Thunder at the Gates

WHEN WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON FAILED TO APPEAR, THE ABOLITIONISTS huddled within the Tremont Temple on the morning of January 1 were not long disappointed. William Wells Brown, a Kentucky-born runaway turned novelist who was then living in Cambridge, rose to speak, as did Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass. Yet another speaker promised those in the audience that once they “got through with the enemies of the black man in Dixie,” they would carry the fight for equal rights across the North. Shortly before three o’clock, a messenger arrived at the temple’s doors with news that “the President’s Proclamation was coming over the wires.” The chamber erupted with shouts of “Glory to God!” Some activists had worried that the president would retreat from his promise following his party’s setbacks in the fall elections, but Abraham Lincoln held true to his pledge: “I have issued the emancipation proclamation, and I can not retract it.” Not only did the January decree drop any references to black emigration, it included the assurance that “such persons of suitable [physical] condition, will be received into the armed services of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts.” As the last words were read, the Boston Journal reported, “cheers were proposed for the President and for the proclamation, the whole audience rising to their feet and shouting at the tops of their voices.”¹

The mood was less celebratory in Confederate Richmond. The intimations that the American government intended to liberate and arm Southern bondmen evoked memories of Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 revolt and John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry just four years before. Confederate president Jefferson Davis condemned the proclamation as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man” and denounced Lincoln’s efforts to transform “several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers,” into brutes “encouraged to a general assassination of their masters.” Ironically, although many Northern whites could not imagine black soldiers as anything but manual laborers, Southern whites feared the worst. With Lincoln’s government preparing to arm “the negroes to fight us,” one Southern soldier warned his wife, the Confederacy now expected “the blood[iest] year of the war.” In expectations of Lincoln’s move, Davis had issued a proclamation on Christmas Eve, declaring that “all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong to be dealt with” as rebels and runaways. Moreover, and confirming Robert Shaw’s fears, those “commissioned officers of the United States” who were “found serving in company with armed slaves” would not be regarded as “soldiers engaged in honorable warfare” but as “criminals deserving death.” Officers of black regiments, in short, were to be considered as John Browns, and “whenever captured reserved for execution.”²

Black Americans and their progressive allies in Washington remained undeterred. Kansas senator James Henry Lane, who had been stealthily enlisting black soldiers since the previous summer, rose in the Senate on December 28 to give notice that he planned to draft legislation authorizing Lincoln to raise 200 regiments “composed of persons of African descent.” But Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens, renowned as the “radical of radicals,” got his bill done first. Introduced into the House on January 12, 1863, Stevens’s handiwork was only a bit more modest than Lane’s vision; he called for the creation of 150 black regiments, or 150,000 soldiers. Although the 1862 Militia Act had alluded to black service, Stevens wished to clarify that African Americans would be soldiers, not laborers. His bill also stipulated that the men would draw the same pay as white soldiers, and that its “company officers may be either white or black.” An astute politician, Stevens was aware of the level of opposition to black troops, but he hoped the reality of expiring enlistments would silence most critics. Large numbers of white soldiers had signed on in the spring of 1861 for two-year deployments, and the July Militia Act had raised additional white troops for three months only. If Stevens’s bill passed, New York attorney George Templeton Strong remarked, “we need not be uneasy about the regiments to be mustered out,” as there “will be 300,000 Ethiop[ian]s to fill the gap.”³

The response of Democratic editors and politicians was fierce, especially among conservatives who continued to insist that only demands for black freedom blocked the path to a negotiated peace. One Detroit publisher alleged that Congress intended to “surround” the president with a permanent palace guard of “nigger soldiers” who would then assist him in “strip[ping] the States of all their Constitutional power.” The House debate dragged on over a long seven days. Charles Wickliffe of Kentucky alternated between ridiculing the very notion of black soldiers and fretting about the impact of such legislation on white troops. Deriding black men as “poor, deluded, uninformed creatures [who] will not stand the firing of a gun” before running, Wickliffe thought it unfathomable that the United States could defeat the Confederacy only by “employ[ing] the negro slave and put[ting] Sambo, or some other man meaner than Sambo, in command.” Stevens, still feisty and dangerous in debate at age seventy-one, shredded Wickliffe’s insinuations that black officers might soon bark orders at white privates. “I do not expect to live to see the day when, in this Christian land, merit shall counter-balance the crime of color,” he snapped. “The only place where they can find equality is the grave. There all God’s children are equal.”⁴

Much to Stevens’s dismay, the bill that passed the House on February 3 by a vote of 83 to 54 did so only after substantial revisions. The final version banned the enlistment of bondmen who belonged to loyal masters in border states, and it even prohibited the establishment of recruiting stations for already-free blacks in the loyal slave states. Worse yet, when the bill reached the Senate, it was referred to the Committee on Military Affairs, where Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, the architect of the previous year’s Militia Act, ordered the bill withdrawn, ostensibly on the grounds that it unnecessarily replicated his earlier handiwork. Quite possibly, Wilson feared that Stevens’s more progressive bill would perish in the Senate. But he also allowed section 15 of his 1862 act to survive, together with its racially based pay inequality, a decision that was to haunt his state over the next two years. Even so, the president pronounced himself happy to work from Wilson’s earlier legislation. Despite the “great aversion to the Negro Soldier Bill” on the part of Democrats, Lincoln remarked, he planned to forge ahead with the enlistment of black soldiers, and African Americans now began to be included on the draft rolls of Northern states.⁵

Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew did not share Wilson’s qualms about Stevens’s lavish plan; while the Senate focused on recruiting runaways as laborers, Andrew was prepared to enlist Northern freemen. Even before Stevens introduced his bill, the governor had contacted Secretary of War Edwin Stanton about raising a black regiment in his state. Although a committed antislavery man, Andrew was also a shrewd politician, and he played on Lincoln’s fear of a court challenge to the Emancipation Proclamation. Recruiting black troops, one of the governor’s advisers observed, would “silence all doubts as to the legality of the Act of Emancipation by taking it out of the civil acts & making it a purely military one.” On January 26, Stanton replied, authorizing Andrew to recruit “persons of African descent, organized into separate corps” for “three years, or until sooner discharged.” Because the Stevens bill had just passed the House, Andrew wrote again for clarification regarding black officers. Since the bill, which Andrew expected to become law, did “not prohibit colored officers in colored Regiments,” the governor urged Stanton to “withdraw [his] prohibition so far as concerns line officers, assistant surgeons & chaplain[s].” The secretary replied that the War Department awaited Senate action on the bill. When Wilson buried Stevens’s act, the ban on black commissioned officers remained, at least for the foreseeable future.⁶

EVEN HAD THE WAR DEPARTMENT AGREED TO BLACK OFFICERS, THE proposed regiment’s first colonel and captains had to be men of experience. A unit led by inexperienced officers could meet with disaster in combat, dooming the entire experiment with black soldiers. Despite being a kinsman of the Shaws, Andrew’s adviser, entrepreneur John Murray Forbes, advanced the name of Ned Hallowell, praising him as “a top man [and] a regular Negrophile.” If the elder brother served as colonel, Forbes reasoned, “his [younger] Brother” Pen might consent to serve in some supporting capacity in “the Black Regt.” Without waiting for a reply, Forbes dashed off a letter to Ned to gauge his interest. When Hallowell was slow to respond, Forbes contacted the governor yet again, assuring him that Ned was “a born leader” who had “showed himself brave and full of resources as a soldier.” Most of all, Forbes thought, Ned had “conviction”: he may have had aspirations to win higher rank, but more importantly, he was “ambitious in a larger way” in his desire to reform his country.⁷

The governor had other thoughts. His “mind [was] drawn towards Captain Shaw by many considerations,” he admitted. Like the Hallowell brothers, Shaw had distinguished himself in combat, and Andrew required “young men of military experience.” Since this was to be “the first colored regiment to be raised in the free States,” its “success or its failure” would have enormous bearing on other black regiments, and so it was imperative that the men be trained correctly. But Andrew also had politics and practicalities in mind. As a mainstream Republican who lacked the abolitionist fervor of his parents, Shaw could “attract the support, sympathy and active cooperation of many besides his immediate family and friends,” while the reputation of Frank and Sarah Shaw might appease those abolitionists who thought the son too moderate. And as the state would have to raise considerable funds for the regiment, their affluence played a role in his choice as well. Ned Hallowell’s father was but “a quaker gentleman of Philadelphia,” of modest wealth and limited connections, and so the governor regarded Ned as more appropriate for a lieutenant colonelcy.⁸

