is a most singular mixture of candor and roughness and refinement. Though he swears like a trooper, there is a drollery and generosity and honesty about him that quite captivates me. The other night I was standing beside him in silence after our troops had marched away from shore, and the mate came up and asked permission to go ashore and get some hens. The captain exclaimed, “Oh my God! Doctor just think of this man robbing hen roosts right in the midst of death and damnation.” The deep, sepulchral voice with which this was uttered made the whole thing so tragico-comical that I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Alberti’s Mills, 40 miles from Fernandina, Jan 30, 1863

Nassau County, Florida, in 1864. Rogers refers to Woodstock Mills, a steam powered sawmill established by Edwin R. Alberti in 1837. Woodstock Mills is located on this map, approximately forty miles up the St. Marys River from Fernandina. Courtesy of Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida.

The river is rebellious to the last degree. It is very crooked and sluggish and black and got us aground so many times in the long, sleepless night that rebel pickets might have picked off many of our men and officers. Again and again we had to turn points at right angles and we were never more than two rods from one or another shore. Often the sides of our boat were swept by the boughs of the mournful looking trees. The shores are generally low and marshy and the moss droops so low as to give the appearance of weeping willows, It is now eleven, A.M. and we are starting homeward.

Oh it was a queer night, so queer that more than once I laughed outright, when I thought of the curious fact that T.W.H. and I were so industriously trying to get a peep at real rebels, while they would undoubtedly do something to get a peep at us. In my time I have seen considerable mismanagement of one kind and another, but I do not remember that I ever dreamed that so much of that article could be employed in one night on board a steamboat. Among the boat’s officers there was no mutual understanding, and it is fortunate for us that the rebels did not know it. But at daylight we did reach Alberti’s mills and then came for me an hour of dreamy, fitful sleep. I had made three vigorous efforts to sleep during the night, but enjoyed the calm moonlight and strange scenery and spice of danger too much for drowsiness. We passed picket fires and felt the possibility that our return might be obstructed, or greatly harassed. Very few officers have voluntarily dared such a responsibility as that resting on our Colonel, but he patiently and vigilantly met all the obstacles and had his pickets and skirmishers so arranged.—

Evening and “Ben Deford” again thank God

. . . I had written thus far when the rebels began firing from the shore and I found myself among our soldiers, who replied with a spirit and precision that sent more than one poor fellow to the dust.

Captain Clifton of the “John Adams” was shot through the head and died instantly. My Major’s head had escaped by about two inches. Strange to say no other accidents occurred in this nor in the subsequent firing from the bluffs on the Florida shore. The first attack was from the Georgia bluffs. They were both desperate, but of short duration. One fellow actually jumped on the flat- boat in tow, and was immediately shot by one of our soldiers. I afterwards asked Robert Sutton what he was about during the conflict, and found that he was deliberately shooting from the pilot house, with two guns, having a man load one while he fired the other. But I will not go back to the sunrise. As I was saying, the pickets and the skirmishers were so placed that there was no escape for the white families at Alberti’s Mills. The Col. had gone ashore and a little after sunrise sent for me to go off [the ship] and take with me some copies of the President’s Proclamation. I found a little village all included in the Alberti estate and the mansion was occupied by madame Alberti and her family. She was a New Yorker by birth and her deceased husband was a native of Philadelphia.  [Edwin R. Alberti graduated from the Philadelphia Military Academy and served in the United States Army for a decade before settling in Florida. By 1850, Alberti was the owner of fifty-two slaves and a steam sawmill known as Woodstock Mills.  He died in 1861, leaving his widow, Ernestine Strong Alberti, as sole owner of Woodstock Mills, located on the St. Marys River approximately four miles downriver from Kings Ferry. The “little village” included a post office, schoolhouse, church, retail store and a two-room jail.]

