“HIS MILITARY RECORD WAS AS GOOD AS ANY FIGHTING QUAKER could desire,” a journalist later said. But the journey of Edward Needles Hallowell—simply Ned to friends and family—from a nonviolent, apolitical son of Philadelphia privilege to the fierce officer who led his men in torching South Carolina plantations was not a simple one.1
Born on November 3, 1836, at the Walnut Street home of his parents, Morris and Hannah Penrose Hallowell, Ned was raised in a large, loving Quaker family whose members bestowed pet names on one another yet retained the formal address of “thee” and “thou” in all of their correspondence. Morris was a surgeon, but also part heir to Hallowell & Company, a family-owned firm that imported silks from China and India. After a childhood of private tutors, Ned briefly studied at Haverford College, a nearby Quaker school, before accepting a position as a stockbroker on Philadelphia’s aptly named Gold Street. But the dashing young man who sported an elegant mustache could hardly avoid the political winds of the late 1850s. By the off-year elections of 1858, he had puzzled his way out of his faith’s nonpolitical stance. “Perhaps thee wold like to know how I ‘get over’ the nonvoting question,” he wrote to Norwood Penrose Hallowell, his younger brother by almost three years. “We pay our taxes,” he reasoned to Pen, as his brother, then a student at Harvard College, preferred to be called. Doing so was not really voluntary, since failure to do so meant prison and Quakers felt “bound to protect our lives.” So if his purse contributed to the Buchanan administration, which he loathed, he was thereby “bound to vote to protect whole classes,” and especially enslaved Americans. “I can’t see that it is nonsense, I stick to it,” Ned insisted, although honesty compelled him to add that if he had not “made this very clear to thee,” that was because he had not yet “got it very clear” to himself.2
It would take brother Pen a few years more to reconcile himself to casting a ballot, but all members of the family were united in abolitionism. Quakers had long stood against slavery, and both Morris and Hannah were dedicated to the cause. On one occasion some of Morris’s Southern customers inquired about his views on slavery, and he angrily turned them out of his office, swearing that while he “sold Goods, not principles,” he “would [have] no further dealings with them.” Ned had been named for Edward Needles, the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and a close friend to Hannah’s mother. In 1859, Ned was himself elected a member of the society. The entire family worked to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced private citizens to comply with federal marshals and slave catchers; that law especially, Pen later admitted, “made an Abolitionist of me.” Although only eleven at the time, Pen found it inconceivable that “any one born and bred at the North could have avoided being an Abolitionist.”3
Pen was less a model youth than his three older brothers—William was the eldest, followed by Richard and Ned—and he was briefly suspended from Harvard for hazing a first-year student. But Pen’s less-than-pacific nature and robust physique—he was just over six feet tall—proved useful on those occasions when fugitive slaves arrived on the Hallowells’ doorstep. In April 1859, the brothers assisted Virginia runaway Daniel Dangerfield, who had been freed by a Philadelphia court but faced a proslavery mob that hoped to return him to his master. The Hallowells hid Dangerfield inside an old tomb in southern Philadelphia until night fell and then spirited him out of the city in Hannah’s carriage. Pen drove the team, while Ned, who was “quite ready to use his five-shooter,” guarded from the rear box. Just months before, their brother Richard, who was married to the granddaughter of abolitionist and feminist Lucretia Mott, had traveled to Virginia to retrieve John Brown’s body and return it north for burial.4
Pen had another occasion to pack his pistol when abolitionist Wendell Phillips was invited to speak at Boston’s Music Hall. Twice during the previous six weeks, anti-abolitionist mobs had rioted at his lectures, threatening the speaker and wounding members of the audience. To provide protection, Harvard student Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. recruited his college friends, including Hallowell, to form a human cordon around Phillips. The student bodyguards smuggled Phillips into the hall, but as he left through a side entrance the group was confronted with what Hallowell described as “a howling mob.” As the gang rushed at Phillips, Hallowell and the others closed ranks around him. “We fought our way down the little alleyway to Winter Street,” he wrote. “A great crowd followed, hooting and howling.” They got Phillips safely home, where the orator spent the remainder of the evening guarding his house with one of John Brown’s pikes. Quaker pacifism was not long for such a world.5
WHILE AT HARVARD, PEN BECAME ACQUAINTED WITH ANOTHER young man of privilege who shared his antislavery convictions. Born in Boston in October 1837, Robert Gould Shaw was one year younger than Ned and two years older than Pen. The Hallowells were more than comfortable, but Shaw hailed from one of the richest families in Massachusetts. The young man’s two grandfathers had earned millions by importing goods from China; one ancestor was prominent enough to have had three portraits of himself painted by Gilbert Stuart. Shaw’s parents, Francis George Shaw and Sarah Sturgis, were married in 1835, after Frank completed three years of study at Harvard. Rob, as he preferred to be called, was one of five children and the only boy. Anna was his only older sibling; Rob grew particularly close to his younger sister Josephine, known to her family as Effie. The boy grew up under the watchful eye of his grandfather, Robert Gould, after whom he was named. Just before he died, the old man summoned Rob to his bed. Fixing him with a stare, he warned: “I am leaving the stage of action and you are entering upon it. I exhort you to use your example and influence against intemperance and slavery.”6
So of course antislavery was a conviction that Rob’s father had learned at an early age. Although most Brahmins—as the Boston upper class styled themselves—tended toward the social conservatism of the Whig Party, Frank and Sarah passionately believed that the gift of wealth should be put to good use. When Rob was five, his parents purchased an estate adjacent to Brook Farm, a utopian experiment in communitarian life. Henry Sturgis, Sarah’s brother, helped to support the commune until its financial demise in 1849. In exchange, the family came into contact with the host of reformers and radicals who visited the Transcendentalist community just west of Boston. There the Shaws met William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator, and Garrison’s friend John A. Andrew, an antislavery attorney and rising free-soil politician. Sarah also became close friends with reformer Lydia Maria Child and feminist intellectual Margaret Fuller.7
After private tutors, Rob enrolled at St. John’s College, a Jesuit institution in Fordham, New York, where he earned average grades. In early 1851, while Frank began construction of an $80,000 house on Staten Island, the family, having decided to undertake a grand tour of Europe, booked first-class rooms for the Continent. The family visited France and Switzerland, then settled for a time near Neuchâtel, on the edge of the Jura Mountains. During the summer of 1853, they rented a house in Sorrento, just south of Naples. There they played host to Frances Anne Kemble, the British actress who had recently returned to the stage following the collapse of her marriage to Pierce Butler, the richest planter in Georgia. Kemble horrified the family—including Rob, who had recently read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the previous year—with tales of her brief stay along the Rice Coast. Most of the family sailed for home in 1855, but Rob remained in the Kingdom of Hanover for additional study so that he might enter Harvard College as a sophomore or junior. The indifferent pupil admitted to his worried parents that he had “no taste for anything except amusing myself.” At length he returned to the United States and spent three years at Harvard, withdrawing from the college in 1859. He then accepted a position in his uncle’s Manhattan shipping firm. But he was as uninspired a businessman as he had been a student, and at a time when his old college acquaintances were facing down proslavery mobs, Rob resisted his mother’s pleas to devote himself to the antislavery movement. “I don’t want to become a reformer, Apostle, or anything of that kind,” he confessed.“[T]here is no use in doing disagreeable things for nothing.”8
If his former classmate Pen Hallowell had doubts about a moral man casting a political ballot, Shaw did not; in November 1860, the twenty-three-year-old proudly stepped forward in support of Lincoln. Rob’s parents’ friend Garrison refused to vote, because he had for years denounced the Constitution as a proslavery document, and some of those abolitionists who did, such as Frederick Douglass, stood with Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party. But Shaw regarded himself as a realist. Although no abolitionist, the Republican candidate was a lifelong critic of slavery and a dedicated free-soiler; even Garrison publicly conceded that “the election of Abraham Lincoln will be a great and encouraging triumph.” Shortly thereafter, Rob saw his parents off as they sailed aboard the Karnak for the Bahamas. Sarah, whose health was always poor, found Manhattan’s winters difficult, and their kinsman John Shaw had recently opened a hotel in Nassau. One wonders if Rob noticed the African manservant traveling on the Karnak with two Europeans. Certainly the election season had turned his attention to slavery and sectionalism. When his uncle tasked him with finding a renter for his house, Rob turned down one applicant on the grounds that a brother-in-law from New Orleans would be living with the family. “We don’t want any secessionists about,” Rob vowed.9