On January 30, Governor Andrew mailed two letters, a lengthy one to Frank Shaw and a second, shorter missive to Rob. As the regiment was “perhaps the most important corps to be organized during the whole war,” as well as a “model for all future colored regiments,” Andrew emphasized to Frank, its officers “must necessarily be gentlemen of the highest tone and honor.” As such, he intended to nominate as colonel “your son,” and “the Lt. Colonelcy to Capt. Hallowell.” Andrew revealed that two officers, one from New York and one from Connecticut, had already written to express their interest, but he did not wish to “start the regiment under a stranger to Massachusetts.” Should Rob decline the offer, Andrew preferred “its being kept reasonably quiet.” The governor’s brief memo to Rob simply noted that he had written to his father, “expressing to him my sense of the importance of his undertaking,” while urging the young captain “to reply to this offer at the earliest day” possible.⁹

The dual letters, together with the reference to the father in the note to the son, suggest that the governor expected parental pressure to come down on Rob. If so, Frank Shaw did all that and more. Rather than merely forwarding the governor’s letter, as Andrew requested, Frank Shaw boarded a train for Washington and then journeyed on to Stafford Courthouse in northern Virginia, where the Second Massachusetts was encamped. Although Frank sought to impress upon his son that both he and the governor considered “it a most important command [and] a great honour,” Rob’s first inclination was to turn down the post. Having “seen the elephant” together, as soldiers dubbed their first experience in battle, Shaw regarded the men of the Second as his brothers. Rob understood that his mother would especially be disappointed in his refusal to lead black troops, but had he accepted, he confided to his beloved Annie, “it would only have been from a sense of duty.” Frank Shaw left, distraught, with a letter in hand from Rob declining the commission.¹⁰

Within days, Rob “began to think [he] had made a mistake in refusing Governor Andrew’s offer.” After the Emancipation Proclamation, he reasoned, “the undertaking will not meet with so much opposition as was at first supposed,” although he still hoped that Annie would not “care if it is made fun of.” On February 5, Rob cabled his father: “Please Destroy My Letter and Telegraph to the Governor that I Accept.” Three days later, he wrote again to his father that he was reconciled to the task, and that he required a furlough from Governor Andrew to return home to Massachusetts. “Tell Mother I have not wavered at all, since my final decision,” he promised. “I feel that if we can get the men, all will go right.”¹¹

What caused Shaw’s change of heart? Certainly his parents played a role. When she heard of her son’s refusal, Sarah dashed off a blunt letter to Andrew. “This decision has caused me the bitterest disappointment I have ever experienced,” she confessed. “It would have been the proudest moment of my life and I could have died satisfied that I have not lived in vain.” If Rob was not privy to that missive, he certainly knew his mother’s mind and could guess, as she assured Andrew, that she “shed bitter tears over his refusal.” Sarah also rushed a cable to her son indicating that Annie did not “disapprove” of his appointment, and that mattered greatly. He had always believed, he assured Annie, that it was important “to prove that a negro can be made a good soldier.” Most of all, the memory of his old friend James Savage nudged him to reconsider. A proud Republican, Savage had once remarked that the only job that could persuade him to abandon the Second would be to serve with a black regiment. Savage had died the previous October from wounds received at Cedar Mountain, and Shaw mourned him as a man of “purity [and] conscientiousness.” The best one could do in life, Rob swore, was to “resemble James Savage.” And so he accepted.¹²

While Frank Shaw hurried Rob’s latest response to the governor, Andrew urged Ned Hallowell, who needed far less convincing, into accepting a position in the regiment. As Andrew explained it to Frank Shaw, he “wish[ed] both gentlemen” to be part of his state’s experiment, and “their relative rank” was of secondary consideration. Fearing that Rob’s reluctance was due to fear of command, as the potential failure of the regiment was a very real consideration, Andrew was willing to name Shaw the “Lieut. Colonel, if desired,” with Hallowell as the regiment’s colonel. Morris Hallowell had already written from Philadelphia to say that both of his sons were “anxious to be useful and would gladly accept a position” in the proposed “Coloured Regiments.” But late in the evening of February 7, Governor Andrew received word of Shaw’s telegram. In response, Andrew notified Shaw that he had been “designated as Colonel” and should hasten to Boston “as soon as possible to assist in the organization of the regiment.”¹³

Civil War regiments comprised ten companies, each with precisely 100 men, an arrangement explicated in General Joseph William Hardee’s popular 1855 manual, Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics for the Exercise and Manoeuvres of Troops. Governors of each state selected their regiments’ senior officers with the approval of the War Department, and then the units were folded into the U.S. Army. Because there were already fifty-three infantry regiments from Massachusetts, Andrew’s experiment was christened the Fifty-fourth. On February 9, Andrew penned a note to Secretary Stanton, informing him of Shaw’s appointment. By the month’s end, William Lloyd Garrison was able to proudly publish the “complete roster” of officers. At the last moment, Andrew inexplicably chose to reshuffle the Hallowell brothers, so that the younger Pen advanced to the rank of lieutenant colonel and Ned was assigned the lower rank of major. To appease Stanton, the governor selected a white doctor, Lincoln Stone, as the unit’s head surgeon, but he insisted on John DeGrasse, “a colored physician in Boston, to be Assistant Surgeon.” Andrew had also requested that Colonel William Lee forward him names for junior positions, and among those on the list were Garth Wilkinson James—Wilkie, to his friends—son of the wealthy theologian Henry James Sr., and Cabot Russell, a soldier in the Twentieth. Edward Waldo Emerson, the nineteen-year-old son of essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, repeatedly attempted to sign on, but the sickly youth failed every physical examination. Even so, as Wilkie’s brother Henry James Jr. marveled, the Fifty-fourth’s officer corps “bristled with Boston genealogies.”¹⁴

The roster of Brahmin officers went a long way in appeasing public opinion in Massachusetts. “Now that it is decided that coloured troops shall be raised,” Shaw assured Annie, “people seem to look upon it as a matter of course.” The shift had much to do, as Andrew had planned, with Rob. As Effie Shaw’s fiancé Charles Russell Lowell bluntly observed, the first black regiment from the North had to be “soberly [run] and not spoilt by too much fanaticism,” by which he meant militant abolitionism. And “Bob Shaw,” Lowell added, “is not a fanatic.” As was the case with many antislavery New Englanders of privilege, Shaw knew few black men intimately, and his discourse indicated as much. In two letters from late February, Shaw felt comfortable using the term “darkey” with his mother, and he laughed to his cousin Elizabeth Russell Lyman that he had become “a Nigger Col.” Some white women who traveled with the army to the Carolina coast to work with freedpeople embraced the epithet “Nigger Teachers,” in part to lessen its sting, but in the late winter of 1863 that appears not to have been the case with Shaw, who wrote to Lyman’s husband Theodore, then in Europe, to say that if he returned home he might serve “as chaplain if he would like to go into a good nigger concern.”¹⁵

GOVERNOR ANDREW HAD HIS OFFICERS; NOW HE NEEDED RECRUITS. The 1860 census had indicated that only 1,973 African American males of military age resided in Massachusetts, and according to the superintendent of the census, if black men volunteered in the same ratio as whites, that would amount to only 394 soldiers. That left the proposed regiment short by at least 600, assuming that all 394 men could pass their physicals. On top of this, Congress was about to pass a new conscription act—it did so on March 3—and with Wilson’s Militia Act now interpreted to include African Americans, another round of enlistments would further drain the state of young blacks, who would serve in the army as laborers. The obvious if unprecedented answer, Forbes counseled, was to recruit beyond the borders of the Bay State.¹⁶

