MANY OF THE OHIO FARMERS ABOARD THE DEMOLAY HAD NEVER even seen an ocean, let alone sailed upon one. Fortunately, the first night at sea was smooth, and the following morning broke calm, if foggy. Rob Shaw grumbled that the steamer was “a very slow one,” but otherwise he conceded that it was “perfectly clean and well-ventilated.” Just after midnight, however, the steamer ran into a strong headwind, and the seas turned rough. The ship “was tossed and pitched about by the waves like a play thing in the hands of a child,” Lewis Douglass wrote, “now away up up up, then down, down now on this side, now on that.” The same men who had relished the thought of combat in South Carolina looked “as though Death would be a welcome visitor,” with many “wishing they never had gone for a soldier.” As for himself, Douglass assured Amelia, he “stood it first rate [and] was sick only a half hour.” Less lucky was Ned Hallowell’s mare. It died and was consigned to the deep. The storm passed on June 1, allowing the “seasick to take some interest in life.” Having survived far worse, former sea cook James Henry Gooding made no mention of the tempest in his weekly letter to the New Bedford Mercury. The landlubbers, for their part, were fascinated by the porpoises and the shark or two that followed the ship.1
On the morning of June 3, the steamer chugged past Charleston Harbor, and in the distance Shaw spied the U.S. naval blockade, and then beyond the ships, “the top of Fort Sumter” and what he guessed to be “the turrets of the iron-clads” supporting the siege. But Charleston was not yet their objective. General David Hunter sent conflicting orders on June 6. The first, a telegraph, instructed Shaw to debark at his headquarters on Hilton Head Island, and the second ordered Captain John Moore, the DeMolay’s skipper, to instead “immediately” sail another fifteen miles up the Beaufort River to the town of the same name on Port Royal Island. There, “Col. Shaw 54 Mass. Vols. [should wait] for orders.”2
Responding to the second order, the DeMolay passed the wharf at Hilton Head on the afternoon of June 3, sailing by roughly seventy ships in the harbor. That evening they docked at Beaufort. Anxious to again tread on dry land, the men were stirring by five the next morning. The regiment left the steamer and marched through town toward their camp on an abandoned cotton plantation, where they joined the Fifty-fifth Pennsylvania. Despite the early hour, black Southerners quickly caught word of their arrival. “Our reception was almost as enthusiastic here in Beaufort, as our departure from Boston was,” Gooding marveled. The refugees who crowded the small town had doubted that the regiment actually existed, and as the soldiers marched through the streets one man ran up to Gooding, crying, “I nebber bleeve black Yankee comee here help culeer men.” Despite his years aboard a whaler, feeding men from around the globe, Gooding found the Sea Islands dialect hard to comprehend, but he suspected that former slaves understood “the causes of the war better than a great many Northern editors.” Black Carolinians knew what was at stake in the conflict, Gooding supposed, and “they think the kingdom is coming sure enough.”3
Those white Northerners who had come south as teachers and doctors were equally ecstatic. “Where did you get these men?” A. D. Smith wondered to Governor Andrew. “Could you have witnessed the feeling on the arrival of the ‘DeMolay’ with the Colored Regt. and heard the ‘God bless you,’ you would have cried too.” A number of Massachusetts reformers, most of them funded by the American Missionary Association, had traveled to the Sea Islands to help resettle the “contrabands” flooding into the region. One of those recent arrivals financed by the governor himself was former slave Harriet Tubman, a longtime Douglass family friend. Years before, Tubman had moved to Auburn, New York, not far from Rochester, and Lewis was pleased to see his father’s old ally. Andrew had expected Tubman to help distribute clothing and food, but typical of the resolute activist, Lewis noted, she had instead become “captain of a gang of men who pilot the Union forces into the enemy’s country.” Douglass was also introduced to Robert Smalls, a Beaufort-born slave of about his own age. Trained as a ship’s pilot, Smalls had stolen a Confederate military transport, the CSS Planter, the year before and successfully sailed it out of Charleston Harbor before turning it over to the U.S. Navy. As a sergeant, Stephen Swails probably also met Smalls that day, although neither could then have imagined what kind of impact the two would have on South Carolina state politics after the war.4
The person Shaw wanted to meet was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers and uncle to Francis Higginson, a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the Fifty-fourth. Born in Cambridge and educated at Harvard some fifteen years before Shaw, the minister-turned-activist had long put his principles into practice. Together with George Luther Stearns, Higginson was one of John Brown’s “secret six” benefactors. He had also been in the forefront of those who tried to batter their way into the Boston courthouse in an unsuccessful attempt to liberate captured runaway Anthony Burns, and he still carried a saber scar on his chin for the effort. On the day of their arrival, Shaw sent a bottle of champagne to Higginson’s camp, and that evening Higginson rode over to see his nephew and to meet Shaw and Hallowell. The three hit if off immediately, with the elder man later remarking that he “was delighted with the officers—the best style of Boston.” Shaw returned the favor, telling his mother that he had never met “any one who puts his whole soul into his work,” and that he was “very much impressed with his open-heartedness & purity of character.” The conversation inevitably turned to the use of black troops. Shaw bluntly admitted that while Higginson’s former slaves had proven “effective in bush-fighting,” he still wondered “how they would fight in line of battle.” Higginson assured Shaw that he had no doubts that they would fare perfectly, and he guessed that Shaw felt the same way. Even so, Shaw mused that it might be prudent to place white soldiers to their rear, “and so cutting off their retreat.” The older officer was stunned by the remark, thinking he would “never have dreamed of being tempted to such a step.”5
