IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1863, ANY BLACK MAN WHO ASKED THE Boston stationmaster for a transfer ticket to Readville could be assured that every other African American aboard the car was heading toward Camp Meigs to join either the Fifty-fourth or, if all of its companies had been filled, its sister regiment, the Fifty-fifth. Even as Rob Shaw and his regiment broke camp on May 28, dozens of recruits continued to arrive at Readville’s gates. By May 31, the first five companies of the Fifty-fifth had been mustered in, and the new soldiers were settling into the barracks vacated only a few days before. Two more companies, F and G, were mustered on June 15. Joshua Dunbar, a forty-year-old plasterer, arrived on June 5 and assured the regiment’s clerk that he hailed from Ohio. (In truth, Dunbar, the father of the yet-unborn poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, was a former Kentucky slave.) Three days later, Nicholas Said stepped off the train. The harried clerk scribbled “servant” into his regimental Descriptive Book and, not noticing Said’s ritual scars, listed the African as being a native of Detroit. Twenty-one-year-old James Monroe Trotter also hiked the short distance from the station to the camp. He went into the book as a “school teacher” and as being of “light” complexion; before the day’s end, an officer—perhaps Pen Hallowell—promoted him to first sergeant. John Smith was mustered in on June 22. Twenty-seven-year-old Henry Jarvis was not far behind, looking, as one admiring white abolitionist gushed, like a “young Hercules in bronze, or a gladiator ready for the imperial review.”1
Because of the groundwork laid by the Fifty-fourth’s Black Committee, recruitment for the overflow unit was easier. John Mercer Langston and George Luther Stearns continued in their efforts, mostly in Ohio. The Ohio legislature, having little interest in black soldiers, refused to provide a bounty for black enlistees. Since Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew continued to promise to assist his state’s black soldiers “on equal terms” with white combatants, Langston and Stearns had little trouble in convincing “the colored men of Ohio [to] leave their own State, and go to Massachusetts.” Cadiz, Ohio, home to only about 1,000 residents, contributed 21 men, who left their families on June 2 “amid many tears and good wishes.” In the East, Manhattan’s enlistment office at 55 West Broadway remained open, advertising for “able bodied colored men desirous of going South [to] join the Massachusetts Regiments.” Even so, money remained an issue. A second Black Committee, co-chaired by entrepreneur John Murray Forbes and Richard Hallowell, was organized in late July with the goal of raising at least $50,000 to assist in the “prompt enlistment of colored men.” The usual roster of Boston Brahmins opened their checkbooks, with the initial membership list boasting Cabots, Lowells, Lawrences, and even an Oliver Elsworth, a descendant of the Supreme Court justice of the same name. As ever, black residents of Massachusetts responded as well, contributing anywhere from a few dollars to one hundred.2
Pen Hallowell, who had been stationed at Meigs since February, had already helped organize and train one black regiment. “Promoted from Lieut. Colonel 54th Regt. Mass. Vols. Infantry,” the clerk dutifully recorded, Colonel Hallowell now took command of the next regiment, effective May 30. Transferring alongside Hallowell was twenty-seven-year old Alfred Hartwell, whose Harvard career had overlapped with Pen’s and whose temporary command of the Fifty-Fourth would come to an end after Ned Hallowell returned to the Carolina coast in October 1863. Now he rose to lieutenant colonel, a rank shared by Charles Fox, a civil engineer who had served with the Second Massachusetts Cavalry. William Penrose Hallowell, six years Ned’s senior and the eldest of the four brothers, signed on as first lieutenant and adjutant; he was a married merchant in Philadelphia at the time of his enlistment, and the position marked William’s first association with the army. Among the second lieutenants were George Garrison and Robertson James, Wilkie’s younger brother. Though he continued to object to his son’s military service, William Lloyd Garrison could not resist proudly printing George’s name and rank in the pages of his Liberator.3
None of the new black recruits expressed anything but praise for their colonel, tested as he had been at Antietam. They had similar confidence in Hartwell, who had risen to the rank of first lieutenant in the Third Missouri. Robertson James—Bob to friends and family—was an altogether different matter. All of sixteen, James was perhaps the youngest soldier at Readville, and certainly the youngest officer. Like William Hallowell, James had never held a musket, let alone faced one from across a smoky field. Undeniably, James’s principles were sound, and he later complained of “the contempt which was shown to these humble” black soldiers. But James, Garrison, and William Hallowell owed their rank to race and family connections. Although at this point the Fifty-fourth had yet to see action on James or Morris Islands, by late June there were noncommissioned officers from that regiment who were far more qualified to serve as lieutenant. Older black recruits in the Fifty-fifth complained about being led by unqualified teenagers “whose antecedents or sentiments we know nothing of.” One officer advised Trotter that it was “too soon” to discuss black promotions, insisting that “time should be granted white officers to get rid of their prejudices, so that a white Lieutenant would not refuse to sleep in a tent with a colored one.” When another assured Trotter that no federal law explicitly allowed a black soldier to receive a commission, his reply echoed the thoughts of many in the regiment: “Do you know of any law that prohibits it?”4
Still, more recruits arrived daily. Stearns and Langston had done their job well. Although Ohio had provided the third-largest contingent for the Fifty-fourth, the Buckeye State furnished the new regiment with an additional 222 men. Pennsylvania was second, with 139 recruits, while New York, which had supplied the Fifty-fourth with its second-largest group, this time sent only 23 men to Readville. Indicating how rapidly the war was shifting south was that soldiers claiming a Virginia birthplace numbered 106 and Kentucky supplied 68, Missouri 66, and North Carolina 30. Despite the fact that the new regiment would march under the Massachusetts flag, the Bay State contributed to the regiment only 22 men, fully 75 fewer recruits than hailed from Indiana. More than half of the unit—596 soldiers—listed their occupation as farmers, with “laborers” a distant second at 76, followed by barbers, waiters, and cooks. Said and Trotter were two of the six teachers. Lieutenant Colonel Fox dutifully recorded that the regiment’s average age was just over twenty-three, while their average height was five feet, seven inches. Though the men were relatively young, 219 were married; only 52 professed to be members of any congregation. As a white New Englander, Fox was also fascinated by the men’s racial background. More than half, or 550, were “pure blacks,” while the other 430, Fox guessed, were of “mixed blood.” But the one demographic that truly set the Fifty-fifth apart from the Fifty-fourth was that roughly one-quarter of them, or 247 men, had been born into slavery.5
Since the last of the Southern recruits had signed on prior to Lincoln’s July 31 order of retaliation, runaways such as Henry Jarvis enlisted with the grim knowledge not only that they would be paid less than white soldiers and take orders from unprepared white officers, but that they would risk reenslavement if captured. Although they possibly knew nothing of the Confederate Congress’s May 1 resolution, all Northern men were aware of Davis’s Christmas Eve threat, and unlike the vast majority of freemen in the Fifty-fourth, many of these new soldiers had living masters; their enlistment dovetailed perfectly with Davis’s promise to reenslave runaways in blue. Samuel Flora enlisted at Fort Monroe, in Virginia, shortly after escaping to freedom, while twenty-one-year-old Theodore Clark, who had fled up the coast from Savannah, was one of six soldiers who listed Georgia as their birthplace. A few others may have been born free but probably lacked the documentation to prove it if captured. The man calling himself Private John Brown listed his home as “Zanzibar, Africa.” Mariner Donald Cardoron, who enlisted as a paid substitute for white draftee Daniel Campbell, was a native of Valparaiso, Chile, which was also the home of seaman Joseph Crooks, age thirty-four. Earlier recruits such as Lewis and Charles Douglass had fathers who had been slaves, but they themselves, though intimately familiar with Northern racism, had never known Southern bondage. For so many freedmen in the second regiment, slavery had defined their lives and their view of the war—as it did, of course, for the loved ones they had left behind in the Confederacy.6
Because so many privates in the Fifty-fifth were Ohio farmers or former bondmen from the South, the level of literacy was far lower in the new regiment than in the Fifty-fourth. Fox placed the number of men who could read at 477, while another 319 could both read and write. That meant that roughly one-third of the unit was illiterate, and for the half who could read but not write, that skill surely did not come easily. The Reverend William Jackson, who ministered at the camp, discovered that a “large number” of the recruits “did not know the alphabet or could not read nor write one word.” The soldiers requested that one of the buildings at Meigs be converted into a school, and both the white commissioned officers and the noncommissioned blacks who had “enjoyed the advantages of a liberal & professional education” devoted their afternoons to teaching privates who may have been weary from the day’s long drills but were anxious to “improve themselves.” George Garrison threw himself into teaching, an activity that helped to dissolve barriers between him and the men in his company. By July 18, Jackson reported, most of the recruits were “making a laudable progress in the Elementary studies,” and the Ohioans especially “distinguished [themselves] for sound practical sense & steady habits.”7