To coordinate the recruitment effort, Andrew pieced together a “Committee of Consultation,” commonly dubbed the “Black Committee.” He persuaded wealthy abolitionist George Luther Stearns to chair the group. As an industrialist who had amassed a fortune in manufacturing lead pipe, Stearns could appeal to such fellow capitalists as Forbes and Amos Lawrence, who also joined the committee. Yet as a militant abolitionist and one of the “Secret Six” benefactors of Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Stearns also enjoyed the credentials to charm what one officer described as “those advanced thinkers and workers who had striven to help and free the slave.” As Andrew had always assumed, Frank Shaw joined the committee as well, promising to raise subscriptions from his New York associates for up to $2,500, while Richard Price Hallowell, the second-oldest of the four brothers, consented to serve as the group’s treasurer. With the committee in such “good hands,” a skeptical Charles Russell Lowell remarked, “this is likely to be a success, if any black regiment can be a success.”¹⁷

For all of its wealth and prestige, the main flaw in a recruitment committee drawn exclusively from white businessmen was that, Stearns aside, it lacked influence in the black community. At one of its earliest meetings, Richard Hallowell suggested—at least as reported by Rob, once again revealing his racial prejudices—that it might “please the coloured population” they intended to contact to have “some influential darkey on the committee.” Stearns was friendly with black activist Lewis Hayden, a member of Boston’s vigilance committee who had spent the previous decades assisting runaways, and Hayden vowed to promote the committee’s cause in the city’s African Meeting House.¹⁸

But as promising as that was, Stearns understood that what was required was a campaign to the west of Massachusetts. Stearns traveled through New York State as far as Buffalo, meeting with black leaders as he journeyed along the Erie Canal. Upon reaching Buffalo, Stearns hired John Mercer Langston, a Virginia-born freeman who had attended Oberlin College before being admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854. After Stearns and Langston opened an office in Buffalo, Andrew’s committee promised to pay New York State operatives $2 for each recruit, give each soldier a bounty of $50, and cover the costs of transportation to Readville. New York’s black community put scant trust in white Republicans, however, since they had refused to endorse the failed 1860 ballot initiative removing the property restriction imposed on black voters, and so even when Stearns was present at a recruitment site, he wisely “insisted that [Langston] do the speaking.”¹⁹

Following the establishment of the Buffalo recruiting office, Langston turned his attentions to his adoptive state of Ohio. Home to 8,000 black men, Ohio had the largest pool of potential African American soldiers after New York and Pennsylvania, and Langston enjoyed the support of the state’s urbanized black leaders, village shopkeepers, rural farmers, and teachers, including one James Monroe Trotter. As in all of the Midwestern states, Ohio’s “Black Laws” restricted the franchise to white males, and Governor David Tod, a Democrat, warned Langston “that this is a white man’s government [and] that white men are able to defend and protect it.” But because Andrew promised to organize any Ohio recruits “into separate companies” within the Fifty-fourth, Tod could count “the colored men of Ohio” as part of his state’s quota allotment under the new conscription act. If nothing else, Langston’s efforts reduced the number of black males in Tod’s state while easing the draft’s burden on its white farmers.²⁰

In the Empire State, meanwhile, the obvious choice to raise further awareness for the regiment was Frederick Douglass. Stearns had known the Rochester abolitionist for many years through mutual friends John Brown and Gerrit Smith, and in June he contacted Douglass to work on behalf of the Fifty-fourth both along the canal and in Washington. “Four or five weeks ago this regiment was a thing of speculation and doubt,” the black activist announced in his Douglass’ Monthly, but thanks to “the zeal, industry, and efficiency of Mr. George L. Stearns,” a “network of influence has rapidly spread over the whole West.” Writing privately to Smith, Douglass admitted that convincing black audiences of the wisdom of dying for a country that refused to recognize them as citizens was often “not to [his] taste.” Yet he had only admiration for Stearns, who regarded “the whole United States as his field for recruiting purposes.” Whatever doubts Douglass had regarding the Lincoln administration, he believed that “to arrest, overwhelm, and annihilate the rebellion [was] our first and highest duty.” Douglass assured Smith that he “shall probably go soon into the work again,” a pledge that revealed how deeply connected the formation of the regiment was with black and abolitionist aspirations.²¹

Douglass was perhaps being overly cautious. For those young black Northerners who had tried to enlist as early as 1861, no public relations campaign was necessary. Black abolitionists recognized Governor Andrew as their ally, yet they also wished to make it clear that their churches and vigilance committees were not subordinate to Stearns’s agency. On February 18, even before Stearns took to the hustings, black activists convened in New Bedford’s Liberty Hall for a massive “war meeting.” Nearly 1,500 people thronged into the building on the corner of Purchase and William Streets. The Reverend William Jackson gaveled the meeting to order before turning the podium over to William Wells Brown. Concerned that some in the audience were reluctant to serve a country that denied them civil equality, Brown counseled that the “prejudice against the race must be overcome by degrees.” In any event, “it was a false principle,” Brown shouted, to equate moderate Republicans with the proslavery administration in Richmond. “Once armed,” he promised, black men “would fight till freedom was established in every State.” Every young man in the auditorium should sign up immediately, Brown urged, as “one Massachusetts colored regiment in South Carolina would make the Confederate Government quake with fear.” Several dozen men shoved to the front to inscribe their “names on the roll.” The first to do so was sea cook James Henry Gooding; somewhat farther back in line was the Virginia runaway then considering a life in the ministry, William H. Carney Jr. Either he was not superstitious or merely too enthusiastic to notice, but Carney was the thirteenth New Bedford man to go for a soldier.²²

As the abolitionist and black press spread the word, activists convened meetings at various locales in Philadelphia. The first was held at the Oak Street Baptist Church in the western part of the city. There, Pennsylvania-born mariner turned cabinet-maker George Stephens told of his near-enslavement after docking in Charleston five years before; his hatred of slavery, he promised, would lead him to enlist in Boston at the meeting’s end. By comparison, the conference held one week later on a frigid February evening in Franklin Hall turned acrimonious after Robert Purvis introduced a resolution praising Massachusetts as “the first in freeing her slaves [and] the first in awarding black men the acknowledgement of citizenship.” Born free in Charleston, the light-skinned Purvis had attended Amherst College before marrying into money after his courtship of Harriet Forten, the daughter of black merchant James Forten Sr. and kinswoman to Peter Vogelsang. Leaping from his seat in the audience, David Bustill Bowser, a portraitist who had once painted John Brown, denounced Purvis “in strong terms” as a pawn of white politicians he doubted would ever do justice to black Americans. “He thought that the colored people had no rights whatever under the Constitution of Pennsylvania,” he yelled, “and the government doesn’t mean to give them rights.” As the raucous meeting drew to a close, Purvis pushed through a weaker resolution calling for the appointment of a committee “for the further consideration of this subject.” In the end, Bowser relented.²³

The biggest crowds in New York were reserved for Frederick Douglass. As a former slave who regarded his youthful fistfight with a slave-breaker as the defining moment in his life, he understood the desire for vengeance on the part of Northern blacks, many of whom were just one generation out of slavery. More than any other advocate of the Fifty-fourth, Douglass fused patriotic oratory with a rage against Confederate officials. Since the dawn of the war, Douglass had publicly argued that “Uncle Sam had been fighting with his soft white hand, and had his black hand tied behind him.” Determined to use the conflict to overturn the hated Dred Scott decision, Douglass believed that once a black man could “get an eagle on [his] button and a musket on [his] shoulder,” all of “the devils in Jeff Davis’ dominions cannot keep [him] out of citizenship.” Although twenty-five years away from slavery, Douglass understood that many of his listeners had scores to settle. For too long, he assured one audience, a series of presidents had been their enemy. “Now the government has given authority” to black men, Douglass thundered, “to shoulder a musket and go down and kill white rebels.” Serving in their country’s military could earn them political rights even as it allowed blacks to achieve “retribution [against] slaveholders.”²⁴

Speaking in small towns and hamlets across the Empire State was all to the good, but larger audiences awaited. In February, Douglass traveled to Manhattan to speak at Cooper Union, the East Village venue where Lincoln had given a famous speech that secured his reputation in early 1860. Employing his usual blend of emotionalism, sarcastic humor, and fury, Douglass filled the institute’s Great Hall with his rich baritone. Since the emancipation proclamation, Douglass said, with great irony, he felt more like a citizen “and felt whiter, and comb[ed his] hair with much less difficulty.” He also drew “laughter and applause” for mocking Northern whites who maintained “that the negroes would not make good soldiers” while at the same time complaining “that perhaps they would fight so well that they would have to be promoted above white men.” He then turned serious. Although the governors of New York and Ohio refused to recruit black soldiers, Massachusetts was ready to do so. “Away with prejudice,” he demanded, “and in this struggle for liberty [and] country,” let the “black iron hand of the colored man fall heavily on the head of the slaveholding traitors and rebels.” Stop calling black men “‘nigger’, and call them soldiers,” Douglass concluded. “Give them a chance! Give them a chance!”²⁵

