AFTER MOST OF THE TOWN’S RESIDENTS FLED IN NOVEMBER 1861 following the arrival of the U.S. Navy, Beaufort had become a village of hospitals. By the time the badly wounded Sergeant Peter Vogelsang was ferried down the coast after the skirmish on James Island, nearly a dozen elegant mansions had been transformed into infirmaries. Slowly on the mend, Vogelsang lay on a cot in what the army numbered “No. 6 General Hospital,” an infirmary reserved for black soldiers. So far as hospitals went, it was not a bad one: the mansion on the corner of Craven and New Streets had been one of several owned by the Sams family. Charlotte Forten described it as “a large new brick building—quite close to the water—two-storied, many windowed, and very airy—in every way well adapted for a hospital.”1
Vogelsang remained pleasantly surprised that he had survived. “I am doing very well,” he assured the Weekly Anglo-African. “My wounds are healing pretty rapidly.” At first, the surgeons believed he had been hit with two balls. After a seemingly endless probing of the wounds, they concluded that one ball had passed completely through him, “but from its very eccentric course they do not see why it did not kill me.” His close brush with death, combined with the knowledge of what Confederates on James Island had done to some of the black soldiers who had tried to surrender, elicited from Vogelsang the gallows humor that was common to the Fifty-fourth. “But you know the old saw of the man born to be hung,” Vogelsang chuckled, remembering the ancient seamen’s saying that a man destined to be hanged would never drown. “May be that is my fate,” he mused. “At all events, I am perfectly satisfied as it is.”2
Vogelsang barely had time to emerge from the ether’s fog before the men wounded at Wagner began to arrive. The medical facilities on Morris and Folly Islands amounted to little more than several large tents, which one officer condemned as “poorly supplied with comforts and conveniences for the sick, and also with medicines.” Those tended to there were either only lightly wounded or sick from dysentery or fevers. The seriously wounded were evacuated to the hospitals in Beaufort, with the black soldiers destined for No. 6 and the white officers for No. 5 in what had been the home of Robert Barnwell; the injured white soldiers from New York and Connecticut were taken to any of the other ten infirmaries that had sufficient beds. Around nine o’clock in the evening of July 19, the first ships reached Beaufort’s docks. A runner came dashing up New Street to No. 6 with the warning: “Prepare immediately to receive 500 wounded men.” Of that number, roughly 150 were from the Fifty-fourth. “The brave boys,” wrote Dr. Esther Hill Hawks, “were brought to us and laid on blankets on the floor all mangled and ghastly.” From his cot, Vogelsang watched as stretcher-bearers carried badly wounded friends from his company into the room. “Such a sight! Blood, mud, sand and water, broken legs and arms, some dying and some dead,” he lamented.3
The regiment’s surgeons were initially overwhelmed by the number of wounded, even though they had the help of Hawks, an 1857 graduate of the New England Female Medical College, and her husband, surgeon John Milton Hawks, who had traveled south together to volunteer in army infirmaries. “We had no beds and no means even of building a fire,” Esther fretted. But the newly freed people living in Beaufort “came promptly to our aid and almost before we knew what we needed they brought us buckets full of nice broth and gruels, pitchers of lemonade, fruits, cakes, vegetables indeed everything needed for the immediate wants of the men was furnished.” Journalist Edward Pierce also marveled at how the work of the doctors was “being supplemented by those of the colored people here.” Harriet Tubman organized the town’s black women, and while they cooked and scrubbed, she saw to the soldiers. “I’d go to the hospital,” she remarked, “early every morning.” Filling a large basin with clean water, she would “take a sponge and begin.” The same large windows that let in the sea breeze allowed for flies, and Tubman “thrash[ed] away the flies, and they’d rise, they would, like bees round a hive.” After she had cleaned the wounds of four soldiers, the water in her basin “would be as red as clear blood.” By the time she returned with fresh water, “the flies would be round de first ones, black and thick as ever.”4
Despite the serious nature of so many soldiers’ wounds, both Hawks and Pierce were stunned by the enthusiasm and bravado of the men in their care. One soldier with a shattered right arm lamented only that he would be unable to “strike another blow for freedom.” Some of those who hoped to regain their health quickly and return to the regiment assured Pierce that they were ready “to meet the enemy again, and they kept asking if Wagner is taken yet.” Talking with soldiers lying in one room, Pierce was swept along by their good humor and laughed, “Well, boys, this was not part of the programme, was it?” Gazing up from his cot, one soldier replied: “Oh, yes, indeed, we expected to take all that comes.” The other men in the room chimed in. “Thank God, we went in to live or die,” one swore, while another promised to fight on until “the last brother breaks his chains.” Only after “all our people get their freedom,” ventured a fourth, “can we afford to die.” Frank Myers, a twenty-three-year-old laborer from New Jersey, knew he would not be among those returning to Morris Island. His arm shattered by a shell, Myers was going home, but he assured the journalist that he thanked “God so much for the privilege” to serve. “I went in to live or die as he please.”5
Charlotte Forten was particularly impressed when she visited the hospital on July 23. Expecting to hear the constant, muted moaning that haunted most battlefield hospitals, she instead found the patients to be “so cheerful” that she first supposed that few of them were badly injured. But as she moved from bed to bed Forten discovered that “among the most uncomplaining” were those “who are severely wounded—some dangerously so.” Among the men she spoke with was Sergeant William Carney, who “suffers great pain, being badly wounded in the leg.” Despite taking four balls and having the back of his head raked with grapeshot, Carney was “perfectly patient and uncomplaining.” Forten sat with Carney for some time, drawn to his “good, honest face.” The story of Carney’s return with the flag was already legendary among U.S. soldiers of both races, and Forten heard him described as “one of the best and bravest men in the regiment.”6
Carney’s numerous wounds never improved sufficiently. At first shipped to No. 6 in Beaufort, his leg injuries were too extensive for the surgeons, whose central task was to patch up the soldiers so that they might rejoin their unit. Long-term rehabilitation was hardly their specialty. In late October, the army moved Carney to the large hospital in St. Augustine known as Government House, but the doctors there proved little better. Just before Christmas, Carney received a thirty-day furlough to return home to New Bedford. Still unpaid, Carney borrowed “what money he wanted” from Lieutenant Henry Hooper and asked his doctor to “give his thanks” to Ned Hallowell for the latter’s “kindness to him.” By January 1864, Carney was able to hobble about with a cane, and the determined sergeant tried to rejoin his company in a noncombat position. But February found him again unwell, this time in one of the hospitals in nearby Hilton Head. Finally, on July 21, a clerk in the Adjutant General’s Office stamped his Certificate of Disability. This time Carney sought rehabilitation in Boston, only to discover that even in the capital of Massachusetts army hospitals were understaffed and ill prepared for the rising tide of incapacitated soldiers. As one member of the state assembly complained to Governor Andrew, “sick and wounded soldiers are obliged to take their place in file, in the order of their arrival, and must stand for hours, or lose their place in the order of precedence.” As a mariner with two blasted legs, Carney’s path to restored health and solvency would be a lengthy one.7
What worried the patients, Hawks learned, was the fate of their colonel. For the first few days after their arrival, the soldiers peppered the doctors with queries about Shaw. “Do you hear any news from Morris Island,” one soldier asked Esther. “Anything of our Colonel?” When definitive word arrived in Beaufort on Friday, July 24, the men were heartbroken. Hawks recorded that they spoke of nothing else. At Readville, Shaw had been a tough disciplinarian, but having ventured his life with theirs, they revered him in death, and their admiration for him, Hawks thought, “has something of the divine in it.” Sergeant John Morgan, a Cincinnati barber, anticipated Frank Shaw’s views on attempts to recover his son’s body. “I suppose his friends will consider it a great disgrace for him to lie buried with a lot of niggers,” Morgan assured Esther, “but if they know how all his men loved him, they would never wish to take him to any other resting place.” To add to their misery, word arrived that General George Strong, who had been shipped north to an army hospital in Manhattan, died of tetanus on July 30. Only thirty years of age, Strong traveled across one final river and was buried in Brooklyn.8
William H. Carney’s heroic protection of the American flag made him an immediate celebrity, and his words upon handing the Stars and Stripes to a waiting soldier—“Boys, I did my duty; the dear old flag never touched the ground”—would be repeated by New England students for generations. He became the most photographed soldier in the Fifty-fourth. Courtesy National Park Service.