By early April 1861, Northern newspapers spoke of nothing besides the situation in Fort Sumter at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. An attempt three months before to send supplies to the beleaguered fort had failed, and Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, had alerted Washington to his dwindling supply of food. Worried about what war would do to their businesses, many Manhattan shippers hoped that newly elected president Abraham Lincoln would give in to Confederate demands to evacuate the fort. Rob thought otherwise. “Lincoln is going to re-inforce the United States forts,” Shaw wrote to his sister Susanna, “and in that case the Southerners will surely resist.” Given the demands placed on the president by the Constitution, Shaw reasoned, he had no choice “but to collect the [tariff] revenue and re-take, by force of arms, the United States property which they have stolen.” Several years before, Shaw had favored letting the South secede, a position embraced by a good number of white abolitionists who felt morally tainted by living in the same nation as slave-holders. But as there now was “no way of making a peaceable separation without giving up everything,” Shaw was “glad, for the credit of the country,” that Lincoln planned to “act now with some firmness.” Seven days later, just before dawn on April 12, shore batteries opened fire on Sumter, and the war was on.10
LINCOLN IMMEDIATELY ISSUED THE CALL FOR 75,000 VOLUNTEERS TO serve for three months, but the question of service divided Northern reformers, particularly since the president’s administration insisted that the war was to be waged only for reunion, not for abolition. In keeping with that pledge, the War Department decreed that free blacks who sought to enlist would be turned away. Garrison continued to preach that just as abolitionists should not vote, neither should those “Peace men” who believed in “total abstinence from war, as a Christian duty,” don a uniform. Garrison’s sons William and Wendell agreed with their father’s position, despite the fact that many of Wendell’s Harvard classmates promptly enlisted. (George Garrison thought otherwise and after the Emancipation Proclamation transformed the conflict into an abolition war would go in search of a black regiment to lead.) Wendell was almost the only student to remain in class. Within days of the fall of Sumter, the university ceased to function. “The college is full of the spirit of war & indignant at the treatment of the country’s flag,” the college’s librarian remarked. “Very little studying [was] going on.” John A. Andrew, now governor, summoned the students to join their local militia companies. Within eight days of the attack on Sumter, 120 young men met to organize the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, a militia unit that dated to the War of 1812. Among them stood Holmes, Pen Hallowell, and Ned Hallowell, who had hastened north to join the regiment “in whose ranks,” its commander bragged to Andrew, “are found men of the best classes in our community.”11
Having quit Harvard two years before, Shaw chose instead to enlist in New York’s Seventh Regiment. On April 18, his untrained unit sailed from its camp on Staten Island to protect Washington from secessionists in Virginia and Maryland. Time was of the essence, and Rob was unable to say his farewells to his parents. He confided to his mother that he could not “help crying a little” when he thought of home and family. But he assured himself that she “wouldn’t have me stay, when it is so clearly my duty to go.” The Seventh hoped to march into the capital by Saturday, April 20, and if they arrived before “Virginia begins to make trouble,” he assumed that there would be no fighting. For a young man who had seen so much of Europe, Rob had never been south of New York State, and he looked forward to meeting soldiers from across the North. “Won’t it be grand to meet the men from all the States, East and West, down there,” he marveled, “ready to fight for the country, as the old fellows did in the Revolution.”12
Following a very rough day at sea, the Seventh disembarked at Annapolis. Travel to Washington was delayed because the rail lines had “been torn up by the Secessionists.” The young man of privilege grumbled about the food, complaining to his father that “the rations we had with us were pretty old, and the meat furnished on board was very horsey.” After marching for several miles, they located an operational train and at length pulled into Washington. Although “covered with dust,” they marched through the White House grounds to pay tribute to the president. Lincoln walked out to greet them, “looking as pleasant and kind as possible” and holding “his two little boys by the hand.” After the Seventh presented arms, the president “took off his hat in the most awkward way, putting it on again with his hand on the back of the rim, country fashion.” But if the young patrician was little impressed by the Kentucky-born president’s manners, he assured his sister that “Lincoln knows what he is about” and told her that the rude slurs on the president’s appearance were unfair. “I have seen many uglier men,” he wrote.13
One of the privates in Shaw’s company was Rufus King, the son of the president of Columbia College and the grandson of the former New York senator. Private King’s family was close to Secretary of State William H. Seward, and on April 30, King invited Shaw to accompany him to the secretary’s office. Seward was so burdened by affairs of state that he rarely ventured out to eat, instead snacking over the course of the day on crackers, cheese, and cold tea supplied by his daughter-in-law, but he spared a few minutes for “a little talk” with the two soldiers. Although Shaw thought Seward “really didn’t look as if he could have written those great speeches,” he nonetheless suspected the secretary “of being a pretty sly old fellow.” Hoping to bring their chat to a quick end, Seward suggested that the two young men walk over to see the president, and he handed them a note of introduction. The two found Lincoln sitting behind his desk, which was “perfectly covered with letters & papers of every description.” They spoke for five minutes, and once again Shaw was oddly drawn to the president’s appearance. “It is really too bad to call him one of the ugliest men in the country,” Rob lectured his mother, “for I have seldom seen a pleasanter or more kind hearted looking one.” Lincoln inquired about their regiment, as well as their education, as his son Robert was then enrolled at Harvard. Nobody else from the regiment had yet enjoyed access to such high office, and King and Shaw strolled back to the Capitol, thinking they “had done a pretty good afternoon’s work in calling on the President & Secretary of State both.”14
Two weeks later, word arrived that Andrew had commissioned Shaw a second lieutenant in the newly created Second Massachusetts Infantry. Rob hastened north to Camp Andrew, named for the state’s new governor, in West Roxbury, once home to Brook Farm. Life as a junior officer suited Shaw just fine. The army paid privates $13.00 each month, with an additional clothing allowance of $3.50. But the second lieutenant drew $150 as “part of two months pay.” Other benefits included having “cots to sleep on, much better fare, and servants in abundance from among the men.” By mid-May, the company was not yet full, so while he awaited deployment, Shaw had ample time to “lie round, & smoke, read or sleep.” Boston was not far away, and most evenings he and the other young officers found ways “to have a great deal of fun in one way and another.”15
By mid-June, the Second was ready to ship southward to Maryland, where it was to guard the upper Potomac River. Shaw was briefly reunited with his family as they passed through Manhattan. Evidently Sarah took his parting hard, for Rob implored her not to “lie awake much dear Mother thinking of me.” A second missive reminded her that a good “many Mothers & Fathers & sisters” felt just as badly as she did, and he assured his mother that “there is not much more danger in war than in peace at least for officers.” Rob was also a bit embarrassed about the way his mother peppered their friends with his photograph, especially one of him as an officer. Elizabeth Haggerty’s daughter Annie, however, was quite another story. Shaw had met Annie in the months just before Sumter, when his sister Susanna arranged a night at the opera. Rob beseeched Susanna to let Annie know that he “had nothing to do with” sending her family so many photographs, but he also hoped that his sister might obtain an image of Annie, provided she could do so without letting Annie know he wanted one.16
JUST AS SHAW WAS SAYING HIS FAREWELLS TO HIS FAMILY, PEN HALLOWELL’S Massachusetts Fourth Battalion of Infantry was reorganized as the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers. While Ned was briefly dispatched to Missouri to serve on the staff of General John C. Frémont, who had been given command of the Department of the West, Pen was commissioned a first lieutenant on July 1. His Harvard chum Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. also received his straps as a first lieutenant, with William Raymond Lee, a West Pointer and a distant kinsman to the Virginia general, as the regiment’s colonel and Paul Revere, the great-grandson of the silversmith, as its major; other venerable surnames—Whittier, Lowell, Cabot, Milton, and Abbott—staffed its officer corps. The Hallowells headed to Readville, Massachusetts, and Camp Meigs, just as American forces clashed with Confederate armies under General P. G. T. Beauregard at the Battle of Bull Run. The July 21 encounter proved a debacle for the United States. One month before, Shaw had promised his mother that “comparatively few men” would ever die in battle, but now he read reports of nearly 5,000 casualties—killed, wounded, and missing—with Union men roughly three-fifths of that figure. Lincoln had requested volunteers for ninety days only, but Bull Run forced leaders and soldiers on both sides to confront the possibility of a protracted, bloody conflict.17