For Douglass, the pen had always been as important as the podium. On March 2, he published an 1,100-word manifesto that he correctly assumed would be reprinted across the North. Entitled, “Men of Color, to Arms,” Douglass pulled together all of the arguments he had been making since “the Rebel cannon shattered the walls of Sumter.” Confronting black antigovernment critics of military service, he repeated his fears that should black men not sign on after Massachusetts “welcomes you to arms as her soldiers,” they would “justify the past contempt of the Government towards you.” Rather than dwell upon historical wrongs, black Americans needed to remember “that every negro hater and slavery-lover in the land regards the arming of negroes as a calamity.” Four million enslaved Americans awaited their arrival in the South, “and the chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries.” Drawing links between black men in blue and those who in the past had sacrificed their lives for freedom, Douglass urged: “Remember Denmark Vesey, of Charleston. Remember Nathaniel Turner, of South Hampton” and those “who followed noble John Brown, and fell as glorious martyrs.” Young men were already marching toward “this first regiment at Readville,” Douglass wrote, and he promised to “forward to Boston all persons adjudged fit to be mustered.”²⁶

As expected in a day of cut-and-paste journalism, not only was the essay reprinted in black-owned newspapers such as Robert Hamilton’s Manhattan-based Weekly Anglo-African, abolitionist journals such as Garrison’s Liberator, and even friendly Republican journals such as Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, but an abridged version of it even appeared in the Baltimore Sun. Other papers, particularly in the lower North and Midwest, declined to reprint the essay but commented on it nonetheless. One journalist sneered that “Fred Douglass is calling on the colored men of the north to come to rescue—but they don’t see it.” A Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, newspaper denounced black service as “mad fanaticism” and an attempt “to reverse the decrees of God!” The “Rochester darkey has been among us,” noted a third, adding that despite his pleas, “the experiment seems now to be mourned by these fanatics as a melancholy failure.” Although Langston had succeeded in recruiting a large number of men from Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer deplored one of his “war meetings” as “galvanized with pretended patriotism” and an abject failure, “dead and forgotten already.”²⁷

In truth, a good many black leaders continued in their doubts, not so much because of past injuries as to current rumors that black soldiers would not draw equal pay, or that they could not rise to become commissioned officers. Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, born a slave in Maryland and so mistrustful of the federal government that he routinely spoke in favor of black emigration to Mexico or Liberia, publicly wondered, “[W]hat have black men to fight for in this war?” Others noted that men of color had fought at “Bunker Hill and under Washington,” yet even after the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, white Americans took it “for granted that ‘the niggers couldn’t be made to fight.’” But more thought as did Jermain Matthews, who volunteered for the Fifty-fourth despite his fiancée’s distress that he could die fighting “for the white man’s country.” After fleeing the South and becoming “a free man,” Matthews wrote, “I solemnly vowed to devote my whole life to best serving my people.” James Henry Gooding agreed. “Our people must know that if they are ever to attain any position in the eyes of the civilized world, they must forgo comfort, home, fear, and fight for it,” he wrote in an open letter to the New Bedford Mercury, and “make up their minds to become something more than hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives.”²⁸

After the War Department appointed Stearns as a permanent recruiter and awarded him the rank of major, one of those who briefly considered a similar position was Frederick Douglass himself. At forty-four, Douglass remained vigorous, and Secretary Stanton briefly considered sending him to those parts of the South already under U.S. control. But Douglass’s insistence on a rank equal to that held by Stearns, a white man, posed a problem, as did the obvious dangers of working in the occupied Confederacy. “Do not take any commission that leads you, personally, into the fighting ranks,” implored his old friend Julia Griffiths Crofts. “Write as you please, but never go south, or killed you most assuredly will be,” she warned. “You are, in many respects, a marked man.”²⁹

DOUGLASS TOOK ENORMOUS SATISFACTION, HOWEVER, IN THE FACT, as he informed Gerrit Smith, that “Charlie my youngest Son was the first to put his name down as one of the Company.” The elder Douglass had just completed a tour of Buffalo, Auburn, Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy, and Albany, and he had recruited nearly 100 men. That the signature of nineteen-year-old Charles Remond Douglass was the first ascribed on the roster filled his father with pride. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Charles worked for his father as a printer. Slightly shorter than Frederick at approximately five feet, nine inches tall, Charles reached Camp Meigs on March 25 and signed on for three years. Owing to both Charles’s famous father and his flawless penmanship, Shaw ordered him promoted to lance corporal within the month and assigned to writing up the endless paperwork for the arriving recruits.³⁰

Arriving at Readville on the same day was the great abolitionist’s eldest son, twenty-two-year-old Lewis Henry Douglass. The tall, athletic Lewis was then employed in the uneventful occupation of “grocer,” and so, as with Charles, it took no persuasion to encourage the enthusiastic young man to enlist. After first traveling to Syracuse, Lewis and seventeen other recruits detoured south to Binghamton, amusing themselves “by singing John Brown[‘s Body] and other songs to the delight of the white passengers in the car.” When Lewis’s group reached Binghamton, they were joined by Charles and six others calling themselves “the Loguen guard,” after the Reverend Jermain Loguen, the Tennessee runaway turned Syracuse minister. As Lewis was betrothed to the minister’s daughter, Helen Amelia Loguen—or simply Amelia, as she preferred—he hurried this cheery news to his beloved. Loguen himself had been recruiting black employees of the New York and Erie Railroad, “and putting them into the hands of the young Douglass boys,” as he told one reporter. If Charles was a natural clerk, the popular Lewis was a born leader of men, and by April 1, Private Douglass of Company F was promoted to sergeant major, the highest non-commissioned rank then possible for a black soldier.³¹

On the morning of Wednesday, March 4, James Henry Gooding bade farewell to Ellen, his wife of just over five months, and set off with his friend William Carney and twenty-two other recruits from New Bedford. Of those traveling north to Readville, ten were married and fourteen were single. More than half were laborers who left behind no skilled occupation, while Gooding was one of three mariners. They arrived that afternoon and met their commanding officer for the first time. Shaw was only ten months Gooding’s senior, but the new private praised him as solicitous, “doing all he can for the comfort of those now in camp.” The recruits marched to their barracks, where they “found a nice warm fire and a good supper in readiness.” Constructed two years before for white regiments, the barracks, in the words of one officer, “were great barn-like structures of wood with sleeping-bunks on either side.” Having spent the last several years telling authorities—including the minister who married him to Ellen—that he was born in Troy, Gooding opted for yet another fiction and assured several army clerks that New Bedford was his birthplace. The army listed him as five feet, seven inches tall, slightly more than was noted in his seaman’s papers, and characterized his complexion as “light.” Gooding, Carney, and all of the New Bedford men were assigned to Company C. That evening Gooding’s fellows were all handed new uniforms, “and now,” he enthused, “they are looking quite like soldiers.” Since many of the recruits arrived “poor and ragged,” their old clothing was symbolically burned. Dressed in their Union blues, Pen Hallowell thought, the men “straightened up [and] grew inches taller.”³²

From New York State arrived Stephen Swails, weary of waiting tables in Cooperstown and eager to open a new chapter in his troubled life. At age thirty, he was older than most privates, and on April 8 Shaw ordered the light-skinned soldier promoted to first sergeant. Far younger but no less eager was James Caldwell, the grandson of abolitionist Sojourner Truth, from Auburn, New York. Caldwell was “full of enthusiasm when he heard that colored men” could finally join the military, Truth boasted. “Now is our time Grandmother,” he swore, “to prove that we are men.” Far older was hotel clerk Peter Vogelsang, who enrolled as a private on April 17. Vogelsang evidently either knew Frank Shaw before the conflict or had met him at a “war meeting” earlier that spring, as Shaw recommended the recruit to his son. Initially, Rob thought Vogelsang, who was twenty-one years his elder, far too old to serve, claiming that “no man of 46 would pass.” But after only seven days Shaw admitted his mistake, promoted Vogelsang to sergeant, and assured his father “that your man Vogelsang was accepted” and had proved “very efficient.”³³