 Mr. [Abraham] Bessent, former business partner of Alberti’s was at the house on a visit, ill with chronic bronchitis. He, being an important person, must be made a prisoner, unless too feeble to be removed from the house. I found on examination, that he could be taken with us without danger to himself. Madame Alberti spent much time trying to convince me that she and her husband had been wonderfully devoted to the interests of their slaves, especially to the fruitless work of trying to educate them. The truth of these assertions was disproved by certain facts, such as a strong slave jail, containing implements of torture which we now have in our possession, (the lock I have), the fact that the slaves have “mostly gone to the Yankees,” and yet other fact that Robert Sutton, a former slave there, said the statement was false. The statement of a black man was lawful in Dixie yesterday. I called madame Alberti’s attention to a former slave of hers, whom she remembered as “Bob” but never before knew as Robert Sutton, corporal in the army of the United States. Robert begged me to forgive him for breaking through my order that he should not exert himself at all till the danger of inflammation of the brain should be averted. The white bandage about his head was conspicuous at the points of danger through all the twenty-four eventful hours of our expedition. It finally devolved upon him and Sergeant Rivers to examine the persons of our six rebel prisoners, for concealed weapons of defense. This last was so very anti-slavery that I fancied the rebels enjoyed it somewhat less than I. I am told that thirteen riderless horses went back to camp after that fight in the woods the other night. That the lieutenant in command and five others were killed and many others wounded. Could our party have known the exact state of affairs, the camp might have been destroyed and many prisoners taken. But it was safer and wiser for the infantry not to follow cavalry in the night.

Our comrades on the “Ben Deford” greeted us heartily and the Provost Marshal was in readiness to take charge of our prisoners. We shall probably take Mr. Bessent to Beaufort with us. He is a wealthy and influential rebel and may become a very important hostage when Jeff Davis begins to hang us. We brought off two or three negroes, and rice, corn, sheep and other valuable things, strictly contraband of war. I wanted the Col. to take a piano, already boxed, and in a store-house at the wharf, but we had no room for it. I thought it would especially please Miss [Charlotte] Forten to have it in her school.

Jan.31, evening.

While I keenly enjoy these moonlight excursions I find that like rising at three o’clock in the morning to go for pond lilies, one is satisfied with about three trips a week. You can imagine a little what an immense tax such a life makes upon the nervous system. But I find we sleep well as soon as opportunity offers. This rough life exposure in the open air puts an end to morbid excitability of the nerves, and one jumps at any reasonable chance for a snooze.

Sunday, Feb.1, 1863

This morning the “Planter,” with Cap’t Trowbridge’s and Cap’t Rogers’ companies, met us in St. Simon’s Bay. They have not been idle. They left Cumberland Bay the day before yesterday and taking the inside route, destroyed some salt works which operation has damaged the rebels to the extent of about twenty five thousand dollars. They met with no opposition, but had a hard time dragging their boats through the marsh. The marshes, or savannahs, in this part of the country, which border the rivers, are almost impassible for human beings, yet many a slave has waded through them toward the north star of freedom.

Today I find a formidable sick list, the result of huddling so many men together in the hold of the “John Adams,” but I think nothing serious will come of it. The officer in command at Fernandina has no authority to send out a flag of truce with prisoners, so we take all ours to Beaufort. I am exceedingly glad of it, since I have found, through Robert Sutton, that one of them shot a man while he was trying to escape to the “Yankees.” After I had dressed Robert’s wound, this morning, he took me to the rebel and ingeniously made him say; “No, you are mistaken, the gun went off accidentally,” “and besides he was not killed, but died of fever.” “Then,” said Robert  “You did threaten to shoot him ?” “Yes, but I intended it only as a threat.” Robert said, “I know you killed him,” and I to Robert, “The testimony of black men is legal now in Florida.”

We are taking several white soldiers and officers from Fernandina to Hilton Head. Their prejudice against our soldiers is amusing. We happen to have command of this steamer and, of course, have the best places. I find white soldiers sleep on deck rather than to go below with our men. Last evening I saw a Lieutenant getting two of our soldiers to take his trunk down to the cabin and he was rather suddenly informed by Lieut. West that United States soldiers were not to be called upon to do menial service. Another Lieut. expressed the opinion to our rough and ready Capt. [George] Dolly, that “these niggers” never would fight much. Dolly, in his fearful way, said; “You d- d fool; these soldiers have already fought more bravely than you ever will, you who have lived a couple of years on Uncle Sam without earning a cent for him.” The Lieut. did not think it safe to reply. I fancy Dolly. He is a vandal, but generous and brave. His men love him and fear him. His orders are somewhat terse, when in battle. I happened to be standing by him when he gave the command, “Cease firing, but if they fire again, give ‘em hell.”

The Colonel’s daring bravery has deepened the love and admiration of his men and officers. I have been a constant source of annoyance to him by words of caution, but am happy to know that they were heeded. The death of Capt. Clifton was a terrible confirmation of all I have said, and I doubt if the Major again puts himself unnecessarily in the way of so much danger. I could not get the ball that passed through the mess room where I was writing, but I picked one up in the prisoner’s room, adjoining. Had we been the prisoners, our places would have been on the upper deck, where they begged we would not put them, and where no one dreamed of putting them. All of them, except Mr Bessent, are now forward with the soldiers. . . .

