CROWDS CHEERED AS the veterans made their way up Second Street on the morning of November 6, 1903. For weeks the City of Petersburg and the A. P. Hill Camp Confederate Veterans had been planning to welcome the veterans to celebrate and reenact the battle of the Crater. The center of attention were the veterans of Major General William Mahone’s brigade, who were escorted by veterans’ organizations with mounted police and the fire brigade to follow; in the vanguard, serving as chief marshal, was General Stith Bolling. “When the excited thousands saw the veterans made up of every camp,” reported a correspondent from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “all bowed, and many lamed, bearing aloft their old battle flag which had been torn literally to shreds by the deadly missiles of the enemy, there arose a cry from ten thousand throats which rent the air and made every heart leap with its contagion.” Once on Market Street the members of Mahone’s brigade were received by Mahone’s widow, who presented each “survivor and each proxy with a handsome badge on which was inscribed the words ‘Mahone’s Brigade.’”1
Finally, the “Crater Legion” arrived at the terminus of the Jerusalem Plank Road and followed the “route by which Mahone’s brigade . . . proceeded to the ravine from which the brigade made its charge on that day.” Once situated in the ravine, Mahone’s veterans listened to an address by Colonel William H. Stewart, who encouraged his men to remember “that we fought for right and justice, for constitutional liberty, for our homes and for our firesides and stand up before all men as proud as a king of the uniform we wore in the Confederate ranks.” Around 1:00 p.m., in front of an estimated crowd of 20,000, the veterans charged the area around the crater, now defended by five companies of the Seventieth Regiment and the Richmond Blues, which were given the job of portraying Federal troops. “As soon as Mahone’s brigade reached the crest of the hill,” reported a correspondent from the Petersburg Daily Index-Appeal, “the infantry in the ravine followed firing as rapidly as possible at will as did also the troops in the Crater. The firing of both the artillery and infantry was quick and rapid and the bloodless battle continued for about thirty minutes.” After the “sham-battle” the participants were assembled at the Crater, where they were given solid silver medals. The rest of the afternoon was filled with additional speeches and smaller ceremonies, bringing together members of different generations, who listened closely to the personal stories of individual veterans. For the people of Petersburg and the rest of the South, it had been an impressive display of living Confederate history.2
By the turn of the century, white Union and Confederate veterans had put aside much of their animosity and claims to the moral high ground, focusing instead on an emotional drive for national unity. While it can be argued that memory of the theme of emancipation and acknowledgment of the crucial role that black soldiers played on the battlefields had been suppressed on the national level, a closer look at Confederate veterans of the Crater suggests a more nuanced story. For veterans of the Crater and other writers, the memory of fighting African American soldiers was never entirely erased, though on more than one occasion—including the 1903 reenactment—organizers of public commemorations of the battle chose to minimize if not omit overt references to this crucial aspect of the battle. In fact, the way Virginia’s veterans of the Crater chose to remember this particular experience conformed to changing political conditions and accompanying racial boundaries through Reconstruction, the four years of Readjuster control, and the era of Jim Crow.
Even as the narrative of the battle fostered by the veterans themselves and white Southerners more generally became ever more closely aligned with Virginia’s political and racial boundaries at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans continued to highlight an emancipationist memory of the war that included the heroics of USCTs. Although overshadowed at this time, it would become much more visible during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In an important sense, the 1903 reenactment functioned as a forum for the meeting of different generations, one representing a lived Confederate history and a younger generation that eagerly embraced the stories passed down. Reenactments and reunions provided a unique opportunity not only for veterans to meet with former comrades to discuss shared adventures but, more important, for communities to construct a collective memory of the past based on heroic acts that could then be passed on to their children. Much of that collective memory embraced principles embodied in the Lost Cause, which provided explanations purporting to answer why the Southern states seceded and why the Confederacy lost. These public memories reinforced white social and political superiority backed by Democratic Party solidarity.