Some of the cases encountered by the medical staff served as depressing reminders that the Fifty-fourth was not a traditional regiment comprising white Yankees. After Private Charles Reason’s gangrenous arm was amputated, Dr. Hawks asked if she could contact his parents in his behalf. The twenty-three-year-old Reason had enlisted in Syracuse, but he confided to her that he was a Maryland runaway who had fled his master “only a few years ago.” Reason told Hawks his story as she bathed “his head and face.” After reaching Syracuse, he had worked on a farm owned by an aged white couple, assuring the family that he was a freeman from Alabama. “As soon as the government would take me I came to fight,” Reason insisted, “not for my country, I never had any, but to gain one.” When Hawks again inquired about his mother, Reason told her that she had died years before. Still pressing, Hawks asked about his father. She blushed at her foolishness when the mixed-race Reason added that his “mother was all I had to love me, and she has gone home.” Reason knew that he was dying, but since he would then see his mother “soon,” he asked only that the doctor “pray with me.” Hawks held his remaining hand as he died, then “kiss[ed] his white forehead” and moved on to the next patient. Reason would be one of thirty-eight soldiers from the Fifty-fourth who died at No. 6 over the next two years.9
The three Krunkleton brothers were united in the sick ward. Nineteen-year-old James had been wounded at Wagner, and his older brothers Wesley and William were already in No. 6 with the injuries they incurred on James Island. Esther Hawks found the brothers lying “side by side,” in some pain but thinking only of their brother Cyrus, James’s twin, who had died in the fighting on July 16. “We offered to go when the war broke out,” one of the brothers assured Hawks, “but none would have us, and as soon as Gov. Andrew gave us a chance all the boys in our place were ready, [and] hardly one who could carry a musket stayed home.” Henry, their eldest brother, had remained on the farm in Mercersburg, but upon hearing of Cyrus’s death, he caught a train for Readville and signed on with the Fifty-fifth. Henry would survive the war and return home to marry his fiancée, but William was to die of pneumonia in a battlefield hospital in Georgetown, South Carolina, five days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender.10
One of the white officers taken to No. 5 was Captain John Whittier Appleton, a thirty-year-old clerk from Boston. Appleton had been wounded at Wagner after crawling into a gun embrasure—an opening cut through the parapet that allowed artillerymen to take aim over a broad piece of ground—to stop the Confederate artillerymen from firing their cannon. Although in need of medical care, Appleton suffered from more than his physical wounds. Black soldiers such as Carney had old friends like Gooding to confide in, while the Krunkleton brothers had one another for moral support or to bolster their courage. White officers, by comparison, felt the need to serve as flawless models for their men, and too often their class and their color isolated them from the men in their command. Appleton’s young wife was far away, and at times the stress became unbearable. “His brain has been seriously affected by isolation and exhaustion during the recent field operations on James Island,” his doctor observed, “so that an absence from the department is necessary to prevent permanent disability.” At length, the captain recovered from his bout of combat stress and returned to the regiment.11
When the injuries lingered or worsened, or simply proved to be beyond the capabilities of the surgeons in Beaufort, the soldiers received leaves to return home to seek care in army hospitals in the North, or private care if they were officers of wealth. Wilkie James sailed up the coast, first to Manhattan and then to Newport, but the wound in his foot grew so infected that doctors had to cut away at it during his journey. By the time Wilkie reached his father’s house, he was delirious and so near death that the bearers placed his stretcher just inside the front door, judging him too ill even to be carried to an upstairs bedroom. For days, his father Henry James Sr. fretted, the eighteen-year-old remained “excessively weak, unable to do anything but lie passive, even to turn himself on his pillow.” His doctors recommended a year’s recuperation, and Wilkie resigned from the regiment the next January. Ever the indifferent student, Wilkie had no desire to return to college, and always “vastly attached to the negro-soldier cause,” as his father put it, he eventually returned to the Fifty-fourth and served until August 1865.12
For a time, Ned Hallowell lay on a cot near Appleton in No. 5, the officers’ hospital. On July 24, Charlotte Forten paid him a visit, remarking that the infirmary was housed “in one of the finest residences in Beaufort, and surrounded by beautiful grounds.” Only six days after the assault on Wagner, Hallowell was in no mood to revel in his surroundings. The two spoke of Shaw with “deep sadness,” and Ned surprised Forten by telling her that Rob, doubting he would survive the battle, had expressed the wish that Charlotte would take charge of his horses until they could be shipped north to his widow. Forten judged Hallowell “to be slowly improving,” yet she could not help reflecting on how one tragic week had altered so many lives. “How strong, how well, how vigorous he was then! And now, how thoroughly prostrated.” Not unlike the enlisted men in his regiment, Ned remained “brave, patient” with his wounds, despite the fact that the army, with its customary inefficiency, remained unsure as to whether the lieutenant colonel was “absent, wounded or a prisoner.” After the battle, an officer with another regiment stumbled across Hallowell’s cloak and “a bag filled with horse equipment,” which he wished to return. But as late as August 6, few outside of No. 5 appeared to know the details of Ned’s whereabouts.13
In fact, by that date, Ned was back in his parents’ Philadelphia home at 912 Walnut Street, being cared for by his father, surgeon Morris Hallowell, his mother Hannah, and a series of doting sisters. On August 1, Dr. William Hunt and Massachusetts state medical director Joseph Swift visited the Hallowells to report on Ned’s recovery. The two “carefully examined his wounds of scrotum, left thigh, & hip,” and concurred that “he will not be able to resume his duties in a less period than twenty days.” The familiar surroundings and the plentiful fare helped restore Ned’s body and soul, and on August 6 he assured John Murray Forbes, the governor’s adviser, that his “wounds are improving rapidly, & I hope in a few weeks to rejoin my command.” Even so, four weeks later Hunt recommended an additional furlough of another twenty days.14
Family friends who themselves had loved ones in harm’s way took great interest in Ned’s welfare. Amelia Holmes, the mother of Pen’s friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., assured Emily Hallowell from Boston that she wished she could take a turn “in nursing him or rather in sitting by his bedside and fanning away the flies.” Amelia knew the torment that came with having a family member in the army, and she encouraged Emily not to work herself too hard while caring for her brother. “The shaving, Emily, how could you have the courage to do it!” Holmes marveled as she remembered Ned’s elaborate mustache. “I suppose you are now the family barber.” Charlotte Forten, visiting her own relatives in Philadelphia, stopped in to see Ned on August 13 and “found him much improved; sitting up and looking quite cheerful and happy.” She noted that Ned tired easily, but thought his “stately mother and sisters were very gracious.” Meanwhile Ned himself worried about the welfare of his men and talked of returning south.15
As he improved his thoughts turned to who should lead the Fifty-fourth in his absence. Seeking “to straighten out our shattered ranks,” he recommended that temporary command of the Fifty-fourth be given to Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Hartwell. Briefly a captain in the unit before being transferred with Pen Hallowell into the then-forming Fifty-fifth the previous May, the twenty-six-year-old attorney had known Pen and Shaw at Harvard, and Ned regarded him as one of the few officers who possessed both ability and racial sensitivity enough. Hallowell also considered recommending Captain William Simpkins for the position, but presumed, based on the limited information he had, that Simpkins was “missing and probably dead.” Sadly, as it turned out, Hallowell was correct, and so Hartwell’s was the name he advanced to General Gillmore. On September 26, the War Department approved Hallowell’s promotion “to be Colonel” in place of “Shaw killed in action.” Soon after, Ned, although not completely mended, donned his uniform and caught the train for Manhattan in preparation for sailing back to Morris Island.16