Others came from farther away still. Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany, the son of journalist and physician Martin Delany, caught a train from Pittsburgh. Joseph Barge, a North Carolina freeman who regarded himself as “a yankee by cultivation, education, and thinking principles,” had fled the South in early 1861 and moved to Massachusetts; from there he “went from Boston as a soldier.” Eighteen-year-old George Alexander, a free-born farmer from Charleston, South Carolina, joined in late April, as did two George Washingtons—one of them a Virginian, the other from Syracuse—and no less than three William Henry Harrisons, one a native of Missouri who had been living in Chicago, with the other two from Pennsylvania and Michigan. (Yet a fourth William Henry Harrison, from Maine, would enlist in December 1863.)³⁴

Recruits arrived at the rate of about ten each day. By March 12, Shaw reported, they had “near 250 men in camp,” and he thought the growing regiment was “getting on swimmingly.” A visiting Connecticut reporter counted “about three hundred” men just a few days later, and with the arrival of another fifty from Albany and the Buffalo area, Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass tallied 548 by early April. A number of men in Lewis’s company were from Syracuse, and he urged Amelia to send him some Syracuse newspapers. “The young men from Boston and New Bedford receive many little niceties from their friends,” he hinted, “which keeps them in cheerful spirits.” Also keeping count was Gooding, whose weekly letter to the New Bedford Mercury on April 18 listed the number of recruits as 674. “But they do not come fast enough for the boys here,” Gooding insisted. “We want the regiment full, and show that we are men.” Hoping to encourage others to sign on, Gooding tried to shame New England readers by pointing to the number of blacks who had arrived from Pennsylvania. “This regiment should be filled now,” and all it needed was “326 more men, from Massachusetts.” Those already present, however, took to the drills with enthusiasm; when a group of skeptical white officers stopped at Readville to monitor the unit’s progress, Shaw was delighted that his men erased any of their “doubts of negroes making good soldiers.”³⁵

The eldest son of Frederick and Anna Douglass, Lewis Henry Douglass, with a natural flair for command, was beloved by his men and quickly rose to the rank of sergeant major. Governor Andrew would consider using Douglass as a test case to press the War Department to promote blacks into the commissioned ranks, but the wounds he received atop the walls of Wagner ended that plan. Courtesy Howard University.

One complicating factor was the rigorous medical examination each recruit faced immediately upon arriving at Readville. Poor nutrition and a lack of protein took their toll on antebellum children, especially those from working-class households. At five feet, seven inches tall, Vogelsang was among the bigger soldiers in the regiment. Lincoln Stone and his team of doctors rejected nearly one-third of all the volunteers. “The first thing I did was to be examined by the surgeon to see if I was in any manner deformed,” Lewis wrote to Amelia, “after which I was told to go to an officer whose business it is to take a description of my looks, and then swear me into the service.” After promising to “obey all orders from the President of the United States,” Lewis collected his uniform. “My badge of office is three stripes placed on my coat in the shape of a half diamond,” he added, dutifully drawing an image for Amelia to appreciate.³⁶

Charles Remond Douglass was anxious to please his famous father but lacked the capacity for military leadership. His persistent ill health and elegant handwriting kept him at Camp Meigs as a regimental clerk, though he saw action in Virginia after transferring to the Fifth Cavalry in March 1864. Courtesy Howard University.

As the regiment at last filled, its officers took stock of the men and their backgrounds. For a contingent that carried the flag of Massachusetts, only 133 men, or 13 percent, were residents of the state at the war’s start. Counting Gooding and Carney, thirty-nine soldiers had arrived from New Bedford, which was two more than provided by Boston. Those present at Camp Meigs by late May hailed from fifteen Northern states, four loyal border states, five Confederate states, Canada, the Caribbean, and, allegedly, the Arizona Territory. The largest group, or 294 men, had marched north from Pennsylvania. Vogelsang, Swails, and the Douglass brothers were four of the 183 New Yorkers present, while Ohio, with 155 men, delivered the third-largest state delegation. Approximately one-quarter of the soldiers identified themselves as farmers—by comparison to the 50 percent of white Union soldiers who were yeomen—while one-third listed themselves simply as “laborers.” Gooding was one of thirty-eight mariners, with Swails listed as one of thirty-four waiters. Swails himself had also once labored as a boatman, and there were twenty-seven of those. Their average age was 24.3 years, while the white officers who led them averaged a slightly younger 24.1 years. Twenty boys ages sixteen and seventeen volunteered as drummers; one of them, Eli Biddle, would be wounded during the fighting but live until 1940. At fifty-seven, America Tabb was briefly the oldest soldier. Allowed to enlist as recompense for his recruitment efforts in Boston, Tabb was soon judged “unfit for duty” and discharged, leaving the far more robust Vogelsang as the regiment’s senior soldier.³⁷

In part because doctors had rejected so many men, those who passed muster bragged of the unit’s physical prowess. “It makes one’s heart pulsate with pride as he looks upon those stout and brawny men,” Gooding marveled. A correspondent for the Weekly Anglo-African agreed, reporting that the soldiers at Camp Meigs, “with very few exceptions, [were] our best young men.” George Stephens, the Pennsylvania cabinet-maker who had brought a contingent of black Philadelphians to Readville, insisted that he did not “exaggerate when I say there is no regiment superior, if equal to this in physique and aptitude of men.” Four hundred men, he observed, had “been rejected because they did not come up to the highest standard of mental and physical proficiency.” Those who remained drilled long hours on the camp’s muddy parade grounds, and those men, Stephens swore, could survive “the severest rigors of a campaign in the field.” Thin-chested and only five feet, five inches tall himself, Shaw conceded that some of his men appeared “as big as all creation—and look really very well” in their blue uniforms.³⁸

The young colonel’s assessment of their intellectual ability, however, did not match that of Stephens, and in the early months of 1863 his remarks on what he habitually dubbed his “darkey concern” betrayed a privileged young Brahmin wrestling with previously unexamined attitudes toward race and class. Writing to his father in late February, Shaw lamented that the recruits who had arrived were “not of the best class of nigs,” adding that if the rest of the North would match Massachusetts’s bounty of $50, “we should be able to get a much better set from the other states.” Shaw’s sentiments spoke to class, however, as much as they did to race. Considering that he was less comfortable with dark-skinned, undereducated, rural freemen from Ohio than he was with cultured urbanites such as the Douglass brothers and the light-complexioned Swails and Vogelsang, it was surely no accident that the men he promptly promoted were middle class. In later years, Pen Hallowell implicitly admitted this bias, bragging that while the term “colored soldier” often conjured up images of “the thick-lipped negro of Congo,” the men of the Fifty-fourth were “people in whose veins [was] an admixture of the blood of every nationality that is represented on this continent.” Clearly, however, leading a black regiment changed these Brahmins. One month to the day after Shaw had complained about the low class of recruits, he confessed a change of heart, writing that he was “perfectly astonished at the general intelligence these darkeys display.” Moreover, for all of Hallowell’s theories about the genetic background of his men, Pen always treated them with respect and demanded that those white officers who served with the regiment deport themselves as “gentlemen who understood the correct orthography and pronunciation of the word ‘negro.’”³⁹

Stephen Atkins Swails joined the Fifty-fourth in part to escape a dissolute youth and a pregnant girlfriend. Utterly courageous under fire, he was shot in the head at Olustee, Florida, but survived to become the first black commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.