Virginia Military Institute cadets visiting the Crater in June 1915. Mary Custis Lee (in dark clothing) is seated at right, in the front row. (Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington)
The general public was presented with a version of the famous fight at the Crater shaped not only by the veterans’ own subjective memory of the experience but also by the Lost Cause tradition and its accompanying political outlook. Evidence for this can be seen in the blatant omission of African American participation in the 1903 reenactment, even though USCTs played an important role at the Crater and were prominently featured in the letters and diaries of Confederates immediately after the battle and in later postwar recollections. There was one “colored man” in the 1903 parade, and his presence reflects an important way in which memory of the Crater had evolved. The individual in question was in fact “Stonewall” Jackson’s cook and servant. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, he “wore the gray of the Confederate soldier, and carried his army canteen. . . .” Frequently he was cheered.”3
Including Stonewall Jackson’s black servant in the procession of veterans leading to the Crater reinforced the goal of submission and compliance to white control. The presence of African Americans at reunions “supported southern racial and political orthodoxies.” A rigid social hierarchy with whites at the top could be maintained by encouraging Virginia’s black population to honor the “old time negro” who followed his owner into battle to care for him and remained loyal even after the war. By concentrating on black compliance and ignoring memories of bitterness associated with having to fight African Americans at the Crater, elite white Virginians were able to “manage race relations” with a philosophy of paternalism. The 1903 Crater reenactment could not properly depict the role of African Americans in the battle for fear of reminding the local black population of their own steps toward freedom achieved during the Civil War.4
The addresses preceding the start of the sham battle, such as the one by William Stewart, made only passing reference to the “brutal malice of negro soldiers.” The general themes of the day remained the leadership of William Mahone, whose qualities, according to Robertson Taylor, “were seldom surpassed.” The highest praise was reserved for the common soldier: “To the dead as well as to the living, we can render unmeasured praise—to none more than to the private soldier.” Stewart’s brief reference to the behavior of “negro” soldiers served to remind his audience of black assertiveness during the war and the necessity of maintaining white solidarity without magnifying its importance.5
Individual accounts at the turn of the century—many still authored by the veterans themselves—continued to emphasize the belief that black soldiers were coerced into the Union army and were fueled by an irrational rage (or by alcohol) rather than by a conviction that they were engaged in a fight for their freedom. George T. Rogers, who commanded the Sixth Virginia, recalled a conversation with a wounded “colored barber from New York” following the battle. When Rogers inquired “why he did it,” the soldier replied “that he was in the army against his will, that he was a drafted man and was obliged to take up his musket, and that, having enlisted, he had done his duty as far as possible.” Rogers went on to make the point that a number of captured black soldiers pleaded for their lives: “I ain’t fired a shot to-day, Massa. I prays don’t kill me.” John S. Wise recounted the reaction of those captured black soldiers who before the war had lived in eastern Virginia and who were now face-to-face with their former owners. According to Wise, “the negroes were delighted at the prospect of being treated as slaves, instead of being put to death or sent to a Confederate military prison.” The submissiveness and lack of fighting prowess of black soldiers are reflected in another reference to their pleas for mercy. “As they came running into our lines through the dangers of the firing from their own friends,” asserted Wise, “they landed among our men, falling on their knees, their eyes rolling in terror, exclaiming, ‘Fur God sake, Marster, doan’ kill me. Spar’ me, Marster, and I’ll wuk fur you as long as I lib.’” The frequency of these stories in which soldiers begged for their lives suggests that not a few of these accounts were exaggerated, if not fabricated. Some no doubt included these stories simply as a way to enliven their account, but it might also be the case that veterans and others used them to reinforce their own beliefs of racial superiority throughout the postwar period and in reaction to the changing racial hierarchy—most recently reflected in the Readjuster movement.6
The 1903 Crater reenactment in Petersburg marks a significant transition in the way the battle was remembered. What is most striking is the sharp distinction between what individual veterans were willing to share in their accounts of the battle regarding the presence of African American soldiers and the public face of the reenactment itself, which was void of any significant black presence on the battlefield. The tendency on the part of writers to deny black soldiers their manhood by denying their willingness to fight reflected the fear of losing white political control in Virginia at the turn of the century, a fear that was also behind the push toward more stringent segregation laws.