WHAT NOBODY IN THE FIFTY-FOURTH COULD GUESS WAS HOW THEIR superiors planned to fit them into the army’s strategy along the southern coast, or indeed who exactly would be making that decision. Having already seized Hilton Head and Tybee Islands, as well as the Florida coastal towns of Fernandina and St. Augustine, American forces hoped to expand their domination of the coastline. Charleston was the prize. The first attempt to take the port had come on the afternoon of April 7, when Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont ordered nine ironclads to steam into the harbor and fire on Fort Sumter. Gunners inside Sumter and to their north in Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island poured 2,200 shells into the ships, crippling five and forcing the rest to withdraw. The “army found that they could do nothing,” reported one officer, as they were “unable to make a landing until the naval force have silenced the Forts.” In the aftermath of the debacle, the War Department instead decided on a combined naval and infantry operation against the city, starting with assaults on James Island and Morris Island’s Battery Wagner. Once the outer barriers to the south of Charleston Harbor were in the hands of the army, Morris Island could be used to shell nearby Sumter. After that citadel had crumbled, the navy planned to stage another incursion.6
With a new strategy came a new commander. The previous January, Hunter had again been appointed Commander of the South, but the high hopes had not been sustained. Hunter was a sound antislavery man, but even his supporters thought him weak and easily controlled by others. Shaw had been in South Carolina only days before concluding that the general was hardly “a great man,” and he immediately heard “some talk of his being relieved.” As had Charles Francis Adams Jr., Pen Hallowell considered Hunter’s earlier effort to raise “contraband” troops doomed to failure by his heavy-handed tactic of ordering white soldiers to round up and enlist black men as if they were “prisoners,” an approach that allowed for “no mutual confidence between officers and men.” Edward Pierce, a correspondent for the New-York Tribune, warned Andrew that General Truman Seymour, Hunter’s chief of staff, was “a strong proslavery man, against arming negroes,” and was actively working against abolitionist general Rufus Saxton, the department’s military governor. Seymour had “set himself against Saxton’s work and [did] all that he could to thwart it,” Pierce complained. Since Washington expected to employ black troops, both Northern free blacks and freedmen, in the campaign against Charleston, Seymour’s overt racism was more than a mere character flaw; it threatened the entire operation.7
Some abolitionists hoped that Higginson would take Hunter’s post should he be removed, and in Beaufort speculation was rife that Andrew had sent the Fifty-fourth to South Carolina so that they might serve under his command. Higginson himself doubted the rumors, although he thought it “evil” to ship a black regiment to the Sea Islands before it was decided “who shall be Brigadier General.” In hopes of keeping the position in antislavery hands, most of Hunter’s staff overruled Seymour and lobbied for Colonel James Montgomery, but Edwin Stanton was savvy enough to recognize that the veteran of “Bleeding Kansas” had little standing among senior officers. On June 12, the War Department tapped thirty-eight-year-old engineer Quincy Adams Gillmore, who had gained fame the previous April by designing the successful bombardment of Georgia’s Fort Pulaski. Shaw worried that the new commander was “not a friend to black troops,” but having lost confidence in Hunter, he was nonetheless “very glad” to hear the news.8
Most of the Fifty-fourth had never experienced anything like a summer on the Southern coast. The weather, one soldier complained, was “intensely hot,” and their tents made poor barriers against the large army of insects. Their wool uniforms, so welcome during the early spring in Readville, added to their discomfort. Worse yet, having expected to soon see combat, on June 6 Shaw instead received orders tasking three of his companies with “fatigue work.” To the dismay of all, Shaw was forced to dispatch Sergeant Peter Vogelsang and Companies A, D, and H out to “the shell road to work on fortifications.”9
The men of the Fifty-fourth did soon have the opportunity, however, to band with Montgomery and his Second South Carolina on a brief foray to Darien, Georgia. “These little miserable expeditions are of no account at all,” Shaw sighed, but it was preferable to manual labor and served “to keep up the spirits of our men.” Those more dedicated to the cause of liberation thought less about overall military strategy and more about what such incursions meant to black Southerners. “When a slave sees the white soldier approach, he dares not trust him,” Gooding suspected, owing to a lifetime of racial animosity. “But if the slave sees a black soldier, he knows he has got a friend,” and then once that bondman is liberated, he can himself “be made a soldier, to fight for his own liberty.” Teacher A. D. Smith agreed, assuring Andrew that the mere arrival of Shaw’s forces “had shaken more trees in rebeldom than any other event that could have happened.”10
Former hotel clerk Peter Vogelsang was both the oldest soldier and one of the 183 New Yorkers in the Fifty-Fourth. Although severely injured early on, Vogelsang served until the end of the war, rising to the rank of first lieutenant, then returned to Manhattan, where he remained active in the black community until his death in 1887. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
Montgomery’s Second South Carolina were preparing to sail for St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast, and Shaw, despite his reservations about what he thought would be a “miserable expedition,” wasted little time in requesting that the Fifty-fourth be allowed to join them. As General Gillmore had not yet arrived, Hunter consented to the assignment. The regiment struck camp at sunrise on June 8 after a night of heavy rains, stowed their wet tents aboard the DeMolay, and endured another “rough voyage of some eighty miles,” arriving at St. Simons the following morning. While the men set to work “pitching camp and clearing the ground,” Shaw awaited Montgomery’s arrival. Born in Ohio in 1814, the forty-eight-year-old schoolteacher had fought beside John Brown in Kansas, and in some ways Montgomery resembled his old comrade. Captain Luis Emilio described the heavily bearded colonel as “tall, spare, rather bowed, with gentle voice and quiet manner.” Shaw had briefly encountered Montgomery in Beaufort and immediately thought him “a strange compound.” As a devout Christian, Montgomery “allows no swearing or drinking in his regiment & is anti tobacco.” But he was a “bush-whacker,” Shaw informed his mother, who “burns & destroys wherever he goes with great gusto, & looks as if he had quite a taste for hanging people & throat cutting.” Like all men who had no doubts about their cause, Montgomery was “a perfect fanatic” who believed “that praying, shooting, burning, & hanging are the true means to put down the rebellion.” Yet Shaw was confident that Montgomery was a competent commander. Had Montgomery attended West Point and “been educated as a military man,” Shaw mused, “he would accomplish a great deal, & he may yet.”11