Morning came early at Readville. Drummers beat reveille each day at six o’clock. The soldiers poured out of their bunks and made haste with their morning meal and a quick prayer. “We have every morning for breakfast one third of a six-cent loaf of bread,” Lewis reported, “nearly a quart of coffee, and a large piece of fresh or corn beef or ham.” For many of the working-class soldiers, the repast was a banquet. Squad drills began at eight-thirty and continued until eleven, and company drills began at the same hour but stretched until five o’clock. Late February turned unusually glacial, even for New England, and Shaw ordered the men “drilled as much as possible in-doors, for it is too cold out there to keep them in the open air for any length of time.” But even as spring arrived the weather remained “so stormy” that the men churned the parade grounds into muddy furrows. All were nonetheless “anxious to perfect themselves in drill that they may the sooner meet the Rebs,” Gooding noted, “and they all feel determined to fight.” A quick break at midday allowed them a meal of “beef and potatoes and the same quantity of bread,” and after a long day of drills they were fed again, Douglass informed Amelia, sometimes with “bean soup,” but “constantly rice and molasses.” As the exhausted men fell into their bunks, the evening ended as it had begun, with a prayer, and “the great degree of fervor exhibited,” Gooding swore, could do the Bethel Church in New Bedford proud.⁴⁰

The first to arrive trained only with Harpers Ferry Model 1841 rifles, heavy smoothbore percussion muskets manufactured between 1844 and 1855. By late April, however, the entire regiment was outfitted with 1853 Pattern Enfields, a British-manufactured rifled musket favored by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The muzzle-loaded weapon fired a .577 caliber minié ball, and its 39-inch barrel could be fitted with a bayonet long enough to be effective against attacking cavalry. “The men can be seen everywhere going through the manual of arms,” George Stephens assured the Weekly Anglo-African, “in which they are already quite proficient.” Having twice experienced the chaos of battle, Shaw relentlessly drilled the recruits, who, as an infantry regiment, had to be prepared to carry out a variety of complicated maneuvers while under fire. Nevertheless, some observers, even white abolitionists, could not refrain from patronizing the soldiers with benign racism. By comparison to white soldiers, the unsigned essay in the Liberator maintained, the men of the Fifty-fourth “are in some respects manifestly superior; especially for their aptness in drill, because of their imitativeness and love of music [and] docility in discipline.”⁴¹

“Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was not a sentimentalist,” Pen Hallowell acknowledged, and he imposed rigorous discipline at Camp Meigs. Having but a few months during which to mold his army of farmhands and day laborers into a cohesive unit, he adopted the same “methods of coercion” used on white soldiers in what Shaw regarded as the most “well-disciplined regiments.” Privates deemed “unruly,” Hallowell wrote, were forced to stand on “barrels, bucked, gagged and, if need be, shot.” White officers were not exempt from this regimen, for Shaw wanted his men to know that correction was not racially based. One captain complained to his wife that he had never served in “a Regiment where the officers were under as strict discipline as [in] the 54th.” General Edward Pierce, the commandant of Meigs, who had witnessed two years of training at the post, finally admonished Shaw to refrain from further “severe and unusual punishments not laid down by regulations.” Yet Shaw’s approach was effective, if only judging by the results. There were few reported incidents of drunkenness, and the guardhouse was “seldom occupied.” Both Shaw and the recruits understood that the eyes of the North were upon them, and nobody at Readville wished the experiment to fail. When one officer sought to test a soldier standing post late one night, the guard barked out, “Who goes there?” and demanded the countersign. When the officer instead responded with, “I will give it directly,” the private sliced his bayonet up “through the officer’s coat, and into his flesh.”⁴²

So thoroughly did the soldiers appreciate what was at stake that even when they believed that the entire regiment had been wronged, they maintained order. The promised state bounty of $50, which the recruits expected to receive at the moment of their enlistments, had not yet been paid by the end of March. Two soldiers from Company B deserted, claiming that Massachusetts had failed to keep its part of the bargain. The pair, whom Gooding derided as the sort of men “to be satisfied with nothing,” were promptly captured and returned to camp—by black guards, he added, who let them taste “a bayonet in the rear.” Shaw had the men fall to and delivered a stern lecture about “the ‘guard house,’ wearing patent bracelets, and sundry other terrors in store” for those men disgruntled over pay issues. Gooding had scant sympathy for the two, yet he also wanted the editor of New Bedford’s Mercury to remember that most black soldiers had “nothing to depend upon but their daily labor,” and so their “homes are left destitute” in their absence. Questions of pay inequity would haunt the regiment, as well as its companion unit, the Fifty-fifth, until mid-1864, but even so, Gooding believed that most of his company were “determined to act like men, and fight, money or not.”⁴³

In their rare off hours, the barracks were converted into classrooms. As did Frederick Douglass, the volunteers anticipated that their service would translate into citizenship, which conferred both rewards and responsibilities. It surely did not escape the notice of the unlettered soldiers that the first to be promoted to corporal or sergeant were men of education. Although the camp had no formally organized school, Reverend William Jackson, the black minister who had recruited in New Bedford and now served as the regiment’s chaplain, shared his “fine library” with the soldiers, ran Sabbath schools each Sunday, and devoted most evenings to teaching literacy, with the Bible as a text. “Quite a number were remarkably well informed and well educated men,” he reported, but those who had spent part of their lives enslaved were a different matter. Jackson and Shaw were not the only ones who noticed the cultural gulf that often divided the working-class soldiers from those of more advantaged backgrounds. Some of the volunteers “amuse themselves by fighting each other,” a puzzled Lewis Douglass observed. The bookish Gooding also complained that he was given “nothing to read,” although, unlike Douglass, he was at least amused by “some of the odd capers” the men practiced on one another. The patriotic oratory of the working-class soldiers, however, Gooding judged “ludicrous,” if typical “to some of our class of people.”⁴⁴

The regiment’s progress was a group effort, of course, from the colonel to the captains to the newest private. But Gooding thought it important to give Shaw his due. He had accepted the posting when not a “dozen [other] men in the North” would have done so, knowing that failure could forever taint their career. But Shaw “put his hands, his head, his heart to the task,” and as a result of his “discipline the regiment was perfect,” not owing to “a slavish fear, but obedience enacted by the evidence of a superior and directing mind.”⁴⁵

SHAW’S COMBINATION OF FAST-PACED DRILLING AND STERN DISCIPLINE was also founded on the knowledge that with spring, large numbers of visitors, politicians, and journalists would descend on Readville, and the men had best be prepared. Not surprisingly, Shaw’s friends and family thought that he had performed admirably. Charles Russell Lowell, stationed in Washington, wrote to say that rumors in the capital held that the Fifty-fourth showed “good promise of taking a very high place among our Massachusetts regiments.” Rather more surprising was the fact that the relentless training won over cynics as well. One officer, a native of Virginia, toured Readville and made it clear that he regarded it “a great joke to try and make soldiers of ‘niggers.’” By day’s end, the officer, who had mustered in nearly 20,000 recruits, confessed that the Fifty-fourth appeared “so fine a set of men.” The “skeptics need only come out here now, to be converted,” a pleased Shaw reported.⁴⁶

Warmer weather, as predicted, brought curious guests of all sorts. The “Ladies’ Committee,” the female auxiliary of the Black Committee, arrived on April 21. Led by Eliza Andrew, the governor’s wife, the group toured the camp, anxious, as one harried officer sighed, “to witness the novel sight of colored soldiers in quarters and on the drill ground.” Each weekend saw a “large number of visitors” line up at the main gate. A far larger contingent arrived on April 30, when Governor Andrew squired William Lloyd Garrison and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase into the camp for a formal review. With the exception of those too ill to drill, the entire regiment donned their “evening dress parades.” Andrew presented the noncommissioned officers with swords, which the Douglass brothers accepted with pride. Privately, however, Lewis fretted that his younger brother was “a little green” and had “not learned yet to boss his men around, which is very necessary.”⁴⁷

Family members and the abolitionist rank and file—who were often one and the same—crowded into the camp each Sunday. Frederick Douglass paid several visits in early May, on the second occasion accompanied by his wife, Anna, and their daughter Rosetta. The elder Douglass was pleased to see Lewis “looking so well,” but as Readville was low in elevation and could be damp and marshy after rains, Charles was sick in the camp infirmary with “a severe cold.” The Douglasses brought “a bag of niceties from home,” but not what Lewis really desired, which was a visit from the Loguens, or at least a photograph or note from Amelia. Perhaps fearing that her fiancé might not return from the war, Amelia had drawn back from their relationship, and her letters grew scarce. In his numerous missives, Lewis balanced reminders that his service was “in the glorious work of bursting loose those chains” that degraded “millions of human beings to a level scarcely on footing with a brute” with professions that she was “ever dear” to him. Lewis knew that Amelia wished “it were not necessary” for him to enlist, but he trusted that her “love of her happiness of your race and my race reconciles you to our separation.” After that failed to elicit the expected response, Lewis at one point reminded Amelia that he was a “privileged character being an officer of the staff” and that he was “thought a good deal of here,” a boast that had the virtue of being true.⁴⁸

