THE WAGON AND ITS UNWANTED CARGO BUMPED ALONG the road, flexing and bouncing through the ruts like a crude float in a parade of tired and dusty horsemen. Romulus Tolbert lay among the wounded prisoners in the crowded wooden bed. By then someone had stanched the bleeding; otherwise—with two gunshot wounds, one to his neck—he would have bled to death. Field treatment of wounds during the Civil War was simple: You stuffed the wound with a rag.
The Rebel entourage, encumbered by its twenty-three insolent despoilers, was headed for Fairburn, Georgia. After driving away the rest of the 8th Indiana patrol, the Rebels had loaded their prisoners and loot, including thirty rifles (some of which were the coveted repeating Spencers), in the wagons and hastened away, leading a pack of captured mules as they passed through Campbellton. Little of importance was left in the town now, other than the ferry crossing on the Chattahoochee River. Campbellton had been in decline since before the war as the result of a local vote to prevent the Atlanta & West Point Railroad from passing through on account of the expected noise. Only a scattering of empty houses, barns, and stores remained, along with a gutted brick courthouse. Campbellton was an empty stage set in a hotly contested war zone—a place no one wanted to be for long. The railroad had been routed to the south, through Fairburn, which boomed as a result. Though the Union cavalry spent much of the summer tearing up the tracks, Fairburn was still securely enough in Confederate hands that later in the month Confederate President Jefferson Davis would visit to try to boost the morale of the troops, who were discouraged by the fall of Atlanta.
In saving Tolbert and the other gravely wounded men, the Rebels followed the rules of war, though soldiers on both sides were known to occasionally shoot prisoners. Perhaps their anger had been muted by Tolbert’s helplessness and misery. It is one thing to take pride in being able to bring down an enemy, and another to disregard someone’s suffering, even if that someone had been trying to kill you a few minutes before.
Confederate General L.S. Ross, who had been fighting the Yankees in the area for much of the summer, was now in charge at Fairburn. One of his officers, J.M. Taylor, had led the ambush in which Tolbert and the others were captured. Upon their arrival in Fairburn, the Rebels unloaded their captives as soon as they could, and Tolbert, who was too badly injured to travel farther, was placed in a private home. There were no real hospitals nearby, and it would have been apparent to anyone that his chances of survival were slim. He was now essentially alone. Everyone who knew him, who thought the way he did or understood why he thought the way he did, was gone. His blood-soaked shirt, his knapsack, his gun, his saber, his horse—all were gone. He could not eat.
Tolbert left no account of his stay in Fairburn, so there is no way to know whether he awoke in a stranger’s bed and wondered where he was, with his head and shoulder bandaged and throbbing with pain; whether the women were compassionate or resentful or the doctors attentive or uninterested. But he likely drifted in and out of consciousness for days, his mind floating to the surface like a fish in a stream, then sinking back into the depths. Severe trauma frequently leads to shock, and during the Civil War a soldier who survived his wounds almost inevitably faced some degree of infection, usually accompanied by fever and delirium. Jesse Hawes, a private from Illinois who went through a period of disorientation after being similarly shot and captured, observed that “the fever that follows a gun-shot wound fills the mind with the wildest fancies.” Hawes, who was also shot in the neck near his ear, recalled that he was placed in a Confederate ambulance with three other injured men who had difficulty not getting in each other’s way and aggravating each other’s wounds. “But I was soon oblivious to all around me,” he wrote. “That awful faintness over-powered me, and I unconsciously went to sleep.”
A person in such a state typically becomes confused, unsure whether it is day or night, alternately fearful, suspicious, and angry, not unlike someone with dementia. There is always a degree of hubris involved in going into battle, but once a bullet penetrates flesh, the hubris bleeds out. The dynamic changes. A captive soldier in such a state has few survival tools other than the ability to enlist sympathy. As his body struggles with trauma and perhaps infection, he may feel the urge to give up one moment and fight the next, then to escape, then to acquiesce. Tolbert’s trials had suddenly escalated. He had endured the energy-sapping marches only to be ambushed. He had survived the ambush only to face the potential for death from his wounds or from infection. Each time he survived, but each time he faced a new and different challenge. Given the level of medical care a Civil War soldier usually received, the struggle that followed would be just as easy to lose. Infected arms and legs could be amputated—and often were, even unnecessarily, but amputation was not an option for someone who was wounded in his trunk and in the head, as Tolbert was.
