CHAPTER NINE

Liberation

“PURSUANT TO AUTHORITY RECEIVED FROM THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of War,” the Weekly Anglo-African reported in early January 1864, “a regiment of Cavalry Volunteers, to be composed of men of color, is now in process of recruitment.” The essay carried a lengthy description of promised state compensation: a $325 bounty to enlist, another $50 upon successful completion of training at Camp Meigs, and then a monthly salary of $20, “in addition to the pay now or hereafter received by him from the United States.” As John Andrew took “great satisfaction [in] the progress made” by the Fifty-fourth, the newspaper remarked, the governor was equally confident in a regiment of black riders designed to “illustrate their capacity for that dashing and brilliant arm of the military service.” The men of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth contested with the black soldiers in the First Kansas Colored Volunteers and the First South Carolina Volunteers, which had been reorganized as the Seventy-ninth and Thirty-third USCT, respectively, over pride of place as the army’s first black regiment—although those units were fairly unknown to white Americans—so Andrew wished it known that his would be the first black cavalry regiment anywhere in the country. The “destiny of their race is in their own grasp,” the governor insisted. It “is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, [so] let no brave and strong man hesitate.”¹

For Andrew and the black soldiers already in the field, the right to serve as cavalrymen was every bit as critical as equal pay or promotion in the ranks. Cavalrymen were elite troops, as evidenced by their higher pay as well as their reputation for dash and courage—and by the dangers they risked, as men on horseback made inviting targets. Midway through the war, however, advances in the technology of the rifled musket—now able to reach 300 yards—had effectively put an end to the cavalry charges that had been pioneered in Europe during the Napoleonic era. Although trained as a cavalryman, for instance, U.S. General John Buford had come to regard the old saber charges as anachronistic, in part because of the disastrous assault made by his friend Elon Farnsworth and the First Vermont Cavalry at Gettysburg. Buford instead advocated transforming cavalry regiments into mounted infantry units armed with carbines, which could be fired at twice the speed of the muskets carried by infantrymen, so that they might move quickly during battle but also dismount and fight on foot. Some more traditional Confederates, such as General Jeb Stuart, remained wedded to the old concept, but Andrew saw the logic in the new tactics (while Stuart was destined to be shot by a dismounted Union private). As with the two black infantry regiments, Andrew’s newest experiment would not be created under the auspices of the USCT. There already being four Massachusetts cavalry regiments, this was to be the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry.²

If anything, Andrew faced even more formidable obstacles than he had the previous January when creating the Fifty-fourth. For one, most Northern whites had an even harder time visualizing African Americans as elite cavalrymen than as common infantrymen. The cost of arming and mounting 1,000 men, moreover, far exceeded the price of outfitting as many infantrymen, and the expense of maintaining ten companies in the field did not decline once the men left camp. The War Department’s Cavalry Bureau also struggled to maintain a “supply of public animals to our gallant armies in the field”; the high combat losses incurred by 1864 had increasingly forced the army to purchase inferior mounts at ever-rising prices. And even for those recruits who were accustomed to working with farm horses, learning to conduct complicated maneuvers as part of a mounted group required months of training.³

To command the unit, Andrew tapped Henry S. Russell, then a lieutenant colonel in the Second Massachusetts Cavalry. Just shy of twenty-six, the Harvard graduate had seen considerable action in Virginia, fighting beside the late Charles Russell Lowell. But what most recommended him for the post—as the antislavery press enthusiastically emphasized—was that he was a cousin to Rob Shaw. As had his kinsman, Russell initially preferred to stay with his old regiment, but after reflection, he concluded that “Bob would have liked to have me do it.” Several white officers from the Fifty-fifth shipped back north to join the new regiment, but no black private from either of the two Massachusetts regiments joined them, though they were given the option. Black newspapers understood that the recruits would come from the South, especially from among the refugees in Washington who had once been grooms or had cared for their masters’ finest steeds. “Let us astonish Gen. Lee and the pride of the old cavalry brigade,” the Weekly Anglo-African proclaimed, “by the novel spectacle of their own servants sabreing their old masters to the tune of Yankee Doodle!”⁴

Andrew wanted to have a sound Massachusetts man as the regiment’s second-in-command. Several advisers advanced the candidacy of Charles Francis Adams Jr., who had by then advanced to the rank of captain in the First Massachusetts Cavalry. The Adams name meant more to the public than did Russell’s, and Charles Sr.’s long-standing support for free-soil politics had led Andrew to believe that the son was more devoted to the cause than he actually was. But if Adams continued to harbor racist assumptions about the character of African Americans, the Fifty-fourth had erased any doubts he had about the ability of black men to fight. White soldiers might eventually capture Richmond, Adams thought, but America’s fight to overcome racism would never “take a step backward” if it was a “success to which 200,000 armed blacks have contributed.” When contacted by the governor, Adams hesitated, but not for long. Russell was an old friend from college days, and Adams, who was typical of the cold, dour men in his family, knew that there were few in his regiment “who know or care for me.” He later insisted that he cared little “for the increased rank, still less for the pay,” but while the latter was surely true, Adams men always strove for excellence, and upon achieving success they invariably wished the world to acknowledge it. A “colored regiment would prove an interesting study,” he mused. And so, provided that the army granted him seventy days’ leave for a voyage to Britain to visit his father and brother, as well as a few days in Boston to see his fiancée, Mary Elizabeth Ogden, Adams accepted the commission and promised to be at Readville by March.⁵

Of the noncommissioned officers, the final one to sign on was Charles Douglass. Content to remain in Readville and process paperwork for both the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, the young corporal had little interest in equestrian pursuits or in shipping south. Organized and possessed of a clear script, Douglass enjoyed the clerical life at Meigs, which often allowed him to venture into Boston on army business. On several occasions, Douglass had been instructed to prepare to escort new recruits for the two regiments to Folly or Morris Islands, but each time those orders fell through. Of all the black soldiers in the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, in fact, only Douglass transferred to the cavalry, and perhaps not of his own volition. But the Fifth required his skills, and so, on March 26, he signed on for another three years—provided the war lasted that long—and was promoted to sergeant. At the same time, his older brother, Frederick Douglass Jr., received a commission from Andrew to journey south down the Mississippi in search of former bondmen who could ride.⁶