Our expedition has been a capital success. We have had our soldiers three times under fire and know that they only care to face the enemy. We know also, that they can be trusted with the conquered foe. Not a single unbecoming act have I seen or heard of on the part of the guards, skirmishers or pickets. It was not for want of temptation, and I am led to wonder at their self control. The material benefit to the Government, of the expedition, is not inconsiderable. We are more than ever satisfied that the blacks must help us in this war. The next question to solve, is, how to penetrate far enough into the interior to free them. Possibly it remains for our regiment to solve this problem. Give us a good gunboat and plenty of ammunition to help us into the midst of them and I think we may trust God and our determination for the result. . .

Camp Saxton, Beaufort, S.C. Feb. 3,1863

At break of day we were at Beaufort and my sick and wounded were being carefully conveyed to the “Contraband Hospital” for better care than our camp hospital affords. I left eight there and it seemed like leaving my children among strangers. But this was only a feeling, not a fact. It was very pleasant to have the black soldiers served first. Col. Rich and the other officers and soldiers, must wait the convenience of our freedmen. I should quite enjoy living in some one of our Northern cities a few months with the 1st S.C.Vols. I fancy there would be a conquering of prejudices somewhat satisfactory to your humble servant. Justice is an admirable machine when in good running order and with honest engineers to keep it going.

The Col. Took his official report in one hand and a captured instrument of slave torture in the other, to Gen. Saxton and left them for an early inspection. I was too busy to breakfast there with the Col. At ten o’clock we were disembarking opposite our camp and the home troops were receiving us with wild cheers of joy. All sorts of false rumors had been reported concerning us. We had been cut up and cut down, hung and cut to pieces and various other rebel morsels of information had been circulated. I trust that you have not been tormented by such rumors. Perhaps it is best for me to take this occasion to say that the rebel reports are not always so reliable as their personal sympathizers could wish. Believe nothing short of official reports and --my letters.

Feb. 5

Lieut. O’Neil informed me today that during the eight years of his military life in Texas, Utah and in the present war, he had never been engaged in anything half so daring as our trip up the St. Mary’s River. He is one of our best officers and has seen much service. . . . I would very much like to go up to Alberti’s Mills again, with flat-boats enough to bring away lumber etc. and then set fire to what we could not take. There is not [sufficient] rebel force in that neighborhood to capture us. If they should block the passage by felling trees across the river, our boys would have the opportunity to do what they so much crave -- meet their old masters in “de cl’ar field.” They besought me over and over, to ask “de Cunnel to let we spill out on de sho’an’meet dem fellers in de brush.” There would have been bushwhacking of a startling nature and I have no doubt we could have brought off some of those cavalry horses hitched in the rear. But the Col. is pretty economical of human life when no great object is at stake.

I have noticed that twenty eight boxes of goods await my order at Hilton Head and that the “Flora” will bring them up and land them at our camp, if I wish. This looks as if the day of honoring requisitions in this department has arrived. Meanwhile, during my absence, my requisition on the Purveyor in New York was honored and I found eighteen boxes of the very best material awaiting my return. The Soldiers Relief Association of Norwich, CT. has shipped a goodly supply of bedding, towels, flannel shirts etc. to us. These things were offered by Miss G the very efficient agent. Gen. Saxton has given me the upper part of the Smith mansion for another hospital, so we shall have twenty four beds as comfortably arranged and as well cared for as any in the department.

Yesterday, Miss Forten sent me, from St. Helena Island, a generous box of ginger cakes. I don’t know how she learned my weakness. This box makes my tent very attractive to the Col. and the young captain.

Robert Sutton has quite recovered from his wounds. He told me that the flesh was healthy and I have found it so and the bone did not get involved. I never look at Robert without feeling certain that his father must have been a great Nubian king. I have rarely reverenced a man more than I do him. His manners are exceedingly simple, unaffected and dignified, without the slightest touch of haughtiness. Voice, low, soft and flooding, as if his thoughts were choking him. He is tall, straight and brawny muscled. His face is all of Africa in feeling and in control of expression. By this I do not mean cunning, but manly control. He seems to me kingly, and, oh ! I wish he could read and write. He ought to be a leader, a general, instead of a corporal. I fancy he is like Toussaint l’ Ouverture and it would not surprise me if some great occasion should make him a deliverer of his people from bondage.