In his condition, he was certainly a source of consternation for his hosts, and perhaps a curiosity. Patience James, a Fairburn resident who was compelled to care for a wounded Yankee at another time (when the Rebels were away), recalled that the local women were accustomed to keeping plenty of food on hand for their own soldiers, for marauding Union troops, or for men whom they were compelled to nurse. As James told her granddaughter, who wrote it all down, she had been pressed into nursing service after a nearby battle, when Fairburn was in Union hands, and, “the Yankees took an old empty house across the street from me for a hospital. They placed straw over the floor and it was where they placed their wounded. The women had to care for them. I did not wait to have one sent to me, but went to select mine. There was a large German soldier shot in the stomach who died soon afterwards. There was a young soldier who claimed to have a broken back whom I selected. He said he couldn’t walk. I believe there were only five men left in Fairburn at that time, so I had to get a little negro boy to help me carry him to my house.”
Once she got her injured soldier home, James placed him in a bed and, she said, “I made the little negro boy, Mont, a pallet by the side of the bed, telling the soldier that if he needed anything during the night to call Mont.” She did not say whether she was relieved when the injured soldier turned up missing the next day, along with Mont’s coat and shoes. She assumed he had lied about his broken back and escaped. Perhaps he became a straggler—what would one day be referred to as AWOL.
Jesse Hawes, whose injuries during his capture were similar to Tolbert’s, was also treated in a private home. After his capture, the Rebels temporarily left him in a wagon with other wounded captives, and he escaped and made his way to a log cabin, where two women helped him inside and put him in bed after laying his rubber blanket across it so as not to soil the linens. The women then brewed coffee for him on the fire. The elderly woman who took charge of his care treated his wound, though as Hawes recalled she mostly just picked at it, rubbed some herbal remedy into the parts that were not violently tender, and talked to him. When Rebel soldiers arrived at the cabin, Hawes officially became an enemy captive again.
Tolbert’s captor-caregivers managed to keep him alive long enough to get free of him, too. After a week in the private home, he was sent to a Confederate military hospital in Montgomery, where he remained for six weeks. Along the way, someone dug the ball out of his jaw. That was necessary, though it amplified the risk of infection, the chief cause of death during recovery from a gunshot wound. Gunshot wounds are uniformly nasty, and during the Civil War they were typically contaminated, such as by a dirty hand raked across them or a rag used to stanch the flow of blood. Flies were a problem, too, bringing with them traces of whatever filth they had recently tracked through, such as feces or carrion. Tolbert’s doctor may have done his best to clean the wound and to remove any related debris, but he would have done so with his fingers and whatever surgical tools he had at his disposal, which were probably not fully sterilized. Before such surgeries patients were given opium or laudanum if it was available, and chloroform if they were lucky.
After the largest bits of debris were removed, Tolbert’s wound would have been sewn up with a needle whose thread had been wetted with saliva, then wrapped in gauze overlaid with plaster. Debris was almost always left behind: Bits of cloth, lead, dirt, gunpowder—even pieces of thread, skin, or bone from other soldiers, if the bullet had passed through them first. Such alien particles were anathema to the body. Even if the wound did not become infected, a fragment of debris could easily move into the bloodstream and cause an aneurysm in the heart, lungs, or brain. When the soldier awoke from surgery—assuming he had been put under, and perhaps even if he had not—he likely suffered from severe headaches, fever, vomiting, and painful swelling. Either way, by the time he was fully conscious, Tolbert would have been acutely aware that major things were going wrong in his body.
As an enemy soldier in a military hospital Tolbert probably received treatment only after the injured Rebels. One woman who served as a nurse in the Union Army reported that after the battle of Gettysburg, “It took nearly five days for some three hundred surgeons to perform the amputations that occurred here, during which time the rebels lay in a dying condition without their wounds being dressed or scarcely any food.” The injury to Tolbert’s neck, mouth, and jaw was clearly the more serious, but the wound to his shoulder was dangerous, too. Minié balls—thimble-sized cylindrical bullets of soft lead that were commonly used during the Civil War—were particularly damaging because they spun during their trajectory and tumbled and deformed inside the victim after impact. If the injury did not kill the person outright, or cause brain damage or paralysis, the ragged wound soon began to enlarge and swell, sometimes to many times the size and depth of the original point of entry.