By 1903 Virginians had approved legal segregation practices and disfranchisement as means to prevent a return to the embittered days of Virginia’s Readjuster movement, when the state had experimented with black suffrage and interracial political cooperation. In 1900 the General Assembly of Virginia called for a referendum on the holding of a constitutional convention that would overturn the constitution imposed on it during Reconstruction. While the primary goal was to limit the black vote, delegates to the convention substantially reduced the white vote as well with both literacy tests and poll taxes. The new constitution had already succeeded in eliminating the right to vote of all but 21,000 black Virginians of voting age and went on to cut that number in half only three years later. At the same time, and following on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the General Assembly in Richmond passed its first Jim Crow law in 1900, which eventually separated the races on streetcars, trains, and in residential neighborhoods. Regulating or “managing” this newly legislated racial hierarchy would take great care on the part of Virginia’s white public officials. The public celebration of the Confederate past, including the battle of the Crater, worked to sanction laws that outlined a strict culture of racial segregation and hierarchy.7
Though the reenactment and public addresses failed to do justice to the racial components of the battle, the spectrum of emotions associated with having to fight African Americans emerged once again for those who put their memories to paper at this time. Perhaps trying to capitalize on the popularity of the reenactment, William Stewart began collecting recollections from members of his old regiment. Though the accounts are relatively brief, they demonstrate clearly that the aging veterans had little difficulty recalling the horror of battle, the details of close combat, and the number of the enemy they individually killed. Many of the contributors no doubt took part in the reenactment, and this may have made it easier to recall the more visceral emotions that went along with fighting at the Crater, emotions that had been suppressed with time. William Pate, who served in Company D, clearly recalled the cry of “No quarter! Remember Fort Pillow!” and also remembered, “I killed three negroes with the bayonet.” At least one Confederate responded to the yelling of “Remember Fort Pillow!” with “Remember Beast Butler.” George D. White “commenced firing on the negroes who were trying to get back from the Crater excavation to their lines” and was “certain I killed eight or ten in this manner.” William Emerson also remembered “shooting a negro as he ran over the hill trying to escape.” Another soldier could not recall how many of the enemy he killed, “and I don’t want to know, but I did my best.” John T. West of Company A recalled that Confederates were “greatly exasperated” after hearing that blacks were taking part in the battle. “I saw one negro soldier wounded and he was trying to get up off his knees,” remembered a soldier in Co. I, “when Laban Godwin hit him in the face with the breech of his gun. . . . I told him to stop that as the negro was dying.” Writing a few years later, in 1910, Alfred. L. Scott admitted that “there was considerable stabbing and shooting even after the enemy had thrown down their arms. Some of the officers tried to stop it, while others encouraged it.” Though Scott was incensed about the presence of black soldiers, “I was even more so against the whites, as having put arms in their hands and brought them there.”8
Veterans from outside the Old Dominion also continued to recall with apparent ease the horror of the Crater and their shock, even after forty years, at having to fight black soldiers. W. A. Day, who served in the Forty-ninth North Carolina regiment, shared in very graphic detail the “slaughter” of the Crater. “The soldiers were excited; they were reckless; they burst the negroes’ skulls with the butts of their guns like eggshells. The officers tried to prevent it,” continued Day, “but they were powerless.” A veteran from the Eleventh Alabama regiment described an “odor equaled only by a skunk” as he engaged a black soldier in a brawl within the crater. The scuffle ended only after a comrade “gave the negro a blow on the top of his head that killed him.”9
The emotionally charged memories of the veterans of the Crater clearly reflect a lingering bitterness at having to fight black soldiers during the war. The individual memories of the veterans contrasted sharply with an evolving public memory that steered clear of overt references to African Americans. These differences in individual and public memories point to competing interests. The strong emotions attached to memories of black soldiers were indelibly stamped in the minds of Confederate veterans. Their inability or unwillingness to ignore or downplay these memories suggests that their own understanding of the significance of this particular battle was closely tied to having to fight black men. On the other hand, public memory of the battle proved to be sufficiently malleable to handle the changing political conditions in postwar Virginia.