At about the same time that Hallowell readied to again sail south, army surgeons grew concerned about the health of Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass. Although raked hard enough by grapeshot at Wagner to have his scabbard blasted away, Douglass judged himself lucky by comparison to those ferried to Beaufort’s No. 6, as did the doctors at Morris Island’s hospital tents who plucked the tiny shot out of his thighs. By mid-August, however, Douglass admitted to Amelia that he was “suffering slightly from a pain in the head caused by the climate.” Although a number of men, including Massachusetts farmer George Pell, contracted typhoid fever while stationed on Morris Island, Lewis’s self-diagnosis was incorrect. Two weeks later, Douglass assured his fiancée that he felt good enough “to be able to attend to [his] duties again,” even though honesty forced him to add that he was “in no wise enjoying perfect health.” Lewis hoped to remain in South Carolina long enough “to see rebellion crushed,” even if “some of us will die crushing it.”17
Just as Douglass was falling ill, John Andrew was considering promoting the sergeant major to the rank of lieutenant, or at least trying to, as the promotion of a black soldier into commissioned ranks would require the intervention of the War Department. Having been too sick to ship south with the Fifty-fourth, Charles Douglass had remained in Readville as an army clerk, and on September 18 he notified his father of rumors at Camp Meigs “that Lewis is going to have a commission as Lieut. as soon as Gov. Andrew returns from Washington.” But just days after Charles posted the letter, his desperately ill brother arrived in Manhattan aboard the steamer Fulton on a thirty-day furlough. Because the city as yet had no segregated hospital for black soldiers, the army lodged Lewis at the Brooks House at 513 Broome Street. As a hotel for well-to-do African Americans, the Brooks House was doubtless far more sanitary than any of the army hospitals for white soldiers in the city. Attending on Douglass was Dr. James McCune Smith, the Glasgow-trained doctor who had become the head physician at Manhattan’s Colored Orphan Asylum in the year of Gooding’s arrival at the institution. Douglass “was then very ill with Diarrhea, Cachexy [a marked state of constitutional and pituitary disorder] and spontaneous gangrene of the left half of the scrotum,” Smith reported on October 6. “He continues seriously ill at the present date, the slough having separated, leaving the part entirely denuded.” Douglass was “now too feeble to be safely removed from this city, and, in our judgment, several months must elapse before he will be able to do even the lightest military duty,” Smith believed. Sergeant Major Douglass, then just three days away from his twenty-third birthday, might live, but he could never father children.18
Frederick Douglass, and presumably Anna as well, hastened to Manhattan and took a room at the Brooks House, fearing that their eldest son was near death. For three weeks, Frederick later told Gerrit Smith, he spent every waking moment “bending over the sick bed of my Dear Son Lewis who has been until now quite too ill to be removed home” to Rochester. Despite the fact that Lewis’s condition was so dire that the army made no attempt to treat him at either Morris Island or in Beaufort, Frederick and Anna hoped that Dr. Smith might perform miracles that could return Lewis “to his post as soon as his health is restored.”19
Within a month, it became clear that Lewis could never do so. Mid-November found him at home in Rochester, one newspaper reported, “slowly recovering from a severe attack of typhoid fever,” which was either an error on the part of the reporter or the story Lewis wished disseminated to the public. Mustered out for “disability” on February 25, he would not be the soldier to break the color barrier and earn his commission as a lieutenant. That grim realization was not merely a calamity for Lewis, but, Frederick Douglass evidently believed, a setback for the cause of black militancy, as the most celebrated black abolitionist now had only one son in the army. As a company clerk, Charles was hardly earning the accolades heaped upon Lewis. In November, and then again in early December, Manhattan’s Weekly Anglo-African reported that Frederick Douglass Jr., the middle son, had “enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts” in his brother’s place, “and will proceed immediately to the camp at Readville.”20
When Frederick Jr. arrived in Massachusetts, however, Governor Andrew decided to employ him “in the recruiting service” rather than in one of the state regiments. The Douglass family consented, in part because they found a better candidate for the army in Nathan Sprague, a twenty-four-year-old Maryland runaway and the fiancé of Rosetta Douglass, their eldest child. The tall, handsome Sprague had been working as a gardener in a nursery near the Douglasses’ home, and while he had won Rosetta’s heart, the semiliterate laborer seems to have had less luck impressing her eloquent father. At length, an understanding appears to have been reached: the family would approve of their marriage, after which Sprague had to prove his worth by joining the Fifty-fourth. The wedding date was set for Christmas Eve. Lewis was still convalescing, and Charles applied for a furlough to attend the nuptials. Nathan, however, found excuses not to join the regiment until the following September, at which time Rosetta was eight months pregnant. He was signed into the army under his father-in-law’s signature.21
ROSETTA SPRAGUE WAS NOT THE ONLY WARRIOR’S WIFE TO FACE tough challenges on the home front. As was the case for tens of thousands of young women in both sections of the nation, the sort of debilitating injuries sustained by Lewis Douglass at Wagner posed profound dilemmas for wives and sweethearts. Amelia Loguen had known Lewis for years; they were bound together not only by their affection for one another but by their fathers’ joint antislavery labors. Their engagement had been public knowledge in both Syracuse and Rochester before Lewis first caught the train for Readville. But now Amelia began to reconsider. She wrote him to say that she was thinking of leaving Syracuse and accepting a position as a teacher, perhaps for several years. For his part, witnessing the marriage of his sister led Lewis to think of his immediate future. “I have just had my attention attracted to those whom God has put together,” he wrote to Amelia in an anguished letter just after the ceremony. Lewis “was attracted by their whispering” and suspected that he “was the subject of their conversation.” Nathan and Rosetta, no doubt, wondered if he was to one day share their happiness. “You are thinking of teaching school for two or three years,” Douglass asked, “what will become of your promise to me?” Barely nineteen years of age, Amelia needed time to evaluate her desire to be a mother against her love for Lewis, and also to ponder her duty and proper role in a conflict that demanded almost as much sacrifice from young women as it did from young men.22
After Amelia left to teach in Binghamton, Douglass was disconsolate. He traveled to Syracuse to visit her parents and wrote her long missives about sitting alone in his room, “that dear box full of your own dear letters to me, close at hand.” He still one day hoped “to call you my own and to be your own and then to live on happily together.” When the first anniversary of his return to Rochester arrived, he wrote to say that he “should have pressed you to marry me two years ago.” While Charles and Nathan continued to serve, Douglass felt “so unsettled” and “very gloomy and discouraged.” By the spring of 1865, as the end of the war neared, Lewis was eager to be married. But after a business trip to the South, he returned home to Rochester, and five weeks passed before a single letter from Amelia arrived. “Why has thou forsaken me?” Douglass lamented. Amelia was to keep Lewis waiting for another four years.23