ON MAY 13, THE LIBERATOR REPORTED THAT 1,000 CAVALRYMEN were “mounted, armed, equipped, and ready for service.” Frederick Douglass Jr. and the other recruiters had found enough men with experience in the saddle, and in less than four months the companies had mastered “the cavalry drills,” although the task of training “the horses to the motion of different exercises” remained unfinished. The men grumbled a bit when the paymaster arrived, since the salary issue had not yet been resolved in Washington; even Sergeant Charles Douglass was paid a private’s wages. Unlike the Northern freemen in their sister regiments, however, the unit’s black Southerners did not refuse to accept the proffered payments. Also unlike the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, the Fifth was roughly two-thirds former bondmen, and possibly because of that, the men were quick to take offense at slights to their manhood. When a white officer slapped a recruit with the flat of his sword, the private spun about, bayonet at the ready. “God damn you!” he shouted. “You will not strike me that way.” The unnamed officer wisely let the incident drop, but the point had been made. Former slaves—some of whom carried the scars of their previous lives on their bodies—were done being battered about by white sons of privilege.⁷

The largely different background of the soldiers in the Fifth set them apart from the black infantrymen in other ways as well. All black soldiers sought to eradicate slavery, but many of the soldiers from New England boasted of ancestors who had been free for generations. Many of the refugees who joined the Fifth Cavalry, by comparison, left wives and children behind when they ran for Union lines, and so for them the war against slavery took on a personal dimension. Peter Vogelsang had enlisted in the Fifty-fourth in the hopes of forcing his nation and state to recognize his claims of citizenship, but for most of the black cavalrymen such a dream stood far behind a desire to free yet-enslaved families. For them the North was not a refuge, merely a place to train before returning as liberators to their native South. Although most of them became politicized during the last years of the war, their backgrounds made them almost as culturally distant from Sergeant Douglass as they were from Colonel Russell.

Readville could be damp and muddy, but the spring of 1864 was warmer and dryer than usual. The men’s health was “pretty good,” one private informed editor Robert Hamilton, and the “officers are much respected.” That was surely due in part to the fact that upon joining the regiment Adams confined his opinions of black capabilities to his letters home. Like many white Republicans, Adams, as he explained it to his father, based his “opposition to slavery” on the notion that the peculiar institution was nearly as harmful to national progress as it was to the slaves themselves. The former bondmen in his new regiment would certainly have disagreed with his assumption that the vast majority of slaves “were not, as a whole, unhappy, cruelly treated, or overworked.” Nor did they refer to their unit, as did Adams, as “nigger all over.”⁸

Not even Adams, however, could miss the readiness of the men to defend their honor. In early May, as the Fifth departed Readville for Point Lookout, Maryland, and traveled through Philadelphia, a man on crutches hobbled into the street and broke one over the head of a soldier. The assailant was saved only when an onlooker knocked the man to the ground. Even then, a white officer had to protect the attacker from the sabers of half a dozen soldiers of the Fifth. Upon reaching Baltimore, one of the soldiers involved “shot at a rough for insults.” At length, the regiment reached their camp, which Adams derided as “a low, sandy, malarious, fever-smitten, wind-blown, God-forsaken tongue of land dividing Chesapeake Bay from the Potomac River.”⁹

Having arrived without most of their horses, the Fifth was put to work guarding roughly 1,400 Confederate prisoners. The enormous depot at Point Lookout was under the command of General Edward Hinks, who was appalled, despite his Maine origins, by the idea of black cavalrymen. As had Rob Shaw and Ned Hallowell before him, Colonel Russell feared that his men were doomed to endless guard duty and fatigue work. “Hurrah for the day that we shall throw aside our muskets for sabres,” one officer confided to his brother. Each man stood guard on alternate days, a schedule that gave the soldiers leisure time, Sergeant George Booth informed the Weekly Anglo-African, to fish “for oysters, crabs, rock or tailor fish, of which there are not a few.” Douglass’s company raided a nearby farmhouse and confiscated seven chickens. The soldiers performed “their duty cheerfully,” Booth insisted, but they longed to see action and prove their mettle. Russell continually lobbied the War Department to assign the regiment to the campaigns in Virginia, and in June he was able to announce that horses would soon arrive. “Then we shall show ourselves one of the best cavalry regiments in the service,” Booth boasted.¹⁰

THE FIFTH DID NOT HAVE LONG TO WAIT. AFTER ASSAULTING ENTRENCHED Confederate lines at Cold Harbor, Virginia, with disastrous results, General Ulysses S. Grant had refocused his armies on Petersburg. The town, roughly thirty miles south of Richmond, was held by a force of only 2,500 men under General P. G. T. Beauregard, who had been transferred from Charleston. Petersburg was crucial to the Confederate supply lines into Richmond, and General Robert E. Lee hurried reinforcements to bolster Beauregard’s thin line. The attack called for General Quincy Adams Gillmore—now stationed in Virginia—to lead two columns of USCT across the Appomattox River, while cavalrymen swept around the city and attacked from the southeast. This third column was led by General August Kautz, the German-born commander of the Second Ohio Cavalry. The Fifth was in his rear when Kautz unexpectedly encountered Confederate pickets. “We had gone but a short distance before we came upon the ambulance train,” Douglass noticed uneasily, “then I knew some of us were not coming back again.”¹¹

Just days before, Charles had confided to his father that he was “not over anxious” to see battle, but “our boys are very anxious for a fight,” and if it came to that, he promised to “meet the devils at any moment and take no prisoners.” In fact, however, Douglass had done just that the previous week when he encountered a Confederate deserter while standing picket. The deserter got within a dozen yards of Douglass before the two spied one another. The Confederate ducked behind a tree, but Douglass shouted for him to step out “or I would knock a hole through him.” The white soldier, half-starved, did so, and Douglass could see that he was unarmed. Douglass ordered the man to start marching, cocking his rifle as he did so. As terrified of black soldiers as Douglass was nervous, the prisoner asked if Douglass intended “to murder him.” Upon reaching the camp, Douglass and his captain searched the man and discovered papers indicating that he “owned the land where we picketed.” If Douglass felt a bit foolish in arresting a deserter on his own farm, he did not indicate as much to his famous father or war hero brother. Rather more satisfactory was that Douglass, while riding his gray mare, discovered six runaways hiding in a nearby farmhouse, whom he shepherded to safety.¹²

By sunup on June 15, the Fifth was within five miles of Petersburg. Moving toward the American forces was a dense swarm of refugees, both white and black, trying to escape the coming battle. “Buggies, hacks, and vehicles of every description were in use, carrying off the women and children,” one soldier reported. “Hundreds, nay thousands of colored people [and] women, poor harmless looking creatures, with rags for clothing” clogged the roads. To one side of the Fifth marched six USCT regiments, while more than 20,000 white soldiers under the command of General Lysander Cutler advanced to their left. Facing them were Confederates sheltered in rifle pits and protected by a system of trenches and breastworks twenty feet thick and backed by four cannon. The Fifth dismounted and “moved forward down the hill into a wheat-field, forming two lines of battle,” Douglass wrote. “Sending out skirmishers, we soon met the enemy’s advance pickets and drove them back through two pieces of woods. Our regiment was in the second line of battle.” As the Confederate pickets retreated, one shouted: “Lincoln’s Massachusetts niggers are on us. They are coming, the damned black bastards, but we’ll give ’em hell.”¹³