Although only fifty-two of the recruits identified themselves as formal members of any congregation, that hardly implied that they lacked religion. One evening, just after the conclusion of the tattoo and roll call, a soldier solemnly stepped forward and delivered “a simple and appropriate prayer.” The entire regiment joined in, singing what one mystified white officer described as “one of their peculiar hymns.” The simple act inspired a camp tradition: each night a different company continued the prayers and hymns. The singing was “really fine,” the officer conceded, and soon the men formed several glee clubs. One, from Company F, was considered the best, and they were invited to give a concert at Dedham that also served to raise money for the soldiers’ families. For these Christian soldiers, the Bible and the Enfield went hand in hand in triumph’s song against slavery.8
Nicholas Said, owing to his unique background and fluency with languages, was a favorite of the press, particularly the abolitionist journals that wished to play up the regiment’s capacity for achievement. In a profile published by the Boston Evening Transcript and picked up by a number of other newspapers, a journalist chronicled Said’s “curious and romantic history,” praising his ability to speak five languages. The Fifty-fifth’s officers thought his “French is quite Parisian and his Italian correct,” the paper reported. In the days just prior to the assault on Wagner, at a time when many Northern whites continued to doubt that black men were either intelligent or brave enough to serve, progressive publishers wished to emphasize Said’s “deportment and intelligence,” observing that his “acquisitions and behavior go far to dispel ignorant and vulgar prejudices against the colored race.” The Weekly Anglo-African proudly listed him as a subscriber. Said assured the reporter that he had enlisted “because all his folks seemed to be doing so.” Yet after a long lifetime of serving others, the former slave quickly realized that he lacked the capacity to lead. Promoted to sergeant on July 30, Said was soon “reduced to the rank [of private] at his own request.”9
Rather less enamored of military life was Private John Smith, the twenty-one-year-old stove-maker and sometime peddler from Maine. Having survived a rugged childhood and a stint in the Brunswick poorhouse, he evidently thought that the army might provide him with a new and better life. He enlisted at Readville on June 9. Smith’s papers described him as single, five feet, four inches tall, with “light” skin and dark hair and eyes. On July 20, shortly before the Fifty-fifth prepared to ship south, Smith failed to report, and the company clerk listed him as a deserter. Instead of returning to Maine, Smith ventured only as far as Boston. He then had a change of heart and returned to Camp Meigs, but not before contracting syphilis. Smith assured the guard that he always intended “to rejoin his Company before the Regiment left the State.” Unconvinced by the confession, the camp commander ordered Smith “apprehended” and instructed Fox to try Smith on charges of “absence without leave.” While Smith awaited trial, he was held in various military jails in Massachusetts, New York City, and Washington.10
Possibly because the regiment’s white officers wished to avoid the bad press that would follow a trial and hanging, Alfred Hartwell lobbied for “mercy” and pretended to believe Smith’s promises that he had planned to rejoin his company after a few final days of pleasure along the Boston waterfront. Another officer also embraced the excuse that Smith “deserted before the Regiment was fairly organized and in the field.” By October 15, the army ruled that “it will be no injury in the service, if he is thus returned to duty,” on the condition that Smith “make good the time lost and forfeit all pay due up to the time of pardon.” Within the year, Hartwell and Fox would come to regret their leniency.11
Army incompetence being what it was, an overly officious clerk also reported Lance Corporal Charles Douglass as absent without leave. While training at Readville, Douglass had fallen ill and so was not with his company when they shipped out on May 29. Douglass was granted “sick leave” until June 29, but instead of returning to Rochester, he remained in the camp hospital. Unaware that Douglass was within the walls of the camp, the clerk then listed Charles as being “a deserter from this regiment in the month of July.” In fact, long before that, Douglass was well enough to return to his duties. Somebody finally noticed his presence and scribbled “Corp. Douglass remains in Massachusetts” into his regimental account. “Reported as deserter by error,” the clerk confessed.12
Having located him, how best to use Douglass’s talents became the army’s next question. Although hardly the natural leader that his older brother was, Charles was the perfect corporal—organized and systematic and far from the type of inept administrator who might report a famous corporal missing. In a day when military forms had to be copied in triplicate, the neat script he had learned in Rochester’s schools was much in demand. General Edward Pierce, the commandant at Meigs, praised Douglass “for keeping things neat and orderly about the camp when all were sick.” Douglass cheerfully adopted the responsibility of tending to the sick; he “wrote to their friends and in fact [did] most all that was to do except doctor them.” Still in Readville in mid-September, Douglass feared that Pen Hallowell might place him in charge of “a batch of conscripts” for the Fifty-fourth and have him escort them to Morris Island. But as he told his father, Lieutenant Erik Wulff sought to keep him as a clerk in Massachusetts, “as I suit him first rate.” That suited Douglass just fine too; as an administrator, he spent a good number of days in Boston. Nevertheless, the army continued to ponder Charles’s role, and Frederick Douglass assured Gerrit Smith that his youngest would soon be transferred to the Fifty-fifth.13
One of Douglass’s trips into Boston served as a grim reminder that even in the North many remained furious at the sight of a black man with a corporal’s winged chevron on his sleeve. Douglass was chatting about General George Gordon Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, with some white soldiers and remarked that he was pleased that the Army of the Potomac finally “had some sort of Gen. now.” An Irish tough overheard the conversation and “stepped in front” of Douglass, shaking his fists and shouting: “[A]in’t McClellan a good Gen. you black nigger. I don’t care if you have got the uniform on.” Mindful that his father regarded his youthful fight with a Maryland slave-breaker as his passage into manhood—not to mention his older brother’s courage under fire—Charles, still only nineteen, threw off his coat “and went at him.” A policeman broke up the fight and marched the ruffian off, which only made “all the other Irishmen mad.” Charles promised his father that he felt sure he “could whip a dozen irish,” especially as he had his “pistol and it was loaded.” He might allow Boston whites to swear at him, Douglass admitted, but he was determined “to shoot the first Irishman that strikes me.”14
While Corporal Douglass filed and copied paperwork, the Fifty-fifth reached its complement of 1,000 men and the Fifty-fourth began to replenish its depleted ranks. Although few Massachusetts residents joined the new unit, many flocked to the pioneering Fifty-fourth. Of the 286 men who joined after the original regiment had sailed south, 161, or 56 percent, listed the Bay State as their current home. Among the new recruits were brothers Warren and William Freeman, ages eighteen and twenty-two. Both were farmers, as was Private Charles Bateman from Northampton. William Henry Morris, yet another mariner from New Bedford, signed on, as did Evan Carrington, a troubled youth who would die the following year in an insane asylum near Washington. The influx of New Englanders—another 24 percent of the new arrivals came from Vermont—helped to preserve the original regiment’s somewhat refined culture. Roughly 90 of these recent recruits eventually transferred to the Fifty-fifth, including Private Charles Cassell, a stove-maker from Baltimore, and Jerome Cross, an upholsterer from Richmond. Joseph Crooks, one of the two recruits from Valparaiso, Chile, also transferred, as did Luke Foutz, a laborer from far-off Denver, and James Hamilton, a farmer from Jackson, Mississippi. At a time when most white soldiers fought beside friends and kinfolk from the same small town, the two black regiments claimed half a dozen nations and nearly every state in the Union as home.15
ON TUESDAY, JULY 21, THE NEW REGIMENT, TOGETHER WITH SOME of the fresh recruits for the Fifty-fourth, prepared to break camp and sail for South Carolina. The Fifty-fourth had trained over a period of nearly four months, but after just slightly more than two months of drilling, the Fifty-fifth was deemed prepared for duty. Eager to emphasize their state’s contribution to the Fifty-fifth—and also to remind Easterners of their state’s discriminatory “black laws” and stubborn refusal to raise a black regiment—the “colored women of Ohio” sent four flags for the unit to carry South. One featured a silver shield, with the words GOD AND LIBERTY emblazoned upon it. A second, sewn from “heavy blue silk,” featured the motto LIBERTY OR DEATH, an appropriation of slaveholder Patrick Henry’s Revolutionary slogan for black soldiers. Recruiter John Mercer Langston, who had signed so many of the Ohio men, arrived at Camp Meigs to present the banners.16