Sadder still were the residents of the Shaw home in New York. Rob’s mother and four sisters dealt with their sorrow by throwing themselves into charity work, most of which was done with the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The five spent hours rolling bandages for Union hospitals and knitting socks and mittens for the survivors of Wagner. “We five knit 10 pairs a week,” bragged Anna, the eldest, although she admitted she found the endless production of mittens “tiresome.” Sarah Shaw devoted three days each week to cutting out shirt patterns for local women to sew into uniforms. Each Thursday, Anna reported, she and her mother went “to the Society at New Brighton & cut for three or four hours, tiresome work.” Fridays were spent handing out the cut cloth to the “sixty to seventy women” who came to the house “to receive the work & be paid for what they bring home.” (Most of the seamstresses were working-class Irish, and Anna complained that the house smelled for hours “after they leave.”) By sewing for wounded soldiers, whom Rob might have fought beside in South Carolina, the Shaws performed the sort of work that Rob would have valued. “And this is the reason why, though I feel for you the tenderest sympathy,” Henry James Sr. promised Frank, “I cannot help rejoicing for him even now with unspeakable joy, that the night is past, and the everlasting morning fairly begun.”24
There were not enough socks and mittens in the world to assuage Sarah’s pain. “Since Robert’s death, Sarah Shaw writes very seldom, and her letters are intensely sad,” commented Lydia Maria Child. “A cold indifference to everything seems to have taken complete possession of her.” Like so many American mothers, Sarah had encouraged her son to march off to war, knowing that he might perish for a cause in which she passionately believed. But just as the conflict had at last become the holy crusade that abolitionists had demanded since April 1861—thanks in large part to the heroism of the Fifty-fourth—her only son had been martyred. “I have great faith that our land is to be rid of slavery,” Sarah wrote shortly before the fight at Wagner. “Would God have inspired now again thousands of mothers and young wives to look upon it with resignation, but for some great end?” But now that Rob was gone, Sarah was no longer sure that her family contribution to the crusade was worth it. “The cup of life for me is poisoned,” she confessed to a friend.25
As did the Douglass family, the Shaws found some small solace in the ongoing lives of their other children. Yet fate, tragically, had not yet finished with the Shaws. On October 31, just three months after Rob’s death, Josephine married Charles Russell Lowell in a simple ceremony at the Shaw home on Staten Island. The following year Effie was seven months pregnant when Russell and the Second Cavalry were ordered south into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to serve in General Philip Sheridan’s army. Impending fatherhood made the young soldier cautious for the first time in his career. “I don’t want to be shot till I have a chance to come home,” he admitted. But Russell caught two bullets on October 19 at the Battle of Cedar Creek; the first broke his arm and collapsed his lung, while the second severed his spinal cord. He died the next day, having assured the surgeon that Effie, then on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, “will bear it, Doctor, better than you & I think.” Their daughter, Carlotta Russell Lowell, was born five weeks later on November 30, 1864.26
Effie’s sister-in-law Annie Haggerty Shaw was not present at the birth of her niece. Following Rob’s funeral, Annie sent a note of thanks to Alec Johnson, the drummer boy who had held Shaw’s horse during the battle; she then fled to Switzerland. Having no desire to be the famous widow of a celebrated martyr, the twenty-eight-year-old Annie would not return to Massachusetts until forty-one years had passed.27
Only twenty-six days after marrying Robert Gould Shaw, Annie Haggerty Shaw watched from a second-floor balcony at 44 Beacon Street with Rob’s mother and sisters as the Fifty-fourth marched through Boston before sailing for South Carolina. She saw her husband for the last time when he paused on his horse, gazed up, and touched his sword to his lips. Courtesy Boston Athenaeum.
AT LEAST ANNIE AND MANY OTHER WOMEN ATTACHED TO THE FIFTY-FOURTH knew, without any doubt, what had happened to their relatives under arms. In the aftermath of the fighting on James Island and at Wagner, many women did not. For the loved ones of men who were taken on June 16 or those who did not join the retreat out of the fort on July 18, their grief was compounded by uncertainty. Northern families had been aware of Jefferson Davis’s edict of December 1862, but only in the weeks before the two July battles had they learned that, on May 1, 1863, the Confederate Congress had amended the president’s decree. Instead of turning captured black soldiers over “to the respective States to which they belong,” the Congress adopted a resolution calling for black recruits and their white officers to be prosecuted by military courts as war criminals, subject to a potential death penalty.28
As the Confederate Congress debated this escalation in retribution, Senator Charles Sumner drafted a public letter to Lincoln on May 20. “I have been horror-struck by the menace of Slavery to our colored troops & of death to the gentlemen who command them, should they fall into the hands of the rebel enemy,” he wrote. Sumner urged the president to issue a formal proclamation promising American soldiers that they would “be protected by the Govt. according to the laws of war, & that not one of them shall suffer without a retaliation.” By mid-June, the Confederate Congress’s resolution had been picked up by newspapers in both sections of the nation, and thirty-four “friends, kinsmen and neighbors of Massachusetts Officers” had seconded Sumner in a petition to Andrew (which the governor forwarded to Lincoln). The petitioners, many of them conservative businessmen, wished it understood that they “express no opinion as to the original policy of enrolling Blacks in our National Army.” But since their state had taken that step, they wished “to deter that enemy from outrages wholly unjustified by the usages of modern warfare.” Governor Andrew submitted a separate plea that Lincoln issue a “clear avowal” of his determination to “punish, promptly, unhesitatingly,” every infringement of the rights of black soldiers. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton assured Andrew that the administration would protect black volunteers “as well as their white officers,” but William Lloyd Garrison worried that absent an unambiguous statement from Lincoln that “he will retaliate,” Stanton’s pledge hardly proved “that it will be done.”29
Unsure as to whether the thirteen men captured on James Island were to be treated as conventional prisoners of war, as criminals, as runaway slaves, or as some combination thereof, General Johnson Hagood contacted Assistant Adjutant General William Nance, then in Charleston, on July 16. “Thirteen prisoners Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, black,” Hagood wrote. “What shall I do with them?” The Confederate general had obviously questioned his prisoners, as he informed Nance that only two of the thirteen were “refugee slaves, the balance free.” Curiously, the details of the May 1 edict appear to have been better known in Boston than along the Carolina coast. While he awaited a reply, Nance ordered the captives moved into the city “under a strong guard, without their uniforms,” and after that imprisoned within Castle Pinckney. The following evening, General P. G. T. Beauregard, commander of the Department of South Carolina, drafted a similar request to General Samuel Cooper, the inspector general of the Confederacy. Beauregard reported that they had fourteen, not thirteen, prisoners, and that “several of the latter claim to be free, from Massachusetts.” Unaware of the Confederate Congress’s resolution, Beauregard assumed that Davis’s edict of the previous December remained in force. “Shall they be turned over to State authorities?” When four days passed without a response, Beauregard again cabled Richmond. “What shall be done with the negro prisoners who say they are free,” he wondered. “Please answer.”30