“As we came through the second piece of woods, the enemy opened on us with solid shot and shell,” Douglass remembered. The Fifth plowed ahead, taking brief shelter in some woods to their front. “Then we were only about a quarter of a mile from the enemy, they being drawn up in line of battle behind their breastworks,” he added. “All this time we were under a withering fire from the rebel batteries.” The underbrush was thick, slowing down the charge and hindering their ability to remain formed in battle lines. The Confederates opened with “shell, grape and canisters” that raked their lines “cruelly,” Private Charles Beman recalled, but “we rallied” and continued the charge “amidst pieces of barbarous iron, solid shot and shell.” The first line of attackers faltered, and Colonel Russell bawled to fix bayonets. Charles Douglass was immediately to Russell’s right. “Come on, brave boys of the Fifth!” Russell screamed, just as a ball snapped off his shoulder-strap. “In an instant our men began to fall around us pretty fast,” Beman later wrote, but those still on their feet poured over the breastworks, driving “the desperate greybacks from their fortifications,” and captured two of the cannons. “Young, middle-aged and old men, fearful of their doom, were flying before the negro legions of Massachusetts,” a third cavalryman reported. Two hundred Confederates threw up their hands in surrender, and standing atop the captured fortifications, the Fifth “gave three cheers for our victory.” Douglass then noticed that it was not merely Russell’s strap that had been hit: a second ball had found his upper arm. Bleeding profusely, Russell refused to leave the field until a surgeon insisted he do so; Douglass then helped him stagger toward the rear.¹⁴

There Douglass fell to the ground, exhausted. “I am yet unhurt, but am much worn out; my shoulders are raw, from the straps of my cartridge-box, as I had forty rounds in my box, two days’ rations, canteen, blankets and musket,” he wrote home. But the Fifth felt vindicated. “It was rather interesting to see the old veterans of the A[rmy of the] P[otomac] stare when they saw the works we had captured,” one soldier marveled. In the attack, another wrote to the Weekly Anglo-African, the Fifth “not only proved themselves valorous men, but added fresh laurels to the already imperishable laurels of the glorious Bay State.” In what became known as the Battle of Baylor’s Farm, the Fifth suffered three men killed, with nineteen more wounded.¹⁵

Fearful of Confederate reinforcements and sharing Hinks’s distrust of black cavalrymen, General William Smith had refused to allow either the Fifth or the USCT units to pursue the retreating Confederates. Grant was furious at Smith’s decision, believing that a perfect opportunity to capture Petersburg had been lost. “There was nothing—not even a military force,” he groused, “to prevent our walking in and taking possession.” The result would be a lengthy siege of the city.¹⁶

ALTHOUGH HE WOULD LIVE, THE POPULAR RUSSELL WAS TOO INJURED to carry on as the Fifth’s commander. The colonelcy was temporarily handed to Henry Bowditch, but only until Governor Andrew and the War Department could permanently assign the position to Lieutenant Colonel Adams. Once again, Adams assured his father, the offers of promotion arrived “unsought by me and undesired.” By the mid-nineteenth century, politicians had abandoned the quaint early American custom of pursuing office while loudly announcing their indifference, but the tradition remained strong in the Adams family. Now twenty-nine, Adams awaited only the arrival of his orders before briefly heading to Washington, “and immediately afterwards,” he told his mother, “I shall join my colored brethren.” Thanks to hearty exercise and heavy doses of quinine, he was free of earlier touches of malaria and jaundice and ready to command. “You will agree with me that ‘64 came to me full handed and has been to me a pleasant and a prosperous year,” he bragged to his still-unconvinced father.¹⁷

If ready to lead the regiment, Adams’s brief tenure as the Fifth’s second-in-command had not altered his opinions of blacks. Of their “courage in action,” he conceded, “there can no doubts exist,” particularly after the fight below Petersburg. But of “their physical and mental and moral energy and stamina I entertain grave doubts,” he wrote. Although sound enough as infantrymen, blacks, Adams maintained, were “wholly unfit for cavalry service, lacking absolutely the essential qualities of alertness, individuality, reliability, and self-reliance.” Few of the wealthy white officers in any of the three black regiments had been close to black men before the war, and both Shaw and Hallowell had preferred to promote light-skinned soldiers in rank. But only Adams, surrounded by dark-skinned freedmen, never grew to appreciate the men he led, no matter how well they performed. Even when he praised them, it was in a patronizing, racially tinged fashion. “You never saw such fellows to eat and sleep!” he wrote to his brother Henry. “Then they’re built so much better than white men. Their feet—you never saw such feet.” At least, Adams considered, the army was “the proper school for the race,” for in the army “they learn to take care of themselves.” It never occurred to Adams, evidently, that while enslaved, his recruits had cared for themselves, their families, and their masters’ horses, all without the supervision of Massachusetts Brahmins.¹⁸

Much to the dismay of Adams’s men, following their June action near Petersburg they were ordered back to Point Lookout to continue guarding Confederate prisoners and construct floating bridges. “After escaping rebel bullets, railroad iron, and harrow teeth,” one soldier complained, they were “sent to the front with inexperienced officers to make pontoon bridges.” Others were set to labor at “removing the rubbish which had accumulated” at the camp of a departing USCT regiment. The soldiers had joined up to fight, but “drilled in Cavalry tactics,” they instead found themselves, as had the Fifty-fifth before them, routinely abused as common laborers. “The regiment has been worked harder than any regiment that ever left the state,” one officer believed. Ever ready to strike back at white tormentors, one soldier warned that should such “outrages” continue, they “shall be under the painful necessity of turning our arms against these demagogues, who, daringly, insult and trample on our manhood without just cause.”¹⁹

As colonel, Adams performed no labor, but he was as bored by the inactivity as were his men. The Fifth were perhaps fortunate to miss out on the July 30 Battle of the Crater, in which Confederates slaughtered a USCT force after U.S. miners blew a hole in Southern fortifications by packing 8,000 pounds of gunpowder into an underground shaft. “I did not see the mine exploded,” Adams lamented. After the detonation, orders to ride in support arrived too late. “The cavalry did not reach [Petersburg] until the assault had failed,” he told his father. “The march was difficult, but it was possible,” he wrote, but “it was not accomplished” owing to a badly coordinated effort. The disheartened men returned to camp, where Adams announced his desire “to see the war over, so that I may see my way out of the army” and get home. “I am tired of the Carnival of Death,” he told Henry, melodramatically. In the meantime, he occupied his time by drafting “a somewhat stately paper” for Governor Andrew on how best to organize a cavalry regiment. The essay, he assured his father—himself a celebrated author and editor before turning to politics and diplomacy—was “distinguished by unusual ability even for me.” Otherwise, “I wait here and kill time.”²⁰