Initially, Governor Andrew had planned to ship the Fifty-fifth by rail to Manhattan, stage a parade down Broadway, and then embark for New Bern, North Carolina. After the draft riots earlier in the month and the lynching of black men, the soldiers, Fox reported, “had been carefully drilled in street-firing.” But Horatio Seymour, the state’s conservative governor, begged Washington to cancel the parade, and at length the War Department agreed. The men were keenly disappointed. While “taking counsel of fear was wise,” Fox conceded, the entire regiment regarded the prospect of “marching firmly and boldly, as they had a right to do, through New-York streets” as the best way to win “new friends of freedom” while intimidating their foes. Just days after the courageous assault on Wagner, one officer groused, “what a re-action in public feeling might have been produced by a thoroughly drilled and disciplined colored regiment” marching through streets that had recently seen black men hanging from streetlamps.17
The regiment’s departure from Boston was disappointing in its own way. Governor Andrew had planned a send-off to rival that of the Fifty-fourth, but Wednesday, July 22, was unseasonably chilly, and torrents of rain forced the cancellation of speeches on Boston Common. Despite the raw weather, a good-sized crowd turned out to cheer. “Many bouquets were thrown to the officers by their lady friends,” Fox remarked, Colonel Hallowell “being particularly favored.” George Garrison thought it “cruel and cowardly” of the state to cancel their parade on the Common, which he attributed, incorrectly, to the governor’s fear of mob violence. “We feared no attack,” Garrison assured his mother, “and if there had been one we were abundantly able to take care of ourselves, as our muskets and revolvers were loaded.” William Lloyd and Helen Garrison had braved the storm to wish their son farewell, but the soldiers moved too quickly and the “rain poured heavily down,” and so they were forced to “beat a retreat—keenly regretting that we could not, even from a distance, shout farewell.” By two o’clock that afternoon, all of the men were loaded aboard the steamer Cahawba.18
The voyage south took four days, and the soldiers endured seas as stormy as what those aboard the DeMolay had faced the previous month. “Rough is a mild expression for the state of the water,” Fox complained, “and very few of us have escaped the fate of novices upon the sea.” Hallowell too suffered from “the usual intervals of sickness,” but he refused to retreat to his cabin, instead joining the men on deck, who huddled beneath makeshift tents constructed of blankets. By Friday morning, one soldier wrote the Weekly Anglo-African, “every person was well, and our sea-sick men were as hungry as wolves.” The Cahawba reached Morehead City, North Carolina, on Saturday afternoon. There they found New York papers that chronicled the assault on Wagner. The men were disconsolate. “If the fort is not taken before we get there, we shall have our turn at it, and I hope with little better success,” Garrison assured his mother, grimly adding that the “chances of our being badly cut up are, I suppose, as good as that of the 54th.” Such grim bravado was hardly what Helen Garrison wished to hear, although the entire family concurred in George’s vengeful promise that if the Fifty-fifth successfully fought its way into Charleston, “the intention is, I think, not to leave one stone upon another, but to level it to the ground.”19
Lieutenant Colonel Fox appraised their temporary base of New Bern, which they reached by train from Morehead City, with the eye of a trained civil engineer. “Situated between two rivers in a comparatively healthy location, with many fine residences often reminding one greatly of the New England origin of its builders,” he explained to his wife, the town suffered from the “two spirits of evil, [which] have made it not a garden, not a desert but to a great extent a wilderness—The blight of the demon of slavery” and “the demon War.” While his men bivouacked below Fort Spinola, just across the Trent River, Pen Hallowell rode over to the office of General Edward Wild, a Harvard-trained Massachusetts doctor who had briefly served as a medical officer in the Ottoman army during the Crimean War. Rumor had it that Wild planned to employ the Fifty-fifth on raids into the state’s interior. But on the evening of July 29, orders arrived from General Gillmore at Morris Island, instructing the regiment to join his command and together with the restored Fifty-fourth take part in further assaults on Wagner. The embarkation began early the next morning, and the soldiers quit New Bern as they had Boston, “in the midst of a pouring rain.”20
Once again, high winds and relentless torrents tossed the three transport ships. “A nice sick time we shall have of it,” Fox groaned. “Our little Schooner pitched nicely.” Officers plied the wet, miserable men with ham, sugar, and coffee during the three-day voyage. The ships finally docked on Folly Island on the morning of August 2 and set up camp in a palmetto and evergreen grove on the north end of the island, roughly one-quarter mile from Lighthouse Inlet, just across from Morris Island. One soldier in the Fifty-fifth worried that they “were but poorly drilled, and had not been in the service long enough to become acquainted with military discipline.” Corporal Gooding, who wandered over a few days later in search of old friends from New Bedford, at least judged the new arrivals physically “superior in material to the 54th.” But after a few months on the Carolina coast, he supposed, “the hardships incident to a soldier’s life” would take a toll on their health.21
Gooding’s judgment was prescient. By the end of the month, Dr. Bernard Beust, the medical director on the island, reported “an alarming increase in the number of sick” men. Of the 1,000 soldiers in the regiment, 105 men were in a battlefield hospital on Folly Island, with another 70 so ill that they had been transported to Beaufort. As the men grew acclimated to the Lowcountry, however, they began to recover. “The health of our regiment is somewhat better than it was at our old camp,” George Garrison assured his brother. “Most all our officers are now enjoying pretty good health.” At least, one correspondent informed the Boston Daily Advertiser, the regiment had suffered no deaths.22
The weather was foul for several weeks. When the winds blew, the few trees on Folly and Morris Islands provided poor shelter. On August 19, the gales were so fierce that even after the soldiers tied their tents closed, sand continued to blow in. The men used boards to shovel out the floors of their tents, which one soldier reported to be “several inches deep” with sand, and he refused to try to sleep for fear “of being buried alive.” Those born in the North complained about the hot, muggy temperatures and fretted about the impact of the dampness on their gear. “Every piece of brass and button about me is tarnished beyond repair almost,” one officer worried. “The scabbard of my sword is as rusty as though it were a trophy of the Revolution.” No matter how carefully cleaned or polished, anything metal was after “three hours exposure to the air as bad as ever.” At least the evenings were “cool and bracing,” another soldier wrote to the Weekly Anglo-African, “so much so, that woolen blankets are not uncomfortable.”23
The Fifty-fourth was encamped roughly ten miles away on Morris Island, and the men of the two units saw one another too little to suit either regiment. Those officers who had enlisted just after Sumter were accustomed to army regulations, but newer captains, such as George Garrison, found the military’s rules infuriating. “It requires almost as much red tape to go from one [island] to the other as it would to get North on a furlough,” he complained. “It is only, therefore, by accident that we occasionally meet each other.” Garrison was able to visit Harriet Tubman, however; the forty-one-year-old abolitionist had remained on the South Carolina coast, helping settle black refugees onto abandoned estates and leading the occasional raid into the interior. When Garrison found her in her cabin, she was ironing, but she “instantly threw her arms around” the young captain and gave him “quite an affectionate embrace,” somewhat to his discomfort and “much to the amusement” of the soldiers accompanying him. Tubman confided in Garrison, telling him that she wished to return north but General Gillmore had begged her to remain. Tubman interviewed all the “contrabands escaping from the rebels,” Garrison observed, and the former slave was “able to get more intelligence from them than anybody else.”24
For the time, Ned Hallowell remained in Philadelphia convalescing; he would not return to the Fifty-fourth until mid-October. When he at last arrived, Gooding was cheered to find him “looking quite hale and hearty,” and his “familiar voice acted like electricity on the men.” Hallowell promptly wrote to John A. Andrew on the issue of black men under his command being promoted into the ranks of commissioned officers, as he knew that the governor had long considered Stephen Swails a potential test case with the War Department. While he awaited an answer, the colonel set out to reward the noncommissioned officers who had helped to run the regiment in his absence. Corporal Gooding, one of the most literate soldiers on Morris Island, was “detailed on Daily Duty at these Head Quarters as Clerk,” and Peter Vogelsang was promoted to quartermaster sergeant. Swails advanced from sergeant to acting sergeant major.25