Bandages were changed infrequently and sometimes reused, which added to the potential for infection. Infected wounds generated copious amounts of pus and sometimes became infested with maggots. Civil War surgeons referred to draining wounds as producing “laudable pus” because of their misunderstanding of bacterial infection, knowledge of which would be developed only a decade or so later—too late to benefit the wounded of the Civil War. In some cases they allowed maggots to remain because they consumed dangerously rotting flesh, a process believed to promote the growth of new tissue. One surgeon recalled treating a wound scarcely larger than the bullet that made it, which become larger and larger until, as he described it, he could have inserted his fist inside. Gangrene also spread rapidly through hospitals, particularly after a few days of cold rain, which required windows and doors to be closed, and one surgeon reported observing a wound on the inside of a man’s upper thigh become enlarged so dramatically that it exposed the femoral artery “until the pulsating vessel stretched like a red rope across the chasm.” Treatment of hospital gangrene called for isolation and exposure to fresh air, which was not always possible, as well as local application of nitric acid, nitrate of mercury, or bromine if they were available. If a patient survived and the infection was arrested, the tissue would slowly grow back. One Wisconsin soldier who was captured and held in the officers’ prison at Macon endured three successive amputations from one leg as a result of spreading infection before he died.
In Hawes’s case, by the time an actual surgeon arrived to tend his wound, it had become so swollen that “one could easily lay his hand in the opening. The surgeon proceeded to sew it up, which operation was a good deal like trying to draw the mouth of a well-filled sack together, and caused me the greatest pain and agony.” Hawes was then loaded onto an ox-drawn wagon, part of a caravan of injured prisoners, each wagon driven by an old man. “At almost every house we came to a halt was made and more wounded added to our number. The heat was intense. The sun poured down its burning rays upon our unprotected bodies like a ball of liquid fire, while the green flies swarmed around our festering wounds like bees around a hive.” Hawes and his fellow prisoners were eventually loaded into a boxcar, but because the railroad tracks were in such bad repair, the train derailed. The car he was traveling in overturned, throwing the injured men against the ceiling, and rolled down an embankment. Men began to wail as a result of new injuries and reopened wounds. “Help was slow in coming,” he wrote, “as the guards had their own killed and crippled to attend to first.” Finally a surgeon and his assistants began working on the injured prisoners, “but when the car was opened some were already past all help, while others soon bled to death from having their wounds torn open.”
Hawes and his fellow survivors were put aboard another train bound for the Confederate prison at Cahaba, Alabama—the same pen where Tolbert ended up after he was released from the military hospital in Montgomery.
The fact that Tolbert was in the hospital in Montgomery for six weeks indicates that he was not doing particularly well, and he had to be stabilized before he could be transferred to Cahaba, where blockades and raids—by men such as him—led to periodic shortages of food and medicine. Clearly, his situation was going to get worse before it got better.
Tolbert’s conditioning, his youth, and his spirit may have helped prepare him for the challenge. If nothing else, he was still alive. There were possibilities.
THREE DAYS AFTER TOLBERT’S CAPTURE, a group of foragers from the 2nd Indiana Cavalry ran into a similar ambush near Stilesborough, Georgia. Perry Summerville had enlisted in the 2nd three years before, at age fifteen, and had seen battlefield action in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, including some of the bloodiest conflicts of the war: Shiloh, Perryville, Stone’s River, and Chickamauga. The 2nd had also participated in McCook’s disastrous raid and a few drowned in the frigid river when a ferry overturned in Tennessee. Summerville had come through each trial to fight another day, but on September 13, 1864, as his cavalry patrol fled a Rebel ambush, he jumped from a speeding wagon and into the abyss. He fell beneath the wagon wheels, felt his leg snap, and was unceremoniously left behind. He then became a prisoner of war.
Summerville was an alert and affable young man, with hawkish eyes and a musing, slightly frowning mouth. He reacted to captivity by drawing upon both his personal charms and his powers of concentration. After his capture the Rebels put him on a mule, which he rode for a few hours in what must have been excruciating pain, until he was loaded into a wagon. Two days later the wagon pulled to a stop in Jacksonville, Alabama, where Summerville was placed in a hospital for a few more days, and where his physician took pity on him. As Summerville later wrote, “The man at the hospital gave me a fine comb, which was the means of catching at least fifty thousand inmates at the prison, and his lady gave me a ten dollar bill.” The “inmates” were the scourge of Civil War soldiers—body lice, which were a nuisance in camp but a plague in the prisons, where the crowded, filthy conditions provided an especially productive habitat.
Throughout much of the war, prisoners were routinely paroled in the field, pending an official exchange. Technically, they were not to fight again until a corresponding enemy prisoner was released, and sometimes their captivity lasted only a few hours. But not everyone was paroled, and the prisoner exchanges had been suspended by the time Summerville was captured. Most soldiers, including Summerville, had been on the other end of the transaction, having captured their share of enemy soldiers, so everyone knew the drill. The prisoners were stripped of their weapons, their mounts, and their personal possessions, which often included items of no monetary value that their captors kept as souvenirs. As soon as possible they were sent to a holding camp. Sometimes the prisoners were treated roughly; at other times they conversed with and even befriended their captors. They were almost always robbed, which was not only an affront but limited their ability to bargain or even to perform routine tasks such as keeping a supply of drinking water on hand.