Prince Rivers, just as black as Robert Sutton, has a peculiar fineness of texture of skin that gives the most cleanly look. He is agile and fleet, like a deer, in his speed and like a panther in his tread. His features are not very African and his eye is so bright that it must “shine at the night, when de moon am gone away.” His manners are not surpassed on this globe. I feel my awkwardness when I meet him. This because an officer ought to be as polite as a soldier.

Feb. 6. 1863

We are just now through with the hardest and coldest north east storm that we have had since I came to the Department on the South. Living through this is evidence of considerable constitution. The storm politely waited for us to finish an expedition but the two together have succeeded in running our sick list up to 129 in today’s report. This morning a poor fellow died of congestion of the lungs, before the surgeon saw him. In this case, as in nearly all the autopsies I have made, I find extensive adhesions which have resulted from former pleurisy. There are, at this moment, not less than a dozen severe cases of pleuro-pneumonia among our sick. I find it true that these people are more subject than the whites to pulmonary diseases. And here I must put a fact of dispraise to the colored people as I find them. They, as a rule, show remarkable indifference to the sufferings of those not immediately related by the ties of consanguinity. I do not believe this to be a want of affection in the race, but due to long influence of inhuman teaching and treatment. I believe the development of individual responsibility and the inducement to rise, will abolish this want of feeling and respect for each other.

Feb. 7. 1863

. . . [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and Thoreau are oftener in my mind, in connection with this camp life and these people, than any other writers I know. While I am constantly studying how to keep these men well, or to alleviate their sufferings, they as constantly fill me with something higher than a feeling of philanthropy, a sort of oriental sympathy, outreaching the wants of the body. Gen. Saxton has said that these people are “intensely human,” and I will add that I find them intensely divine. It is, however, more difficult to call out the divine than the human.

The blessings resulting from freedom will wash away the accursed stains of slavery and all the world will see that these are also children of God. They have a boundless conception of the divine spirit and a more intense trust in the fatherhood of God than have the cultivated whites of my acquaintance. It is true, they will commit almost as many sins as their white neighbors, but I am speaking now of the religious element and leaving the moral to be controlled by culture.

This morning I had a break in my tent. But in spite of cold and damp, I never sleep cold. Had the Lord anticipated this war I think he would have made buffaloes native here. My robe seems half human in kindness and warmth. The “Free South” has published Col. Higginson’s official report of our expedition. He told me tonight that there were many things he would have been glad to embody in the report, but the rebels would have gained thereby such information as we wish to keep from them. I think our prisoners will be held as hostages.

Keeping our men below so long on the “John Adams” destroyed more lives than the rifle shots would have done. It seemed a choice of evils and the least apparent was chosen. But the return of sunshine will help restore the sick.

St. Helena Island, Feb. 9, 1863

Yesterday afternoon I put my new saddle and bridle on the long-legged horse, claimed by the Col. and Adjutant, and came over here to spend the night with the Hunn’s and Miss Forten. This is the first night I have slept in a house since the 18th day of December. It seems strange to find myself in the midst of civilization and buckwheat cakes. . . . Just before leaving camp, I read Mr Emerson’s “Boston Hymn” to our regiment, while assembled for divine worship. I prefaced it with the remark that many white folks could not understand the poems of Mr. Emerson, but I had no apprehension of that kind from those before me. It was enough that Robert Sutton’s eyes were glistening before me as I read. I was standing on the veranda of the plantation house and the men were under a beautiful magnolia tree toward the river. Mr. Emerson would have trembled with joy to see how much these dark colored men drank in the religion of his poem. The chaplain was filled with emotion by it and straightway took the poem for his text and when I left, was enthusiastically speaking from it.

Camp Saxton, Feb. 8, 1863

My package for you is so enormous this morning that it quite startles me. My reputation for making notes is almost equal to the Colonel’s though I didn’t get out my notebook in the midst of the whistling bullets on St. Mary’s as I saw him do.

I feel that it was a little cowardly in me to run away from camp yesterday, but I knew that three of our good soldiers must die within a few hours and I could do no more for them. It is just impossible for me to get used to losing patients. Such death is equivalent to losing some vital part of one’s self. This comes from distrust of myself, rather than of God. Our sick list is rapidly lessening and all will soon be as usual. I have this afternoon conversed with a pro-slavery surgeon, who has had much to do with negroes. I thought he seemed rather pleased in making the statement that their power of endurance was not equal to that of the whites. I nevertheless gathered valuable information and hints relative to their treatment. If I am permitted to remain in the regiment a year I shall prove that while the blacks are subject to quite different diseases from those of the whites the mortality among them will average less and the available strength or efficiency will average more. This is the season for white soldiers to be well and blacks to be ill. . . . My pleasant visit at Friend Hunn’s made me forgetful of camp trials and I have returned with renewed vigor.