The Hallowell brothers could do little, however, to combat the lingering racism in the all-white First and Second Brigades. “Notwithstanding the bravery of the 54th Mass. which has earned a certain position for them,” Fox confided to his wife, “the colored troops” remained unpopular with white soldiers recently arrived for the siege. “There is a strong feeling against them,” he added, a sentiment not found among the white Connecticut soldiers who had fought beside the Fifty-fourth on James Island. General Gillmore, at least, praised the regiment for its “cleanliness of dress, good conduct, and proficiency,” and so, Gooding hoped, the Fifty-fourth might “live down all prejudice against its color, by a determination to do well.” Despite this, one week later, after being dismissed while on dress parade, one of the regiment’s black sergeants marched his company to the front, as had white sergeants leading white companies. Three days after, the soldiers “were informed by an order (without any signature) that they need not march to the front” of the columns, as that appeared to place black men at the head of white soldiers. So “the prejudice against negro troops still exists,” William Lloyd Garrison editorialized. Despite their July heroism, their efforts to redeem America were not the work of a day.26
Black men wearing officers’ straps on their arms especially infuriated commissioned officers in white regiments. While Ned Hallowell was still absent, Captain J. A. Burns of the 140th Pennsylvania made it his business to check on the soldiers of the Fifty-fourth, and he complained to his superiors that he noticed “the guard is sometimes turned out and sometimes not.” In early September, Burns took it upon himself to reprimand Sergeant Newton Williams for “neglect of duty in this particular.” Burns ordered Williams arrested and confined to his tent, and he demanded that Colonel M. S. Littlefield “see that a proper rebuke be administered.” When the punishment failed to suit him, Burns again ordered Williams held, this time in the guardhouse. Weary of these escalating demands and requiring his sergeant back with his company, Major Henry Hooper, recently transferred to the Fifty-fourth, wrote Burns a curt note, insisting “that Sergeant Williams be returned to his command.”27
When a soldier from the two black regiments needed to be chastised, the men preferred to do it themselves, or with the assistance of one of their own officers. After one unnamed private in the Fifty-fifth committed the unpardonable sin of stealing from a fellow soldier, Fox sentenced him to be “marched down the line of the regiment, with the word ‘thief’ printed on a board around his neck.” Being humiliated in front of his own company was too much for the young private, and when it came time for the unhappy ceremony he “absolutely refused to march down the line.” Ned Hallowell “was not in sight,” so Fox thought he had no choice but to order “two of the guard to load and cap their rifles, fix bayonets, and take their places behind him.” The prisoner obeyed, but Fox regretted the incident. “War is an institution of the Devil,” he admitted, “only justifiable to prevent greater evil.” Lieutenant Garrison took away a different lesson from the affair, and one that served as a sad reminder of the cultural gulf between the enlistees and even the most well-intentioned white officers. “Most of the colored men with us are rather inclined to be dishonest, I think, than otherwise,” he wrote to his brother, before admitting that his suspicion “may be a slander upon them to a certain extent.”28
AS THE SOLDIERS OF BOTH REGIMENTS SETTLED INTO THEIR NEW lives on the islands, the U.S. Army of the South returned its attention to the problem of Wagner and the siege of Charleston. After two failed frontal assaults on the battery, General Gillmore had finally learned the virtue of patience. “I don’t think there will be any more storming parties here,” one soldier assured his mother. The “fighting will be with artillery mostly with infantry as reserve.” Gillmore and his senior advisers decided on a two-pronged attack in which the blockading fleet would first shell Sumter and Wagner day and night, and then Gregg and Moultrie, while the Massachusetts soldiers advanced a series of trenches toward the battery’s front wall. With Sumter reduced, one soldier believed, “we can starve the garrisons of forts Greg & Wagner to surrender.” Major George Brooks, an engineer, was put in charge of the trenches—formally known as parallels—and because the digging was to take place under Confederate guns, Brooks wished to employ the Fifty-fourth, “it being desirable to have older troops for the important and hazardous duty required in the advance.” All of the soldiers understood, according to one, that they faced a “long siege of it here.” Gooding warned the readers of the Mercury that they should “not expect Charleston to be taken in two minutes.” Even after the capture of Wagner and Sumter, “there is still a few miles between Sumter and the city, backed by heavy batteries on each shore.”29
In the weeks after the fighting on July 18, General P. G. T. Beauregard ordered Wagner’s defenders to hold the battery “at all costs.” Five hundred Confederates remained within its walls, most of them living within the comparative safety of the bombproofs. Beauregard hoped that the number was sufficient to hold Wagner until reinforcements could arrive. The U.S. guns began the bombardment on the afternoon of August 17. Lieutenant Colonel Fox and five soldiers of the Fifty-fifth climbed a tree to get a bird’s-eye view as “the Ironsides, all the Monitors and wooden gunboats crossed the bar and ranged themselves along the harbor from below Fort Wagner to nearly under the walls of Sumter.” As black smoke clogged the harbor’s mouth, the soldiers could see only “the continuous flashes of the guns.” Gooding watched in fascination from the Fifty-fourth’s camp on Morris Island. “Such a roar of heavy cannon I greatly doubt has been heard since the art of war has been known,” he marveled. “Shot after shot tears up the bricks and mortar of Sumter’s walls,” and while Sumter’s flag “floats defiantly from the battlement,” Gooding was confident that his readers could “anticipate the fall of secession’s mother before the genial days of September are gone.” Fox agreed: “The scene was grand and terrible.”30
By August 20, the incessant shelling had eroded Sumter’s parapets; twice its flagpole was shot away. Using spyglasses, gunners counted at least nine large holes in Sumter’s walls, while the northwest wall was a ruin of rubble, fallen arches, and shattered guns. On Saturday, August 22, alone, the U.S. Navy aimed 604 shots at Sumter and claimed that 419 of the shells hit their target. Fox guessed that Sumter could “not withstand the bombardment if continued for forty-eight hours longer, some portions look like a perfect honeycomb.” On Morris and Folly Islands, when the soldiers were not watching the shelling they tried to sleep, and after the “thunder at greater or less intervals during day and night,” the men “gradually became acquainted to their sound.” “The next time we attack the rebels, it is the intention of Gen. Gillmore to pretty effectually use them up with artillery before the troops attack them,” George Garrison guaranteed his worried mother. “There is a very large fleet here.”31
Even before the defenders within Sumter abandoned the wreckage, the fort ceased to provide artillery protection for Wagner. One U.S. officer aboard the steamer Quaker City reported the fort’s surrender as early as August 29, having mistaken its shattered flagpole as a signal of capitulation. That was premature, but as a soldier in the Fifty-fifth notified the Liberator on September 1, Sumter had “not fired a gun for a long while.” A second black private also wrote to Garrison, adding that the fort had “not sent a shot from its shattered walls since last August, with the exception of a few grape and canister thrown at the picket boats.” But its guns could no longer reach the ironclads, nor stretch across Wagner onto the beaches of Morris Island. The fact that the forts would soon be captured by black regiments, the private remarked, was something the Liberator’s readers “might be pleased to know.”32
While the navy continued to hammer away at Sumter and Wagner, Gillmore ordered the Fifty-fifth to construct a battery in the marsh between Morris and James Islands and to drag an eight-inch Parrot gun—a rifled artillery piece invented by Robert Parker Parrot—to the site. Although formally known as a “siege rifle,” the eight-inch gun was 162 inches long, weighed 16,500 pounds, and was capable of launching a 150-pound projectile 8,000 yards. By August 21, the massive piece, dubbed the “Swamp Angel,” was in place, and gunners from the Eleventh Maine informed Gillmore they were ready to fire. That afternoon, Gillmore sent an ultimatum to Beauregard, threatening to “open fire on the city of Charleston” if Wagner and Sumter were not immediately evacuated. The Confederate general was away inspecting the city’s defenses. Upon finally receiving the message, he scribbled an angry response, complaining about the lack of a “timely notice.” When no move was made to evacuate the forts, Gillmore ordered the first round fired at 1:30 a.m. the next morning. By dawn, gunners had rained sixteen shells down into Charleston. “It is a sad day for poor old Charleston,” Henry William Ravenel wrote in his diary, “so long defiant, & the first to strike the blow in this revolution—now about to feel the foot of the foul invader on her neck.” An American naval officer saw it differently: “Charleston is being ground to powder thanks to Treason.”33