As much as Adams might doubt his men’s abilities, as their colonel he wished them properly outfitted. Too many rode old, tired mounts, and some cavalrymen had no horses at all. Determined to obtain an adequate supply of first-rate animals, Adams caught the train for Washington, a town he thought he knew how to navigate. From the first moment of his arrival, however, he found himself in a bureaucratic quagmire. After being told by two War Department staffers that all available horses were needed for the Petersburg siege, Adams knocked on the door of Colonel James Hardie, who referred him to Charles Dana, assistant secretary of war. “Dana suggested Colonel This or General That,” Adams sighed, and when that failed he tried Henry Halleck, general-in-chief of all U.S. armies. “In about one minute he signaled an emphatic disapproval of me and of my plan,” before slamming his door in Adams’s face. The frustrated colonel tried Secretary of State William Henry Seward, an old family friend, and he even encountered Governor Andrew and adviser John Murray Forbes, as both were then in Washington. The two were encouraging but lacked authority with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Adams next tried General George Gordon Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, who promised nothing more than a letter of introduction to Grant. Adams had heard little good of the hard-drinking general, and he expected even less. But quitting Washington for the Virginia countryside, Adams thought it worth a try.²¹

Adams found Grant sitting in front of his tent, chatting with several staff members. The young colonel explained why he was there, and Grant asked him to be seated. Grant sat, “puffing at his eternal cigar and stroking his beard as he listened to what I had to say,” Adams told his mother. Staring hard at Adams, Grant surprised him by replying only: “I will approve your plan and request the Secretary [of War] to issue you the horses and have an order made out to you to go to Washington to attend to it yourself.” Adams was stunned, admitting that this “was three times what I had expected to get from him.” While Grant dashed out the order on the back of Meade’s letter, he chatted with Adams “as he would had he been [just] another Captain of Cavalry.” The young officer promptly announced himself to be “a violent Grant man,” and Adams returned to his regiment with 700 of the best horses, “without exception,” that he had “ever seen in Virginia.” Being an Adams, however, meant never being content with success, and he complained to his brother Henry that while they now had excellent mounts, he “didn’t have one tolerable blacksmith.”²²

Though fortified by his exercise regime and doses of quinine, Adams fell ill as fall turned into winter. October 1864 was an unusually wet and cold one, even in Virginia, and on November 17 he was granted one month’s sick leave. Although he spent the time in wintery Quincy, Adams could at least enjoy hot food and a warm hearth’s fire rather than remain ill in a damp tent. Suffering too was Sergeant Douglass, whose lung ailments contracted at Readville nineteen months before had never completely mended. As a result, “I am Honorably discharged [from] the service of the United States,” Charles informed his parents. Douglass first had to travel to Washington to have his “papers made out for pay,” after which he planned to sail north to Boston before catching a train for Rochester. “Love to you all,” he finished his brief note, before signing off with: “Your Aff. Son, Charles R. Douglass, civilian.”²³

ALTHOUGH HE PERHAPS WAS UNAWARE OF IT, DOUGLASS PASSED through the War Department in the same month that another black soldier arrived to make his case for promotion. The previous spring, in the days after his heroics at Olustee, Stephen Swails had been promoted to second lieutenant by Governor Andrew on the recommendation of Ned Hallowell. The unprecedented action made news across the North, with the Liberator praising Andrew for having “dealt a sturdy blow to colorphobia.” But General John Foster, the latest commander of the Department of the South, had refused to muster him out as a sergeant major without authorization from Washington. Word shortly arrived at Hilton Head that Secretary Stanton approved of Foster’s delay, pending action by Congress. Hallowell was furious. He ordered Swails “to discard his officer’s uniform,” but also procured him a furlough to travel to Hilton Head to see Foster himself. Foster in turn extended Swails’s furlough so that he might go to Washington and present his case. The general was at least willing to arm Swails with a letter remarking on the “several occasions” in which he “distinguished himself in battle.” Foster also assured an annoyed Andrew that “in refusing to discharge him as an enlisted man,” he had “acted under particular orders from the War Department.”²⁴

Hallowell had no interest in letting the matter drift. On June 1, he informed Captain William Burger, Adjutant General for the Department of the South, that he was again asking that Swails “be discharged in order to accept promotion,” insisting that as a “vacancy exists in the grade” of second lieutenant, his regiment was short on senior officers. At about the same time, Alfred Hartwell added to the pressure by recommending James Monroe Trotter for the same rank. Once again, the promotion was denied on the grounds that “no law existed for their muster as commissioned officers.” Trotter was particularly incensed, as some white officers made little effort to hide the fact that they took a “most lively satisfaction at the result.” One pulled Trotter aside to counsel patience, advice that white conservatives had dispensed for decades—and would do so for years to come. “An officer told me that it was ‘too soon,’ that time should be granted white officers to get rid of their prejudices,” Trotter fumed. The “U.S. government has refused so far to muster them because God did not make them White,” Trotter wrote to the Weekly Anglo-African. “No other objection can be offered. Three cheers for ‘our country.’”²⁵

With the pay issue at last resolved, the question of promotions became the new flash point for the soldiers of the three Massachusetts regiments and the abolitionists who held the top positions in each. As a good abolitionist, Hallowell saw only the injustice of denying promotion to a deserving sergeant who had “distinguished himself for coolness and bravery.” Swails’s crime in the eyes of the War Department, Hallowell supposed, was that his “skin is rather darker than most officers.” The dark-skinned soldiers in the regiments, however, could hardly fail to notice that the men most quickly promoted at Readville were of light complexion. Almost all of those promoted to sergeant or corporal by Shaw or the Hallowell brothers had other attributes to recommend them—literacy, age, family connections—yet invariably they were also mixed-race. Swails, Vogelsang, Trotter, Gooding, and even Charles and Lewis Douglass had white fathers or white ancestors. Swails was “as brave as any of the commissioned officers,” one soldier admitted. Yet “we cannot call the promotion of Swails a triumph, as he is too near white.” In most states, if not told that Swails was a man of color, “he would be a white man, [and] therefore the victory is barren.”²⁶