Feb. 10

No day so thoroughly spring-like as this, yet I feel we are to miss the unlocking delight we realize in the New England transition from winter to summer. The bugs and birds and frogs seem to realize the change but they know their own and are grateful for the smallest favors. I miss the melting snow at noon and the crunching crystals at night and morning. My eyes are not dazzled by the pure splendor as the days lengthen. The cawing crow flies back and forth, be he does not seem so earnest, so put to his trumps as those that fly above Wigwam Hill, when Long Pond is all leaden and weeks of sunshine and rain must come to free the ice-bound waters. The shores of our river here are covered with nourishing things, and the tides make high and low for the benefit of lazy lives, but I do not see the use of living such easy terms. Sometimes it seems to me like a funny experiment to try the merits of the body in this land of ease, and of the soul in a less genial clime. How long the experiment is to last the Lord only knows, but I am devotedly thankful that my place of nativity is among the cold mountains of Vermont. I do not believe it is possible for a New England type of man to originate in this level land. I shall soon expect to find alligators in Charles River, or turkey buzzards among the Adirondacks. This reminds me that on my way through the pine woods yesterday, I ran one of these southern birds down. He had probably eaten so much that he could not fly. I easily captured him and brought him into camp for James to prepare for the Natural History Society of Worcester. Can you imagine me galloping across the plains and through the woods with this South Carolina specimen in my arms? I was thankful the long-legged horse did not have a fit of ugliness as he did the day before.

Before the countersign was given, tonight, the Captain and I went out to see a sick soldier at Battery Plantation. It was much more convenient to enter the lines at the guard- house when we returned, than to go to the ordinary entrance. We were challenged in the dark by “Who came darm?” “A friend of the guard: call a corporal of the guard to let us in.” “Halt, halt!” At the same time cocking his musket. We of course halted and asked if his gun was loaded. This raised his suspicion and his gun at the same time and he again demanded, “Who dar?” I said, “The surgeon and Captain Rogers.” “I don’t know any Sur John” and I began to think he might fire upon us before the corporal came, so I told him the doctor and captain. This lessened his apprehension. I believe it would surely be fatal for any one to attempt to get by the guard here at night. To our soldiers, this war is not play, they intend to obey orders.

Feb. 11

. . . It is to be remembered that the officers of a regiment in which the privates do not read and write, have much to do that would otherwise be done by an orderly or by a private detailed for the purpose. Today I have planned a new hospital and begun to lay the foundation of the first ward. This looks a little like having a brigade here sometime. We have a charming spot near the river for hospital buildings. I shall have only sixteen patients in a ward. Each ward is to be a separate building 20 x 50 feet, containing two fireplaces. From morning till evening, all through the summer, a breeze comes up the river and my wards shall be blessed by it. What a relief it would be to have Stephen Earle take charge of this, but it is all to be very simple and our efficient chaplain takes almost all of it on his hands.

Feb. 12. Evening

Tonight the tree toads sing in the adjoining grove and sounds of life are everywhere. The day has been like one in midsummer, when showers are expected in the afternoon and do not come; but the evening is cooler. The Col. and I walked out a little way to a cypress grove, where alligators might thrive, and where they tell of finding one. The trees are large, like oaks and have similar tassel like blossoms, or catkins, but the bole is broad at base and tapers rapidly up six or eight feet in a beautiful compound column and then becomes a simple Doric. All around under these trees are the cypress knees, from six to eight inches in height and looking preciously like cloaked and hooded monks, in prayer. The resemblance was so marked that I hesitated to break the silence of the place which seemed as holy as the “Sanctuary,” opposite Wigwam Hill. I will endeavor to send home one of these knees that you may see how a congregation of them must look.

At last the Adjutant has been made very happy by the arrival of his affianced. They are to be married before the regiment. I confess I should feel somewhat about marrying here as Cap’t. Clifton did about the robbing of hen roosts up the St. Mary’s.

Tonight I chanced to get into conversation with Serg’t McIntyre of Co. G., a soldier whose appearance always interested me. He is a native of Palatka, Fla., was born on the plantation of old Governor Mosley, & was always treated kindly by him. When our gunboats went up the St. John’s, this Serg’t went to his old master, who was much suspected of Union sentiments by the rebels, and begged him to come off under protection of our flag. But, failing to start him, McIntyre informed the old man of his intention to go himself and take with him his parents and sisters, that if he could always be sure of having the old Governor for a master he loved him so much that he would stick by him. The Governor much regretted their leaving him, but, knowing that his children would not treat them as he had done, he interposed no obstacles. All but the mother, who had “brought up” the Governor’s daughters, came away. I have written the above as a preface to the reasons of this man’s gratitude and attachment. [William Dunn Mosley was elected Governor of Florida in 1845.]