With ironclads just outside of Charleston Harbor bombarding Sumter and Wagner, fatigue parties began to construct the trenches toward the battery’s front wall. Initially the Fifty-fourth was assigned the task, but after it became clear how slow and arduous the chore would be, the Fifty-fifth joined in. No white soldiers from the regiments stationed on the islands were assigned this task. Major George Brooks typically placed three companies in each fatigue unit, and they would dig in eight-hour shifts. Brooks hoped to work nonstop, with one unit starting at 4:00 a.m., the second relieving them at noon, and the third picking up their shovels at 8:00 p.m. But “the enemy’s sharpshooters were quite annoying during the day,” one officer reported, “and it seemed impossible to drive them from the shelter.” Instead, Luis Emilio grumbled, “most of the work had to be done at night.” During the day, some soldiers remained in the unfinished trenches, standing guard to repel any potential attacks. Each morning at sunup, the weary black soldiers stumbled back into camp and fell onto their blankets, their grim expressions showing “plainly at what cost this labor was done.” Within days, their uniforms “were in rags, [with] shoes worn out, and haversacks full of holes.”34
While the fatigue crews dug, other companies were assigned the task of cutting and dragging timber for the trenches’ sides and floors. As the parallels advanced soldiers from both regiments hauled forward the heavy siege guns, which were only slightly smaller than the famous Swamp Angel, their labors made more difficult as the “sling carts” that carried the guns sank into the sand. Those soldiers in the Fifty-fifth who were not digging stood picket on Folly Island. “All details for fatigue were made from the colored troops,” Charles Fox noted sourly. “If there were any exceptions to this rule, they did not come to [his] notice.” George Garrison was pleased that the men of the two regiments at least got to see one another as the fatigue companies came on and off duty, and a sort of friendly regimental competition emerged over which company had moved the most sand. One soldier in the Fifty-fifth bragged that most of the digging was “done under fire of the enemy, and the men, more or less all of the time, are obliged to dodge the shot of the enemy.” But the pressure was “good experience for them,” he thought, for they learn to “keep cool” under fire.35
By early September, a pleased Pen Hallowell reported, a series of five trenches ran across the island from just above the shore to the marshes facing James Island. Sitting within the front lines were three 200-pound siege guns. The zigzagging troughs allowed the soldiers to advance more than 600 yards from their initial lines; most of the parallels came within 250 yards of Wagner’s face, with a winding branch of the fifth parallel approaching 100 yards from the wall. The diggers encountered a number of buried land mines, “which were removed,” Pen remarked, but “not without some distressing casualties.” The soldiers were so close that late one night a number of men from the Fifty-fifth crept up the battery’s sandy wall and removed “a sort of palisade made up of projecting spikes and sharp-pointed stakes.” Warned of the crown of spears that sat atop Wagner’s front wall by the survivors of July 18, the new arrivals hoped to remove the impediment in preparation for a potential third assault.36
Transporting the heavy mortars through the trenches, one private informed the Liberator, “was the hardest night’s work I have yet had.” Just as they were getting the gun into place, a Confederate shell “burst not a great way” above their heads. A shell fragment pierced the ground where he had just been standing. “The whole time we were there, we were under tremendous fire from our own and the rebel guns,” and the fifth parallel ran so close to Wagner “that the men in it were more afraid of our own shells than they were of the enemy’s.” But the soldiers got the mortar into place and returned fire, “almost every shot coming down plump into Wagner.” The men earned the praise of their colonel, as Ned “thanked them for their coolness.” Even the habitually critical New York Times admitted—but without dropping its patronizing language—that “the darkies stand fire well amidst the bursting of shell.” But some of the Fifty-fourth were less lucky. Private John Green of Brooklyn died in the trenches, as did Alexander Hunter, a laborer from Cleveland. Shells from Wagner also took the lives of Lennox farmer Charles Van Allen and eighteen-year-old George Vanderpool of Coxsackie, New York. “A man dies none the less gloriously standing at his post on picket, or digging in the trench,” Gooding reflected, as “his country needs him there, as he is as true a soldier as though he were in the thickest fray.” Even if they thought their work important, the hard labor served to further infuriate the men about the ongoing pay dispute. As one soldier of the Fifty-fifth observed, the “men need money badly.” Yet if “Charleston is taken,” he added, “it will be owing to the hard labor and exertions of the colored troops here.”37
After the two failed assaults on Wagner, General Gillmore chose to reduce the battery with shelling from the water and from trenches on Morris Island. Most of the hard, dangerous work of moving sand and placing guns was given to the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, who were only rarely assisted by white soldiers or prisoners taken after the draft riots. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
If the black soldiers lacked the assistance of white troops in the trenches, they greatly enjoyed the company of more than 200 prisoners who had been arrested in the wake of Manhattan’s July draft riots. Gooding had lost his boyhood home when the rioters torched the Colored Orphan Asylum, and the soldiers relished the sight of the convicts being put to work “at the very front” of the parallels where they were all “the time under fire from the enemy.” The army pitched their camp close to the tents of the Fifty-fourth’s, and the prisoners “have behaved themselves quite respectfully,” Garrison remarked, with the exception of a dozen toughs, who then found themselves in the island’s guardhouse, where they were watched by armed black men. That, Garrison laughed, “had the effect of curing their prejudices at once.” The prisoners also turned out to watch the Fifty-fourth on dress parade, and Garrison suspected that “from their looks that they were getting some new ideas into their heads in regard to the negro.”38
By the end of the first week in September, Gillmore estimated that his shore-based guns alone had landed 1,247 shells within Wagner’s walls and that, of those, 1,173 had smacked into the roof of the bombproof. Despite the vast sacks of sand protecting the soldiers inside the bunker, at least 100 of Wagner’s defenders were killed or wounded, with another 50 casualties suffered at nearby Battery Gregg. Beauregard and Colonel Lawrence Keitt, in command of Sumter, finally determined that both batteries had to be evacuated. Late on September 6, Keitt ordered all of his cannon but the remaining Columbiad to be disabled. As his men quietly boarded forty skiffs and barges that would ferry them into Charleston, Keitt packed the Columbiad with a double charge, but when the order was given to fire, the gun refused to go off. The few defenders tried again, and when the Columbiad still sat silent, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove the spike they had just hammered into the touch-hole of a nearby cannon. At around 1:00 A.M. on Monday, September 7, after a siege of fifty-eight days, the two batteries stood empty.39
Noticing less activity to the front of the trenches, Gillmore sent word to Pen Hallowell that “black troops shall again have the honor” of entering Wagner. Hallowell in turn instructed Bob James—who, despite his young age, had recently been promoted to first lieutenant—to take several companies of the Fifty-fifth and advance through the trenches. When they reached the end of the fifth parallel, two soldiers “crawled belly-wise” through the watery ditch and up Wagner’s front wall. Both disappeared over the parapet, and for several minutes, James admitted, the hearts of those still in the trenches seemed “as if in concert to stop beating.” Then one of the men reappeared atop the wall, and by the gray light of morning they could see him waving his cap. As a “great cry” went up, detachments from the Fifty-fourth and the Tenth Connecticut dashed along the James Island side of the battery and captured the last three Confederate barges as they shoved off. A few Confederates dove over the side and drowned. About 100 were taken prisoner, “and to a man,” Private George Stephens commented, they denied “having been in the fort” on July 18. The black soldiers discovered the bodies of two Confederate officers and eight privates within the bombproof, together with “two wounded men who had eaten nothing for three days.” The deceased, a soldier reported, “were decently interred by our own men,” and although they tried to care for the two survivors, both died while being removed to the camp hospital.40
THAT NIGHT, ADMIRAL JOHN DAHLGREN, COMMANDER OF THE SOUTH Atlantic Blockading Squadron, decided the time had arrived for an amphibious landing at Sumter, whose south-facing wall had been breached by Gillmore’s guns. September 8 was a moonless night, and Dahlgren estimated that they would find “nothing but a corporal’s guard” within the fort. Four hundred sailors and marines paddled out from Morris Island aboard thirty skiffs, quietly rowing across the narrow channel. Despite the darkness, the defenders either heard or guessed that they were coming. As the marines landed Confederates inside responded with muskets and hand grenades, while gunners across the harbor at Fort Moultrie poured metal into the storming party. Shells smashed three boats. The “barges in the rear, terror stricken by the concentrated fire,” gloated the Charleston Mercury, “abandoned the attack, leaving the Yankees who had landed” to be killed or taken prisoner.41