While Beauregard impatiently waited for a reply, Isaac W. Hayne, the South Carolina attorney general, submitted his opinion on the matter to Governor Milledge Luke Bonham. Writing on July 18, Hayne referred the governor to the 1740 Negro Act, a comprehensive slave code passed in the wake of the previous year’s slave rebellion along the Stono River. As its title suggested, the ancient law drew no distinction between slaves and free blacks, a notion that was easily maintained in a state in which only 2.4 percent of African Americans were free in 1860. “By the laws of South Carolina a negro is presumed to be a slave until the contrary appears,” Hayne reminded the governor. Unless captured or wounded soldiers could prove otherwise, their “color is prima facie evidence that the party bearing the color of a negro, mulatto or mestizo is a slave.” Since the soldiers in question were within South Carolina’s boundaries, Hayne argued, the army was required to turn the captives over to state authorities.31
That night and the next morning, following the assault on Wagner, the number of captured soldiers rose precipitously. To the fourteen men held in Castle Pinckney the Confederates added another seventy-three, twenty-nine of whom were wounded. On the morning of July 19, all of the prisoners were taken under heavy guard into Charleston, where, one soldier later remembered, “they were greeted by the jeers and taunts of the populace.” Handed over to the provost marshal, the forty-four healthy soldiers were first ferried out to Pinckney, while the wounded were carried to a hospital for captured soldiers on Queen Street. One of the wounded, Daniel States of Philadelphia, later told Captain Luis Emilio that “the colored prisoners were somewhat separated from the whites” of the Connecticut and New York regiments “and received treatment last.” A large crowd assembled outside the hospital’s windows to witness the curious scene, including a journalist from the Charleston Courier. “Yankee blood leaks out by the bucketful,” he reported. “Probably not less than seventy legs or arms were taken off yesterday, and more are apt to follow today.”32
Armed with Hayne’s opinion, Governor Bonham fired off letters to both Beauregard and Secretary of War James Seddon. The governor was also evidently unaware of the congressional resolution, as he referred only to Davis’s edict of Christmas Eve in his letter to Seddon. Eager to punish the men of the Fifty-fourth, Bonham—an attorney previously elected to both the U.S. and Confederate Congresses—sought to enlarge upon his president’s proclamation. Where Davis had ordered that captured blacks be turned “over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong,” Bonham chose to interpret that phrase to mean “the executive authorities of those States in which the offense might be committed.” On July 22, Seddon cabled Beauregard to inform him, incorrectly, that the “joint resolution of the last Congress” had endorsed the governor’s understanding of the situation, and that the soldiers were “to be handed over” to the state. A perplexed Beauregard telegraphed Richmond that he knew “of no joint resolution about the disposition of captured negroes,” having heard rumors that “it failed to pass.” Meanwhile Beauregard dragged his feet in replying to Bonham, who wrote again the following day.33
The precise meaning of this flurry of communications was unknown to officials in Washington and Boston, but as early as the July 24 conference between U.S. general Israel Vogdes and Hagood, it was clear that the Confederates intended to treat their black prisoners differently from white soldiers. When Vogdes pressed the issue, Colonel Edward Anderson, a Confederate commissioner present at the parlay, replied only that “in compliance with instructions, all information or conversation upon these troops was declined.” Three days later, when word of this impasse reached Boston, John Andrew fired off a short letter to Lincoln. Having “never received any reply to my letter” of June 18, the governor pointedly observed, “I am unable to assure the friends and relatives of these prisoners as to the treatment they will receive from their captors.” Three days later, on July 31, Frank Shaw weighed in as well. His only son, Shaw reminded the president, “was killed on the parapet of Fort Wagner, in South Carolina, & now lies buried in its ditch, among his brave & devoted followers.” In the battle of July 18, Shaw believed, the regiment “proved their valor & devotion,” and now it was time for the administration to clearly “proclaim to the world” that it would “extend the protection of the United States over his surviving officers & men.” In closing, the grieving father wrote that if “our son’s services & death shall contribute in any degree towards securing to our colored troops that equal justice which is the holy right of every loyal defender of our beloved Country, we shall esteem our great loss a blessing.”34
On that same late July day, a second parent posted an extraordinary letter to the president. Hannah Johnson, then living in Buffalo, was the daughter of a slave who had fled Louisiana. “I have but poor edication but I never went to schol,” Johnson admitted, “but I know just as well as any what is right.” Hannah’s son served in the Fifty-fourth and “fought at Fort Wagoner but thank God he was not taken prisoner, as many were.” Like so many mothers, Johnson had not wanted her son to enlist, but he had assured her that “Mr. Lincoln will never let them sell our colored soldiers for slaves.” Should the Confederate government refuse to exchange black prisoners as it did whites, or worse still, force them to labor, the president “must put the [captured] rebels to work in State prisons to make shoes and thing.” If that seemed harsh, she added, “a just man must do hard things sometimes, that shew him to be a great man.” Her son counted on his commander-in-chief to ensure fair and equal treatment. “You ought to do this, and do it at once,” Johnson lectured. “Meet it quickly and manfully, and stop this, mean cowardly cruelty.” Even after a thousand years had passed, “that action of yours will make the Angels sing your praises.”35
Unbeknownst to both Johnson and Shaw, on the day that they signed their letters Lincoln issued General Order 252. The families of the soldiers in the Fifty-fourth desired a firm, unambiguous statement, and Lincoln’s order was just that. The laws of nations, Lincoln warned, “permit no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war.” To “sell or enslave any captured person” was not merely a violation of standard rules of warfare but “a relapse into barbarism and a crime against the civilization of the age.” The president wished it known by friend and foe alike that his government would afford “the same protection to all its soldiers,” and that if either the Confederate government or any of its states attempted to enslave black soldiers, “the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy’s prisoners in our possession.” The public directive was as extraordinary as Johnson’s private plea. Only months before, only the most progressive Northern whites approved of the use of black troops. Now, however, Lincoln counted on the general outrage over the Manhattan draft riots, together with the praise heaped upon the Fifty-fourth after Wagner, to result in support for his threat that “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war a rebel soldier shall be executed, and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works.”36
Despite, or possibly because of, Lincoln’s statement, a bellicose Governor Bonham chose to escalate his demands. On August 8, he again wrote to Secretary Seddon, insisting that any white officers captured leading black soldiers be turned over to him as well. Referring to Davis’s December 24 edict, Bonham claimed that “commissioned officers” were also insurrectionists under the state’s 1805 law. The Secretary of War cabled back that while none of the captured men from the Fifty-fourth were either from South Carolina or “slaves at the commencement of the war,” he had instructed Beauregard to surrender the “negroes captured in arms” to the “authorities of the States in which they are taken.” Seddon said nothing, however, about their officers. While he awaited Bonham’s anticipated complaint, Seddon approached Davis in hopes that he might resolve the issue. Although he believed that black captives should not “be regarded as regular prisoners of war,” but rather “dealt with in some exceptional way to mark our stern reprobation of the barbarous employment” of African Americans, he wanted Davis to endorse his view that they should be put “to hard labor” instead of being “promptly executed.” In response, Davis—a man normally criticized for being overly attentive to the business of his cabinet members—drafted a vague nonreply. While it was true that the congressional resolution granted him the power to commute the sentences of white officers, Davis conceded, he did “not see how a definite answer can be given.” A frustrated Seddon finally informed Bonham that the May 1 resolution “annulled” the president’s earlier order and required that white officers be tried in military courts. In “consequence the officers demanded by you cannot be delivered.”37