By the Governor he was always treated kindly. By trade he is a builder and his master allowed him, for eight years, to work at his trade where he pleased, by paying him (the master) $360.00 a year. He hired six other slaves from their masters, at various rates, according to their ability, and went off to Micanopy - which was not much of a place at that time - and within eight years they had built up “a smart town.” Twice a year he was obliged to go back to Palatka, fifty miles, to pay the masters for their kindness in allowing their slaves to clothe and board themselves and furnish their own tools and bring in from $150.00 to $360.00 per year, per man, in return. Even now this honest fellow does not fully realize the outrage. It was so much to them to escape the constant restraints of bondage that they forgot the rest. Many of the houses were built by contract instead of by the day, and if the chivalry had paid him always as agreed, he could have cleared about $550.00 per year. As it was, he was only even with the world when the war began and he was suspected of giving information about the “Yankees” to the slaves and he was compelled to leave his wife and two children at Micanopy. The first man to appear against him on a sort of trial for such suspicion was one for whom he had just built a home and received nothing for it. Should we ever go up the St. John’s River into the heart of Florida, the Serg’t will be a valuable guide. He has sisters at Beaufort and at Fernandina who have paid their masters fourteen dollars per month year after year, and supported themselves by washing and ironing.

Feb. 13, 1863

Tonight I have been talking with Cato Waring, one of my old nurses in the hospital. The attempt to give a report of his history seems futile. He is a quiet, old black man, this Cato, with singular combination of intellect and ready shrewdness, a subtlety of character that makes you feel as if a serpent might silently coil around you at any moment, without the rustle of a leaf. He appears dull and heavy, but is full of unspent sharpness and agility. He is old, but not gray, body and spirit alike intact. The night after our return from our expedition, I was telling them in the hospital about it and old Cato sat, with his dull eyes bent upon the fire, seemingly indifferent to all, till I came to the death of the rebel officer in the woods. Then his eyes sparkled and glared at me. “Did you know his name?” “No.” “Oh, I hope to God it was my young master who went down that way.”

Tonight Cato came to my tent and began very quietly to tell me of his life in slavery and his escape from it, but it was not long before his tone and manner became too dramatic for me to take notes and I felt as if all the horrors of the accursed system were being poured upon my naked nerves. His voice was always low, but commanding. He was born on the Santee River and “raised by Mr. Cooper as a pet.” But he was sent away to learn the carpenter’s trade, and after seven years apprenticeship returned home to find his old master was dead and the estate insolvent by mismanagement on the part of the widow and children. Finally, he and the other slaves were sold to pay the debts. Dr. Waring, his new master, “was a bad man, but not so bad as his wife.” The Dr’s family increased rapidly and his expenses were so great that Cato was made not only driver, but overseer of the estate, a position he held till his escape, a period of sixteen years. Dr. Waring and his wife ranked among the affectionate specimens of humanity. “Dey ollus kiss wen he go out an wen he come in”. Mrs. Waring was a neat housewife and made her servants “clean all de brasses and eberyting befo’ daylight in de mo’nin’-“ When she arose in the morning and examined the furniture with her white handkerchief for dust, there were usually one or two victims selected for the lash. It was Cato’s business to wait at the door for orders to apply from one hundred to five hundred lashes every morning before going out to the plantation. If the victim was male, he was stripped and cords were fastened to his fingers and then drawn over a horizontal pole above his head, till his toes only, touched the ground; then the master would stand behind Cato with a paddle and knock him over for any delinquency on his part. The same treatment was applied to women, except that instead of stripping off the clothing, the skirts and chemise were drawn up over the head. When the parlor was filled with visitors, the mistress would wind a towel around the end of a stick and have it thrust into the throat of the victim and it would come out all covered in blood- thus the screams of the tortured would be smothered. These statements would seem exaggerated to me if I had not, over and over, in my medical examinations in this regiment, found enormous horizontal scars around the body, and, on inquiry, been told “Dat’s whar my ole Marsa had whipped me.” Never once have these revelations come to me except by inquiry.