The minimizing of the role of black soldiers from Southern accounts of the Crater by the 1880s fit into a broader shift in how Americans chose to remember their Civil War. Few general accounts of the war published before 1900 provided sufficient coverage of black enlistment or of the ways in which their actions on the battlefield altered racial prejudices or contributed to Union victory. In the few cases in which the Crater was mentioned at all, historians chose to minimize or ignore entirely the role of black soldiers. Such a view is reflected clearly in Theodore Ayrault Dodge’s A Bird’s-Eye View of Our Civil War (1883). In four pages, and in the most general terms, Dodge catalogued the decisions leading to the explosion of the mine and the confusion that defined the Union attack. In all fairness to Dodge, only three names are referenced—Grant, Lee, and Burnside—however, it is difficult to surmise that the absence of black soldiers in his account was integral to the goal of providing the most general account of the war.10
The African American veterans of the Fourth Division stood the best chance of being remembered in the pages of newspaper articles and magazine essays authored by their former white officers, who collectively proved to be their greatest advocates. Such postwar accounts reflect both the shared experience of the battlefield and the continuing gulf that existed between the two races. Some white officers wrote about the bravery of USCTs as an extension of their continued work with blacks to uplift the race and promote equal justice. Most simply could not fully account for their own war experience and acts of bravery without referencing their former “colored” comrades.11
One of the earliest of these accounts and arguably the most important is Henry G. Thomas’s article in Century Magazine in 1877. Thomas’s article appeared as part of a series of essays on the Civil War that was later republished as the four-volume Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. The article guaranteed that a wide popular audience would read about the bravery of the men under his command who, he believed, deserved the “respect of every beholder.” Thomas begins his account by conveying the optimism that pervaded the ranks on the eve of their first opportunity to “show the white troops what the colored division could do.” The decision to replace the division in the eleventh hour not only leaves the reader wondering what might have happened had the original plan been adhered to, it also absolves the officers and men of responsibility for the disaster.12
Writing in 1907 in the pages of the National Tribune, Captain D. E. Proctor of the Thirtieth USCT expressed doubt that the veterans of his unit and their descendants would be accepted as full citizens: “It’s the white man’s burden to settle the question whether a man is a man, without regard to race, color or previous condition. In God’s own time it will be settled rightly,” Proctor predicted, “but we feel that those who were participants in the great war for the preservation of the Union, and incidentally the freedom of the slave, will never see that day.”13
For other white officers, the postwar period presented them with a very different burden. The charges of drunkenness leveled at black soldiers at the Crater as well as James Ledlie’s record continued to color accounts of the battle as well as the reputations of white officers in the Fourth Division. One officer in the Nineteenth USCT asserted that accusations of drunkenness were “unwarranted by facts.” In his own recollection of the battle, published in 1903, J. Q. Adams of the Thirtieth USCT recalled, “I did not see a single officer of colored troops in the slightest degree under the influence.” Defending his reputation and those of his fellow white officers, Adams proudly claimed, “The officers of these regiments are the finest body of young men mentally, morally, and physically, that I have ever seen collected together.” Adams’s vehement defense of soldierly qualities among many white officers reflects a continued belief that the success of the black soldiers could be traced to the moral character and skills of their white officers.14
No two former officers of the Fourth Division were more supportive of the black men under their command than Colonel Delavan Bates and Lieutenant Freeman S. Bowley, both from the Thirtieth USCT. Bates authored one of the most extensive accounts of USCTs at the Crater in the pages of the National Tribune on January 30, 1908. While Bates did not pass over the opportunity to highlight his own participation in the battle, the brunt of the article focused on the performance of the men in the regiment. More unusual, however, is his commitment to sharing a more personal profile of these men with his readers. Bates recalled a scene on the eve of battle involving the men of Company H, who were gathered to listen to one of their own noncommissioned officers, a preacher before the war.