As the sun began to set on June 10 the combined regiments boarded the transports Sentinel and Harriet A. Weed, supported by the gunboat John Adams. Montgomery brought five companies from his regiment, and Shaw brought eight, leaving Companies C and F behind—and with them, Douglass and Swails—to guard the camp. Both transports promptly grounded on shoals, and so the raiders had to await high tide. The vessels finally reached the Altamaha River, some 100 miles south of Beaufort, with the John Adams, a bemused Captain Emilio noting, “occasionally shelling houses and clumps of woods” along its banks. They reached Darien around three in the afternoon. The town appeared to be nearly deserted, but the gunboat launched a few shells into the heart of the village anyway. Peering over the railing of the Sentinel, James Henry Gooding could see no more than about twenty people. There had been reports of a large Confederate force, he knew, but Gooding guessed that they had abandoned the coast given the concentration of U.S. forces on St. Simons Island. Shaw ordered his men ashore, instructing them to post pickets and form in the public square. He counted only “two white women and two negroes.”12
Traditional rules of war allowed for the confiscation of materials or foodstuffs that aided either combatant, and Darien’s waterfront storehouses and mills held large quantities of rice, resin, and cotton, the last of which, smuggled through the American naval blockade, helped keep the wilting Confederate economy afloat. Gooding assisted in loading a number of bales, as well as “about a dozen cows, [and] 50 or 60 sheep,” aboard the transports. But Montgomery had more in mind than confiscation. Hunter had encouraged him to engage in “a system of operations which will rapidly compel the rebels either to lay down their arms and sue for restoration of the Union or to withdraw their slaves into the interior.” Whether Montgomery would have arrived at the same decision regardless of his orders, after the town “was pretty thoroughly disemboweled” of movable property, he turned to Shaw and, with his customary low voice and “sweet smile,” said simply: “I shall burn this town.” Shaw was momentarily speechless, finally responding that he “did not want the responsibility of it.” Montgomery was “only too happy” to do it himself, lecturing Shaw that white Southerners “must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.” Because Shaw had been assigned to Montgomery’s command, he had to allow one of his companies to assist in the arson, although Montgomery cheerfully fired the last building himself. “We are outlawed” by President Davis, Montgomery added; since they could be summarily executed if captured, they were “therefore not bound by the rules of regular warfare.” Gooding later reported that the men remaining in camp on St. Simons Island could see the flames from fifteen miles away.13
Shaw was disgusted by the affair, denouncing it “as abominable a job” as he had ever had to perform. His soldiers had “met with no resistance there,” and the town “was never known to be a refuge for guerrillas.” Until that moment, Shaw believed, he had survived the war with his honor intact, and neither he nor any other officer in his regiment wished “to degenerate into a plunderer and robber.” For Shaw, the destruction was both a violation of his personal code of honor and an assault on the integrity of his men. As the pioneering Northern regiment, the Fifty-fourth wished to prove to the nation that black men could be effective combatants, and if the regiment spent the remainder of the war burning and looting alongside Montgomery’s “contraband” unit, their chance to prove themselves would be lost. The previous October, Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart had raided into Pennsylvania, and as Shaw pointedly observed to Governor Andrew, Montgomery’s actions stood in “singular contrast to that of Stuart,” who had avoided destroying civilian property. Shaw and Hallowell had consented to serve in a noble experiment designed to vindicate the ideals of New England abolitionism, not to live down to the low expectations of racists in both sections of the nation.14
As Shaw expected, Southern whites condemned the act. Even George Luther Stearns scorned the raid as “dirty work” and “unwanton vandalism.” Yet not everyone agreed. Frederick Douglass endorsed Montgomery’s theory that since the Confederate government was violating the rules of civilized warfare by threatening to summarily execute white officers, they had lost any right to insist that the U.S. Army adhere to a code of conduct they had themselves abandoned. Although Lewis Douglass, as a freeborn Northern soldier, was not subject to Confederate threats against white officers or former slaves, the Rochester abolitionist regarded Davis’s edict as highly personal. Harriet Tubman also refused to condemn the raid, since her work under Montgomery as a scout and spy invariably led to the liberation of enslaved Carolinians. The black press was largely silent, but George Stephens published a lengthy defense in the Weekly Anglo-African. The Pennsylvania cabinet-maker, who had been promoted to first sergeant on April 30, praised Montgomery as an “active and brave leader [who] gives none under his command time to rot, sicken and die in camp.” Although Stephens conceded that the town was “almost entirely deserted” when they arrived, he reminded his readers that Confederate cavalry had been active in the area. Without apology, Stephens defended the burning of Darien as a method of “spreading terror to the hearts of the rebels throughout this region.”15
Corporal Gooding also saw no cause for regret. A voracious reader, he consumed every account of the affair he could lay his hands on, and he was infuriated by what he found in Manhattan and London newspapers. In a series of letters to the New Bedford Mercury, Gooding attacked those “gouty conservatives” who condemned the raid as an “act of Vandalism” by “Nigger guerillas.” Their accounts, he fumed, were designed to convince “credulous people that Darien was a place rivaling New York, in commercial importance, and the peer of Rome or Athens, in historical value.” Would Confederate sailors, he wondered, had they the ability to do so, “have any scruples about burning New York with Greek fire?” As for complaints lodged in the London Times, the historically conscious Gooding thought it incongruous for British imperialists to describe the raid as an act of “inhuman barbarity.” When, he questioned—in a reference to British tactics in putting down the Indian rebellion of 1857—had American soldiers “lashed a rebel to a gun and blown him to pieces?”16