After being captured in North Carolina, Thomas Newton wrote that he and his fellow Yankee prisoners were “deprived of all that was on our horses, including haversacks, blankets, canteens, tin cups, etc. so we had no cooking utensils or anything to get water in.” This forced Newton to be resourceful. “While marching through Goldsboro, I saw an oyster can in the street and stepped out to get it. The guard, not knowing my intention, ordered me back to my place, but I requested the next guard to get it for me when he kindly went and brought it to me, and still farther along I picked up a piece of wire to make a bail for it, all of which seemed to be providential, for undoubtedly the little pail was the means of saving my life.”
Newton was aware of one of the basic truths of surviving captivity: You had to start from scratch. Men who bemoaned their circumstances and failed to adapt typically did not fare well. Those who made use of their limited control did better. Some men wasted away in the dirt of the prison yard, nearly naked and starving, while others set up rudimentary business enterprises, carving utensils from roots to trade, cutting soldiers’ hair on barter, hoarding and then selling food. At his next stop on the way to prison, Newton secreted the pail he had fashioned from the oyster can, along with a few other possessions he had managed to conceal from the guards. “They took everything in the shape of money and valuables that they could find or thought was worth something, with some exceptions,” he wrote. “One of the boys had a good watch that he refused to give up. He told the guard he could not have it unless he was stouter than he. Mr. Reb gave it up saying he would see the lieutenant about it after examination, but we heard no more about it.” As for himself, Newton wrote, “I had a watch, jack-knife, wallet and two or three dollars in money, all of which I put in my little pail and slid under the cell door, which was open at the time, so he did not find it.”
After arriving at a temporary prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Newton and the other prisoners received nothing to eat for sixty hours (he apparently timed the lapse with his treasured watch). “We had become so weak it was with difficulty we could walk across the floor; in making the attempt we would be so dizzy that we would almost fall over. I never knew what hunger was before, but thought I knew then.” In fact, as was the case with many prisoners, the worst was still ahead. Soon Newton was sent to Andersonville, the most notorious prison in the Confederacy.
Jesse Hawes had been captured the first time near Guntown, Mississippi—the result, he later said, of his troops’ “overweening confidence” in their repeating Spencer rifles. Advancing hurriedly through a dense bramble, Hawes had tripped on a vine and simultaneously “a thousand bullets flew hissing into the thicket.” Trees began to splinter around him, and smoke from the Rebel guns blew into his face. He realized that his fall may have saved his life. Many of his comrades were killed or injured. Soon he was on his feet again, rushing toward the Rebel line, but when he emerged into the open he found himself alone in the face of the enemy, with perhaps a hundred guns leveled on him. “For a moment I stop in confusion,” he recalled. “A score of Confederates yell, ‘Don’t shoot that man; surrender, d—n you, surrender!’” So he did. “Running so actively that hot day, for a few moments I was breathless and a passive subject in their hands while they stripped me of my arms, a dozen men swearing at me most roundly during the act. The instantaneous change from a pursuing, exultant freeman to a roughly handled, roundly cursed, humble prisoner, presented a ludicrous side to my mind, and as soon as I could get breath suggested to my captors that the change was a rough joke to their unwilling guest. But they were in no joking mood. Indeed, they were never more serious in their lives.” He later escaped, was recaptured, again escaped, and was again recaptured.
There was no hope of escape for Summerville, since his leg was broken. After Jacksonville he was taken to Talladega, where he was locked in a small cell with a dozen Rebels, who, he assumed, were captured deserters. At some point he was given a pair of crutches, and a few days later he was transferred to a jail in Selma, then moved to Cahaba prison. It was now the end of September 1864. He would spend Christmas and his eighteenth birthday there.