My deah bredern, dis am gwine to be er gre’t fite de gre’tes’ we’uns hab eber seen if we’uns tek Petrsburg mos’ likly we’l tuk Richmun, and derstroy Mars Gin’ul Lee’s big ahmy and den clos de wah. Ebery man hed orter lif up hiself in praher fur er strong hyart. O, bredern, ’member de pore cullud fokses ober yer in bondage. En ’member Marse Gin’ul Grant, en Marse Gin’ul Burnside, en Marse Gin’ul Meade, en all de uder ob de gre’t Gin’uls ober yunner watch’n yer, en, moreover, de fust nigger dat goes ter projeckin’ es gwine ter git dis byarnut inter him. ’Fore Gawd, hits sho nuff trufe Ise tellin’ yer.
Bates’s decision to share in the original dialect what he remembers hearing gives voice to the black veterans of the Crater in a way that they could not do themselves. What emerges is a strong bond built around a shared history of slavery and the hope that their actions on that day would spell its doom. The failure of the attack did nothing to diminish their bravery. According to Bates, “One thing that has been proven, viz, the colored troops dared meet not only in open field the best troops of the Confederacy, but they also dared attack them behind breastworks almost impregnable, and as to results the best standard by which to test the qualities of an army is this: The number killed on the battlefield.”15
Freeman Bowley authored four accounts of the battle between 1870 and 1899 and, while they differ in detail, he goes to great lengths in each to highlight his own brave conduct on the field as well as that of the men under his command. The nation’s failure to acknowledge his men as well as Bowley’s own failure to secure a Medal of Honor threatened his sense of honor as a soldier and challenged his conviction that the war had given rise to new freedoms and civil rights to African Americans. Like Bates, Bowley gives voice to the men in his command:
Of the men of my regiment who had rallied with me all but one, a Sergeant, lay dead or dying. As he stood at my elbow, loading and firing, I said to him, “Sergeant, things are looking very bad for us.” . . . “Yes, Lieutenant,” he answered, “dey is sho’ly lookin’ powerful bad. I reckon, sah, we has to die right yere, sah!” And this was said not in a spirit of bravado, nor in a tone of regret, but as a matter of fact our duty had called us to this place, and it was a part of that duty “to die right yere,” and there was no thought of shirking the responsibility.
Bowley’s account places him alongside his men in the heat of battle, facing the same dangers and finding a common strength to resist the Confederate tide and possible death.16
Even after his capture and imprisonment, Bowley refused to distance himself from the men in his command. Unlike some of his fellow officers, Bowley acknowledged to his captors directly when asked to identify his command: “Thirtieth United States Colored Infantry.” Throughout his captivity between Petersburg and Columbia, South Carolina, Bowley withstood the taunts and abuses of white Southerners, who believed that he and the rest of the Union army were “all a miserable lyin’ set of thieves, come down yere to steal we’uns niggers.” Bowley’s memory of these encounters strengthened his own conviction that his service in the USCTs was part of a much larger commitment to emancipation and the betterment of the black race. Although his postwar accounts are sprinkled with stories of reconciliation and reunion, Bowley never backed away from recounting the execution of large numbers of his men after they had surrendered. By 1900 Bowley was one of the few USCT officers who remained committed to challenging a collective memory of the war that had moved away from honoring the service of black soldiers and their role in saving the Union.17
The success of the 1903 Crater reenactment functioned to identify the battlefield more closely with the memories of white Virginians as a gallant defense of their homes and their Lost Cause. Throughout this period the African American community in Petersburg and in much of the rest of the nation struggled not only to claim Civil War battlefields such as the Crater as their own but also simply to maintain a presence in the broader collective memory of the war as whites grew increasingly averse to acknowledging the crucial role that USCTs had played in the preservation of the Union as well as in bringing about the end of slavery.