Even so, as James Henry Gooding informed his readers, “Sumter is a mass of shapeless ruins,” and Battery Gregg “is occupied by our forces, a small detachment of men, to repair and hold it.” Although yet in Confederate hands, “the deserted castle,” as Gooding described it, “fires no guns now,” and soldiers from the Fifty-fourth rarely spied “any men on the ruined walls.” Sumter’s flag had been shot away fourteen times, and while its defenders continued to restore the flagpole, they now raised it “but a very few feet above the ruined walls,” and soldiers could see it only by standing on the distant hills of Folly Island. Naval gunners returned to their daily bombardments, Fox wrote his wife, so that “Sumter is being rapidly reduced to a pile of bricks.” The daily shelling began at dawn, so “there is no danger of our losing our habit of early rising at present,” he observed.42
Meanwhile, for the soldiers of the two black regiments, and particularly for the men who had survived the assault of July 18, the fact that Wagner was “now in our possession” was a grand victory. The men yanked the pikes out of the ditch and the parapet and carried them back to their camps as souvenirs. Ned Hallowell sent Jesse Benton Frémont, the wife of abolitionist general and politician John C. Frémont, a “piece of a rebel gun taken at Fort Wagner,” and she in turn praised the young colonel as “a quaker of the war kind.” Garrison’s Liberator reminded its subscribers “that Fort Wagner was one of the strongest works ever constructed by the rebels.” For Gooding, who had lost so many comrades in the battle, Sumter’s temporary survival mattered little by comparison to the fact that “at last Wagner and Gregg have the old flag waving over them.” One soldier wrote the Boston Traveler to insist that the “fort was taken by the spades and shovels of the 54th,—deny this who dare.” Given the friendly rivalry between the sister regiments, it was hardly surprising that the only writer who accepted the dare was a soldier in the Fifty-fifth. The soldier wanted it understood that although the newer arrivals did not “lay claim for our brigade to all the fame earned by colored soldiers at that well known siege,” he believed that “we of the 55th [performed] as much hard service as any other regiment in the field.”43
With the entirety of Morris Island under U.S. control, relatives of some of the white soldiers who perished at Wagner begged the army to retrieve their loved ones’ bodies. The family of Augustine Webb, a lieutenant in the Forty-eighth New York, requested “permission to disinter [his] remains and send them to Mass.” Ignoring Frank Shaw’s public letter of August 24, the army began to search for Rob’s body. Writing again to General Gillmore, Shaw insisted that “such efforts are not authorized by me, or any of my family, and they are not approved by us.” Gillmore deferred to the family and ordered that Rob’s grave not be disturbed. The army could not control the waves, however, and for months afterward the tide disclosed the soldiers’ final resting places. Susie King Taylor, a former slave turned nurse who assisted the First South Carolina, routinely noticed “many skulls lying about” as she walked along Morris Island. “They were a gruesome sight,” she remembered, “those fleshless heads and grinning jaws.”44
The failed incursion against Sumter served as a grim reminder that Charleston’s fall was hardly imminent. As the correspondent for the New York Herald reported, the Confederates still controlled shore batteries on James Island, as well as Battery Bee and Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. Moultrie’s cannon were no longer effective against Wagner, but the sands near Gregg remained unsafe. “Around Castle Pinckney they have built up huge barricades of sand extending to the very parapet,” the journalist noted, “and have thus rendered that work capable of a strong defense.” While riding along the beach, Ned Hallowell had his horse shot from beneath him; the shell fragments miraculously missed him. Gooding supposed that the forts on Sullivan’s Island held very few men, but “they must be got out.” The weary corporal proposed that a “steam force engine” shoot “petroleum, or kerosene, or any other combustible fluid or oil,” into Sumter and Moultrie, and then ignite the liquids “by the bursting of a few shells.” Although cruel, Gooding admitted, such tactics would ultimately save lives that might be sacrificed in conventional campaigns. “War is nothing but barbarism at the best, and those who can excel in that, to put an end to a longer train of barbarisms, are in the end the most humane of the two.” The former sea cook, who had turned twenty-five the previous August, was among those who had seen Shaw fall, but his opinions were likely shared by those soldiers who could remember being slaves.45
This September 1863 map shows the trenches immediately below Wagner, as well as the U.S. batteries that were relentlessly shelling Wagner and Fort Sumter. On the southern tip of Morris Island, the newly created Fort Shaw guarded the entrance to the inlet above Folly Island. Courtesy Virginia Historical Society.
While shore gunners and monitors continued their daily barrages against the remaining harbor fortifications, the black regiments were far from idle. “Our regiment has been working very hard at what is called ‘fatigue duty,’” one soldier in the Fifty-fifth complained, “and I can assure you it is rightly named.” Each morning, between 50 and 200 soldiers received orders to perform various labors, “mostly in unloading vessels of freight and ammunition of all kinds.” Sixty soldiers were detached to the First New York Engineers, where they “were set to work leveling ground for the Regimental Camp, digging wells &c pitching tents and the like,” even though white soldiers had long performed such labors themselves. The regiments’ sick lists increased daily. “We perform the same duties of other Massachusetts troops,” snapped Private Stephens, “and even now we have to perform fatigue duty night and day.” Yet they were “offered $10 per month or nothing until next December or January! Why, in the name of William H. Seward, are we treated thus?” Stephens had enlisted to fight, not to dig wells, and the battleground, he argued, was “the proper field for colored men.” But because they were black, even in the aftermath of Wagner, the army thought them fit only for “menial work.”46
A handful of white progressives also began to speak out. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a public letter, widely reprinted in the abolitionist press, denouncing “the cruel fatigue-duty” imposed on black recruits only. It was as if the army had “calculated to destroy all self-respect in the soldiers,” Higginson observed, “because no esprit de corps can be created in a regiment” that existed only to unload vessels. Yet in the same way that the valor shown by the Fifty-fourth at Wagner had softened the hearts of some white critics, watching fellow soldiers perform backbreaking labor forced others to reexamine their long-held assumptions about race. Although he wanted it known that he was no “nigger worshiper,” Private John Westervelt of the First New York Engineers concluded that it was simply wrong for black troops to be “ill used by those whose duty it is to look after their interest and see them get what Uncle Sam intends to provide for all alike both white and black.” After the battles on July 16 and 18, Westervelt admitted, “there is no longer any question about their being good fighters,” yet they are “put at the hardest as well as the meanest kinds of work.”47
As the morale of the black soldiers continued to plummet, their commanders found it necessary to make a stand. Colonel James C. Beecher, the half-brother of antislavery novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, filed a complaint against Gillmore on September 13. Beecher commanded runaways in the First North Carolina, and his soldiers, he reminded the general, “have been slaves and are just learning to be men.” It was bad enough that they were daily “called d——d Niggers by so-called ‘gentlemen’ in uniform of U.S. Officers.” But now that sin was compounded by having them “policing camps of white soldiers.” Beecher threatened to “forward” his objections to the highest levels of military authority. Ned Hallowell began to refuse to allow soldiers from the Fifty-fifth to perform manual labor, prompting Gillmore to inform General Wild “that the excuse offered by Col. Hallowell for not Complying with the order detailing 200 men from his Regiment is insufficient and cannot be accepted.” Wild was unhappy at being caught up in the growing dispute, and unhappier still when Ned was openly rude to the unfortunate captain who was tasked with delivering Gillmore’s commands. Wild commanded Hallowell to be “severely reprimanded for disobedience” and warned him that “hereafter any disrespect shown to any one of my Staff Officers, when representing me, shall be regarded as disrespect shown to myself.” Quakers, even fighting ones, answered to a higher authority than generals, and Ned stubbornly continued to back his troops.48