In the spring, though, there did appear some cause for hope, at least with regard to the basic question at hand. Attorney General Edward Bates’s public letter to Lincoln of April 23, 1864, on the salary dispute already hinted that the commander-in-chief could do as he wished under the Second Confiscation Act. “I have already said that I know of no provision or law,” Bates had concluded, “which prohibited the acceptance of persons of African descent into the military,” and consequently there was also no law that forbade them from being “lawfully accepted as commissioned officers, if otherwise qualified.” Garrison’s Liberator continued to publicize Bates’s ruling, which mirrored the argument that Trotter had been making almost from the day of his enlistment: “Do you know any law that prohibits” black promotion? In the meantime, one soldier grumbled, African Americans awaited the advancement of “men from their own ranks” while continuing to serve “under command of [white] vagabonds and upstarts” who were approved by the board merely because of their race.²⁷

WHILE WASHINGTON DITHERED, THE FIFTY-FOURTH AND FIFTY-FIFTH were ordered to again try to sever the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, this time by capturing the junction at Pocotaligo, a hamlet far above Hilton Head on the river of the same name. Sherman’s forces continued to advance from the southwest, and the general also sought intelligence on the size of Confederate forces below Charleston. As acting assistant adjutant general, Lieutenant Leonard Perry, an officer in the Fifty-fifth, placed the Second Brigade—which included the Thirty-fourth USCT—under Hallowell’s command. Perry then ordered Hallowell to take portions of the Fifty-fourth, together with Alfred Hartwell and the Fifty-fifth, and move inland. The march began on the afternoon of December 20, 1864. After riding ahead in reconnaissance, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Trowbridge of the Thirty-third USCT reported back that the main road toward the junction was littered with felled trees, while impassible swamps to the lane’s left would require the black troops to thin out into a long, vulnerable line.²⁸

The advance forces were within a mile of Pocotaligo when they encountered roughly 300 Confederate cavalrymen, spread from the river on Trowbridge’s right into the swamp on his left. The Thirty-third attempted to fight their way into a small gap near the marsh, but the Confederates retreated into nearby woods, “opening a brisk fire” on the advancing soldiers. The soldiers charged into the woods “and routed the enemy, who broke and fled in the direction of the railroad,” Trowbridge later reported. But Hallowell, upon moving to the front, ordered his brigade to pull back down the road. The narrow causeway prevented him from utilizing most of his troops, and he suspected that the Confederates would dig in outside the town, turning any attack into a second Honey Hill. He reported that his men had “captured some of their blankets, overcoats, haversacks, canteens, &c.,” and guessed at twenty to thirty Confederate casualties. Hallowell’s brigade suffered seven casualties, two of them mortally wounded. Among the wounded was Colonel Alfred Hartwell, with three more wounds to add to the two balls he took at Honey Hill, although this time none were serious. As ever, the Confederates minimized their losses and exaggerated their victory. General Beauregard informed Richmond that they had captured much of Hallowell’s “transportation, baggage, and supplies” and that the retreating American forces had abandoned “many dead negro troops on the road.” The black soldiers burned “Government and railroad buildings” as they “retreated in the direction they came,” he added, and that was probably true enough. Hallowell’s temporary setback, however, did little to slow the overall Union strategy, and Sherman expected to capture Savannah within days.²⁹

Five days later Christmas arrived, and almost magically at noon so too did a basket for Hallowell from Philadelphia. “I jumped with joy,” he assured his mother, adding: “I love thee and some day I’ll try to be worthy of thee.” The package was bursting with “Turkey, Cranberries, Mince pies, Cake, sugar, plums, tooth powder, Cigars, tobacco, Whiskey, poetry & Butter.” It was hard to be so far from home during the holidays, and Hallowell wished “it was not my duty to fight, then I’d come home & be thy darling.” Hallowell also informed his sister that “a party of ten contrabands came into our lines,” having hidden “all night in the swamp, the little children nearly dead with cold.” The soldiers ate well, including a slaughtered cow taken during the Pocotaligo skirmish, and that made up for “the life we lead in the field,” which was at once “cruel, inhuman, awful, but exciting and jolly.” Wilkie James could hear the distant guns shelling Charleston, which gave his men “the merriest Christmas wish we possibly could.”³⁰

New Year’s Day of 1865 found the Fifty-fourth back in their old quarters on Morris Island, and the Fifty-fifth, temporarily under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fox until Hartwell mended, returned to their camp on Folly, hard beside Trowbridge and the Thirty-third USCT. Most of the soldiers were allowed to journey down the coast to Beaufort to help celebrate the second anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “The many bleeding and bruised of the 55th, who had poured out their life’s blood free as water, at the fight of Honey Hill,” deserved the day off, remarked the Reverend John Bowles, the regiment’s chaplain. As their transport steamer neared the landing, the soldiers spied a procession of freed men and women “moving down to the dock to receive” them. Behind the crowd marched a band, and behind the musicians came a wagon bearing the “Goddess of Liberty,” drawn by six white horses and “filled with a score or more of boys and girls, bearing Union flags in their hands.” The goddess, Bowles noticed, was “a good looking colored woman dressed in white,” with an American flag tied as a sash over one shoulder. As the soldiers tumbled off the boat, the woman “sang a national song, assisted by the children.” The children, Bowles later discovered, were being taught to read by a black-run school in Beaufort. “What a sight in South Carolina!” the reverend marveled.³¹

By the month’s end, Hallowell had received orders to sail again upriver toward Pocotaligo. “The men will carry in their knapsacks and haversacks five days’ rations” only, his orders detailed, with the rest of their gear stored in Hilton Head. Confederate forces had evacuated Savannah on December 20, and Sherman’s army arrived around noon on the following day. Sherman had placed the city under martial law, a new experience to white Georgians, who found themselves prisoners in their own town. Savannah’s blacks had crowded into the Second African Baptist Church to celebrate their liberation. One bondwoman “screeched and screamed” when she saw the general; her voice finally gave out, and so she took off her apron and waved it in salute as he passed by. Sherman next planned to move north, and he wanted either Pocotaligo captured or the rail lines cut. This time Hallowell was to be given both cavalry and artillery support.³²

At about the same time, five companies of the Fifth-fifth sailed for Savannah, with the remaining forces remaining on Folly Island to assist with the Charleston siege. Hartwell had recovered enough to rejoin the departing companies, and when the noncommissioned officers heard of his return, Sergeant Trotter recalled, “we made the old tent ring with cheers.” After an uneventful journey, the soldiers established their encampment at Fort Camp Barton, a large fortress about four miles from Savannah, “named after a prominent slave holding Rebel,” Trotter noted sourly. There was no other black regiment in the region, and the white residents of the city “did not fancy being guarded by colored soldiers,” one Northern journalist remarked. Or, as Trotter put it, invoking the biblical story of God’s judgment on Babylon: white Georgians “are trembling because of our proximity” to Savannah, “and the expectation of our coming to town to them was [as] Belshazzar reads the handwriting on the wall.”³³