Upon arriving at Readville, the soldiers of the Twentieth were examined by surgeons, who gauged their fitness to serve. Those who passed muster were handed a uniform and a complete suit of underclothing and instructed to head to the camp bathhouse for a warm soaking, an essential order given the unhygienic habits of even wealthy men in the 1860s. On August 19, Colonel Lee received orders to prepare for departure for the nation’s capital. Finally, on September 4, the regiment left Readville for Manhattan, where the soldiers were given a lavish send-off and toasted by Governor Andrew, who accompanied them that far. Pen Hallowell dined that evening with family friends “and one of their kid daughters,” Sarah Wharton Haydock. Before departing, Pen “gave her [his] photograph.” After a parade down Broadway, the unit boarded ship for Philadelphia and then on to Baltimore. As had Shaw nearly five months before, the Twentieth marched through Maryland with their state flag unfurled and their rifles loaded, but this time, as one officer remarked, “not a hiss or reproach was audible.” After commandeering a train pulling cattle cars, the dusty soldiers reached Washington and pitched their tents near Camp Kalorama on the Georgetown heights. Colonel Lee reported to General Ambrose Burnside, who folded the regiment, together with the First Massachusetts Sharpshooters and a Pennsylvania company, into his Fourth Brigade.18
Within the month, the Twentieth was to see far more action than they desired. In the days following Bull Run, General George B. McClellan began to build up the Army of the Potomac in preparation for an invasion of Virginia. In mid-October, he instructed General George McCall to march his division toward Leesburg, some thirty-five miles south of Washington, in hopes of discovering Confederate strength in the region; at the same time, he ordered General Charles Stone, whose division was guarding the Maryland banks of the Potomac River, to “make a slight demonstration” in hopes of driving Confederate forces farther south. Traveling with Stone was Colonel Edward Baker, a former Illinois congressman turned U.S. senator from Oregon. Believing he had troops enough at his disposal, Stone told McCall to pull back toward Washington, while he sent raiders, including the Massachusetts Twentieth and Fifteenth, across the Potomac in reconnaissance of a rebel encampment. They found no camp, so on the morning of October 21 the soldiers dispatched a rider in search of Stone and new orders. Instead of having the men recross the river, Baker brought up his troops to assist in the withdrawal, but the small number of boats at their disposal slowed the retreat.19
With McCall’s troops gone, the Confederates had numbers enough to deal with any American soldiers on their side of the Potomac. Virginia and Mississippi soldiers arrived by early afternoon, forcing the Massachusetts regiments to fan out just within the tree line, the steep drop-off known as Ball’s Bluff to their rear. By three o’clock, the fighting was fierce. “Come on, Harvard!” an officer shouted just as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. took a bullet to the chest. Only too late did Captain John Putnam see a redshirted Confederate taking aim, and he fell, his arm shattered, leaving his lieutenant, Pen Hallowell, in charge of his company. Baker dashed back and forth behind the Twentieth’s line, shouting for them to hold fast. “It made me wince to see the colonel, so handsome, brave, and cool, expose himself with such noble disdain,” Hallowell admitted. “He asked me whether I could stand off the rebels from working through the woods,” and after making “some cheery remarks,” the senator ran off into the smoke to shore up the faltering line. “You want a fight, don’t you?” he roared to others in the Twentieth, and they answered with a cheer. Pen was not with Baker when the lawmaker-turned-officer was hit by six balls, one of them entering his skull just above his left ear, making him the only sitting senator ever to die in battle.20
As their numbers dwindled, the men of the Twentieth peeled off their scarlet-lined gray coats. Many hung their new jackets from nearby branches, and Confederates, spying the shapes through the din, fired on the coats. Attempting to hold the end of the line, Hallowell noticed Confederates circling his flank and preparing to fire directly into the regiment’s side. Grabbing his rifle, the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant led six men to within range of the Virginians, posting each man behind a tree. The move proved to be “quite effective,” and the Confederates retreated. After the fact, Hallowell wished he had thought to ask Colonel Lee to rush “two or three companies” to his position, as he might have wiped “out anything opposed to it.” But with Baker killed, the soldiers began to retreat toward the bluff, reported one officer, “throwing away their arms [and] deserting their killed and wounded.” As they raced down the hill they discovered that most of the boats were either swamped or already pulling away for the other shore. Many threw off their gear as they plunged into the Potomac, while Confederates knelt at the crest and poured a steady fire down into the terrified men. “The river now seemed covered with heads and was as white as a great hail-storm where the rebel bullets struck,” a Massachusetts soldier recalled.21
Pen remained cool, methodically loading and firing as he slowly inched toward the river. He later chided himself for doing so, admitting that he was “green and foolish” at the bluff and that he instead should have been “looking after the men.” In truth, he did that too, but it was never the Quaker way to boast. Hallowell was still trying to hold his position when he heard Colonel Lee warn the fleeing men that he had done all he could do: “You are at liberty now to care for yourselves.” Captain William Bartlett of Company I raised his sword and bawled: “Those who desire to surrender will follow me.” Pen judged that “a perfectly rational thing” to do, yet he was not one of the eighty who tailed Bartlett. Those who opted to stay with Hallowell took cover until it grew dark. Most of the Massachusetts men knew how to swim, and around eight that night they set out for Harrison Island, which divided the Potomac at that point. The occasional shot slapped the water as the soldiers waded in. Pen was the last to do so, stripping off his heavy clothes, then swimming with his sword in one hand and his watch about his neck. Cold and weary, Hallowell and his company reached Maryland shores and located a temporary hospital, where a surgeon found him “a shirt and a pair of drawers.”22
McClellan denounced the last moments of the battle as a butchery. Union casualties—both killed and wounded—numbered 921, with another 700 missing, most of whom probably drowned as they swam for safety. Downstream, bodies washed ashore at Mount Vernon and at Washington for days. Lee and Revere were reported missing and presumed captured, and Confederates picked up as many as 1,500 abandoned weapons from the field. Confederate losses amounted to a mere 136 killed, with 117 wounded. Holmes survived, as did a young private in Hallowell’s company who had a ball completely pass through his body. Pen later saw him walking about camp, but only after writing a letter of condolence to the boy’s mother. “One is always startled when he meets a man who he thought was dead,” Hallowell reflected. The tragedy marked yet another loss for the United States, but at least one Boston editor remarked that while others fled, the Twentieth had behaved with “admirable discipline and soldierly conduct,” fighting “and firing with the precision of veteran soldiers.”23
IN THE AFTERMATH OF BALL’S BLUFF, THE EXHAUSTED UNION SURVIVORS witnessed a growing number of runaway slaves passing by, attempting to reach Washington or Baltimore. The exodus of enslaved Southerners had begun on May 23, 1861, just one month into the conflict, when three bondmen being used by the Confederate military to construct fortifications escaped and reached the gates of Fort Monroe, an enormous citadel at the southern tip of the Virginia peninsula that remained under federal control. In command of the fort was General Benjamin F. Butler, a Massachusetts Democrat who had arrived only the previous day. By late July, an overwhelmed Butler reported that approximately 900 refugees had reached Monroe and were living under his protection. Only 300 were “able-bodied men,” he informed the War Department, while the rest were women, children, and the aged, “substantially past hard labor.” With “many more coming in” daily, Butler requested clarity from Washington. “Are these men, women, and children slaves?” he wondered. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 yet remained in force, but with Virginia’s secession, had “all property relations ceased?” Since the first three runaways to reach the fort had been digging Confederate trenches, Butler, an attorney and politician before the war, thought it proper to consider the liberated a critical element of the war effort, and so “contraband of war.” The general’s idea accorded with traditional war-power theory, and on August 6, 1861, just one week after the receipt of Butler’s inquiry, Lincoln signed the Confiscation Act, which effectively ratified Butler’s suggestion by allowing for the seizure of all property, including bondmen, being used to support the Confederate military.24
Among the first runaways to reach the fort’s gates was Henry Jarvis. Born in Northampton County around 1836, Jarvis, commonly known as Harry, labored as an oysterman on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Jarvis’s owner was regarded as one of the meanest men in the region, and one day after he shot at Harry to scare him into working harder, the enslaved waterman decided he had “stood it ’bouts long” as he could and ran for the woods. Jarvis hid in the swamps for three weeks, evading the search parties and hunting dogs by crossing and then recrossing streams. One of Jarvis’s closest friends, Peter Drummond, whom he had known since he was six, smuggled him food when he could. Jarvis waited until his master threw a fancy ball, knowing the whites would be “drinkin’ an’ carousin’ night an’ day,” before slipping down to his owner’s dock to steal his canoe. Jarvis rigged up a small sail and set out for Monroe, thirty-five miles across the bay. A sudden storm tore his sail and nearly carried it away. But it was “death behind” him, so Harry prayed for God’s help and “made fas’ de sheet.” By morning, he had reached Fort Monroe.25