Southern editors, who were as likely as Bonham to suspect that all black soldiers were, or at least should be, slaves, endorsed the governor’s tough position. Although J. J. Pennington, publisher of the Raleigh Daily Progress, initially admitted that the soldiers captured on Morris Island carried the Massachusetts flag, he concluded his story by observing that “if our own slaves, taken in arms against us, are to be treated as prisoners of war by the Confederate government, we had better give up the contest at once.” A similar conflation of freemen with Southern runaways appeared in the Richmond Dispatch. While “the Yankee Government” had a right to enlist “free negroes,” just as they did “to make war upon us with elephants,” the editor huffed, they had “no right to steal a man’s negro, and arm him against his master.” Emboldened, Bonham persevered in his plans. On August 10, he instructed Attorney General Hayne to convene a court for the trial of those captives who might have once been slaves or who were freemen born in Confederate states. By then, only twenty-four of the captured soldiers were well enough to stand trial, which suggests that twenty initially judged to be fit had fallen ill. Bonham appointed a three-member commission comprising two men from his personal staff and one “prominent” citizen to question the soldiers. Held within the bowels of the cavernous city jail, all but one of the prisoners, though they were intimidated and scared, answered the questions put to them. Four days later, the commission reported back to Bonham. Of the twenty-four, they concluded, only four had been born slaves. Two of the men—Privates George Counsel and Henry Worthington—had once been enslaved in Virginia, while two others—Henry Kirk and William Henry Harrison—were Missouri natives. Kirk had been captured during the retreat from Wagner, while the other three had been taken during the fighting on James Island.38
The four perhaps told their inquisitors the truth about their childhoods, or possibly the commissioners coerced the captives into supporting a narrative they had made up to appease the governor. Kirk listed his home as Galesburg, Illinois, at the time of his enlistment, and Harrison was living in Chicago. Henry Worthington may in fact have been born in Virginia, the state that his father, Archibald Worthington, told census takers was his birthplace. But Henry appeared in the 1850 census as a three-year-old child living in Union, Ohio, so if he had been a slave, he was freed at an early age. Counsel had signed up in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Based on the commission’s findings, Bonham urged that they be put to trial on two charges. The first held that being slaves, they were in rebellion against the state, while the second alleged that the four had been “concerned and connected with slaves” in insurrection, as the Fifty-Fourth’s camp at the time was not far from Higginson’s First South Carolina regiment.39
Under the 1740 Negro Act, African Americans were not afforded a jury trial, since that would imply that they were the peers of white jurors. Instead, they faced a board of magistrates. The trial of the four men was set to begin on September 8 in the provost marshal’s court for the Charleston District. Attorney General Hayne and Alfred Proctor Aldrich presented the state’s case, while two Charleston-based attorneys spoke for the defense. In typical cases, court-appointed attorneys wasted little effort on behalf of their clients, but one of the Charleston attorneys, Nelson Mitchell, was a Unionist who had spoken out against secession in December 1860. According to captured private Daniel States, Mitchell “came to the jail and offered to defend” the black prisoners. Although States, a teamster from Philadelphia, was not accused of being born a slave, he noted uneasily that authorities had begun to erect a gallows “in the jail-yard,” and that his captors taunted them that it was “to be used for hanging all our colored boys.” Mitchell took the case without compensation, “and he was very kind to us at all times,” States later recalled. Perhaps unknown to Mitchell was that General Thomas Jordan, Beauregard’s chief of staff, was quietly telling anybody who would listen that “retaliation would fall alone upon the military forces of the Confederacy” should the four men be executed.40
The editor of the incendiary Charleston Mercury demanded that the court ignore Lincoln’s order despite the risks, as did one of the magistrates, who assured diarist Henry William Ravenel that the “conviction & execution of these negroes” could not “be avoided by us, though it inaugurates bloody acts of retaliation.” The Savannah Republican, however, argued “against a rigid execution of the law” and suggested that the soldiers might strike “a plea in defence that they were acting not of their own free will.” In the event, Mitchell provided a majority of magistrates with the pretext they sought. The four were subject to neither Davis’s edict nor the congressional resolution, he skillfully claimed. The soldiers in question might have been born into slavery, but they had been legally freed years before by their masters, who in any case could not be located. Since the Confederate Congress had overruled Davis and handed jurisdiction to the army, the men could also not be tried in a civilian court. Although it was hardly the intent of that Congress, Mitchell argued that by placing black soldiers and their white officers under military law, the Confederacy had implicitly recognized them as legitimate soldiers protected by the rules of war. Convinced more by General Jordan’s admonitions than by Mitchell’s logic, a majority of the magistrates directed Charleston authorities to return the four to the city jail and ordered that “the governor be informed of the action of the court.”41
Despite Mitchell’s small victory, the Confederate Congress approved another resolution backing “the actions of the Executive” when it came to the treatment of black soldiers. Speaking before that Congress in Richmond, Alabama’s Jabez Curry insisted that arming blacks was “not among the acts of legitimate warfare” but rather akin to “the right to use poisoned weapons or to assassinate.” By mid-September, Edwin Stanton ordered General Gillmore to investigate the treatment of the men of the Fifty-fourth. “If no satisfactory reply could be got from Beauregard,” Stanton assured a subordinate, “we should assume the worst, and should retaliate.”42
As ever, black activists did not wait for events to unfold but lobbied the government to act. During the trials, Frederick Douglass was speaking in Philadelphia, and Major George Luther Stearns, the chief recruiter for the Fifty-fourth, encouraged Douglass to go to Washington and press Stanton. Upon reaching the capital on August 10, Douglass was accompanied to the War Department by Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy. As did most visitors, Douglass thought the humorless, asthmatic Stanton “cold and business like throughout but earnest.” The abolitionists promptly brought up the issues of discriminatory salaries and a guarantee of treatment at the hands of the Confederates. As to the first, Stanton bluntly replied, he had publicly endorsed Thaddeus Stevens’s bill of the previous January, which had died in the Senate. Yet he pledged himself committed to providing “the same pay to black as to white soldiers,” just as he was open to the possibility of promotion for meritorious black soldiers.43