The end was in sight, and the men knew it. Better yet for morale, on Saturday, January 21, Edwin Stanton notified Governor Andrew that he was “authorizing Swails being mustered” as a second lieutenant, making him the first man of color in the entire army to become a commissioned officer. New England newspapers uniformly praised the promotion, noting Swails’s “conspicuous gallantry in action, and his merits as a man of character.” William Lloyd Garrison, of course, applauded Stanton’s decision but correctly observed that somebody in Washington “might have done this piece of justice long ago.” Reformers recognized that Swails’s promotion would establish a precedent for others, but Stanton’s silence on Hartwell’s recommendation of a lieutenancy for Trotter led one soldier to write to the Liberator to wonder “about other colored men who have already given, or who may hereafter give, good cause to be recommended for promotion.” Would Trotter’s and Vogelsang’s names be submitted to the board of examiners as if they were white men, “or is each such instant to be made the subject of a protracted correspondence, a series of postponements, and finally a special order from the War Department?” If Stanton had hoped that a single promotion would silence the black community and their allies, he had missed that the debate was over principle. Black soldiers wished to be treated precisely as were whites, as if color were simply not a consideration.³⁴

The Fifty-fourth found little time to celebrate. With Sherman slicing a path toward the South Carolina state capital of Columbia, Confederates abandoned Pocotaligo on January 14 and retreated into the interior. Hallowell and his Second Brigade—which had grown with the addition of two companies of white Ohio soldiers—marched into an abandoned junction. Word then arrived for him to move north along the rail line toward Charleston, while conducting “a reconnaissance of the enemy’s position” on the southern side of Charleston Harbor. Hallowell’s superiors expected him to move fast, and his orders were to take only “two days’ rations and sixty rounds of ammunition per man.” The companies of the Fifty-fifth who remained on Folly received orders to sail down the coast and then up the Edisto River and to connect there with the Fifty-fourth. With Confederates racing west to support Columbia, General Foster hoped to encircle Charleston’s rear from the southwest. Small bands of retreating Confederates “halted on every bit of rising ground, or on the farther side of swamps, to throw up barricades of fence-rails,” reported one soldier in the Fifty-fourth, “and delayed our advance by shelling us with their field-pieces.” But Hallowell’s “skirmishers moved on steadily through water, swamp, and heavy under-growth, until their flanks were threatened, when, after exchanging shots, they would retire to new positions.”³⁵

Confederate guerrillas succeeded in killing a white lieutenant under Hallowell’s command on February 8, but their march was hampered more by rains “drenching us to the skin,” remembered Captain Luis Emilio, “and making the road a quagmire.” Hallowell’s brigade continued to inch north. “My life is now very active and exciting,” he reported to one of his sisters. “We are following the Rebs very close and hope to be in Charleston when Sherman compels them to evacuate it.” Runaway slaves arrived daily at his camp, providing intelligence on Confederate movements. Hard marching meant that some days his regiment had “to go hungry,” but mostly, he chuckled, “we ‘live high,’ [as] the country is well stocked with cattle, poultry, rice, etc.” His men applied “torch & axe” to the mansion houses they passed, always taking care to “leave the Negro shanties” undamaged. “It makes me sick to see such elegant furniture destroyed, but it’s South Carolina and it must be.” Although yet a devout Quaker, Hallowell shared Sherman’s view that his country had not started the war, and that Jefferson Davis could end the “havoc” at any moment by surrendering. The Fifty-fourth had learned to dig about in the basements of the mansions they marched by, and they routinely uncovered large quantities “of china, silver ware etc” buried beneath floors. “There’s wine & cider in the cellar,” so Ned’s men drank well too. “I never was better in my life,” he concluded, “& I shall never be happier if we only march into Charleston.”³⁶

HALLOWELL AND HIS MEN WOULD SOON GET THEIR WISH. ALL BUT surrounded within Charleston, the demoralized defenders, one officer reported, deserted “at every opportunity.” Shells continued to rain down on the city, reaching as far north as Calhoun Street, a boulevard on Charleston’s northern border named for the deceased senator and states’ rights advocate. On the night of February 17, most of the remaining soldiers abandoned the city, hoping to avoid Sherman’s advancing forces by retreating north across the Santee River. A Union prisoner witnessed some of the Confederates mourning their defeat by getting “drunk and crazy [on] turpentine whiskey.” Other defenders blew up the remaining ironclads in the harbor, set fire to the Ashley River Bridge and the shipyard, and burned vast stores of cotton and rice. A handful of boys decided to join the mayhem after stumbling across a cache of gunpowder stored in the Northeastern Railroad Depot. They threw handfuls of the powder onto the already blazing cotton fire, which eventually set off the entire stock, killing several hundred poor white and black refugees who had sought shelter in the depot. By sunup on February 18, nearly all of the homes and buildings along Chapel, Alexander, Washington, and Charlotte Streets were ablaze.³⁷

That morning, Hallowell and the Fifty-fourth were some forty miles west, on the upper Ashepoo River. They had to repeatedly stop and backtrack after encountering burned bridges and abandoned ferries; they also marched by an abandoned wagon filled with 300 pairs of shoes, which the tired soldiers were happy to confiscate. They bivouacked at the estate of Dr. Theodore Dehon, the men feasting on his previously hidden supplies of “corn, poultry, sweet potatoes, and honey.” Happy to see a white face, Dehon complained to Hallowell that his former slaves had been “helping themselves and carrying furniture off by whole boat-loads.” Hallowell was unsympathetic to his host, who also begged Ned to urge his self-emancipated workers to return to his fields. Ned called them all together and told them they were free to stay or to leave, and as a result, Emilio laughed, Dehon lost “all his slaves, young and old.” Just then, a rider brought news of Charleston’s evacuation. “Cheer after cheer rang out; bonfires were lighted; and the soldiers yelled long and frantically,” Emilio wrote. “Far into the night, nothing else was talked about around the campfires.”³⁸

The first soldiers to enter the charred city on February 18 were the Twenty-first USCT, joined by a handful of soldiers from the Fifty-second Pennsylvania. They were met by Mayor Charles Macbeth, who handed them a note: “The military authorities of the Confederate States have evacuated the City. I have remained to enforce law and preserve order until you take such steps you think best.” The Twenty-first’s commander ordered the regiment to assist the local freedmen in extinguishing the numerous fires that still burned around the city. The next day the Fifty-fifth quit Folly Island and pitched camp at Mount Pleasant, directly across the river from Charleston; a few companies settled nearby on the coast of Sullivan’s Island. Because the slave pens that once marred the island were long gone, it is likely that few of the soldiers knew that at least 40 percent of the Africans imported into North America came ashore on that island, including, undoubtedly, many of their ancestors.³⁹