Unaware of Shaw’s missives to Andrew and the War Department, Montgomery returned to Hilton Head, leaving Shaw temporarily in charge of the camp on St. Simon’s. Gillmore had finally arrived to take control of the Department of the South, and prodded by politicians in both Massachusetts and Washington, he consented to withdraw the Fifty-fourth from Montgomery’s command. Gillmore ordered the Second South Carolina to relocate to Folly Island, just south of Charleston Harbor, to help construct fortifications. The Massachusetts press was overjoyed. Montgomery’s “negro brigade” had been reassigned “to handle the shovel,” the Worcester National Aegis gloated. “Their disgraceful raids are probably at an end.”17
GILLMORE GAVE SHAW UNTIL JUNE 24 TO RETURN HIS REGIMENT TO Hilton Head, so the men had nearly two weeks to rest and explore St. Simons. One officer enjoyed the “subtle languor in the hum of insects, the song of birds, and the splash of warm green water upon the shore,” while Gooding simply regarded the summer heat as “enough to make a fellow contemplate the place prepared for the ungodly.” Gooding had endured a winter in Baffin Bay, but at least the Artic lacked “stink weed, sand, rattlesnakes, and alligators.” Shaw discovered that Pierce Butler’s abandoned plantation stood nearby, and having met Butler’s former wife, actress Frances Anne Kemble, ten years before in Switzerland, he rode over to see it. The estate was deserted but for “about ten of his slaves,” all of them “sixty or seventy years old.” Some of them remembered Kemble and “looked much pleased” when Shaw mentioned her. One aged slave named John made Shaw promise that if he ever saw her again, he would tell “Miss Fanny” that he sent his regards. “The darkeys here are an interesting study,” Shaw commented to an old friend. “You have no conception of the degraded condition they were allowed to live in by their masters.” Yet it was not merely the patrician colonel who found the Gullah people of the Low-country exotic. New Bedford–born Lewis Douglass had much the same reaction, calling the refugees he encountered in South Carolina “natives” and describing as almost quaint their habit of “singing and praying nearly every night in their prayer meetings.” Whatever else, “they are a happy people,” he assured Amelia.18
The men spent a long night on June 24 stowing their gear aboard the Ben Deford, finally sailing at six the next morning. They made camp across the bay from Hilton Head on St. Helena Island, about fifteen miles south-east of Beaufort. Beyond those basic orders, Shaw received no details. “Whether we go with [Gillmore] and make an attack on Morris Island and Fort Sumter,” or remain in “garrison at Beaufort, or on some detached expedition,” Rob told his mother, “I can’t say.” At the very least, most officers regarded Gillmore as “much more active and energetic than Hunter,” and that pleased Shaw. His wish was that the Fifty-fourth might get into the fight and, together with Gillmore’s forces, put an early end to the conflict, so that he could return home to Annie. “I shan’t realize until about two years after the war is over, that I am married,” he remarked to his sister Effie’s fiancé, Charles Russell Lowell, who had recently been promoted to colonel in the Second Massachusetts Cavalry. Rob was pleased to hear of their engagement, assuring Russell that “there are not many girls like Effie.” The two men were only twenty-five and twenty-seven, but the war had altered them both, and Boston seemed very far away. “I hope this war will not finish one or both of us,” Shaw added, “and that we shall live to know each other very well.”19
Shaw’s melancholy reflections were interrupted by the arrival of the army’s paymaster, bearing the Fifty-fourth’s first disbursements. To Shaw’s dismay, on orders from the War Department, the regiment had been classified “with the contraband regiments,” and so instead of the expected $13 each month, the paymaster offered only $10. This was a great “injustice,” Shaw complained to Andrew. His men “were enlisted on the express understanding that they were to be on precisely the same footing as all other Massachusetts troops.” The paymaster, whose orders were unambiguous, refused to reconsider. “If he does not change his mind,” Shaw assured both his father and the governor, “I shall refuse to have the regiment paid until I hear from you on the subject.” Should the federal government fail to maintain its end of the bargain, Shaw believed, the Fifty-fourth ought to “be mustered out of service” and returned to Massachusetts.”20
The fault, ironically, lay with Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, a Republican and an ally of Andrew’s. By ordering the withdrawal of Thaddeus Stevens’s bill to recruit black soldiers, Wilson had permitted section 15 of his July 1862 Militia Act to survive, and so too its proposal to pay blacks on fatigue duty lower wages than white soldiers in active service. Following the May 1863 creation of the Bureau for Colored Troops, Secretary Stanton asked William Whiting, solicitor of the War Department, to provide him with a decision regarding the pay of “persons of African descent.” On June 4, Whiting submitted his findings. Both the Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act authorized the enlistment of blacks as manual workers, although the former made no mention of payment. Wilson’s Militia Act, however, stipulated that African American laborers would receive $10 each month, from which $3 would be deducted for clothing. Congress, Whiting added, essentially confirmed this policy in March 1863 by passing legislation paying black cooks $10 each month. After the clothing deduction (the uniform was required, even for those who would not fight), black laborers would receive only $7, or about half of the wages paid to white privates. The assumption was that only white soldiers engaged in combat, and their higher pay reflected the greater risks they faced. A furious Andrew fired off complaints to Stanton, and on the advice of the state assembly, he requested that William Schouler, the adjutant general of Massachusetts, immediately report what remedy he “would advise.” Stanton replied only that his hands were tied, as cabinet members lacked the authority to overrule an act of Congress. “For any additional pay or bounty colored troops must trust to State contributions and the justice of Congress at the next session,” he responded.21