As to the problems posed by Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress, Stanton observed, that question lay with the commander-in-chief, and the secretary proposed that Douglass and Pomeroy pay a call on Lincoln. Douglass had recently published an angry essay in his Monthly on the question, charging that until “Mr. Lincoln shall interpose his power to prevent these atrocious assassinations of Negro soldiers, the civilized world will hold him equally with Jefferson Davis responsible for them.” Yet Douglass later recalled that Lincoln “quickly [and] completely” made his guests feel welcome, saying: “I know who you are, Mr. Douglass; Mr. Seward has told me all about you. Sit down. I am glad to see you.” The president encouraged the editor to consider his policies regarding black soldiers as parts of “the whole slavery question.” Lincoln admitted that the unequal pay offered black combatants was unfortunate, but he insisted that Northern Democrats “despised” the enlistment of black men, and that their lower salaries helped “smooth the way.” The time would come, Lincoln promised, when that would change. Though he stood behind his July 31 order, Lincoln said, he worried about using the “terrible remedy” of retribution. “Once begun, I do not know where such a measure would stop.” Although Douglass left the meeting without any firm assurances, he took heart in the president’s denial that he was guilty of “vacillation” on these questions. As Lincoln had put it, “I think it cannot be shown that when I have taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.”44
When the Confederates remained inflexible, Lincoln made good on his promise and announced the suspension of prisoner exchanges on November 22. According to a statement released by the War Department, the “rebel authorities, so soon as we placed colored soldiers in the field, proclaimed the purpose of handing over their officers when captured to their several states’ authorities to be punished under their states’ laws as criminals engaged in slave insurrections.” Though the four soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth had escaped this fate, the policy had not been rescinded. With his term drawing to an end, and having been rebuked by his own court, Bonham chose to wash his hands of the matter. On December 8, he notified Secretary Seddon that he was turning the men back over to the Confederate military. “A few of them, it is supposed, may be slaves,” he groused, “but the State has no means of identifying them or their masters.” The Confederate War Department opted to keep most of the prisoners in the Charleston jail but moved some to its prison camp in Florence, South Carolina. Not until the final moments of the war did Davis relent and agree to exchanges on a color-blind basis. Henry Kirk and George Counsel survived long enough to be exchanged, but both Harrison and Worthington died of typhus in Florence in early 1865. Another nineteen men of the Fifty-fourth died while in Confederate custody, either of wounds received at James Island or Wagner or from poor prison conditions. Among the dead was nineteen-year-old Nathaniel Hurley, the Douglass family’s friend from Rochester.45
THE DEATH OF A SON OR HUSBAND WAS TRAGEDY ENOUGH FOR AMERICAN women in the years after 1861, but for those who had loved ones in the Fifty-fourth, the death often also signaled a descent into poverty. Many of the soldiers in the regiment were but one generation removed from bondage; “laborer” was the occupation scrawled on countless induction records. Even in peacetime, their families had struggled to get by. Now, in many cases, the youngest, strongest male, and the future of the family, was gone. Amelia Nelson of Montrose, Pennsylvania, lost her son Daniel to smallpox late in the conflict. Daniel’s father had died in 1847, and Private Nelson, a single mechanic in civilian life, had been her sole support, “providing her with food and Clothing, and . . . sending her money while in the service.” Also destitute was Sarah Vorhies of Philadelphia, whose son Isaac had died of “chronic dysentery” on Morris Island just after the attack on Wagner. Isaac had worked as a teamster, earning “$10 to $15 per month & contributed thereof to his mother’s support.” Having no property of her own, Sarah hired “out as a servant at $5.00 per month.”46
Complicating matters for both grieving loved ones and army bureaucrats was the lack of documentation for those soldiers newly arrived in freedom. Sarah Dorsey was the mother of Isaac Dorsey Jr., who died on Morris Island during the fall of 1863, and the widow of Isaac Sr., whom she had married in Washington, D.C., in 1837. But “her husband being at that time a slave, no records [of the marriage were] made or kept.” Private Wesley Ryal died on Folly Island during the fall of 1863, leaving two young children behind in Sandusky, Ohio. Ryal had married Julia Rice in 1856, but after he enlisted she vanished, leaving the children in the care of neighbor John Mackey. Acting as their guardian, Mackey applied for a pension for Ryal’s children, although he conceded that he possessed no evidence of a legal marriage for the deceased private, and he did not know “the exact day” of either child’s birth.47
The instability of slave marriages was brought home to Harry Jarvis, the oysterman who had stolen a boat and sailed to Fort Monroe during the summer of 1861. Not wishing to endanger his wife, Jarvis had left her behind but promised not to forget her. After taking a job with a ship sailing to Liberia, Jarvis then booked passage for Massachusetts. On arriving in Boston, he somehow got word to her that he was back, and that he planned to join the Fifty-fifth. But “she sent word she thought she’d marry anoder man.” After the war, Jarvis returned to his native Virginia, by which time his ex-wife’s husband had died. Hurt by what he regarded as her betrayal, and unmindful of her need to survive during his prolonged absence, Jarvis replied that she should “a kep’ me when she had me, ’n I could get one I liked better.” Jarvis, never having been legally wed, married Mary Jane White, a far younger schoolteacher.48
Jarvis might have been a bit more forgiving had he known of the plight of Patsey Leach, a Kentucky slave whose free husband, Julius, journeyed to Massachusetts to enlist. After word arrived that Julius had died in late 1864, Patsey’s owner, Warren Wiley, whipped her severely, “saying my husband had gone into the army to fight against white folks.” Fearing that one day Wiley would whip her to death, she took her baby and fled to Lexington, leaving Julius’s four other children behind. “I dare not go near my master,” Patsey agonized, “knowing he would whip me again.”49
Sarah Thompson, the mother of Stephen Swails’s children, struggled in her own ways. On September 22, Sergeant Swails was granted a two-month furlough to return home to New York State. Since Swails had seen Sarah nine months before, it is possible he was given leave to see his new daughter, Minnie Swails. At the time, Sarah was living with Stephen’s brother Jesse, who worked as a porter at the Frasier House in Corning. As the abolitionist press continued to hammer away on the issue of unfair wages, the family of the soldier now being considered by Governor Andrew as the test case for black promotion—as Lewis Douglass was in the process of being mustered out—made for good copy. “Think of their starving families!” editorialized William Lloyd Garrison. “There is Sergeant Swails, a man who has fairly won promotion on the field of battle.” Yet while Swails was atop Fort Wagner, “his wife and children were placed in the poor-house at home.” The publisher of the Weekly Anglo-African quickly corrected Garrison, noting that “some friends were kind enough to loan Mrs. S. sufficient [funds] to take her to her mother’s house in Elmira.” The fact that she was not in a public institution, editor Robert Hamilton added, was “no thanks either to the General Government of the authorities of Cooperstown.” But however often the press referred to Sarah as “Mrs. Lieut. Swails,” they never married, and their relationship evidently remained a troubled one.50