James Henry Gooding concluded that complaining to senior officers was not enough. On September 28, the young corporal decided to submit his grievance to his ultimate superior: Abraham Lincoln. Gooding hoped that the president “will pardon the presumption of an humble individual like myself, in addressing you,” but he wished Lincoln to know what the men thought about the interconnected problems of unequal pay and unfair treatment. “Now the main question is, Are we Soldiers, or are we Labourers?” Gooding declined to mention that he had stood atop Wagner’s parapet two months before, but he did observe that the Fifty-fourth had “shared the perils and Labour of Reducing the first stronghold that flaunted a Traitor Flag.” Since Lincoln had warned “the Rebel Chieftain, that the United States knows no distinction in her Soldiers,” would it not then be “consistent to set the example herself by paying all her Soldiers alike?” Although he was certain that the service of former slaves was “undoubtedly worth much to the Nation,” the recruits in his regiment had not “enlisted under any ‘contraband’ act.” He and those who had signed up with him were “American Soldiers, not menial hirelings.” Gooding promised to fight on, but he prayed that the president might fight for him as well. “We feel as though our Country spurned us,” he concluded, “now that we are sworn to serve her. Please give this a moment’s attention.” Although Lincoln declined to reply, he clearly read the letter and forwarded it to the War Department.49
The scandal threatened to become even more embarrassing when Southern newspapers picked up the story and argued that if black men could perform manual labor for the American military, “the Confederate Government should place in [its] army as many negroes as may be needed to do all fatigue duty.” Pressured by influential journalists, and perhaps also by the War Department, Gillmore assured correspondents for a number of Northern newspapers in early October that it had only recently “come to his knowledge that detachments of colored troops” were being employed to “prepare camps and perform menial duties for white troops.” Having given an explicit order to use only “colored troops” on August 2, the discomfited general now condemned “these details as unauthorized and improper.” On November 25, Gillmore elaborated in his General Order No. 104, in which he promised that “colored troops will not be required to perform any labor which is not shared by the white troops.” A vindicated Ned Hallowell retained a copy of Gillmore’s order, and a soldier from the Fifty-fourth assured the Weekly Anglo-African that the general’s “second order against the unequal distribution of labor” had resulted in “the greatest improvement imaginable.” Neither the officers nor the men trusted Gillmore, but as both regiments returned to regular training with “the most rigorous drill and discipline,” they hoped the time had arrived “for the bravest troops” to again see combat.50
THE PAY DISPUTE WOULD PERSIST, HOWEVER. UNFORTUNATELY, THE fatigue and pay issues coincided, so that each problem served to exacerbate the other; the soldiers returned from arduous days on fatigue detail to discover pleading letters from home describing hungry children and unpaid rent. On August 5, Colonel Milton Littlefield, the acting paymaster, arrived on Morris Island. Calling the regiment together, Littlefield promised them that they “need not be afraid . . . that you won’t get your thirteen dollars per month, for you surely will” when Congress again met. He then encouraged them to temporarily accept the lower pay of $10, asking those who would do so to “raise your right hand.” The men glanced up and down the lines, seeing who might break ranks. “I am glad to say not one man in the whole regiment lifted a hand,” Gooding proudly observed. Littlefield warned the unit that by refusing their wages, they might not receive any money until Congress convened in December. His company “had been over five months waiting,” Gooding replied. “Too many of our comrades’ bones lie bleaching near the walls of Fort Wagner to subtract even one cent from our hard earned pay.” Not a soldier among them would “sell our manhood for ten dollars per month.”51
In hopes of ending the crisis, Governor Andrew traveled to Washington in September to meet with Lincoln and members of the cabinet. The president offered vague promises of reforms but hinted that the fault lay with Congress and the wording of the Militia Act. Frustrated, Andrew remarked that, as the navy paid black and white sailors the same wage, “therefore the Navy is daily breaking the law.” But the terrible news from the late September debacle at the Battle of Chickamauga, which ended the U.S. offensive in southeastern Tennessee and resulted in the greatest casualties since Gettysburg, occupied the attentions of policymakers in Washington. The pay scale for black soldiers, Andrew understood, would not soon be resolved. Instead, acting upon the recommendation of longtime adviser John Murray Forbes, Andrew decided to call the state assembly into a special session and ask them to pay the difference between what the two regiments were promised and what the federal government offered. Forbes urged the assembly to act quickly “in view of the suffering of the families of these soldiers.” At least initially, Robert Hamilton, the editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, supported the idea. “This will be cheering news to our brethren in arms, and will show them how wisely they have acted in relying upon the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”52
After the legislature agreed to Andrew’s proposal, the governor appointed Major James Sturgis and Republican businessman Edward Kinsley as his special envoys to carry the payments south and explain the compromise to the two regiments. The emissaries docked on Morris Island on December 12 and stood ready to disburse the wages. Sturgis and Kinsley were stunned, therefore, to find the Massachusetts regiments hostile to the offer. One soldier announced his “surprise and disappointment” that the state, “in effect, advertises us to the world as holding out for money and not from principle.” The newer recruits of the Fifty-fifth also held firm. The men should die rather than accept unequal pay or agree to serve only as “menials in the Union army,” Sergeant James Monroe Trotter insisted. Ned Hallowell was proud of his men. By accepting the cash, he agreed, they “would be acknowledging to the world that the money is what they fight for.” Hallowell called in all of the sergeants under his command to read them Andrew’s message to the legislature, but “every one has reported that his Company would refuse now and always to take any part of their just dues, until the US was ready to give them the same as other soldiers.” The sergeants were concerned about their relatives, they admitted, yet “nothing but the starvation of their families will make them back down.”53
Sturgis and Kinsley “pleaded with the men by every argument, by every persuasion they could command,” Hallowell observed, but “[i]n vain.” A handful of contraband soldiers from the Third USCT, who had never drawn a day’s wages in their lives, expressed a willingness to take the proffered $10, but the Massachusetts regiments “did not falter.” They were “soldiers of the Union, not of a State,” Hallowell added. George Garrison proudly assured his family that “there was hardly a baker’s dozen of men in the regiment that would consent to take” the money. Aware of the hardships this protest imposed on their families back home, the white officers “advised them to take it,” Garrison noted, “but it had not the slightest effect upon them.” One soldier promised Garrison that if they had “to work their whole three years for nothing,” they were prepared to do so.54
The soldiers in both regiments were grateful to Andrew and the legislature for their “kindness in offering to make up to us the amount which we enlisted for,” one man informed the Liberator. But they signed up “with the same patriotic motives as actuated any white soldiers,” another told the Weekly Anglo-African. Both regiments had tasted Confederate fire, so “we consider ourselves as manly and as soldierly as any other troops of our experience, and therefore their equals.” The units took pride in the fact that Massachusetts “was first to send two colored regiments in the field,” but in reality every state was represented in the units, and they had signed on as soldiers of “the U.S. Government on the same terms as her other Regiments.” Those recruits from outside New England had long faced discriminatory laws, segregated or nonexistent schools, and ballot boxes reserved for white voters. Racially based unequal pay was the final insult, and so the soldiers collectively decided they “must respectfully and yet firmly reject [Andrew’s] generous offer.”55
As had become his custom, James Henry Gooding was no longer content to submit his opinions only to the New Bedford Mercury. Having already filed a complaint with the president, he now drafted a response to the governor—and sent a copy to the press. The young corporal worried that if Massachusetts paid the difference, there would be no motivation for Congress to address pay inequality. “As men who have families to feed, and clothe, and keep warm, we must say, that the ten dollars by the greatest government in the world is an unjust distinction to men who have only a black skin to merit it,” Gooding argued. All Congress had to do, he believed, was to acknowledge that black men were soldiers and not hewers of wood; no special legislation was necessary. As it now stood, no matter “how brave they had been” at Wagner, their contribution “was spurned, and made mock of.”56