While Shaw awaited word from Boston, the officers found time to enjoy the Fourth of July celebrations. On July 2, Shaw and Hallowell accepted an invitation to tea at a nearby plantation, which had been transformed into a freedmen’s school. The two met “four ladies and the same number of gentlemen,” but the one who fascinated Rob was Charlotte Forten of Philadelphia. “She is quite pretty, remarkably well-educated, and a very interesting woman,” Shaw told his mother. At twenty-five, Forten was exactly his age and “decidedly the belle here.” Despite his five months among black troops, Shaw remained very much the Boston Brahmin, and notwithstanding her family’s wealth, what made Forten’s accomplishments most surprising to him, he admitted, was that she was a mixed-race “quadroon.” After a pleasant afternoon on the piazza, the group walked over to the plantation’s church to watch a service. The praying, Forten scribbled into her diary, was some “of the very best and most spirited” she had ever heard, and she was pleased that Shaw “listened with the deepest interest.” In fact, Rob was merely being polite. “The praying was done by an old blind fellow, who made believe, all the time, that he was reading out of a book,” he grumbled. “Their singing, when there are a great many voices, is fine, but otherwise I don’t like it at all. The women’s voices are so shrill, that I can’t listen to them with comfort.”22
Shaw was far more enthusiastic about the celebration that he, Hallowell, and Saxton witnessed on the Fourth. Held in a grove near a Baptist Church about seven miles from their camp, the festivities began with two speeches by black ministers. Next, one black student stepped forward to read the Declaration of Independence and then, together with other pupils, lined up to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” The freedwomen donned “gay dresses & turbans,” which Shaw thought “made the sight very brilliant.” If Shaw ever had any doubts about their mission, the celebration helped put them to rest. “Can you imagine anything more wonderful than a coloured-Abolitionist meeting on a South Carolina plantation,” Rob asked rhetorically. “Here were collected all the freed slaves on this Island listening to the most ultra abolition speeches,” thanks to the arrival of the army. “Now they own a little themselves, go to school, to church, and work for wages.” Never the most pious of men, the day nonetheless led Shaw to “believe that God isn’t very far off.”23
The next morning Shaw and Hallowell found there was yet more to celebrate. Two days before, on July 3, Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania had met with disaster when a charge of 12,000 men was repulsed by heavy U.S. artillery and rifle fire. The Second and Twenty-second Massachusetts had both been in the thick of fighting, the latter suffering a casualty rate of 60 percent. Among the fifteen dead in the regiment was Shaw’s old Harvard classmate Charles Mudge. “Poor fellows,” Rob lamented, “how they have been slaughtered!” Miraculously, one day later, on the Fourth, the siege at Vicksburg, Mississippi, ended with the surrender of the fortress city to Major General Ulysses S. Grant. The victory divided the Confederacy, separating the western states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from the rest of the South and allowing U.S. gun-boats to sail the length of the Mississippi River.24
THE TWIN VICTORIES MADE SHAW ALL THE MORE DETERMINED TO have the Fifty-fourth included in the War Department’s plans for the Charleston assault. Shaw had grown friendly with General George Crockett Strong during their few days together on St. Helena, and when Strong’s forces were ordered to Folly Island, Shaw wrote to express his distress at “being left behind.” He remained convinced that his men were “capable of better service than mere guerilla warfare,” and he regretted that his regiment no longer formed “a part of the force under your command.” Although Strong was a career soldier, he had been raised in Vermont and was but five years Shaw’s elder. Rob did not mention the pay issue in his plea, but he hoped Strong agreed that “the colored soldiers should be associated as much as possible with the white troops,” so as to erase the image of them in the white mind as mere laborers and plunderers.25
Strong did not reply directly to Shaw’s letter of July 6. His response instead arrived at noon on July 8 in the guise of orders instructing the Fifty-fourth to be prepared to move within the hour, bringing only their blankets and rations. By three o’clock, seven companies were loaded into the transport Chasseur, with the remaining three aboard the Cossack, a steamer they shared, Shaw noted uneasily, with Montgomery and his staff. The skies opened and the long night, one captain groused, “was made miserable by wet clothes” and the “crowded conditions on the small steamers.” But shortly after one in the morning on July 9, the transports reached the mouth of the Stono River, and by noon the soldiers had all debarked on the western end of Folly Island.26
Already in control of portions of the island, Gillmore proposed to use the flat, northeastern edge of Folly as a staging ground for assaults across a narrow inlet to Morris Island, which he described as an equally smooth “mess of sand about three and three quarters miles long.” On the eastern side of Morris, Confederate engineers had constructed Battery Wagner, a beachhead redoubt of fourteen cannons, which together with Fort Moultrie, across Charleston Harbor, guarded the harbor’s entrance and protected Fort Sumter. To the north, across Folly River, lay the far larger James Island. On its harbor side, Confederates had strengthened a dilapidated eighteenth-century stronghold, Fort Johnson, to protect against an overland assault on Charleston. Otherwise, General P. G. T. Beauregard, in charge of the city’s defenses, relied on the natural barriers of salt marshes, creeks, snakes, and mud to keep U.S. forces at bay. Gillmore’s plan was to shell Wagner with shore batteries constructed on Folly Island and, from warships outside the harbor, have General Alfred Terry and 4,000 men—including the Fifty-fourth—launch a feint north onto James Island in hopes of pulling Confederates away from Wagner and Morris Island more generally. To slow the arrival of Confederate reinforcements, Higginson and the First South Carolina were to sail up the South Edisto River and cut rail lines to the south.27
Drawn by topographical engineer Robert Knox Sneden for General Quincy Adams Gillmore, this charts the islands and terrain from Charleston Harbor to the Stono River. The Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth used Folly Island as a camp; it also served as staging ground for the July 1863 assaults on James and Morris Islands. Courtesy Virginia Historical Society.