Finally, the war began. Old Cato heard the guns for Fort Sumter and waited and waited to hear his master speak of it. He and all his fellow slaves felt that the hour of deliverance had come. Finally, he said one night to his old master, young Doctor who “had been off to some place dey calls Paris,” and who was worse than the old man; “what all dat tunder mean way off dar?” “Oh it’s the d—d Yankees who want to steal all our property.” Of course Cato was indignant at the Yankees and promised to stand by his master. Time went on and the rebels began to doubt their success and at the same time began to swear that they would “work de niggers to deat’ before the d—d Yankees should have them.” Cato was compelled to exact tasks of the slaves that were before unheard of. He could not do it, and told his master so one Sunday night. The Doctor swore vehemently and ordered Cato to report himself in the morning for chastisement. Cato said “I tanked him berry much for de information an’ went to my hut an’ hung all de keys whar de ole woman could fin’ ‘em, but didn’t tell her what I’se gwinen to do, cause she’d make such a hullaboo about it. But Sunday mornin’ befo’ de hen git up, “ Cato was in a dug-out pushing his way through the rice swamp, so that the dogs could not follow his trail. He had gone far before daylight, and during the day, lay quietly in his boat, for he had been three days without eating. When he unexpectedly met a white lady, he assumed nonchalance, touched his hat and said, “howdye,” and told such a plausible story that he got something to eat. At another time he went four days without eating and in the evening saw a black man nailing up a coonskin by torch light, on the side of his hut. “Dis big ole man look like a religion feller,” and Cato was almost on the point of trusting him enough to go up and ask for food, but finally thought it safer to wait a little and try to steal something. He had just entered the yard when a great dog caught him by the chest, but fortunately, got only his clothing in his mouth. His hickory cane silenced that dog, but others came, an’ all de blacks an’ whites came down togedder.” He ran to the woods and found a pond and waded half the night to escape the dogs. “I didn’t git noffin for eat, but I wasn’t hungry no mo’ that night.” At last he found shelter and food and rest under a roof of a negro whom he could trust. He was then twenty-two miles from the river and in the night a black horseman came and said a Yankee gunboat was “commin’ up de ribber, an’ de Cap’n was holdin’ out his arms an’ beck’nin’ de niggahs fus’ from one sho’an’den from de odder.” Cato straightway started toward the river, but there were many roads. The horseman agreed to break off pine boughs at such partings and then go on rejoicing. By some mistake he did not reach the river at the point designated, and afterwards learned that his mistake had saved him from a trap of the rebels for whom the black horseman was acting.

Another night he was lying under a garden fence when a rebel was leaning over it, watching, intently, the house beyond, ready to shoot him when he should jump from a window. “My heart did beat so hard I wondered he didn’t hear it, but he didn’t an’ wen dey come to search de garden, I crawl on my belly till I jump troo de gate an’ it rain so fass I knowed deyre guns wouldn’t go wen dey snapped em at me.” At last, after wandering about “from de secon’ week in May till de las week in June I reached de gunboat.” His approach to the boat was full of apprehension. Before he could be certain of the boat, he saw soldiers on the shore and did not quite know whether they were Yankees or rebels. So he wavered between holding up his “white rag” and keeping out of sight. At last they saw him in his little boat, which he had somewhere confiscated, and “I hol’ up de rag an’ de mo’ de boat come, de mo’ I draw back, but oh, wen I get on de boat I thought I was in hebben.” I shall not trouble you with more slave stories. It is too much like trying to relate a tragedy acted by Rachel - very tame.

Feb. 16, 1863

Our Colonel has been down to Hilton Head today and reported Brig. Gen. Stephenson under arrest and to be sent to Washington for asserting that he would rather the Union cause should be lost than be saved by black soldiers. I should like to see the gentleman this evening. Everything may go against us in the present, but these little episodes are refreshing.

My heart is lightened by the return of usual health to our camp. It is pleasant to find every one looking up instead of down. Some of the replies to medical questions are quite unique, as, for instance, “I feel jail bound an’ cough powerful.” “I’ve got misery all de way down from de top ob de head to de sole ob de foot.” If I had not promised you freedom from individual histories in the future, I should try to write out the history of my head hospital nurse. Mr. Spaulding is a very superior man. He was kept in the stocks three weeks in the winter and his legs have not since been as strong as before. He is averse to speaking of himself. I trust his integrity, tenderness and natural ability as I would trust those qualities in John Milton Earle. He is a prince and commands the respect of all.