Governor Andrew, who had called his state assembly into a special session to address the problem, was unamused at being lectured by a black corporal. “While I fully appreciate his intelligence and good will,” Andrew huffed, “I can only say that I have no time for the effort to explain to those who do not understand what is so clear.” Since the governor completely agreed that the two regiments had “the clear right to be treated, in all respects, by national and State governments as soldiers,” he did not appreciate the men turning down the legislature’s compromise. Anticipating that Gooding’s missive would strike a nerve, Ned Hallowell wrote to Andrew in hopes of explaining why the offer was “received unfavorably by the enlisted men of this Regiment.” Hallowell hastened to assure Andrew of the unit’s gratitude in his “efforts to establish their just rights,” but he pointed out that to accept lower federal pay “would be acknowledging a right on the part of the United States to draw a distinction between them and other Soldiers from Massachusetts.” Since the War Department paid white privates $13, to agree to less, regardless of who made up the difference, was to concede “that because they have African blood in their veins they are less men than those who have Saxon.”57
Although they led black regiments, the segregated pay did not extend to white officers. As did most of the officers of the Fifty-fourth and the Fifty-fifth, Lieutenant Colonel Fox offered to serve without pay, but the men “requested them” to accept their salaries. The black soldiers regarded their collective position as a matter of racial solidarity, and while they respected most of their white officers, they regarded the pay dispute as their own cause. Certainly the gap between what Congress paid officers and privates was substantial. George Garrison informed his brother that his “salary I believe is over $1,000 a year,” which allowed him to “be of some service to Father and Mother if they are in need of it.” Even as they accepted their pay, however, most of the officers felt guilty in doing so, and their letters home spoke of their anguish and resentment. “I would be overjoyed if the men could only get that which belongs to them,” Bob James told his parents. “It is disgraceful, the way in which the Govt. is treating them.” Fox agreed, telling his wife that he wanted “to see justice done to the men.”58
According to one of his advisers, Governor Andrew “was at first considerably put out by the complete overthrow of his plan.” But as it became clear that the white officers (and their influential families) supported the “uncompromising spirit shown by the men,” he returned his attention to Washington. On December 14, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens introduced a bill to equalize the pay of all U.S. soldiers. Since Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson had taken a hand in creating the confusion in the first place by demanding the withdrawal of Stevens’s bill of the previous winter, it was fitting that he now joined with the Pennsylvania radical to advance a bill through both houses. As Gooding had feared, Maryland’s Reverdy Johnson insisted that if Andrew had promised his recruits $13 in violation of the 1862 Militia Act, “let Massachusetts redeem it.” But even alleged supporters, such as William Pitt Fessenden, a Maine Republican, wondered as to the wisdom “in our going back and paying them this increase for services already rendered.” The Senate, he maintained, “must not consider that the Treasury can meet everything.”59
This view prevailed, and when word of this latest setback arrived on Morris Island, Sergeant Major Stephen Swails decided he was done with the army. He had “performed the duty of a soldier” at Wagner, Swails reminded Adjutant General E. D. Townsend. “But the Government having failed to fulfill its part of the agreement, in as much as it refuses me the pay, and allowances of a Sergeant of the regular Army,” Swails “respectfully demand[ed] to be mustered out of the service of the United States.” Instead of responding to the request, Gillmore scribbled, “The tone of this communication is disapproved” across the bottom of the letter.60
AS IF THE ILL WILL CREATED BY FATIGUE DUTY AND UNEQUAL PAY WAS not enough to dispirit the regiments, by the late fall of 1863 Pen Hallowell’s health again worsened. His Antietam wounds continued to plague him, and under the heat and dampness of the Carolina coast, the pain in his arm grew unbearable. In September the War Department granted him another thirty days’ leave to recover in his parents’ Philadelphia home. There, he tallied up the number of months he had missed while convalescing. Over the past thirteen months, he had been “off duty” for seven, on special assignment at Readville raising the two regiments for another four, “and in the field [only] two months.” Less concerned about his own health than what he owed to his regiment, he fretted that he “shall be partially disabled for a long time to come.” And so, on October 5, he wrote to the adjutant general and tendered his resignation as colonel of the Fifty-fifth. Norwood Penrose Hallowell was not yet twenty-five.61
Andrew responded in a gracious letter, commenting that he was aware that Hallowell had agreed to organize black troops “at a time, when the undertaking was not a popular one, or its success guaranteed.” He hoped that Pen’s “health, when no longer taxed by exertions, perhaps too great, will be fully restored.” The governor also accepted Hallowell’s recommendation that Alfred Hartwell take command of the Fifty-fifth. The loss of Hallowell “was a source of great regret” to all the men in his regiment. “Universally beloved and respected as an officer and a man,” Fox observed, “all felt that his place could not be easily filled.” Garrison agreed. Apart from the fact that the Fifty-fifth was “now very short of officers,” he judged Hartwell “to be a man unable to hold out against any one,” as he “lacks firmness.” Fearing just the opposite, curiously, Pen’s last words of advice to Hartwell, according to surgeon Burt Wilder, were “to refrain from the ‘gruffness’ (something like hauteur, too) to which he is prone.” Pen divided the contents of his trunk between his junior officers, said his final farewells, and sailed for Philadelphia.62
Christmas Day 1863 was “cold and windy,” but the soldiers welcomed the festivities, even as they thought about distant loved ones. For both regiments, cooks prepared special dinners, with apple dumplings, minced pies, beefsteak, mutton, and ham added to their usual fare. “It was the best time I ever had,” one soldier marveled, and although it was “about as cold a morning as we have here,” it was nothing like “the weather at home.” Pen Hallowell shipped a case of wine south for the officers of the Fifty-fifth. The soldiers received the day off, and most celebrated the holiday with “various games and amusements.” To remind the Confederates that wars take no holiday, U.S. gunners, Captain Emilio remarked, “sounded their fearful Christmas chimes by throwing shells into the city after one o’clock.” For the next three hours, shells slammed into Charleston as fast as the artillerymen could reload. That evening the soldiers on Morris Island could see fires in the city that “illuminated the whole sky and destroyed twelve buildings.”63
Far grander still were the celebrations of liberty that greeted January 1 along the coast south of the harbor. To commemorate the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Colonel Benjamin Tilghman marched a company of enlisted men from the Third South Carolina down to Beaufort to assist in a “Freedmen’s Celebration.” On Morris Island, Sergeant William Gray organized a “Solemn Convention” for the Massachusetts regiment. At thirty-eight, Gray was one of the older soldiers in the Fifty-fourth; a New Bedford mariner, he had enlisted with Gooding and, like his friend, had survived the assault on Wagner. Dressed in their cleanest uniforms and “fully armed and equipped,” the Fifty-fifth marched to the parade ground. Some of the recruits had formed a “Musical and Vocal Club,” and after a prayer offered by Chaplain Samuel Harrison, the club sang “Year of Jubilee.” Gray ascended the dais to speak. As did all of the men, Gray resented the lack of pay and the long hours spent on fatigue drudgery and was saddened by the loss of the younger of the Hallowell brothers. But instead of dwelling on that unhappy past, Gray ventured that the year 1864 was for looking ahead. He thanked his comrades for the “accumulated testimony of negro patriotism and courage” they had demonstrated the previous summer and fall. He asked his “fellow soldiers” to reflect that it would someday “deck the page of history, that on South Carolina soil the race that her laws have been studiously framed to oppress” now stood ready “to make their liberty permanent.” Their government and some of the white men they served beside scorned their contribution, but “our children will refer with pride to their fathers, who, for the sake of the liberty of the human race, suffered the baptism of fire.”64
Corporal Gooding reported on the day’s events to his loyal readers back in New Bedford, adding that “all is quiet and evidently settled for the winter.” He knew of nothing “very exciting in the military line” and assumed that the regiments would remain on Folly and Morris Islands until the fall of Charleston. For once, the young corporal was wrong. Lincoln hoped to return Florida—the least populous of all of the Confederate states—to the Union, while General Gillmore wished to secure a source of cotton, turpentine, and lumber, sever Confederate supply routes for beef and salt, and liberate more contraband troops to hurl against Charleston. By the month’s end, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth would receive orders to ship south. For the newer recruits, who had not taken part in the battles of the previous July, tests of their courage and mettle awaited them on fields that carried strange names, including the one the Creek called “black water”—Olustee.65