Cahaba was an unfinished cotton warehouse, partially roofed, on the banks of the Alabama River, surrounded by a small wooden stockade. As Summerville entered the stockade gates he heard other prisoners hollering “fresh fish,” the army slang for new arrivals. He spent the day scoping out the situation and looking for an older man named Brown with whom he had been taken prisoner in Georgia. At nightfall he had no blanket to ward off the cold and fell asleep on the ground, using his crutches for a pillow. The next morning he spent several hours trying to clean the dirt from his uniform, unwilling to give in to the squalor of the prison. Meanwhile his leg was getting worse. He was taken to the Confederate hospital housed in the nearby Bell Tavern Hotel, a few blocks from the prison, where he managed to surreptitiously fashion a knife from a piece of iron hoop he had found. He was unable to mentally endure the hospital, though, writing, “to see the dead carried out every morning was too much for me and I went back to the stockade.” He eventually found Brown, and the two formed an alliance, Summerville with his knife and Brown with a railroad spike, which they used for splitting wood. This meant, he said, “We were better fixed than the average prisoners.”
It would not be long before wood became scarce and Summerville was reduced to whittling away one of his crutches for firewood, to stay warm and to cook the meager rations the prisoners were issued raw. He burned all of the first crutch and started in on the second, which left him with a cane. When the cane was stolen, he observed, “That left me in a bad fix.”
FOR J. WALTER ELLIOTT, the pivotal event of the war came around the time Tolbert and Maddox were setting off on Rousseau’s raid, in early July 1864, when he was promoted to captain in the 44th regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops. Elliott, who had graduated from officer’s training school six years before, finally got the recognition he wanted, but it carried immense challenges and risks. Racism was common in both armies, and the use of black troops was controversial. The white officers who commanded them were often ridiculed within their own army, and the troops were typically undersupplied and given few opportunities to prove themselves in battle. They were also largely unschooled and received less pay than their white counterparts. More significantly, according to Confederate law they and their white officers were subject to execution as illegal combatants if captured.
In the movie Glory, which is based upon the journals and letters of Robert Gould Shaw, the protagonist accepts a promotion to lead the colored troops of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. His best friend reacts incredulously, saying, “I know how much you’d like to be a colonel, but a colored regiment?” A contemporary article in the Indianapolis Journal was even more blunt, observing that the practice of arming blacks was tolerated only because “no white soldier could be found who would not sooner see a Negro with one arm off, than to have one off himself.”
Elliott’s promotion unleashed a series of calamities. Though he did not mention his black soldiers by name in his numerous wartime accounts, nor the fact that almost all of them were returned to slavery after capture, he used their shared travails to portray himself as a brave, well-connected leader who endured great adversity. Like the majority of officers in the U.S. Colored Troops, Elliott was white, though his dark complexion perhaps opened him to insults along the way. The Elliotts were a staunchly Unionist family. His uncle Robert was involved in the Underground Railroad, and two of his younger brothers, Simeon and John, also served in the Union Army. One of his cousins, James H. Elliott, served alongside him initially in the 10th Indiana Infantry. While in the 10th, Elliott was involved in some of the war’s bloodiest conflicts. He participated in the siege of Corinth, Mississippi, in the pursuit of Confederate cavalry under General Braxton Bragg into Kentucky, and—more or less—in the battles of Stone’s River, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. After joining the 44th U.S. Colored Troops he was posted to Chattanooga and saw limited action, mostly in and around Dalton, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee. At Nashville his troops came out on the short end of one engagement, though not, apparently, for lack of trying.
The 44th was organized in Chattanooga in April 1864 by Major General George H. Thomas and placed under the command of Colonel Lewis Johnson. After the fall of Atlanta, the 44th was primarily used for manual labor and picket duty. Like other black regiments, the men were aware of the special perils they faced, but their willingness to fight was bolstered by a profound fear of capture. On September 24, 1864, soldiers of the 110th Colored Infantry were captured by forces under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest near Athens, Alabama, after their commanding officer, Colonel Wallace Campbell, set fire to his own supply stockpiles and ordered his troops to seek refuge in a block-house, or stockade, beside the railroad tracks. Campbell had sent two couriers with a request for reinforcements, one of whom was captured and killed, while the other escaped, injured, and returned to the fort. Just after dawn the next day, the Rebels began shelling the fort, and after a few hours Campbell received a surrender ultimatum from Forrest.
“I have a sufficient force to storm and take your works, and if I am forced to do so the responsibility of the consequences must rest with you,” Forrest wrote. “Should you, however, accept the terms, all white soldiers shall be treated as prisoners of war and the negroes returned to their masters. A reply is requested immediately.” After Campbell sent a message declining to surrender, Forrest replied, “I desire an interview with you outside of the fort, at any place you may designate, provided it meets with your views. My only object is to stop the effusion of blood that must follow the storming of the place.”