The Fifty-fourth had only a few hours’ rest before orders arrived for Terry’s division to move, but most of the men discovered that anticipation was the enemy of sleep. A monitor, two gunboats, and a mortar schooner began to push up the Stono River, firing on James Island on their right and John’s Island to their left. Thirteen transport ships followed close behind. Beauregard was not completely wrong to think his southwest effectively guarded by creeks and swamps. Most of the lower portion of James Island, which faced Folly and Morris Islands, was latticed with twisting rivers and creeks, and even three miles up to the Stono River, on the island’s southwestern side, where Terry’s forces landed near Holland Island Creek, the island was more marsh than dry land. The soldiers made camp on a spit of higher land roughly three miles long and half a mile wide. Known to locals as Solomon Legare Island, after the largest plantation in the area, the strip was effectively cut off from the rest of James Island by a wide bog; earlier residents had constructed two narrow land bridges of dirt roads just under a mile apart to connect the estate with the northern portion of James. Most of Terry’s division made camp on the southern edge of Legare, with the Fifty-fourth guarding its northern shore and the two causeways.28
At five o’clock the next morning, the soldiers could hear “heavy cannonading” coming from the direction of Morris Island. Having correctly assumed that Beauregard had shifted troops to the northeastern side of James Island, Gillmore ordered his men to cross the narrow Lighthouse Inlet to Morris Island. The attack began inauspiciously. George Strong was in the lead boat, and misjudging the depth of the inlet, he waded off into what he believed to be shallow waters. The water was well over his head, and all his men saw was his hat drifting on the waves. They fished him out of the water, and pulling off his waterlogged boots, Strong led the charge up the beach, hatless and in his stockings, while gunners in the harbor opened fire on Wagner. Confederate soldiers along the beach scrambled for the safety of Wagner’s bombproofs, abandoning their kettles. Although Strong failed to take Wagner itself, the army soon controlled three-quarters of the island. Had Strong pushed on at that moment, his troops quite possibly might have overrun and captured Wagner as well. Union losses stood at fifteen killed and ninety-one wounded, while Confederate casualties were far higher at nearly three hundred, with eleven artillery pieces left behind during the retreat. The news, one officer remembered, was received by the soldiers on James with “rousing cheers.”29
The following day proved far less successful for U.S. forces on both islands. At dawn on June 11, Strong’s brigade advanced on Wagner through heavy fog. But heavy fire from within the battery combined with the narrowness of the beach to keep other units from following. Overly confident, Gillmore ordered no artillery bombardment prior to the attack. Nor were Strong’s men provided with covering fire during the assault itself. By the time Strong ordered a retreat, he had lost forty-nine men, with nearly another three hundred either wounded or missing. On James Island, the Fifty-fourth and other U.S. forces were able to advance pickets across the western land bridge, known as Grimball’s Causeway, thanks to supporting fire from the gunboat Pawnee. But with the grim news from Wagner and their uncertainty about the number of Confederates several miles to their front, they dared advance no further. In the chaos, Private Abraham Brown accidentally shot and killed himself while cleaning his pistol. As it began to pour again, Ned Hallowell rode out to inspect the pickets along the northern edge of Legare and, no doubt, to bolster the flagging morale of his men.30
Correctly believing Wagner to be secure, Beauregard reduced his force on Morris Island and concentrated on James. Higginson’s expedition up the Edisto River had failed, even before six regiments of Confederate infantry arrived from Georgia and North Carolina to assist in the defense. On June 15, Confederate infantrymen suddenly appeared in front of the Tenth Connecticut pickets, and several pickets from the Fifty-fourth reported seeing scouts close to their lines. At about six that evening, Companies B, K, and H relieved Pennsylvania troops, and the 300 men from the Fifty-fourth spread out in front of the Tenth Connecticut, all of them holding a precarious position, as they had a dense swamp to their rear. It continued to rain, but an officer, climbing atop a house, could see the Confederate signal corps flashing messages. He shouted for the men to remain vigilant and prepare for an attack, his words almost lost in the squall. Undaunted, Private George Brown crawled forward far enough to get a shot off at a Confederate picket.31
Around three in the morning on June 16, Confederate sharpshooters began to take aim at the Union pickets, hoping to drive them away from the road and toward the center of Legare Island so that they might advance in greater numbers by daylight. Suddenly, just before dawn, six companies from the Twenty-Fifth South Carolina and two from the Nineteenth Georgia swarmed across River’s Causeway, the easternmost land bridge. Despite the warnings of the previous night, the Tenth Connecticut was caught unprepared, and far to their rear the pickets could hear Shaw and Wilkie James bawling for the remaining companies to form lines.32
Peter Vogelsang held his position behind a thick palmetto tree, but within moments “one hundred Rebels were swarming about him.” Cartridges for Enfield rifles consisted of paper-wrapped powder charges with a lubricated minié ball resting on its top; Vogelsang bit off the end of the cartridge, tasting the bitter gunpowder as he poured the charge down the musket of his gun, frantically inserting the bullet and ramming it down the barrel. He led his men to the left, away from the bridge, firing as they slowly retreated. One Confederate took his bullet and went down, and Vogelsang sliced three more with his bayonet. Swinging his empty musket, Vogelsang caught a fifth soldier in the stomach and “doubled him up” before stabbing down with his bayonet. After the skirmish, Vogelsang remembered that the dying soldier “looked so young,” but in the moment he thought only to grab the fallen man’s gun. The “rebels came so thick and fast, and on horseback, too.” His unit dashed toward a creek and the safety of land beyond. “You know I am pretty good at running,” the forty-six-year-old sergeant recalled, “and I did my prettiest.” Cut off from the rest of the company, Vogelsang “dropped the old secesh rifle” and waded into the creek. Although not wide, the water was neck deep in the middle, and as he scrambled into the tall grass on the other shore a ball nicked his heel. Just behind him, two slower soldiers, Corporals Harvey Davis and Anthony Schenek, were shot as they tried to swim across; they drowned, their blood oozing into the slowly moving water. Confederates shouted for two others to surrender, and they “very foolishly did so,” in Vogelsang’s estimation, as they “were afterwards found, tied and shot.”33