Upon arriving, the self-liberated, twenty-five-year-old oysterman asked to see General Butler and proudly announced himself to be “contraband.” He then asked to enlist. A startled Butler replied that the war was for reunion only, and that it was not a “black man’s war.” Jarvis glared down at the diminutive officer. “It would be a black man’s war ‘fore dey got fru,” he snapped. Jarvis had sailed alone, not wishing to put his wife in danger, although he hoped to send for her before too long. Shortly thereafter, Drummond somehow arrived. Despite offers of employment at Monroe, the two signed on as laborers on a ship sailing for Cuba and Haiti, and then on to Africa. Having no interest in settling in Liberia, they took jobs with another ship heading for Boston, hoping that by the time they returned to the States it would have “got to be a black man’s war fo’ suah.” Both would get their wish.26
The youngest son of devout Quakers and militant abolitionists, “Pen” Hallowell briefly served as lieutenant colonel in the Fifty-fourth before agreeing to lead the Fifty-fifth. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
During the months when Jarvis and Drummond were at sea, the nation continued to wrestle with the thorny questions of race and refugees. On November 24, two other black men arrived in Camp Benton, near Poolesville, Maryland, where the Twentieth was stationed. The two sold “cakes, pies, &c. to the Soldiers,” and appearing to be hungry themselves, a German-born soldier invited them to breakfast. As a loyal border state, Maryland was not subject to the Confiscation Act. When a slaveholder arrived at the camp, demanding that the army “deliver them up,” General Stone agreed and instructed Lieutenant George Nelson Macy to seize the alleged runaways and “escort the prisoners to their supposed owners.” Pen Hallowell, catching word of the incident, stormed into Macy’s tent and demanded to know by “what authority do you make New England soldiers do such work?” Macy retorted that he was merely carrying out Stone’s orders. “I didn’t think that any New England Gentlemen would do such dirty work,” Hallowell shot back. A true blue blood, Macy declared himself “insulted” at having his honor questioned in such a fashion, and a fuming Hallowell stamped away. A number of Massachusetts papers picked up the story, all of them denouncing the slave-catching “blood-hounds” of the Twentieth. That in turn led to a congressional inquiry as to whether Stone had given “aid and comfort to the rebels,” especially after it was discovered that the master in question resided in Leesburg, Virginia, and was not a loyal Maryland man.27
Three years older than Pen, and more politically minded, “Ned” Hallowell transferred from the Massachusetts Twentieth to the Fifty-fourth when black Americans were finally allowed to enlist, initially serving as lieutenant colonel. Hallowell commanded the unit from fall 1863 until the end of the war. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
The affair at least had the virtue of elevating Hallowell in rank. The regiment’s Company D largely comprised German nationals, the vast majority of whom were resolutely antislavery. Most of the company had joined “with the understanding that they, as Massachusetts men, would never be called upon to act against the colored people,” one soldier assured Governor Andrew. Lieutenant Macy, in their view, had performed the slaveholders’ “dirty work,” and they implored the governor “to let them have an officer who will not violate their consciences, principles & force them to escort slaves.” Anxious to protect himself politically, Andrew assured Wendell Phillips and Senator Charles Sumner that he was “greatly pained” by Macy’s actions and publicly denounced him as “unworthy of any position of honor, trust or responsibility.” (The governor did not mention that the orders originated with Stone, whom he had recently promoted and who enjoyed the patronage of the equally conservative General McClellan.) When Andrew promoted Pen to captain on November 26, it would be the first time the men of Company D agreed to serve under an American-born officer. A few months later, Congress prohibited the army from returning runaways.28
THAT SAME MONTH, YET ANOTHER CHILD OF PRIVILEGE DECIDED TO enter the fray. Members of the Adams family had never been warriors. Generation after generation had served their country as politicians and diplomats, but never by picking up a sword. Charles Francis Adams Jr., the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, was the third of seven children born to Charles Francis Adams Sr., a former Massachusetts state assemblyman and the Free Soil Party’s 1848 vice presidential nominee. In 1858 the elder Adams won election to the U.S. House of Representatives; after only two years in Washington, Lincoln nominated him to fill the critical role of minister to Great Britain. The diplomat took his fourth child, Henry, with him to London to serve as his secretary, leaving Charles behind to mind the family’s business affairs. Having graduated from Harvard in 1856, Charles was quite capable of doing so. But as an antislavery Republican, Charles began to fear that he was shirking his duty to country and cause by wasting the war in a Boston countinghouse. The previous July, he had gone to the train station to say his farewells to those college friends who had joined together with Shaw in the Second Massachusetts Infantry, and he confided to his mother that he “certainly env[ied] them very much.” Off to war they went, he lamented, “in good spirits and full of life and hope,” abandoning him to trudge slowly back to his books and ledgers.29
The July disaster at Bull Run helped clarify matters for Adams. He “began to realize,” he admitted later, “the mistake [he] had made in not going earlier.” He had missed both Shaw and Hallowell at Harvard, having graduated the year Rob arrived in Cambridge, but many young men his own age were risking their lives for their country too. In his many moments of self-examination, he acknowledged that his father had entrusted him “with the care of the bulk of his property, and never was property so difficult to manage” as during a civil war. Neither did Adams flatter himself a natural-born fighter. Although bored with the law, to join the army was to “give up a profession for which [he was] little adapted for one to which [he was] adapted even less.” Yet it was not simply patriotism, or a sense of missing out on a grand endeavor, that inclined him to serve. Charles resented the untenable position his father had placed him in, and his intense dislike of his father made his enlistment a spirited act of youthful rebellion. Adams later described his father as “rigid” and “narrow” and “even less companionable” than his grandfather John Quincy Adams. “The fact was that my father,” he remarked, “with the coldness of temperament natural to him, took a wholly wrong view of the subject” and “did not believe in any one taking a hand in [an] actual fight.” The elder Adams’s disdain for the military was not born of a Garrisonian pacifism, but from a patrician’s contempt for common soldiers. Charles Sr., his son feared, “wholly failed to realize that it would have been an actual disgrace had his family, of all possible families American, been wholly unrepresented in the field.” With Henry abroad, he himself “was the one to go.”30
Realizing he could never win his father’s approval, in mid-November Adams enlisted in the First Massachusetts Cavalry and only then picked up his pen to alert the U.S. minister to Britain. “I don’t know whether you will be surprised or disgusted or annoyed or distressed by the information,” Charles Jr. wrote to his father, sadly aware that “proud” would not be one of the adjectives the diplomat would use when he discovered that his son had joined up. “You know it now and I am glad of it!” Adams confessed. “I do not think it right that our family,” he lectured, “so prominent in this matter while it is a contest of words, should be wholly unrepresented when it has grown to be a conflict of blows.” The senior Adams responded to the news by refusing to respond, but Henry wrote back with a mixed blessing. “I do not think it my duty to express any regrets at the act,” Henry observed, owing to the “strange madness of the times,” although he prayed that his brother was not “throwing [his life] away.” If Henry could not bring himself to defy his father and congratulate his older brother for his courage, he did at least conclude his missive by promising to “be always ready to stand by you with what aid” he might provide.31
Being a Boston Brahmin, of course, had its advantages. Adams was enrolled as a first lieutenant. Not only was he not “a soldier by nature” but he admitted with the brutal honesty typical of his forebears that he was also “utterly lack[ing in] a nice, ingratiating tact in [his] dealings with other men.” Yet he thought the regiment a fine group and immediately regarded them as “kith and kin.” Hardly “popular or adored by” his men, Adams was a capable rider, athletic, and clearly bright and able, and so they respected him. Not so their colonel, Robert Williams. A West Point graduate and a Virginian by birth, Williams was the wrong choice to lead a unit of antislavery New Englanders. “He had a set of us young Harvard fellows for officers,” Adams mused, and as “he did not understand our Massachusetts men,” his discipline was brutal. In moments of crisis, the colonel was also “invariably drunk” and would prove to be “an utter failure.”32
AS 1862 DAWNED, THE MEN OF MASSACHUSETTS FOUND THEMSELVES scattered across the eastern half of the republic. Shaw and the Second were placed under the command of General Nathaniel Banks (the previous governor of Massachusetts) and deployed against General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. After Frémont issued a proclamation of emancipation in the West, which Lincoln feared would drive Missouri into the Confederacy, the president relieved the general of his command. Needing a new posting, Ned returned east, securing a commission as second lieutenant in the Twentieth on January 11. The Hallowell brothers and the Twentieth were transferred to the command of McClellan, who planned to ship his army down the Chesapeake Bay to Fort Monroe and then march northwest up the peninsula to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond.