Campbell wrote that Forrest subsequently informed him that “if he was compelled to storm the works it would result in the massacre of the entire garrison. He told me what his force was, and said myself and one officer could have the privilege of reviewing his force. I returned to the fort, when, after consultation with the commanders of various detachments in the fort, it was decided that [if] after reviewing the force of General Forrest I found he had 8,000 or 10,000 troops, it would be worse than murder to attempt to hold the works.”
Campbell agreed to surrender on the condition that all of his commissioned officers would be permitted to go to Meridian or some other point in Mississippi, and from there to Memphis for parole, and that they would be allowed to keep all their personal property, including horses, saddles, sidearms, and clothing, while the enlisted men—about three hundred fifty of whom were black and one hundred twenty were white—“shall be kindly and humanely treated and turned over to the C. S. Government as prisoners of war, to be disposed of as the War Department of the Confederate States shall direct.”
Forrest agreed to the terms, but many of Campbell’s own officers and men did not. Though they argued that the fort was strong enough to withstand a Rebel attack indefinitely (and a group of his officers afterward requested that Campbell be investigated by the military), they were overruled. In their request for an investigation, the officers wrote, “We also feel it our duty to make mention of the bearing and disposition of the soldiers in the fort, both white and black. It was everything that any officer could wish of any set of men.” When told that the fort had been surrendered and that they were prisoners, the officers wrote, “they could scarcely believe themselves, but with tears demanded that the fight should go on, preferring to die in the fort they had made to being transferred to the tender mercies of General Forrest and his men.”
The 44th, in which Elliott served, met a similar end. The men saw their first real action at Dalton, Georgia, on October 13, 1864, and it resulted in their capture. They were part of a Union garrison in Dalton that was surrounded by Confederate troops under General John Bell Hood. Colonel Johnson, who commanded the 44th, occupied the garrison with about seven hundred fifty men, as many as a hundred of whom were unarmed and more than six hundred of whom were from the 44th. A few soldiers had gone “foraging” or “recruiting” and so escaped capture, but Elliott was not among them. He and the other officers of the 44th were captured and paroled in the field on October 15.
The surrender at Dalton was remarkably similar to the one at Athens. Johnson reported that his scouts had observed the Rebels destroying the railroad within five miles of the town and burning the connecting bridges. He had requested reinforcements and received about fifty white troops from Illinois. By the time his cavalry returned, the Rebels were in close pursuit. After some brief skirmishing, Hood delivered an ultimatum under a flag of truce, demanding that Johnson surrender. Hood promised that the white officers and soldiers would be paroled but said, “If the place is carried by assault, no prisoners will be taken.” In other words, everyone would be killed.
Johnson responded that he could not surrender, “whatever the consequences may be.” After another half-hour of skirmishing, the parley was repeated. Then Hood began to prepare for battle in earnest, forming what Johnson described as “a very long and dense line of infantry, about two miles in length,” with artillery emplacements. “In short,” Johnson reported, “we were surrounded.” He sent three white officers out under a flag of truce to demand an inspection of the Rebel troops and said that if their numbers proved overwhelming, and if Hood would guarantee safe conduct to the next military post, he would evacuate his garrison. Hood refused. Johnson’s men had seen what they needed to, however: An overwhelming force, in a far more commanding position. “General Hood told me that I must decide at once; that I already had occupied too much of his time; and when I protested against the barbarous measures which he threatened in his summons he said that he could not restrain his men, and would not if he could; that I could choose between surrender and death,” Johnson wrote, a bit breathlessly, adding, “To fight any more than had been done was madness, in the face of such barbarous threats, which I was fully satisfied would be carried out, as the division of Cleburne, which was in the immediate rear of the rebel general and his staff, was over anxious to move upon the ‘niggers,’ and constantly violated the flag of truce by skirmishing near it, and to fight was also hopeless, as we were surrounded and could not be supported from anywhere.”
Unwilling to submit his nearly eight hundred troops to possible slaughter, Johnson surrendered on the condition that his black enlisted men would be treated humanely, that his officers and white soldiers would be paroled and allowed to retain their swords and whatever personal property they could carry, and that they be allowed to remain with their black troops. The latter request was denied. “I was told by General Hood,” he wrote, “that he would return all slaves belonging to persons in the Confederacy to their masters; and when I protested against this and told him that the United States Government would retaliate, and that I surrendered the men as soldiers, he said I might surrender them as whatever I pleased; that he would have them attended to, &c.”