Two days later, on February 21, the Fifty-fifth entered Charleston, parading through the city on their way to their new camp on the Neck, at the city’s northern edge. “Many of Charleston’s wealthier citizens had fled with the Confederate army,” and those whites who remained behind, Fox observed, stayed indoors. But the black residents “turned out en masse,” pouring into the streets to cheer. One soldier rode at the head of the column, carrying a large banner emblazoned with the word Liberty. “Bless de Lord,” shouted an old woman, her arms raised toward heaven. “Bless de Lord, I’s waited for ye, and prayed for ye, long time, and I knowed you’d come, and ye has done come at last.” The soldiers returned the favor, singing “John Brown,” “Babylon Is Falling,” and the “Battle Cry of Freedom” and “cheering for Abraham Lincoln and Governor Andrew” as they marched through what they regarded as “the chief seat of that slave power.” One soldier pulled down the bell from the city’s slave mart, which he promised to ship to Wendell Phillips. “The glory and triumph of this hour may be imagined,” Fox wrote in later years, “but can never be described. It was one of those occasions which happen but once in a lifetime, to be lived over in memory for ever.”⁴⁰

The soldiers of the two Massachusetts regiments had long dreamed of capturing Charleston, which they regarded as the heart and soul of proslavery secession. This Harper’s image depicts the tumultuous reception for Colonel Alfred Hartwell and the Fifty-fifth as they marched into Charleston on February 21, 1865. Courtesy Library of Congress.

On the morning of February 27, the Fifty-fourth’s turn came. The regiment crossed the Cooper River aboard the Croton and then marched up King and Meeting Streets, Charleston’s two major thoroughfares. “We could not but be exultant,” Luis Emilio admitted, “for by day and night, sunshine and storm, through close combat and far-reaching cannonade, the city and its defenses were the special objects of our endeavor for many months.” Emilio guessed that the city’s population had dwindled to about 10,000, down from its prewar peak of roughly four times that. Once again, whites were nowhere to be seen, but black Charlestonians filled the streets to cheer their liberators. “I saw an old colored woman with a crutch,” Sergeant John Collins reported to the Philadelphia Christian Recorder, “who, on seeing us, got so happy that she threw down her crutch, and shouted that the year of Jubilee had come.” Collins, a Chicago printer who had been wounded at Wagner, waved back, perhaps recalling one of the final statements of Corporal James Henry Gooding: “For the sake of the national honor let Charleston be taken before the war is over.” Glancing up, Emilio spied the towers of the jail and the Workhouse; like Hallowell, he was anxious to rescue any soldiers who remained behind its walls.⁴¹

The presence of U.S. troops in what was once the soul of the Confederacy transformed the city overnight. “During the last three weeks, more and more radical, anti-slavery speeches have been delivered in the city of Hayne and Calhoun than in the home of Phillips and Garrison,” remarked a correspondent for the New-York Tribune. Northern journalists crowded the liberated city, interviewing black residents and describing the physical devastation and human optimism they saw all about them. A Boston reporter was thrilled to hear several men from the Fifty-fifth cheer the American flag, the state of Massachusetts, and Governor Andrew. Yet another noticed a young officer barking out the command to “shoulder arms,” and taking a closer look, he recognized him as “the son of William Lloyd Garrison!”⁴²

Amid the celebrations, a company marched to the Workhouse and discovered that four prisoners from the Fifty-fourth were still being held there, nineteen months after capture: Sergeant Walter Jeffries, a thirty-eight-year-old Ohioan, and Privates John Dickinson and John Williams, all of whom were captured during the fighting on James Island on July 16, 1863. The fourth was George Prosser of Pennsylvania, age twenty-one, who had been taken two days later during the assault on Wagner. Much to everybody’s surprise, the four were in reasonably good health and able to rejoin their companies.⁴³

The regiments’ liberation tour was not yet at an end. On February 28, General Hatch instructed Hallowell to take his brigade—now 1,800 strong—toward Savannah and to encourage “the lately freed people” he encountered to “come into the city.” Hoping to pacify the countryside, and aware of the Fifty-fourth’s reputation for enjoying captured bounty, Acting Assistant Adjutant General Perry directed Hallowell’s black soldiers not to confiscate any foodstuffs, warning that “not even a chicken can be taken.” Hallowell was in no mood to comply. Planter Henry William Ravenel awoke on March 2 to discover that black troops were banging on his door and entering his “negro yard” to speak with his slaves. “They soon entered the house, (four or five colored men) armed & demanded to see the owner of the house,” he scribbled into his diary. They “demanded his horses & wagons, his guns, wine &c” before marching into the quarters “to tell the negroes they were free & should no longer work for him.” When Ravenel objected, they responded with “very threatening language [and] with oaths & curses.” Some of the soldiers handed out confiscated guns to the now-liberated freedmen before marching to a neighbor’s estate, where they dug up seventy-five bottles of wine and “10 to 12 gal. French Brandy.” Most dismaying of all for Ravenel, two of his favorite domestics opted to leave “with the black troops wild with excitement.” Masters like Ravenel had always assured themselves that they were beloved by their human chattel, but thanks to the presence of black troops, he fretted, “some of the very peculiar traits of negro character are now exhibited.”⁴⁴

About three weeks later, George Garrison’s company of the Fifty-fifth found itself on reconnaissance far up the Cooper River, liberating slaves and searching for Confederate cavalry. One planter fled as they approached, “leaving to our tender mercies everything he possessed,” a soldier reported. The planter’s slaves, however, poured out of the quarters “and gave us a warm and hearty greeting.” Despite orders to spare civilian property, Garrison confided to his diary that they came across a second estate, with its “furniture and goods packed and ready to be carried off.” Garrison’s men “completely sacked it of everything to be of value, and ruined what they could not bring away.” The Fifty-fifth proved far kinder to the common folk. A good number “of rebel deserters and stragglers came or were brought in,” Charles Fox recorded. “They were mostly from the poor whites, and almost all expressed themselves as tired of the war.” The deserters undoubtedly told Fox and Garrison what they wanted to hear, yet it was also true that middle-class disaffection with the planters’ war had emerged early on, leading to the Confederate Conscription Act of April 1862, and by war’s end President Davis was a deeply unpopular figure. Confederate yeomen were surprised “at the good treatment they received from the colored troops,” Fox noted, as their officers had warned them that black soldiers would shoot them “at once if officers were not present.” The actual treatment they received, Fox hoped, might “greatly enlarge their knowledge of national affairs and of Yankee character.”⁴⁵