The sobering prospect of not surviving the war also led Shaw to think of marriage. Rob had fallen for Annie Haggerty shortly after meeting her in the spring of 1861, assuring his friend Elizabeth Russell Lyman that Annie would one day be his “young woman.” About the time he agreed to serve with the Fifty-fourth, he asked Annie to marry him and not to wait for the war’s end. Neither her parents nor the Shaws thought the timing propitious, since the Fifty-fourth would soon be marching south. “I can’t help feeling that, if we are not married before I go,” Shaw fretted, “I shall feel very much dissatisfied and discontented.” He surely knew that his proposal placed Annie in a most difficult position, and not merely with her parents. Should he die, she would be a widow while still in her twenties; were he to die with them unwed, he would forever be the fallen martyr, against whom other men could never measure up. Without waiting for her parents’ approval, Annie agreed. Rob and Annie decided to wed on May 2, as the army was willing to grant him one week’s leave at that time. They married in Manhattan before spending their brief honeymoon in the Lenox, Massachusetts, home of Annie’s parents. By May 9, the couple was back in Boston, and while Shaw had to return to the regiment, he rode over to see Annie most nights. “Domestic bliss is the thing,” he marveled.⁴⁹

While the young couple was still in Lenox, yet more recruits arrived in Readville, and with the Fifty-fourth already filled, Andrew made the decision to employ the new arrivals as the nucleus of a second regiment. The governor offered the colonelcy to both Hallowells—as ever, Andrew regarded the brothers as interchangeable cogs in his military apparatus—but when each expressed the desire to remain with the regiment they had devoted so much energy to forming, he simply ordered the twenty-four-year-old Pen to “stay and help organize it, whether he wishes to or not.” Pen relented, Shaw reported, “as the Governor wouldn’t let him” ship south, “at any rate.” Andrew so notified the War Department, and the chief mustering officer for Massachusetts duly processed the paperwork to “muster out of the service, Lieut. Col. Norwood P. Hallowell, of the 54th Mass. Vols., and muster him in as Colonel of the 55th Regt. Mass. Vols.” Shaw had grown very fond of Pen Hallowell and took the transfer hard, especially as he feared that Andrew would next promote Ned to second-in-command of the new unit. “If I lose the Major too, I don’t know what I shall do,” Rob groaned. As it turned out, Governor Andrew did have a promotion in mind, but not for the Fifty-fifth. Much to Shaw’s delight, he instead transferred Captain Alfred Hartwell, an attorney and Harvard classmate of Shaw and Ned Hallowell, into the Fifty-fifth and elevated Ned into the vacant position in the Fifty-fourth, ordering him “promoted to be Lt. Col. [on] May 31.”⁵⁰

With the new regiment forming and so many white officers shifting units, William Lloyd Garrison’s son George decided that the time had at last arrived for him to sign on. Though he promoted the black regiment in the pages of the Liberator, both his pacifism and his fear for George’s life led the elder Garrison to oppose his son’s decision; he even went so far as to warn that his enlistment would injure “the health and happiness of your mother.” But some members of Garrison’s circle applauded George’s enlistment. “So, after all, Norwood Hallowell has accepted the colonelcy of the 55th. I am glad of it,” abolitionist Lucy McKim observed to Wendell Garrison. “And your brother George is advertised as one of the lieutenants. Will you give him my warm regards and congratulations?” McKim had remained loyal to pacifism for the first two years of the war, but the Emancipation Proclamation clarified matters for her. “When a brawling nation thrusts our reason & gentleness back in our faces, I undertake to say that one cannot hinder her from worse than murdering four millions of helpless beings,” she lectured an unpersuaded Wendell.⁵¹

WITH THE CREATION OF THE FIFTY-FIFTH, WASHINGTON BELATEDLY moved to nationalize the effort. Congress created a new agency, the Bureau for Colored Troops, and on May 22 Stanton’s War Department issued General Order No. 143, placing the bureau under the authority of the adjutant general. Under the order, all black regiments in the process of being mustered by states were elevated to the federal level and assigned a new number as one of the United States Colored Troops, or USCT. Although white soldiers remained organized by state regiments, the USCT was forged in recognition of the reality that African American men felt no loyalty to Northern states that denied them civil rights and instead sought to serve, as one politician noted, “the United States—the government [that] had promised them freedom.” Senator James Henry Lane’s First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry became the Seventy-ninth Infantry USCT, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s First South Carolina Volunteers, an irregular unit of runaway Carolinians, became the Thirty-third USCT. But to maintain their pride of place as the first Northern regiments to be approved by Washington, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth (and later the Fifth Cavalry) retained their original designations and took their marching orders from Boston.⁵²

As Northern recruiters made it clear that they intended to enlist black men in those parts of the South already under American control, the Confederate Congress moved to endorse Jefferson Davis’s proclamation of the previous December. On May 1, in a joint resolution, the Congress authorized the president to “cause full and ample retaliation to be made” for what white Southerners regarded as any violations of the usual rules of war by the United States. As had Davis’s Christmas Eve order, the joint resolution required white officers leading black troops to “be put to death or otherwise punished at the discretion” of a military tribunal. All black men taken under arms were to “be delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured” and returned to slavery. Although that clause was more apt for Higginson’s unit than for the freemen in the Fifty-fourth, a few soldiers in the Fifty-fourth, such as William Carney, were runaways; if taken alive, Carney was in danger of being reenslaved in Virginia.⁵³

Andrew hurried to Washington in hopes of securing a firm promise from somebody in authority that Confederate retribution would be met with Union reprisals. Although Lincoln was not yet prepared to issue any precise promises of vengeance, Andrew found a sympathetic ally in Stanton. The secretary “stated in the most emphatic manner” that the administration “was prepared to guarantee and defend to these men, all the rights, privileges and immunities that are given, by the laws of civilized warfare, to other soldiers.” Although Stanton’s statement was reported across the North by the abolitionist press, Andrew was more alarmed by the Confederate policies than were the men of the Fifty-fourth. The common soldiers understood the risks being taken by the white men who led them, and so the May resolution helped to bridge the cultural gulf between the working-class privates and the privileged officers. Pen Hallowell was outraged, but Shaw took it with fatalistic humor. He had always understood that “the officers of colored regiments” would be in a rather “ticklish situation, if caught by the Rebels,” he shrugged. If Confederates executed him, they would have to face the wrath of Ned Hallowell, who then “will be in command.” Black soldiers were defiant. Camp Meigs was “cropping out corporals and sergeants” fast enough, one proudly insisted, to face down “the rebel President” and his “friends in the North.”⁵⁴

They would soon have their chance, since by May the Fifty-fourth was ready for deployment. Worrisome reports appeared in the Northern press that the War Department intended to ship the regiment to Fort Monroe in Virginia. There was a logic to that plan. With nearby Norfolk having surrendered in May 1862, a black unit could not only hold the garrison but help recruit black Virginians for the USCT. Thanks to General Benjamin Butler’s “contraband” decree, an enormous “freedman’s colony” had emerged in Roanoke, and the Fifty-fourth might protect the growing refugee camp. Troubling, however, was the assumption that black troops would “remain there to man the fort, and thus allow the white troops to go into the field.” Other rumors hinted that the Fifty-fourth might “be sent away piece-meal,” with some companies sailing for Fort Monroe while others performed guard duty elsewhere. This possibility especially Shaw regarded as destructive to the unit’s cohesion and morale. Should the War Department do so, Shaw warned the governor, he intended to “respectfully suggest” that his commission be withdrawn, “and that Captain E. N. Hallowell be commissioned & mustered in” as his replacement. In fact, Andrew complained to Stanton that his soldiers had been “raised and officered, for active [and] not for fatigue duty.” General David Hunter, recently reappointed commander of the Department of the South, was clamoring for help along the Carolina coast. “Under Genl. Hunter negro troops will be appreciated and allowed a place in onward and honorable movements of active war,” Andrew argued.⁵⁵