As the Tenth Connecticut scrambled into formation and Shaw’s companies fell in on their right, the 300 men of the Fifty-fourth continued to pull back, able only to hinder but not halt the wave of 800 attacking Confederates. “Our picket line retired slowly and reluctantly,” George Stephens wrote of Company B, “delivering their fire as if on a skirmish drill.” Not far away, Vogelsang heard a cavalryman shout “surrender” and spied a mounted Confederate aiming in his direction. The ball caught him as he spun, hitting him in the upper chest and collapsing his left lung before narrowly missing his spine and exiting through the center of his back. “It made a sort of stinging, numb sensation for a moment,” he recalled, finding it odd that the pain was not greater. Vogelsang dropped to his knees and tugged off his cartridge box and haversack and began to crawl away, yet after scuttling but “one hundred feet or so,” he passed out.34
“Our men fought like tigers,” Lewis Douglass assured his parents. “The rebels were held in check by our men long enough to allow the Tenth Connecticut to escape being surrounded and captured.” The white soldiers were able to reach the Stono and took shelter under the protection of the Pawnee’s guns. Shore batteries succeeded in landing a few shells on the Pawnee, but soon the other gunboats, which had steamed north, dropped back downriver and began to rake the Confederate lines. The noise of the ships’ guns awoke Vogelsang, but as he had fallen behind the advancing Confederates, he remained where he was, lying “in the blood, mud and water” up to his waist for the next several hours. Unable to see the action, he had no idea “which side would win, or if they would come” and search for him. In the center of the island, the Confederates “yelled and hooted,” but the main body of the Fifty-fourth stood their ground. The soldiers poured “volley after volley” into the Confederates, their shoulders bruised from the recoil of their rifles, Stephens reported, “and after a contest of two hours they fled.” Sweating and bone-weary, James Henry Gooding lowered his rifle. “It was a warmer reception than they had expected,” he said proudly.35
Despite the victory, General Terry feared that the U.S. forces could not hold out against a second assault and gave the order to evacuate the island. Search parties located Vogelsang, cut off his clothes, and dressed his wounds as well as they could before carrying him aboard a transport ship bound for Folly Island, and then on to the Union hospital in Beaufort. The Fifty-fourth suffered fourteen killed and twenty wounded, with another thirteen missing. Among the dead was twenty-four-year-old Corporal Charles Holloway, a student from Wilberforce, Ohio, and Sergeant Joseph D. Wilson, an Illinois farmer. Wilson had been surrounded by Confederate soldiers who ordered him to surrender. He bravely “refused to do so,” Gooding reported, “and was shot through the head.” Because the men who joined the Fifty-fourth had often marched off to Readville with groups of friends or relatives from the same towns and villages, fights such as the one on James Island could have disastrous effects on black communities back home. Although Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, was home to only several thousand residents, four brothers from the Krunkleton family had signed on. All four served in Company K and stood near River’s Causeway when the fighting began. James Krunkleton was unharmed, but Wesley and William were among the wounded, and nineteen-year-old Cyrus was killed. The Confederates reported only fifteen casualties, a ludicrous undercount that nobody believed. “They carried cart loads of dead off the field,” Stephens remarked.36
Worrisome too was the fate of those captured. The thirteen listed as missing were assumed to have been taken prisoner, and rumors circulated within the regiment that Confederate infantrymen had mistreated their black captives. One soldier who had taken cover after being overrun by Confederates reported seeing black prisoners protected by officers, but watched as three others were shot and bayonetted when no officers were nearby. Private George Counsel, a laborer from West Chester, Pennsylvania, was among those unaccounted for, as were William Henry Harrison, a thirty-five-year-old teamster from Chicago, Henry Worthington of Defiance, Ohio, and James Caldwell, the grandson of abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Yet unknown to Shaw and Hallowell was the fact that General Beauregard, unsure of what to do with captured black soldiers who did not fall under the description of men listed in Davis’s decree, had written to General Samuel Cooper, the inspector general of the Confederacy, to ask about their status. While he awaited an answer, Beauregard ordered the men imprisoned in Castle Pinckney, a small island fortress previously used as a lockup for prisoners taken during the First Battle of Bull Run. With good reason, Beauregard suspected that a far larger number of black prisoners were about to fall into Confederate hands. It remained “a nice question,” commented one Charleston reporter, whether free black troops “are to be regarded as belligerents or outlaws.”37
At five o’clock that afternoon, the Fifty-fourth prepared to withdraw from James, only hours after the last shots had been fired. As the regiment shouldered their arms and prepared to march, several officers from Connecticut rode in to express their thanks for “the service rendered by the Fifty-fourth.” Shaw was even more gratified by a message that arrived from General Terry: “Tell your Colonel that I am exceedingly pleased with the conduct of your regiment.” Brief though the action was, it was the first time in the war that black and white soldiers had fought side by side, and Shaw believed that “what we have done to-day wipes out the remembrance of the Darien affair.” Wilkie James, having survived his first taste of battle, was yet more enthusiastic. “For the first time,” he wrote his father, “we had met the enemy, and had proven there, fully to our satisfaction at least, that the negro soldier was a fighting soldier.” Lewis Douglass, of course, had never had any doubts that men like himself made effective combatants, but even so, he was proud to inform his parents that the battle “earned us our reputation as a fighting regiment.”38