Most of the marriages of the soldiers in the Fifty-fourth survived the war, but not without considerable adjustment. Private David Demus, a young farmer from Mechanicsburg who was wounded at Wagner, chided his wife, Mary Jane, for working the fields of a white neighbor. But since Demus was among those who refused to accept segregated pay and had declined the $90 yet owed him, she had no other option. Other soldiers were engaged, and most of those promises too survived. William Carney, only twenty-two on the day of his enlistment, was engaged to Susanna Williams. Peter Vogelsang had begun to court his sister-in-law, Maria Margaret DeGrasse, shortly before enlisting; she made do thanks to the help of Vogelsang’s eldest son, George Peter, who was now twenty-two, worked as a clerk in Manhattan, and helped care for his two younger siblings. Virginia Isaacs of Chillicothe, who was engaged to James Monroe Trotter, one of the first recruits of the Fifty-fifth, had the financial and emotional support of Sally, Trotter’s sister, and her own married sister, Mary Elizabeth Dupree. Charles Francis Adams was not engaged at the start of the war, but while on sick leave in Newport in 1863 he met Mary Elizabeth Ogden, eight years his junior. Although the Adams men prided themselves on their lack of emotionalism, Charles gushed that he had “never met so charming and attractive a person.” The Ogdens were in mourning, having lost their only son in battle in Virginia, a tragedy that reminded the young pair that romance during wartime could be all too fleeting. Within the week, they were engaged.51
AS DIFFICULT AS IT COULD BE WHEN SOLDIERS SPENT TIME ON THE home front, once these men returned to the war, their families had to again face a gloomy existence of infrequent letters and intermittent and inaccurate news reports. The question of how captured black soldiers and the whites who led them would be treated by the Confederacy remained an open one, but that was not the only source of the constant uncertainty most families experienced. When the war began, both the American and Confederate governments established agencies to compile records for wounded or deceased soldiers, and copies of the resulting reports were submitted to bureaus in Washington or Richmond. But no copy was sent to the families of the soldiers, and no officers were tasked with traveling the countryside to notify parents or wives of casualties. Newspaper editors attempted to fill the breach, and chaplains routinely mailed lists of their regiment’s dead and wounded to sympathetic journalists. As a result, most wives first heard of their husband’s death or injury by reading the Manhattan newspapers. In the months before Wagner, Lydia Maria Child confided to Sarah Shaw that each day, as her husband walked out to collect the newspaper, she was “all of a tremble, [and] urged him to take a quick look for the killed and wounded.” Although each afternoon, at least until July 1863, revealed that “your darling” was alive, Child had to steel herself for the following day, wondering “what tidings the next paper might bring.” Since letters from old friends often brought unhappy news, Child was always anxious when receiving missives covered with familiar handwriting. Before she opened the envelopes, she invariably hoped her correspondents had “not sent anything about the war.” Aware that initial reports were often inaccurate, Lewis Douglass had once cautioned Amelia to “never give [him] up for dead until you are certain of it.” Douglass feared that he might “be reported dead when I am not, [as] it is often the case in battle.”52
Yet the soldiers on Morris Island were most worried about the ability of their wives and parents to provide for themselves, and not only in cases where a soldier was killed or permanently debilitated. Months had gone by since the Fifty-fourth first refused to accept the government’s racially biased salary structure. “How do the authorities expect our families to live without the means to buy bread, pay house rent, and meet the other incidental expenses of living in these terrible times, we know not,” one soldier complained to the Weekly Anglo-African. Another soldier broke into tears after he received a letter from his wife, who related that she had been sick for several months and begged him to send her fifty cents. But as this was “not a question of pay but of equality,” another soldier reminded Garrison, the regiment refused to give way, and so it fell to their “parents, wives, children and sisters to suffer,” while they remained down the coast from Wagner, “fighting the battles of the nation.” The pleas from Northern families so demoralized the men, one admitted, that he begged editor Robert Hamilton to spread the word that the “good wives at home” should avoid sending “such down-hearted letters” to their husbands. “Every heart-burning letter makes us less contented and gives us a very bad disposition.”53
As early as May 1861, as Lincoln issued the call for volunteers in the wake of the attack on Sumter, Massachusetts had passed “An Act in Aid of the Families of Volunteers,” which was designed to supplement household income by providing $1 per dependent. Not only was that a paltry amount, but having been designed originally for white soldiers who enlisted in their town of residence, it was not available to the majority of the families of the Fifty-fourth or Fifty-fifth who lived outside Massachusetts. Since governors in New York and Ohio were uninterested in raising black regiments, wives and parents in those states, complained one soldier, were “often refused [help] at the almshouse for their color.” Richard Hallowell, Ned and Pen’s brother, began a fund for those families who lived beyond the borders of Massachusetts, but to the dismay of the soldiers stationed in South Carolina, Philadelphia philanthropists disliked ceding control of the organization to Boston donors. “The best people here refuse to having anything to do with it,” Morris Hallowell confessed to Governor Andrew, “and some are exceeding disgusted with it.” This bickering among white reformers did little to put food into the stomachs of soldiers’ children, and Congress, having dragged its collective feet when it came to enlisting blacks, failed to provide for even the widows of black soldiers until July 1864.54
As a result, those black women who could afford to help stepped forward, aided in some cases by the mothers and sisters of white officers in the regiment. In the fall of 1863, former slave Harriet Jacobs organized the New Bedford Relief Society to provide for the children of black soldiers. Martha Gray, the wife of Sergeant William Gray, who had been wounded at Wagner, and the cousin of two other men in the regiment, collected medical supplies for the soldiers and their families. Yet she continued to think her labors inadequate and so contacted her congressman for permission to “go south as a nurse for the sick and wounded.” The Colored Ladies Sanitary Commission of Boston sought to alleviate the “suffering among the families of these noble men,” and the Colored Ladies of Stockbridge held “a festival for the benefit of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment” and their dependents. By the war’s end, the New Bedford Ladies’ Soldiers’ Relief Society, a private committee, was able to donate $25 to the family of every black soldier who had enlisted from the seaport.55
The regiment’s supporters were also mindful of the “sick and wounded” soldiers of the regiment, both those who were slowly healing at Beaufort’s No. 6 and those, such as William Carney, who had been mustered out because of their injuries. Emily Hallowell donated $100 to a fund “for the benefit of the sick.” On March 18, 1864, the women of New Bedford held a fund-raiser featuring “essays, recitation and music.” A trio of young women “sang several patriotic pieces,” while a “committee of ladies” set out several tables “laden with the substantials and dainties of the season.” The evening raised “more than exceeded their expectations,” and the Weekly Anglo-African urged the women to continue in their efforts “until this country shall be set free from the curse of slavery and every soldier be permitted to see the sun rise and set on a glorious and free republic.”56
By mid-October, Ned Hallowell had recovered from his wounds sufficiently to say his farewells and again ship south. This time Pen Hallowell and the soldiers of the Fifty-fifth were there to greet him. Both now colonels, each in charge of one of the two sister regiments, they joined the hundreds of black recruits in leaving behind worried wives, sweethearts, and families who would have to cope with their absence as best they might. New to coastal Carolina were Lieutenant George T. Garrison, former schoolteachers Nicholas Said and James Monroe Trotter, and Henry Jarvis. Private John M. Smith, a troubled young man from Maine, arrived several weeks after his regiment, having briefly deserted the Fifty-fifth at Readville before being arrested in Boston. As the Fifty-fourth again began to fill with new recruits to replace those men killed or captured at James Island and Wagner, the Hallowells and their men returned to the unfinished task of capturing the battery and fighting their way into Charleston.