Members of Petersburg’s African American community may have been in a much stronger position, relative to other communities, to publicly celebrate and commemorate their participation in the late war. The city had a sizeable free black population even as late as 1860, which remained active in the community. During the 1870s and 1880s, the black population was even in number with the white population. Blacks enjoyed the benefits of citizenship, including educational opportunities, expanded civil rights, a voice in the courts, enfranchisement, and political office-holding. It was due to the success of the Readjuster movement that Petersburg’s black population continued to enjoy those benefits at a time when other states succumbed to “Redeemer” governments after the official end of Reconstruction in 1877.18
Deeply rooted institutions such as the church as well as a broad range of fraternal organizations supported political, economic, and social activities within the black community. The community stayed informed of the many happenings in the area through a growing number of newspapers, including (at different times) the Petersburg Lancet, Afro-American Churchman, American Sentinel, National Pilot, and Herald. Such a vibrant community and active press made it possible to promote and commemorate significant moments in recent black history as well as to remain connected with commemorative movements outside of Virginia. The efforts of African Americans in Petersburg and elsewhere to celebrate their past was intended to show that they had contributed all along to the growth of the nation and that they had earned their rights as citizens through their willingness to make the same sacrifices as white Americans during the war.19
The creation of several black militia companies proved to be one of the most successful ways to instill civic spirit in the community as well as to provide a vehicle for the remembrance of black military service. The Petersburg Guards were organized in June 1873, followed by the Flipper Guards in 1877 and, finally, the Petersburg Blues in 1878. The three Petersburg militias joined companies from places such as Richmond, Staunton, Danville, and Fredericksburg and at their height in 1880 numbered approximately 1,000 members. The companies primarily served a social and recreational function, including participation in local and state ceremonies and four presidential inaugurations. In Petersburg the companies could be seen leading the parades that marked Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1 and Independence Day on July 4. On July 4, 1875, white militia joined the Petersburg Guards for the largest Independence Day celebration since the Civil War.20
Local appearances and public drills offered ample opportunity to commemorate the heroism of the region’s black veterans. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the formation of the Petersburg Guards, A. W. Harris, a local black member of the General Assembly, addressed the company, calling on them to remember the bravery of black soldiers during the Haitian revolt of 1802 as well as their role in such Civil War battles as Fort Wagner and Olustee. That same year, another local politician, George Fayerman, implored the militia and the rest of Petersburg’s African American community to reject the commonly held belief that they had no military tradition. Referencing the likes of Toussaint L’Overture and the Carthaginian general Hannibal, Fayerman said, “It makes my blood boil to hear people say that the colored man cannot fight.” It is unknown why the Crater fight was not mentioned in either speech, but the fact that a slave revolt and its leader were openly celebrated in Petersburg in 1883 attests to the continued black influence in local and state politics.21
However effective commemorative speeches proved to be in forging a collective memory within the black community of Petersburg, they could not compete with the growing trend among white Virginians to dedicate monuments in public spaces that reflected their own selective memory of the war. The period between 1870 and 1910 witnessed the erection of impressive monuments such as the Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond in 1890 as well as countless generic soldier monuments gracing the lawns of just about every county courthouse in Virginia. If the African American community were to participate in this process, it would have to find a way both to influence the local political apparatus and to raise the necessary funds—both of which proved difficult during this time. The Petersburg Lancet urged its readers to “never cease to praise the valor of their sacred dead, and to create monuments in their honor. O! ingratitude and shame on the colored people of the United States, who show such little appreciation for the valor of negro soldiers who died for the preservation of the Union.” Perhaps remembering the failed assault at the Crater, the editorial exhorted its readers to support “a monument to the black heroes, who leaped over the fortification [at Petersburg] with their muskets in our defense and suffered their bodies as it were to become breastworks while pouring out their blood most freely and willingly for our redemption from bondage.” Black activists made numerous attempts to add the black soldier to the commemorative landscape across the South, but by the end of the nineteenth century only three monuments depicted blacks in military service—and they were all located in the North.22