Sympathetic newspapers concurred. As one correspondent wrote, the “boys of the Tenth Connecticut could not help loving the men who saved them from destruction.” The journalist predicted that “probably a thousand homes from Windham to Fairfield have in letters been told the story how the dark-skinned heroes fought the good fight and covered with their brave hearts the retreat of brothers, sons, and fathers of Connecticut.” He was not wrong. One white soldier wrote home to his mother, praising the Fifty-fourth for fighting “like heroes.” Had it not been “for the bravery of three companies of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth (colored), our whole regiment would have been captured.” Connecticut, of course, was a Republican stronghold. In fact, Lincoln had carried every one of its counties in 1860, and so the state was inherently more sympathetic to Andrew’s experiment than were white soldiers from the Midwest. Yet this did not mean that the fight for James Island was not a crucial step in the right direction.39
After several hours’ preparation, the march back to Folly Island finally began around nine o’clock. The men bundled most of their stores, extra ammunition, and horses aboard the steamer Boston, but the transport ship was a small one, and after the wounded were carried on, there was no space for the rest of the regiment. When the pathways through the swamps grew too marshy, the soldiers threw down planks as makeshift bridges. “A driving rain poured down nearly the whole time,” one officer remembered. “Blinding flashes of lightening momentarily illuminated the way, then fading but to render the blackness deeper.” The boards grew slick from the rain and muck, and it took the regiment from ten o’clock that night until five the next morning, Shaw observed, to travel four miles. “For nearly a mile we had to pass over a bridge of one, and in some places, two planks wide,” Shaw remarked, “without a railing, and slippery with rain.” Short on both water and rations, the regiment collapsed on the southern shore of Cole’s Island, just opposite Folly Island, sleeping until the sun grew too hot. Their trek, Douglass presumed, was surely “one of the hardest marches on record through woods and marsh.”40
As they lay on the beach awaiting transport ships to ferry them across to Folly, Rob found time to write to Annie, promising her that he “shouldn’t like you to see me as I am now.” Apart from being washed by the summer rains, none of the men had bathed or shaved in several days. Shaw himself had eaten nothing but “crackers and coffee these two days,” and his hunger, combined with his lack of sleep and the incessant bombardment of Fort Wagner in the distance, did little to improve his mood. Leaning over to Hallowell, Shaw asked him if he believed in presentiments, adding that he felt sure he would die in the next battle. Astonished, Hallowell begged him to “shake off the feeling.” After a long moment, Shaw replied only: “I will try.”41
AS IF SHAW REQUIRED YET ANOTHER REASON TO BE DISCONSOLATE, word of deadly race riots in New York City began to filter south. Four days before, on July 13, when the new 1863 draft law went into effect, mobs of working-class Democrats and Irish immigrants systematically sacked federal property and buildings associated with the Republican Party before turning on their black neighbors. Rioters burned the West Broadway pharmacy of Dr. James McCune Smith, the attending physician at the Colored Orphan Asylum, before turning on that institution itself. As teachers hurried the 233 children out the rear entrance, rioters brushed aside the two policemen guarding the orphanage and ransacked the building of furniture, bedding, and dishes before soaking the floors with turpentine and setting it afire. The children took refuge at the Thirty-fifth Street police station, where inmates tried to strike at the black orphans “through the bars of the doors.” Sarah Shaw and her daughters fled their Staten Island house, while Frank, after arming his gardener and coachman, prepared to defend his home. The mobs left him alone. Overall, at least eleven blacks were murdered during the riots, including one man who was beaten with paving stones, lynched, and then burned. Another of the murdered was the seven-year-old nephew of Sergeant Robert J. Simmons of the Fifty-fourth. Corporal Gooding had survived the fight on James Island only to live long enough to read that his childhood home had been reduced to ashes.42
When George Stephens heard the news, he penned a lengthy letter to the Weekly Anglo-African. “Are we their enemies? Have we tyrannized over them? Have we maltreated them? Have we robbed them,” he wondered of the rioters. Black Americans, he observed, had long been “loyal to the country, in season and out of season,” while newcomers to American shores attempted to “subvert the government by popular violence and tumult.” Yet the mobs, Stephens believed, were but the tools of influential Democratic politicians who sought to leverage the chaos into “arbitrary power.” Despite the fact that for years the federal government, “by its every precept and practice, conserved the interests of slavery, and slaves were hunted down by United States soldiers,” blacks remained prepared to “defend it against powerful and determined foes.” But having enlisted and been shipped south to fight, black soldiers had to read of “mob-fiends” who “brandished the incendiary torch over the heads of our wives and children and burn their homes.” For his part, Peter Vogelsang, despite his worries for his home in Manhattan, tried to remain optimistic about his country’s future. Writing from the army hospital in Beaufort, Vogelsang assured his New York friends that he “sympathized with you all in the trials you have had to undergo” during the three days of rioting. “Tis hard, but may be a better day will dawn for us, at least, I hope so.”43
Not until late that evening did the transport General Hunter arrive to ferry the soldiers back to Folly Island, and even then the only way to get the men aboard was by way of a leaky longboat that could hold only thirty per trip. “Rain was pouring down in torrents,” Captain Emilio sourly noted, as thunderstorms yet again drenched the regiment. Colonel Shaw himself saw to the embarkation, which took hours, and when the last private was aboard, he chose to remain on deck with his soaked men rather than retire to a dry cabin below. Sailing up Folly River, the transport reached the landing by nine in the morning on July 18. Having not enjoyed a full night’s sleep for days, the exhausted men were heartened by the sight of white soldiers cheering their arrival, shouting, “Well done! We heard your guns.” A few soldiers accepted the offered hardtack and coffee, their first meal in many hours. Most of the men wished only to sleep, but the cannonade waged daily against Wagner began around ten-thirty. A few of the soldiers climbed to the top of a sandy hill, from which point they “could see the distant vessels engaging Wagner.” Shaw instructed his officers to keep the men “near the shore” while they awaited “further orders.” Sergeant Simmons used the opportunity to scratch out a few lines to his mother, although he was unsure as to where he should mail his letter, since not only had his nephew been murdered in the rioting, but his mother’s apartment house had been burned down. “God has protected me through this, my first fiery trial,” he wrote. “Goodbye! Likely we shall be engaged soon.”44