Adams and the First Cavalry sailed even farther southward, landing between Charleston and Savannah, Georgia, in Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, which had been captured by the U.S. Navy the previous November. Both the trip and the landing were “pandemonium,” Adams reported to his brother. The unit’s major was drunk both before and after their passage, and the guns terrified the horses. “We are all green, officers, men and horses, and long practice is absolutely necessary,” he admitted. But as did all American soldiers, Adams hoped to take part in the capture of Charleston, long a hotbed of secession. “Ah,” he laughed, “wouldn’t I like to ride into Charleston!”33
As was the case for many Northern boys, the war provided Adams with his first view of the South and plantation slavery. On February 2, he rode out with the regiment’s advance guard to inspect an abandoned plantation on Barnwell Island. The once-elegant estate was littered with smashed furniture and “the remains of a library of fine books.” Even though Carolina planters “had brought all this on themselves,” he could not help regretting the damage. Adams revealed far less pity for the roughly 7,000 black “contrabands” who flooded into Beaufort, and his letters to his family betrayed the first hints that he would never truly come to understand the black men he would one day lead into battle. He thought the refugees “lazy [and] submissive,” although those were traits he at least attributed to their former masters as well. Otherwise, his stereotypical views of African Americans reflected not only the worst of biases but also an inability to understand the slaves’ survival mechanisms. The freedmen were “intelligent enough,” he assured his father, “but their intelligence too often takes the form of low cunning.” Adams believed them to be dishonest, a prejudice he never revised, and he complained to his father that most former slaves were “dreadful hypocrites,” as they “would say to their masters, as a rule, what today they would say to us.” Apart from the Confiscation Act of the previous July, the federal government had taken no steps against slavery, yet Adams could not grasp that black Carolinians were hedging their bets. Unable to formulate a consistent, rational assessment of black characteristics, he described the freedmen again and again as “lazy,” even as he observed that “they will work for money and indeed are anxious to get work.”34
Like all devout Republicans, Adams was confident that the war would be the undoing of slavery. “Not by any legal quibble of contrabands or doubtful theory of confiscation,” he argued, “but by stimulating free trade.” Northern travelers invariably remarked on Southern poverty, and as he rode along Carolina’s shore Adams thought himself “amid the institutions and implementations of the middle ages.” Coerced slave labor, he believed, was “awkward, cumbrous, expensive and behind the age,” and so the liberation of its working class “will be the greatest blessing which could happen to the South.” But what of the former slaves—or as Adams indelicately put it, how to resolve “the ‘nigger’ question?” Although “good tempered [and] patient,” blacks were too “docile” to survive in a tough world governed by “the operation of economic laws over which Government has no control.” Africans might once have been fierce, he theorized, but centuries of enslavement had “deprived the African of their capacity for freedom,” and so any attempt by the Lincoln administration to free or arm African Americans “would be a terrible calamity to the blacks as a race.” Wars often changed people, but it was not, evidently, in an Adams to evolve.35
Adams was right enough, at least, in his objections to the tactics of General David Hunter, a career soldier who had leveraged his friendship with Lincoln into being given command of the Department of the South (comprising Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida). The New York–born abolitionist found himself on the South Carolina coast, and in April 1862 he requested that the War Department send him 50,000 rifles and an equal number of “scarlet pantaloons” with which to arm and clothe “such loyal men as [he] could find in the country.” Although he did not say so directly, Hunter intended to free and enlist Carolina slaves well in advance of any initiative from Congress or the president. Some male refugees enthusiastically signed on, but as Adams noted, others had good cause to distrust all white men, and Hunter finally resorted to conscripting men from the Sea Islands into his unit. Adams suspected that Hunter’s great sin was to engage in a good cause but to do it badly. The general, Adams warned his father, had “gone crazy” and was inadvertently “doing the blacks all the harm” he could. When Hunter tried to encourage enlistments by declaring free all slaves in the three states of his department, an exasperated Lincoln overruled his decree and finally, in late September, removed him as commander. Adams felt “a strong regret at seeing the red-legged darkies march off.” Instead of provoking conservative Democrats in Congress and infuriating the commander-in-chief, Hunter might have waited for both black Southerners and white Northerners to get accustomed to the idea of African American military service. “The slaves would have moved when the day came,” he assured his father.36
WHILE ADAMS AND THE FIRST CAVALRY DRILLED ALONG THE SOUTH Carolina coast, the Hallowell brothers and the Twentieth inched their way toward Richmond as part of McClellan’s 120,000-strong army for the Peninsula Campaign. Although he had a vast numerical advantage over the Confederate forces, McClellan sought to avoid a full-scale engagement, hoping his superior host might somehow scare President Jefferson Davis into surrendering. The odds in favor of the Confederacy shifted considerably on May 31, however, when General Joseph E. Johnston launched an assault on the Army of the Potomac while it was divided by the Chickahominy River. In the subsequent battle of Seven Pines, Johnston was badly wounded and General Robert E. Lee became the new commander. Rechristening his forces the Army of Northern Virginia, the aggressive Lee abandoned Johnston’s strategy of retreat. In a series of clashes known as the Seven Days, the Confederates launched a sequence of punishing strikes against the timid McClellan.