Despite the threat, “The colored soldiers displayed the greatest anxiety to fight,” Johnson reported, adding, “It grieved me to be compelled to surrender men who showed so much spirit and bravery.” After the surrender, the black soldiers “were immediately robbed and abused in a terrible manner. The treatment of the officers of my regiment exceeded anything in brutality I have ever witnessed, and a General Bate distinguished himself especially by meanness and beastly conduct. This General Bate was ordered to take charge of us, and immediately commenced heaping insults upon me and my officers. He had my colored soldiers robbed of their shoes (this was done systematically and by his order), and sent them down to the railroad and made them tear up the track for a distance of nearly two miles. One of my soldiers, who refused to injure the track, was shot on the spot, as were also five others shortly after the surrender, who, having been sick, were unable to keep up with the rest on the march.” As his white officers were being paroled Johnson entreated his captors to free the black “servants and soldiers” in the regiment who came from the free states of Indiana and Ohio, but to no avail. “From the treatment I received, and what I observed after my capture, I am sure that not a man would have been spared had I not surrendered when I did, and several times on the march soldiers made a rush upon the guards to massacre the colored soldiers and their officers,” he wrote. “Mississippians did this principally (belonging to Stewart’s corps), and were often encouraged in these outrages by officers of high rank. I saw a lieutenant-colonel who endeavored to infuriate a mob, and we were only saved from massacre by our guards’ greatest efforts.”
Johnson and his officers were paroled and released at a place called Dug Gap, but their black troops were sent south into slavery or to work for the Confederate Army. John Leach, a sergeant with the 44th, later reported that they were put to work in the vicinity of Dalton, then marched to Selma and Corinth, destroying railroads along the way. “During the time I was in the hands of the rebels there were about 250 men of the Forty-fourth delivered to their former masters, or men who claimed to own them, thereby returning these men to slavery,” Leach wrote. At the time he managed to escape to Union-held Memphis on Christmas Day, about one hundred twenty-five men from the 44th were “still laboring on these railroads, the remainder having either been sent to the hospital to die, or turned over to civilians as slaves, or effected their escape.”
Elliott later said that after being paroled, he and the remaining officers of the 44th returned to Nashville, where they reorganized and moved south to Chattanooga to join the army of General William Tecumseh Sherman, though they were subsequently ordered back to Nashville and placed under the command of Colonel Thomas J. Morgan. On the way to Nashville, the train on which the 44th and two companies of the 14th Colored Infantry were being transported was disabled by fire from Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s batteries at about 11 a.m. on December 2, 1864.
The train on which Elliott and his troops had been riding was “the hindmost one,” and during the night of December 1, the train ahead of them had derailed. Thus delayed, they had received what Elliott later concluded were bogus orders, fabricated by the Rebels, to return to Nashville. “We went forward, and when on the bridge over Nine Mile Creek at Block-house No. 2, Gen. Forest opened fire on us with a battery, at short range, from the curve just in advance of the train,” he wrote. The train was crippled on the bridge. Elliott and company leaped into the creek, waded to the bank, drove the Rebels back, and then made their way to a small blockhouse, where they continued fighting until dark. “Soon after dark a council was called by our colonel, Louis Johnson, in the block-house, & as the result was sent 4 several parties to try to pass Hoods line to…the Cumberland to reach Gen. Thomas & seek his aid for our rescue.”
At about midnight, Elliott recalled, the men concluded that Hood had invested Nashville, preventing Thomas from coming to their aid, and “that our only safety lay in stealing out thro’ the darkness and then some must remain to maintain the line and keep up the spasmodic night firing. That duty fell upon myself and my 2nd Lieutenant H.C. Knowles.”
Johnson reported that the Confederate batteries were delivering relentless fire upon the stockade and had destroyed the lookout tower, caved in the roof, and injured or killed numerous men. “My position was quite desperate, and when I took into consideration that my stock of ammunition was almost expended, the stockade so much used up that a few shots would have knocked it down, and having lost one-third of the men, I resolved to abandon the stockade and fight my way to Nashville,” Johnson reported. “I knew that should the place be surrendered or taken by assault a butchery would follow, and I also knew that re-enforcements would have been sent to me if it had been possible to send them. I therefore left the block-house at 3.30 a.m., and, contrary to my expectations, got through the rebel lines without much trouble. I arrived at Nashville about daylight.” The 44th’s troop surgeon and chaplain remained behind with the wounded men and raised the hospital and truce flags above the blockhouse.
Elliott, Knowles, and a small squad of soldiers meanwhile crept away into the darkness and “began the task of stealthily passing two lines of Forest’s and thro’ Hoods lines to Nashville, an almost hopeless undertaking, but I & Knowles had all to win & nothing to lose by the experiment. Capture meant death, shot like dogs by the Southern chivalry while prisoners of war, and no living comrade to tell our friends of our end.” They managed to pass through the first line of pickets but soon encountered mounted squads of Rebels and “had some lively, active firing experiences in bush, briar, brambles and streams of water,” which scattered his men.