Feb. 17, 1863. Evening

Today I have been reading Judge Conway’s speech in Congress. I have found no leisure to watch carefully the reported change in public opinion in the North. I did not believe till today, that our friends are actually getting hopeless about the restoration of the Union on the basis of universal freedom. Judge Conway’s opinion I respect, and in this instance it weighs like lead upon my spirits. Besides, I somehow feel that the sentiments of a majority of the friends of freedom are too nearly represented in this speech. If so, nothing short of a miracle can bring the present generation of slaves into freedom. This thought makes me tremble when I look into the faces of our brave fellows and remember that millions of such are waiting in bondage for an opportunity to be as brave. The contemptible love of dominion so long fostered in this nation will yet be the death of it. Of course a better nation will grow out of the moldering ruins, but it is cruel that the present good of a nation and a race should be sacrificed on the altar of selfishness. These men have wives and children, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers yet in slavery and they daily pray God to bless the nation that has begun to let them fight for freedom. If the nation proves false to this half realized hope the curse of God will weigh more heavily on us than ever before. I would rather make my grave with the oppressed and outraged than survive the day of blighted anticipations. As God lives, liberty will come at last, but long I see her before I die. [The reference to Judge Conway may have been to Marcus Daniel Conway, 1832-1907, a Virginia-born radical abolitionist who published books advocating abolition in 1861 and 1862. Conway gave a lecture in 1862 in the Smithsonian Abolition Lecture series that was intended to pressure Lincoln to embrace abolition as the main goal of the war. He also returned to his home state in 1862 to assist thirty-two of his father’s slaves to escape to freedom in Ohio. Marcus Conway was not a judge, however, it was conservative father, Walker Peyton Conway, and his paternal uncle Eustace Conway who were judges in Virginia. Both men were pro-slavery and states’ rights advocates.]

Feb. 18, Evening

Last evening had more sadness for me that I have known since I left New England. But while gloomily preparing for bed at ten o’clock, my young assistant, Dr. Minor, thrust his head into the tent with, “Doctor, don’t you want to see the Atlantic for February? I have a box from home.”

 “A well known legal writer,” (vide N.Y. Evening Post) made me experience somewhat of the “Law of Costs” by holding open my eyes and heart and soul long beyond the physiological rules of camp, but what was lost in quantity of sleep was made up in quality by the reading. I long to take my old friend by the hand and thank him from my heart for this philosophical statement of vital truth. I find no leisure for reading books when so many unread souls lie open before me and writing and speaking in the face of a bleeding nation seem somewhat disgraceful to me, but the “legal writer” has come in at a critical moment with a reserved force of language which may prove better then a whole division of armed men. We now have the medical department of our regiment so systemized that I find more freedom from care than a few weeks ago. The prospect of a change of location leaves my new hospital in status quo.

Feb. 20. Evening

Yesterday I visited Miss Murray’s school in St. Helena Island. Miss Murray is assisted by Miss Towne and Miss Foster. Since the season for tilling the land had begun, the school has lessened in numbers from 200 to 125; both sexes and from three to fifteen years of age. Many of them have been under tuition several months and compare very favorably with Irish children after some length of instruction, as I have seen them in N.E. From what I have seen in camp, I think the mode of receiving instruction is very different in the two races. Imitation and musical concert are the avenues to the minds of these children. Of course the habit of such dependence will be changed by education, but such is the beginning. After centuries of slavery, which utterly shuts the avenues of thought, we should hardly expect rapid development of activity in the superior regions of thought. Only now and then some genius like Robert Sutton can be left to prove the God-like relation. The simple fact is that use is less destructive than disuse. [Ellen Murray and Laura M. Town were life-long friends who came to St. Helena Island in April 1862 as missionary teachers and founded the Penn School for black children.]

I dined at Friend Hunn’s and was accompanied by Miss Forten on a visit to Mr. Thorpe, who had charge of the Tripp plantation. [Rogers was riding] Edisto, a meager little confiscated creature from Edisto Island, with a saddle that must have been afloat since the flood, a bridle that left him comparatively unbridled and erratic in his ways and a girth that could never gird his loins up to the scriptural injunction without breaking. He had neither sandals nor shoes to his feet nor speed to his body. You can imagine that our ride of four miles through the pine barren was not so rapid as John Gilpin’s. But the afternoon was like the last of June and full of sunshine and jasmine blossoms and the ground was covered with brown pine needles. I have seen none but the pitch tree here. The needles are often a foot long and now that they are enlivened by steady warmth, they sport graceful plumes against the sky. [David Franklin Thorpe, a Brown University student and abolitionist, came to St. Helena Island as part of the Port Royal Experiment. He was a plantation superintendent from 1861-1869.]