Although nearly bedridden by illness, Ned Hallowell rejoined the Twentieth in time for the June 29 battle of Savage’s Station, the fourth of the Seven Days skirmishes. For the first time in the war, the two brothers found themselves fighting side by side. Although hoping to be part of a broad counterattack, Hallowell realized they were on their own; nevertheless, he vowed “to retard the advance of the enemy to the utmost.” Casualties were high on both sides, and buckshot caught Pen on his left side, “perforating [his] clothes and redden[ing his] skin.” Moments later, a ball scraped across his stomach; “the shock was as though some one had struck a blow on that part,” he remembered. A cannonball mowed down a column of men immediately to his right, soaring so close that it scorched Pen’s beard and burned off his eyebrows. Convinced that he would not survive the attack, Hallowell promised himself that if he ever “got out of this hole [he] should never again be scared.” Once again responsible for leading an orderly retreat, Pen hurried his company into dense woods, coming out after night fell only long enough to retrieve their wounded. Company D finally caught up with the bulk of the retreating U.S. Army, but only after abandoning several badly wounded officers at a nearby farmhouse, hoping that Confederate surgeons might save them.37
Ironically, by failing to press on toward Richmond, the conservative McClellan bettered the odds of the war evolving into a crusade against slavery. Had the Confederacy collapsed that spring, slavery across the defeated South might have survived intact. The New Jersey general had hectored his commander about not confiscating human property from white Southerners, and for that reason some Northern abolitionists grudgingly welcomed Lee’s victory. If the South was “overthrown in one great battle and totally scattered they will surrender at once to save their slaves,” one New York soldier remarked. “If the war be protracted we shall be driven gradually to emancipate the slaves.” Despite almost losing her son Oliver, Amelia Holmes held similarly tough-minded views, informing Pen’s and Ned’s sister that she prayed “that the war will go on till every slave is free, and that my child will always be ready to defend & struggle for humanity.” Amelia “hate[d] bloodshed,” but she “hate[d] slavery more.” Lydia Maria Child made much the same point to Sarah Shaw. “I pray to God that the victories may not come too fast, and that we may be castigated till we do the right thing,” she admitted. But then, reflecting that she was writing to the mother of a young officer in harm’s way, she added that her “own prayer gives me a pang, as if it were something wicked and monstrous.”38
The failure of the Peninsula Campaign also destroyed the initial operation against Charleston, as Adams and 10,000 soldiers were hurried north to protect the capital and reinforce the battered Army of the Potomac. The thought of a long, if not endless, war had begun to trouble Adams. Not that he doubted that the South would one day be defeated; he feared instead that it would become necessary to hold “down by force” the “savage and ignorant” Southern white population and that, in doing so, “a spirit of blind, revengeful fanaticism” could take hold in the North. Never fond of his state’s senior senator, Adams worried that Charles Sumner might “bankrupt the nation” to fund “immense standing armies,” all in hopes of bringing about the immediate destruction of slavery.39
WHILE GENERALLY OPEN TO THE GRADUAL EMPLOYMENT OF BLACK Southerners by the army, the highly educated Adams could be strangely obtuse when it came to the fundamental connection between slavery and secession, or the more immediate linkage of a protracted conflict with emancipation and black military service. Republicans in Congress were quicker to understand what was required. Although roughly 5,000 African Americans had served in New England state militias and the Continental Army during the Revolution, Congress flatly banned blacks from further service in either type of unit in 1792. As McClellan’s invasion wilted and soldiers returned north with stories of Confederate fortifications built by conscripted bondmen, some congressmen began to openly discuss amending earlier laws so as to allow Lincoln to employ runaway slaves. Even if no congressmen yet openly embraced the idea of black Americans serving in combat, Republicans at least insisted that families of bondmen who enlisted as laborers should become free too, a powerful motivation for those fortunate enough to have a choice.40
In the summer of 1862, unwilling to wait for the commander-in-chief to act, Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull introduced his latest bill regarding the confiscation of rebel property. While his earlier Confiscation Act of 1861 had merely allowed for the appropriation of bondmen being used by the Confederate military, Trumbull’s “An Act to Suppress Insurrection, to Punish Treason and Rebellion, to Seize and Confiscate the Property of Rebels,” commonly dubbed the Second Confiscation Act and passed on July 17, 1862, expanded considerably upon the first. Under this law, individuals known to be in rebellion against the United States were liable to have their “property, money, stocks, credit,” or human chattel commandeered, regardless of whether that property was being used to aid the Confederacy. Betraying the conflicted mind of Northern Republicans, the law empowered the president “to employ as many persons of African descent as he may deem necessary” and to “organize and use them in such manner as he may judge best”—but also to settle outside of the country any slave liberated by the act. Since Lincoln continued publicly to endorse the voluntary emigration of blacks, Trumbull’s statute concluded with the contrary provisions that the president could either employ former bondmen in “the suppression of this rebellion” or “make provisions for the transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country,” of the black men and women who reached Union lines.41
In part to clarify the bill, on that same hot July afternoon Congress also passed an updated Militia Act. Drafted by Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and championed in the lower chamber by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the revision of the 1792 Militia Act authorized President Lincoln to call up another 300,000 men, ages eighteen to forty-five, with quotas based on state populations. Going a step further than the Second Confiscation Act, Wilson’s bill allowed African Americans—free or contraband—to enlist in the military, where they might perform “camp service, or any other labor.” Provided their master was in rebellion, both the recruit and his “mother, wife and children” would become free upon his enlistment. But if the clause permitting black men into “any military or naval service” indicated that congressional Republicans at long last intended to admit them into the army, the wording of the law and a segregated pay scale suggested that they were not to be combatants. White privates were paid $13 each month, but section 15 of the Militia Act—thirty-one words destined to cause anger and division within black units—stipulated that black recruits would receive $10 per month, with $3 of that deducted to cover the cost of uniforms (a fee not charged to white soldiers). Given that Democrats on Capitol Hill denounced even the quietest overtures about black enlistments and proposed that freedmen serve without pay, a racially based pay scale was designed in part to assuage Northern concerns about black equality within the army. It also hinted that many in Congress doubted that black recruits would ever see actual combat.42
Because the Militia Act applied only to runaways fleeing disloyal Confederate masters, not to Northern-born freemen, Frederick Douglass blasted the laws as designed “to shield and protect slavery.” Instead of allowing black men from New York and Massachusetts to serve their country, Douglass charged in an incendiary editorial, Lincoln inconsistently permitted only rebel chattel to join up, and even then “he merely authorized the military commanders to use them as laborers.” Douglass and other Northern activists would have been more incensed yet had they been privy to the correspondence of Governor Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa. Although an antislavery Republican, Kirkwood assured General Henry Halleck that he required no “contrabands” to fill his state quota. But if the administration might send him some freedmen to do “negro work,” such as chopping wood, clearing roads, or general “police camp” labor—the term given to latrine duty and trash removal—Kirkwood would be obliged. Privately, the governor added that he had no objections to black men fighting too, for when “this war is over & we have summed up the entire loss of life,” he would “not have any serious regrets if it is found that a part of the dead are niggers and that all are not white men.”43
IN FACT, BY JULY 1862, IF NOT BEFORE, LINCOLN HAD ALREADY DECIDED to expand upon the Confiscation Acts with a decree of emancipation for those areas still in rebellion. Frustrated by McClellan’s refusal to advance, the president had reached the conclusion that emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.” At Seward’s urging, Lincoln locked his draft document on black liberty in his desk and awaited the proper moment. That opportunity arrived in September, when General Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia, 55,000 men strong, across the Potomac into Maryland in his first invasion of the United States. The Confederate incursion found the Second Massachusetts in northern Virginia and the Twentieth near Frederick, Maryland. Shaw’s regiment had just taken nearly 200 casualties at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Rob survived the action “without a scratch,” but he neglected to inform his family that his luck was due to the fact that his pocket watch had stopped a ball. As McClellan and General “Fighting Joe” Hooker hurried north from Washington to intercept Lee’s forces, the Second received orders to pull back and defend Maryland. By then, the Twentieth was already in the thick of it. During the night of September 14, Pen Hallowell, aware that Confederates were nearby, led his company on an eight-mile march to Middletown. “The night was made beautiful by the camp-fires of two hostile armies blazing in all directions,” he marveled.44
Stopping near the town of Sharpsburg the following day, Lee deployed his forces along a low ridge just behind Antietam Creek. Although Washington would have to be evacuated if Maryland fell, McClellan’s habitual timidity and overestimation of the Confederate numbers kept him from approaching Lee’s lines until the evening of September 16.