The loss of political leverage following the defeat of the Readjusters, along with the challenge of raising the necessary financial resources, left the black community in Petersburg with little hope of being able to add to the region’s growing number of Civil War monuments or shape other public spaces. By the early twentieth century, political disfranchisement, along with a short and ultimately unsuccessful deployment during the Spanish-American War that was plagued by problems with the unit’s white commander, led to the end of the black militias. Even though the governor called out the black militia only once during its existence, it effectively functioned as the one place where members of the black community in Petersburg could publicly commemorate and nurture a collective past that connected them to the Civil War through the men who had fought in it.23
If the rise of Jim Crow represented the nadir of the black community’s ability to celebrate its collective past in public, it did not extinguish it completely. Rather, black leaders emphasized their shared heritage by continuing the fight for civil and political rights as well as for improvements in education and the economic condition of the race. The segregation of public schools did have the positive effect of creating a space where African Americans could develop a black historical consciousness outside of the purview of whites and in opposition to their preferred historical view. That isolation, however, came with the price of being pushed further away from public institutions that whites used to disseminate their history, which in turn worked to reinforce their control of local, state, and national government.24
Not surprisingly, few accounts of African American participation in the war were published during this time. The few that did surface received favorable reviews—most notably George W. Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America from 1619–1880 (1883) and A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion (1888). At the age of fourteen, Williams enlisted in the Union in 1863, later enlisting in the Mexican army to aid in the government’s fight against French colonists. Upon returning to the United States, in 1867 Williams enlisted again in the U.S. Army, serving for one year on the frontier. Williams later served as pastor of the Twelfth Street Baptist Church in Boston and in 1879 he became the first African American to serve in the Ohio legislature.
Williams led the way in presenting African American history accurately through the use of oral history and archival research, seeking to legitimize it as a field of historical study. In an attempt to encourage the preservation of a black historical consciousness, Williams joined others in calling for the creation of an American Negro Historical Society. His History of the Negro Troops offers a detailed account of the experiences and challenges USCTs faced during the Civil War, and access to the newly published Official Records made it possible for Williams to provide ample coverage of their performance on the various battlefields. At times, however, it is difficult not to read into this study a sense of Williams’s desperation concerning the difficulty of conveying the full significance of the sacrifice made by black men to his readers:
The part enacted by the Negro in the war of the Rebellion is the romance of North American history. It was midnight and noonday without a space between; from the Egyptian darkness of bondage to the lurid glare of civil war; from clanking chains to clashing arms; from passive submission to the cruel curse of slavery to the brilliant aggressiveness of a free soldier; from a chattel to a person; from the shame of degradation to the glory of military exaltation; and from deep obscurity to fame and martial immortality. No one in this era of fraternity and Christian civilization will grudge the Negro soldier these simple annals of his trials and triumphs in a holy struggle for human liberty. Whatever praise is bestowed upon his noble acts will be sincerely appreciated, whether from former foes or comrades in arms. For by withholding just praise they are not enriched, nor by giving are they thereby impoverished.