In the early light, Elliott found himself alone with Knowles, and they were forced to do some “zigzag running and dodging” to try to escape. Once they passed out of the line of fire, they hid behind a fallen tree, “concealed by a dense growth of weeds that lapped over the log.” They could see pickets about seventy-five yards away and decided to lie quietly, wet, hungry, and shivering from the cold, to “watch & pray for night, when we might hope to crawl thro’ Hood’s army. Foragers passed so close I could have touched them with my hand as I lay there in the wet earth.” Sometime after noon, Elliott fell asleep and was awakened by a whisper from Knowles, who told him the Rebels were advancing toward them. Glancing up, Elliott realized that “discovery and capture was inevitable. We were alone & might escape identification as ‘nigger’ officers and recognition. It could be no harm to try & we had life to gain by success & could be no worse off by a failure, so quick as thought, in that supreme moment of capture thought and action were simultaneous. I whispered to Lieutenant Knowles, ‘My name is Capt. David E. Elliott of Co. ‘E’ (I now think it was) 75th Ind. V.I. & yours is Lieutenant Henry Clay of Co. ‘F’ 16th Ill. V.I.’ the co. he was promoted from. About two minutes afterward Knowles & I advanced on a brisk walk to report to Col. or Gen. Ross of Forest’s command, having by then been discovered by one of the Rebels.” Elliott had met David Elliott the first night of the organization of Company E of the 10th, back in Indianapolis, and the two, he later recalled, “became friends & I loved him for his gentlemanly & soldierly qualities.”
Despite his fears, Elliott wrote that the first Rebel to interview him was “a very courteous gentleman.” When General Ross demanded Elliott’s name and command, he unfurled his lie and introduced “Clay,” who, he said, “seemed scared and to lose his wits.” Asked why they were separated from their command, Elliott said they had been cut off after Sherman “took one of his crazy fits and took French leave of Atlanta & left a few thousand of men & officers on leave at home and as we returned to join him we found ourselves cut off and were stopped at Chatta. & when you uns got to kicking up such a hell of a racket here General Thomas sent us straglers a very pressing invitation to join him, but while on the way General Forest took charge of the train & we took to the woods.”
Ross sent Elliott and “Clay” to Forrest’s headquarters “at the first toll-gate out from Nashville.” En route they passed through Franklin after a two days’ march, subsisting on two ears of corn per man. Elliott said he “kept up a merry fusilade with the long haired jesters,” all the while fearing he would be recognized by his fellow prisoners and outed as an officer of colored troops.
The remaining colored troops under Johnson continued to fight, and in a subsequent report he observed that they suffered the greatest casualties. During one particularly brutal skirmish, he reported, “I was unable to discover that color made any difference in the fighting of my troops. All, white and black, nobly did their duty as soldiers, and evinced cheerfulness and resolution such as I have never seen excelled in any campaign of the war in which I have borne a part.”
George Fitch, a lieutenant with the 12th Colored Infantry, reported that later in the month he was captured and shot, along with two other black officers, one of whom was with the 44th. After their capture by Forrest’s scouts, the men were robbed, stripped, and marched toward the Rebel headquarters. “After leaving the road about half a mile, as we were walking along through a wooded ravine, the man in advance of us halted, partially turned his horse, and as I came up, drew his revolver and fired on me without a word,” Fitch reported. “The ball entered my right ear just above the center, passed through and lodged in the bone back of the ear. It knocked me senseless for a few moments. I soon recovered, however, but lay perfectly quiet, knowing that my only hope lay in leading them to believe they had killed me. Presently I heard two carbine shots, and then all was still. After about fifteen minutes I staggered to my feet and attempted to get away, but found I could not walk. About that time a colored boy came along and helped me to a house near by. He told me that the other two officers were dead, having been shot through the head. That evening their bodies were brought to the house where I lay. Next morning they were decently buried on the premises of Col. John C. Hill, near by.”
Fitch continued: “The shooting occurred on the 22d, and on the 23d, about midday, one of Forrest’s men came to the house where I was lying and inquired for me; said that he had come to kill me. The man of the house said that it was entirely unnecessary, as I was so severely wounded that I would die any way, and he expected I would not live over an hour. He then went away, saying that if I was not dead by morning I would be killed. After he left I was moved by the neighbors to another house, and was moved nearly every night from one house to another until the 27th, when I was relieved by a party of troops sent from Columbia and brought within the Federal lines.”