The battle commenced at dawn that day. Having tasted combat for the first time at Cedar Mountain, Shaw was surprised at how cool he remained as his company began to advance. He had not previously felt “the excitement which makes a man want to rush into the fight,” he admitted to his father several days later, yet he “did that day.” The morning air was thick with smoke and sizzling fragments of metal, and men on either side of Shaw were “wounded by shell, which were flying about loosely.” Shaw himself was struck in the neck by a spent minié ball, but it merely bruised the skin.45
Far to Shaw’s left, Ned Hallowell, who had been dispatched to make contact with General Napoleon J. T. Dana, galloped by his brother, “waving his sword in recognition” of the Twentieth. Ned was not by nature “a contentious man,” Pen mused, “but he was one of the few men who really seemed to enjoy a fight” and charged into the fray “with grim delight.”46
Adams was on the far edge of the battle. The cavalry arrived just as a furious artillery duel erupted, and with each passing moment he expected “to be ordered to advance on the Confederate batteries.” But owing in part to McClellan’s ill-planned assault, no orders came. At length, the men dismounted and the weary Adams “dropped quietly asleep,” waking only long enough to look after his terrified horse.47
Elsewhere on the field, chaos and panic took hold as thick smoke obscured battle flags and uniforms. The Fifty-Ninth New York was fresh from camp and so terrified that they fired a volley into the backs of the Fifteenth Massachusetts. Captain Holmes, only recently returned to the Twentieth after being shot at Ball’s Bluff, swatted a private in his company with the flat of his sword for firing into the rear before realizing that the Confederates had shifted behind him. Just as he bellowed for his company to face about he took a ball through his neck. The colors of the Twentieth went down four times in as many minutes, and of the five men who sought to raise the flag, four were wounded. Their efforts ceased only when a ball snapped the flagstaff. Amid the thunder, Pen Hallowell suddenly noticed two horses trying to comfort each other, “the one cribbing the neck of the other in a friendly way.” With Confederates pouring in a killing fire from three directions, the Twentieth, one sergeant wrote, “melted away, like frost in the sunshine.” A bullet shattered Pen’s left arm. As soldiers on both sides reloaded and fired as rapidly as they could, nobody paid Pen any attention as he stumbled through Confederate lines. As luck had it, his captain’s uniform had remained behind with his company’s baggage, and so on that day he wore his old private’s blouse. Cradling his fractured, bleeding arm, Pen covered several hundred yards before reaching the Nicodemus farm, which the U.S. Army had converted into a battlefield hospital.48
Hallowell lay down on the floor of the parlor, which was littered with men. Because the farm lay behind Confederate positions, Pen took care “to remove his shoulder-straps” and conceal his officer’s sword beneath a blanket. Holmes staggered in, holding the back of his neck; miraculously, the ball had barely missed his spine and arteries. A shell landed just outside the farmhouse, shattering the windows and killing several wounded soldiers lying in the yard. After twenty minutes, Union ambulances arrived to carry the most seriously wounded to Keedysville. Pen passed out several times; when he awoke his arm was “much swollen,” and he feared the doctors would amputate. Instead, Thomas Antisell, the medical director at the hospital, was called to examine him by a soldier from Philadelphia who thought the wounded man looked familiar. When Hallowell named his father, the stunned cavalryman exclaimed, “Why, I know him!” Antisell performed an exsection, an operation that removed the damaged bone and left Pen’s left arm nearly one inch shorter than the right. As Hallowell emerged from his stupor, he heard somebody remark, “He will hardly pull through.” But the next morning Hallowell was alive enough to see his brother gazing down at him. “They told me thee was dead,” Ned murmured after a long moment. Although himself coming down with typhoid fever, Ned had spent the previous night wandering the battlefield, turning over dead men in search of his brother. Pen shouted for an attendant, who persuaded Ned to lie down on the next cot.49
“The next surprise” for the Hallowell brothers was the unexpected appearance of Morris Hallowell. A skilled doctor, the elder Hallowell wanted his sons as far away as possible from the Maryland hospital, and he intended to transport them home to Philadelphia, which lay 170 miles away. He packed both Ned and Pen into a rented carriage and drove the fifteen miles to Hagerstown. There they found an empty freight car headed for Philadelphia; favoring speed over luxury, the Hallowells climbed aboard and tried to make themselves as comfortable as possible. Just as the train pulled away from the station, a young slave appeared at the car’s open door and “begged to be taken along.” Morris reached down and “yanked him into a dark corner of the car.” The lurching of the train made the trip a painful one for Pen and Ned, but the ordeal was soon over when the party arrived in Philadelphia the next afternoon.50
After initially declining the offer to lead the Fifty-fourth, Robert Gould Shaw, prompted by his mother’s anguish over his refusal, finally accepted Governor John A. Andrew’s offer. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Unlike in later conflicts, the army employed neither chaplains nor officers to inform families of their losses, so it fell to newspapers to print the names of those who had been killed or wounded. Pennsylvania newspapers reported that “Captain Norwood Hallowell has a severe wound in the left arm” and that his brother “Edward Hallowell is suffering from an attack of the typhoid fever.” But both, the Inquirer added, were resting in their father’s home. They were among the lucky. The Union wounded numbered a ghastly 9,540, with another 2,108 men killed. Although the U.S. losses slightly outnumbered the Confederate casualties of 10,316—marking Antietam as the single bloodiest day of the conflict—Lee’s invaders had been forced to retreat into Virginia, and so, by default, the Hallowells, as did the rest of the North, counted the day as a victory. Colonel Norman Hall of the Seventh Massachusetts praised Ned for serving as General Dana’s galloper despite being “scarcely able to stand,” and the general himself commended his aide for his “coolness, bravery, and activity” under fire.51
Charles Francis Adams Jr., who was expected to care for his family’s estate while his father and brother Henry served in Britain, enlisted in part as an act of rebellion against his father. Adams eventually served as colonel in the Massachusetts Fifth, but never learned to respect the black men under his command and later denounced Reconstruction-era reforms in the South. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
Shaw was luckier still. In the space of a month, a minié ball had smashed only his watch and a spent ball at Antietam had left him with nothing more than a bruise. But in the five weeks from Cedar Mountain to Antietam Creek, the war had claimed the lives of eighty men from the Second. “It seems almost as if nothing could justify a battle like that,” he confided to his sister Susanna, “and the horrors inseparable from it.” Shaw was disappointed that McClellan did not pursue Lee’s army across the Potomac. “We remained in possession of the field, and the enemy drew off undisturbed,” he lamented. “Whether that is all we wanted I don’t know; but I should think not.” In hopes of finding out how the other men from Massachusetts had fared, Shaw rode over to the Twentieth’s encampment. He found them much diminished in number. Holmes, he discovered, “has received his second ball,” and Pen Hallowell had been “badly hit in the arm.” Hallowell “is one of the No. 1 sort,” Rob assured his sister.52
Shaw also found time to write to Annie Haggerty, taking care to remind her of their trip to the opera nine months before. Rob had not seen her since, but his two close encounters with Confederate rifles had reminded him of his mortality and life outside, and after, the war. As a devoted son, Rob confessed that he had always loved his mother “more than anyone else in the world,” and so he thought himself “wicked” when he realized that he wanted to see Annie “even more.” By November, Shaw had not received a firm commitment from the young woman he had met only on several occasions, but her letters hinted of an attachment on her part. He knew his parents would think their distant courtship unwise, yet he assured his mother that if he “ever [got] home” alive, his hope was to “marry Annie,” and he wished that Sarah and his father “will be pleased with it.”53
BY THE TIME SHAW POSTED HIS MISSIVES, HIS WAR HAD BECOME A war for abolition. Five days after Antietam, Lincoln summoned his cabinet and reminded them of the proclamation he had drafted the previous summer. While the July 1862 Confiscation Acts liberated only those slaves owned by known rebels, Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation, issued on September 22, freed all enslaved Americans held within Confederate lines. Because Lincoln warned Confederates that they had 100 days to surrender before their human property was liberated (a deadline the president had no expectations that white Southerners would accept), and because most already captured portions of the South were exempted from the proclamation, some abolitionists were dismayed by the decree and its legalistic tone.