Although Williams’s broad moral observation about the meaning of black military service is easily interpreted as a response to the growing call for reunion between white Americans, it must also be understood as a reflection of racial pride that he hoped blacks would continue to embrace even as the fruits of that sacrifice were being stripped away.25
Williams’s desire to account for the bravery of the USCTs at the Crater led to a few literary flourishes, such as the claim that “three veteran white divisions had been hurled back in confusion” before the Fourth Division had been ordered to advance. And one wonders if Williams would have confidently asserted, “The Negro soldier’s valor was, after this engagement, no more questioned than his loyalty” if he had had access to the accounts written by the black troops’ white comrades in the wake of the battle. Given the amount of attention Williams devoted to the battle and his apparent commitment to doing justice to the service of black soldiers, it may seem strange that he does not reference the slaughter of captured soldiers. His acknowledgment and detailed overview of Fort Pillow adds to the mystery, but it should be remembered that the volume of the Official Records that covers the Crater was not published until 1892. In other words, Williams may not have known that there was a large-scale massacre or, if he did, he may not have been able to accurately judge its scope.26
Edward A. Johnson, principal of the Washington School in Raleigh, North Carolina, chose to include a detailed discussion of the Crater in his history of African Americans to provide his students with “information on the many brave deeds and noble characters of their own race.” Johnson was all too aware of the lack of attention given to African Americans: “The Negro is hardly given a passing notice in many of the histories taught in the schools; he is credited with no heritage of valor; he is mentioned only as a slave, while true historical records prove him to have been among the most patriotic of patriots, among the bravest of soldiers, and constantly a God-fearing, faithful producer of the nation’s wealth.” In Johnson’s history of the Crater his students could read about Ambrose Burnside’s decision to place his black soldiers at the head of the attacking column (or “post of honor”) and the final decision to replace them with a white division, which ultimately led to disaster. Johnson described this decision as a “ridiculous mistake,” citing the testimony of Grant, who argued that if Burnside had relied on his original plan, the attack “would have been a success.” “Four Thousand Four Hundred Union soldiers perished,” according to Johnson, “through the mistake then of not allowing the colored troops to take the Confederate works.” As for the conduct of the black soldiers on the battlefield, Johnson praised their bravery and even included Confederate references to the screams of “No quarter!” which was reinterpreted as evidence that they would have their work cut out for them in securing the salient.27
Others works of merit were published at this time, including Joseph T. Wilson’s The Black Phalanx (1890), which offers extensive coverage of the history of black military service going back to the American Revolution. As much as these accounts by black historians offered a much-needed corrective to the prevailing view, many are written in a “defensive” style, as their authors were forced to respond to critics who relied on stereotypes and the newly emerging “scientific” evidence of racial inferiority. The need to defend their “manly honor” on the battlefield was only compounded by the humiliation caused by the gradual winnowing away of their civil liberties.28
By the beginning of the twentieth century, white Virginians had succeeded in stamping the Crater battlefield, as well as the war as a whole, with their preferred memory. That memory highlighted the battle as a gallant defense of home and lauded the performance of the Virginia brigade and Mahone’s leadership as responsible for Confederate victory that day. The fact of USCTs’ participation at the Crater was either ignored entirely or carefully controlled so as not to remind the community that black men had attempted to secure their own freedom. This served to unite white Virginians around a shared set of values that bound them together with their Confederate ancestors and functioned to justify a return to a political system that excluded blacks. For the veterans of the battle, however, time did not diminish the impact of having to engage black men in close combat. They recalled the spectrum of emotions that gave meaning to their experiences that day and, on occasion, recorded their memories for their community and posterity.
The triumph of reunion and reconciliation in the country’s collective memory of the Civil War pushed memory of the role of African American soldiers and the theme of emancipation from the national stage. The tendency for public commemorations of the Crater (along with other commemorative events at the turn of the century) to ignore the participation of black soldiers and the racially infused memories of the battle’s veterans all but guaranteed that USCTs at the Crater would be erased from the historical landscape until the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The setbacks associated with segregation and Jim Crow, however, did not prevent African Americans from taking steps to commemorate and preserve a historical record of their role in the war and the contributions of black soldiers to saving the Union.