Like Charles Francis Adams Jr. the previous year, Shaw and the Fifty-fourth were hopeful for a chance to take part in the capture of Charleston. If there was to be an assault on the city, Shaw admitted, “I trust we shall have a share in it.” Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass was even more passionate. To engage South Carolina was “to fight for Liberty & Union,” he assured Amelia. “Our regiment is a fine one and no doubt will accomplish much,” he added. Not a man in his company wished to give Governor Andrew “occasion to regret the steps he has taken in raising the regiment.” Soon, Douglass hoped, Washington would allow for black commissioned officers, and if so, he could be promoted and granted considerable leave to “come home and stay” for a time. In the meantime, he begged his fiancée not to worry or “think of me in pain [or] of me enduring hardships.” Most of all, he urged, “[r]emember that if I fall that it is in the cause of humanity, that I am striking a blow for the welfare of the most abused and despised race on earth.”⁵⁶

Upon receiving confirmation from the War Department that the Fifty-fourth would be deployed in South Carolina, Andrew wished to give the troops the news himself. For May 18, the governor’s office proposed an impressive ceremony for the presentation of flags and banners, one inspiring enough, an aide to Andrew laughed, “to convert all but the most incorrigible Hunkers,” as Republicans had dubbed conservative Democrats. Anticipating a crowd, Andrew scheduled extra trains for the ten-mile journey from Boston to Readville, and journalists counted as many as 2,000 spectators, a majority of them African American. The day was beautiful and sunny, but what excited the men most was that Massachusetts paymasters arrived with the long-promised bounty, which, as Gooding remarked, they “had almost despaired of ever getting.” Shaw marched his regiment into a tight square surrounding the speaker’s podium, after which “the colored ladies of Boston” presented him with an American flag. Other banners followed, from the state flag to a white silk banner emblazoned with the words Liberty, Loyalty, and Unity. Then Andrew handed Shaw a telegram from Secretary Stanton, reading: “The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts will report to General Hunter; make requisitions for transportation, so that they may go at once.” Gooding was overjoyed. “We have received marching orders,” he cheered, adding that he was proud that there was “not a man in the regiment” who was unaware of the dangers as well as the “ignoble death that [may await] him, if captured by the foe, and they will die upon the field rather than be hanged like a dog.” Give the Fifty-fourth a chance, Gooding believed, and the “greatest difficulty will be to stop them.”⁵⁷

Prayers and speeches dedicated to manhood, nation, Christianity, and home followed, with Andrew assuring the black sons of Massachusetts, as well as those “of surrounding States who have now made themselves citizens” of the Bay State, that their blue uniforms conferred citizenship upon them, regardless of the still-binding Dred Scott decision. Pointing to the soldiers, Andrew promised that the American flag was “their country’s flag now as well as ours,” and that they should go forth to “rend the last shackle which binds the limb of the bondman in the rebel States.” In a far shorter reply, Shaw thanked the governor for providing the regiment with the “opportunity to show that you have not made a mistake in entrusting the honor of the State to a colored regiment—the first State that has sent one to the war!” From somewhere in the crowd, Frank Shaw joined in the applause as the afternoon concluded with a battalion drill. Sarah Shaw, often unwell, remained at home, but Rob assured her that while the “Governor made a beautiful speech,” his own “response was small potatoes.”⁵⁸

HUNTER SENT WORD TO PREPARE FOR A DEPARTURE ON MAY 28, which left the regiment but ten days to pack and, for those from the Boston area, say their farewells to loved ones. Northern troops often shipped south out of Manhattan, and Andrew initially planned for a parade down Broadway. “All America looks on at a Broadway procession,” one of his advisers remarked. But New York City was a Democratic stronghold, filled with Irish immigrants fearful of what black liberty and postwar migrations north might mean for their own precarious economic situation. In the event, it was decided that the regiment would retrace the steps of Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns, runaways who had been captured in Boston and marched to the docks by federal marshals and U.S. Marines in 1851 and 1854.⁵⁹

The troops broke camp at an early hour and reached Boston by nine o’clock. A “large crowd” met them at the depot and followed as they strode into the city. One hundred policemen attempted to clear a path toward the parade ground on the Common, and unknown but to Andrew and a few officers, “reserves of police were held in readiness, under cover, to repress any riotous proceedings.” Journalists reported that the streets were lined with observers; “men cheered and women waved their handkerchiefs,” while the inquisitive crowded the sidewalks to witness the curious sight. As the formation turned onto Essex Street, a young woman rushed out to present Shaw “with a handsome bouquet,” and the young colonel paused to thank her. On several occasions, the streets grew so clogged with on-lookers that the soldiers had to pause. “The men grounded arms, and were receiving the parting salutes of their kindred and friends,” one reporter observed, when three African American women, perhaps the “mother, wife, and sister,” ran out to kiss a soldier. One handed him a handkerchief, and as they moved back to the sidewalk the private “leaned his head upon his musket, and wept like a child.”⁶⁰

A few observers were determined to show their disfavor, although most wisely did so from upstairs windows. Pen Hallowell spied “certain members of a prominent club” hissing in disgust as the Fifty-fourth marched by, and Wilkie James heard a few “groans” from those “of the rankest sort.” One tough shouted an insult, only to be knocked to the ground by another observer. But these were exceptions. Businessmen who stood on the steps of the Exchange cheered the troops, and black entrepreneur George Downing, who came to say his farewells to Vogelsang, his brother-in-law, was thrilled to see “ladies of all complexions,” many of them Irish, passing out “ice-water or lemonade” to the soldiers. William Lloyd Garrison watched from the terrace of Wendell Phillips’s Essex Street home; somebody thought to drag a bust of John Brown out onto the balcony, and Garrison, quietly sobbing, rested his hand upon it. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was also moved to tears by the sight. As Shaw “rode at the head of his troops,” he wrote Lydia Maria Child, “the very flower of grace and chivalry, he seemed to me beautiful and awful as an Angel of God, come down to lead the host of freedom to victory.” Rob’s sister Ellen Shaw had nearly the same thought. Watching the procession from a balcony with her mother, Rob’s wife Annie, and her other sisters, seventeen-year-old Ellen was both touched and startled by what she witnessed. Knowing where his family would be standing, Shaw paused as he rode by and “looked up and kissed his sword, [and] his face was as the face of an angel.” Yet at that moment Ellen had an awful premonition, and “felt perfectly sure he would never come back.”⁶¹

Upon reaching the State House, the Fifty-fourth was joined by Andrew, Senator Charles Sumner, and members of the Black Committee recruiting group. Together they marched through the Common and then down State Street toward the Battery Wharf. A band preceded them, playing “the stirring music of John Brown’s hymns.” Just before one o’clock, the regiment arrived at the DeMolay, their transport ship. Frederick Douglass had come to say good-bye to Lewis (Charles still being unwell and in the hospital at Readville), and he “passed round among the different companies, bidding the soldiers farewell, and giving them words of encouragement.” It took three hours to store the guns in watertight boxes, load the men, and walk the officers’ nervous horses aboard. Finally, at four, the DeMolay steamed out of the harbor, bound for South Carolina.⁶²

How “grandly the 54th went off to their work,” Douglass marveled to Gerrit Smith, choosing to remember the glory of the afternoon rather than the dangers facing his son outside of Charleston. Rob Shaw thought so too, writing one old friend from the Second Massachusetts that “the passage of the 54th Mass. through Boston was a great success” and remarking that he had never seen “such a heavy turn-out there before.” As the DeMolay slowly chugged south, Shaw thought back to his initial reluctance to accept Andrew’s offer. “Just remember our own doubts and fears, and other people’s sneering and pitying remarks, when we began last winter,” he wrote Annie on his third day at sea, “and then look at the perfect triumph of last Thursday.” Never as devout, or as devoutly abolitionist, as his parents, Shaw told Annie that he was truly “thankful for all my happiness, and my success in life so far.” If the Fifty-fourth proved to be “a benefit to the country, and to the blacks, as many people think it will, I shall thank God a thousand times that I was led to take my share in it.”⁶³