Even some moderate Northerners felt the same. Failing to comprehend how the actions of Lincoln and congressional Republicans had yoked the freedom of black Americans to the survival of the republic, or what impact word of the proclamation would have on black Southerners, Shaw did not “see what practical good” it would do. “Wherever our army has been, there remain no slaves, and the Proclamation will not free them where we can’t go.” Shaw little realized how the decree encouraged runaways such as Henry Jarvis to instead come to them. He was right enough, however, in fearing that “Jeff Davis will soon issue a proclamation threatening to hang every prisoner they take.”54
With the Militia Act and the Confiscation Acts on the books, and with the proclamation soon to go into effect, Northern whites at last began to perceive a drift toward the use of black troops. Both congressional Republicans and the president had taken their time arriving at this juncture. The previous January, when Edwin M. Stanton had replaced the hapless Simon Cameron in the War Department, he was surprised to discover that of all the cabinet members, only Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase believed it foolish to fight Confederate slaveholders without destroying the underlying cause of the rebellion. As early as August 1861, Shaw thought it “extraordinary” that the administration refused to “make use of the instrument that would finish the war sooner than anything else,—viz. the slaves.” If nothing else, runaway slaves amounted to “a line of spies right into their camp.” Shaw suspected that former slaves “would probably make a fine army after a little drill,” since pliable blacks “could certainly be kept under better discipline than our independent Yankees.” A year later, on the eve of Antietam, Shaw returned to the issue in a letter that revealed a change of heart on abolitionism. “I think the men would object to it very strongly at first,” he admitted to his father, “but they would get accustomed to it in time.” And indeed, a good many white soldiers increasingly embraced Shaw’s opinions. “Many a man who sneered at her ‘abolitionism’ now wishes he was a Mass. man,” one soldier recorded. “Their prejudice melts away and they begin to acknowledge that Mass. was right.”55
If nothing else, Northern moderates hoped that emancipation would strip the Confederacy of its enslaved supply corps and the men who dug trenches and constructed rebel fortifications. The “negroes employed to dig those entrenchments,” the Chicago Tribune insisted, “were worth to the rebels as much as that number of soldiers; and they would be worth as much to us.” The president’s decree also helped sway public opinion in Britain toward the Union cause. The London Spectator commented that, as the proclamation should draw “a great number of negroes Northwards,” where they might incite “the greatest jealousy” of white laborers, the obvious solution was to create “a large auxiliary negro army.” Unlike Shaw and Adams, however, the Spectator’s editor had every confidence that black heroism would pose “by far the most effective check on slavery propagandism” and the theory of African American inferiority. “But if the Northern statesmen will never look beyond the hour, what can save them?”56
Northern Democrats, who detested emancipation as an impediment to reconciliation with the South, were vociferous in denouncing plans for black enlistments. Congressional Democrats instinctively grasped the implications of the decree when combined with the Militia Act, and conservative politicians, publishers, and soldiers vented their rage against a campaign they feared they were powerless to halt. One Illinois soldier vowed that the day “the sole issue of the war [became] the ‘Nigger Question’” would be the moment that “the war spirit of the West will be virtually dead.” The majority of Western troops, he added, “will never strike a blow to free a negro.” Upon receiving his party’s nomination for governor that fall, New York’s Horatio Seymour tore into the president for shifting the war’s objectives from reunion to antislavery. As did Southern whites, Seymour warned that the inevitable consequence of “arming the slaves” would be “the butchery of women and children for scenes of lust and rapine, or arson and murder unparalleled in the history of the world.” Other critics simply thought the entire notion absurd. When former New York congressman James Brooks cautioned an audience that the enlistment of black men would elevate them as “fellow citizens,” his listeners erupted in laughter.57
Black activists, of course, had precisely such hopes. When African Americans met in an antislavery convention in Ypsilanti, Michigan, they not only promised to “stand ready to obey our country’s call, in a summons to arms,” but appointed a committee to call on the legislature and demand that it erase the word “white” from the state constitution. Some Northern blacks, however, doubted that lawmakers would reward them with equal rights and citizenship even if they served with distinction. Lincoln’s Illinois restricted the franchise to white males, as did Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Even after Republicans captured the Indiana statehouse, few assemblymen championed the repeal of the state’s “black laws,” in part because Democrats hoped to turn the issue of black soldiers to their advantage in 1864.58
Some white abolitionists were skeptical from the start, believing that Republicans began to consider black troops only because of the Union’s inability to best Confederate forces. Once there was “any real fighting to be done—any Bunker Hill battles to win,” one editor wrote, Northern politicians “would doubtless be then willing enough to have [black men] shot at or bayonetted.” Whether that service would then lead to a reversal of the Dred Scott decision was quite another matter.59
Inspired by Congress’s tentative moves toward black enlistments, a handful of whites surreptitiously sought to organize black units. As early as 1861, Kansas senator James Henry Lane, previously a free-soil partisan during “Bleeding Kansas,” had called for the use of Indian troops in the West, a request met with silence from the War Department. In the days after Lincoln’s proclamation, Lane began to enlist men into a black regiment. Writing to Secretary Stanton on August 5, Lane announced that he was “receiving negroes under the late act of Congress,” and he wondered whether the White House had “any objections.” Stanton replied that while the Militia and Confiscation Acts empowered the president to employ black men in the military, Lincoln had not yet “given authority to raise such troops in Kansas.” The old radical continued to quietly do so anyway, dubbing his unit the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, although he thought it prudent to “keep [the soldiers] from public view.”60
FOR THE BRAHMINS, AS FOR MUCH OF THE NORTH, CHRISTMAS ARRIVED with mixed news. The Hallowell brothers continued to convalesce in their parents’ Philadelphia home, in the midst of a large number of loving Quaker friends and relatives and, much to Ned’s liking, good food and wine. Following the Antietam campaign, Adams and the First Cavalry settled into winter camp at Aquia Creek, Virginia. On December 1, just shy of twelve months after enlisting, news reached Adams that the War Department had promoted him to captain, and for once the dour officer was pleased. “I took great pride in it,” he admitted to his diary, “and devoted myself to my duties and improvement.” But for Shaw, some fifty miles north of Adams at Fairfax Station, the news was not good: he received word on Christmas Day that his cousin Theodore Parkman had died on December 16, one day after the Union debacle at Fredericksburg, Virginia, which took the lives of 1,284 U.S. soldiers; another 11,369 men were wounded, captured, or reported missing. “I think it’s the saddest death we have had yet,” Rob told his father. “I never knew a fellow like him for sticking to his principles.” With the Army of the Potomac retreating toward Washington, and rumor hinting that an aggrieved president might soon relieve General Ambrose Burnside of his command, the Harvard men all understood that their labors were far from over.61
The year 1862 also ended in considerable disquiet for African Americans, some of whom anxiously awaited January 1 and with it the reading of the final Emancipation Declaration. Others continued to doubt that the country of their birth would ever afford them equal rights, or even that the United States could successfully subdue the Confederacy or liberate its millions of enslaved subjects. On occasion, hope and fear divided African American families. As New Year’s Day approached, the black community of Boston prepared to celebrate it “as a day of jubilee” at the Tremont Temple, with Frederick Douglass to deliver the keynote oration. In December, Douglass had given speeches across New York and New England, each with the same refrain. “All we ask,” he promised his audiences, “is that you treat us as you treat others. Protect us in our rights, and if we cannot sustain ourselves, let us go down.” Douglass had long denounced the Republicans for their support of black emigration to Liberia, hints of which had crept into Lincoln’s preliminary decree. But Lewis Douglass, Frederick’s eldest son, was among those who placed little hope in the republic’s future, and that October he considered traveling to the Colombian province of Panama with Senator Samuel Pomeroy, an advocate of colonization. The venture came to nothing when Secretary Seward refused to fund the project, but Lewis and his younger brother Charles continued in their doubts. Yet everything might change, they believed, if the president and his cabinet dropped their misgivings and agreed to the formation of a black regiment.62