FIVE HUNDRED MILES TO THEIR NORTH, COLONEL CHARLES FRANCIS Adams was well enough to return to the Fifth Cavalry’s camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. While the siege of Petersburg dragged on, Adams spent his days studying cavalry tactics in the mornings, “and in the afternoon drill[ing] the regiment.” Adams rarely left his tent in the evenings to join his men—even the white officers—around the campfire, “and people rarely drop in on me,” he proudly assured his brother. The men continued to guard Confederate prisoners, a task that required 276 soldiers, while another 58 were tasked with guarding the camp itself. As was their colonel, the men of the Fifth were bored and hoped to either soon see action or return to their families. “The love of liberty alone induced me to leave the comforts of home and take up arms,” one sergeant wrote, “but I still hope that some good may come out of Nazareth [as the] Lord is in the work.”⁴⁶

The Fifth was not destined to be bored for long. Just before dawn on April 2, U.S. forces punched through Confederate lines along the Boydton Plank Road. Although Confederate defenders slowed their advance, Lee was forced to pull his remaining troops out of Petersburg and Richmond that evening and flee west. He hoped to unite his armies in Danville, Virginia, which would also serve as the new home of Jefferson Davis’s government. General Richard Ewell, in charge of Richmond’s defenses, was ordered to destroy all bridges, military stores, and warehouses that might be of use to American soldiers. As civilians looted the city, fires spread, burning roughly 800 buildings and reaching the edge of Capitol Square. Southeast of Richmond on the Darbytown Road, U.S. soldiers heard what sounded like “the exploding of shells in the city,” and a reporter from the Philadelphia Press described “immense flames curling up” into the sky, indicating “that they were destroying all that could not be taken away.” The Fifth were anxious to move, but prudence demanded that they wait until dawn. Adams curled up in a blanket by the side of the road, oblivious to the inferno over Richmond.⁴⁷

By six o’clock the next morning, the Fifth was mounted and riding up Darbytown to the Charles City Road, on the outskirts of the city. The Union command was nearly as confused by the chaos as were Confederate generals, and orders soon reached the Fifth to dismount and be “prepared to fight on foot.” They marched for the better part of an hour before yet another order arrived for the Fifth to halt. Still in the saddle, Adams was “fretting, fuming and chafing” at the delay. When no further instructions arrived, and with it clear that the road before them was vacant of Confederates, Adams “concluded something was up and it was best to push ahead.” The cavalrymen could still hear explosions to their front and see the flames from boats, bridges, wharfs, and even one blasted ironclad. “We entered the city about 9 o’clock a.m. Monday, April 3d,” Private Charles Beman wrote to the Weekly Anglo-African. The Fifth passed several forts and breastworks, some of them topped with heavy guns, while others were “Quaker guns,” thick logs painted black, the soldier noted, “to frighten Uncle Sam’s boys with.” The Fifth were the “first mounted men in the city,” Beman bragged, not without cause. Davis, they were told, had fled, “but no matter where he has gone,” Beman added, “the Confederate States of America have fallen.”⁴⁸

As in Charleston two months before, the black residents cheered the conquering army. The cavalrymen, already tall upon their mounts, stood up in their stirrups and waved their swords above their heads, sparking “the wildest demonstrations of joy on the part of the colored people.” Seeing their burned city liberated by proud, mounted, well-dressed men of their own race was a spectacle most could never have imagined. “They danced and shouted and prayed and blessed the Lord and thanked him that the Yankees had come,” one officer wrote. “It will be an event in history that colored troops were the first into the city,” marveled another.⁴⁹

From second-floor windows, a few war-weary residents of both races unfurled American flags. Richard Forrester, a seventeen-year-old freeman and errand boy for the legislature, scrambled to the top of the capitol building to raise the same, enormous American flag that he had been instructed to pull down in 1861, and that he had hidden for the past four years. The past several days had been gray and wet, but the morning, as if in promise of a new day, was bright and sunny. Leading his men through the streets, Adams wondered at “the good fortune which brought me there.” To have “led my regiment into Richmond at the moment of its capture is the one event which I should most have desired as the culmination of my life in the Army,” he told his father. Upon hearing the news, even the disapproving Charles Francis Adams Sr. was impressed. “It was a singular circumstance that you, in the fourth generation of our family, under the Union and the constitution,” the diplomat wrote from London, “should have been the first to put your foot in the capital of the Ancient Dominion, and that, too, at the head of a corps which prefigured the downfall” of slavery. Choosing to forget that he had been furious at his son’s enlistment, the elder Adams forwarded Charles Francis’s description of the day to his mother, who was then touring Rome.⁵⁰

Alongside soldiers from the Thirty-sixth USCT, the Fifth set to work putting out the still-burning fires, throwing buckets of water on roofs and pulling down smoldering buildings that threatened to spread the conflagration. By midafternoon most of the fires were extinguished, and the tired soldiers set up camp at Capitol Square, breaking out their rations and sharing their meals, and especially their sugar-sweetened coffee, with the city’s hungry residents. In exchange, grateful whites broke into a nearby warehouse and “dashed in the heads of several hundred barrels of whiskey,” a commodity, unlike coffee, never in short supply in the South. Adams, different in this way from Hallowell, did not permit his soldiers to drink, at least while on duty, and he quietly cursed civilians for sharing liquor with his men. But he refused to allow the day to be spoiled and admitted that he witnessed no misbehavior on the part of his regiment.⁵¹

Among those observing firsthand the Fifth’s victorious entrance into Richmond were the roughly thirty-five black Confederates who represented Jefferson Davis’s last-minute effort to purchase, free, and arm bondmen—he had planned on putting 40,000 into the field. Ironically, the sterling service of the Fifty-fourth helped to prod Davis into action. “Some people say negroes will not fight,” one adviser to the Confederate president remarked. “I say they will fight. They fought at Ocean Pond [Olustee], Honey Hill, and other places.” Following an acrimonious debate, the Confederate Congress finally voted to arm selected slaves, but not to free them. Understanding the absurdity of that position, on March 23—just ten days before the Fifth entered his capital—Davis overruled his legislature with General Orders No. 14, granting any recruit “the rights of a freedman.” Instructed to raise a company of black troops, Major J. W. Pegram placed a notice in the Richmond newspapers, begging those masters who had “freely given their sons and brothers, their money and property,” to the Confederacy to now donate their slaves as well. Editor Robert Barnwell Rhett was apoplectic. “It was on account of encroachments upon the institution of slavery,” he editorialized, that his South Carolina had seceded. “We want no Confederate Government without our institutions.” About half a dozen free blacks enlisted, and Virginia governor William Smith donated two slaves who had been sentenced to hang for burglary. “Dey was mostly poor Souf Carolina darkies—poor heathen fellers, who didn’t know no better,” reported one black Virginian, when asked by a journalist about the short-lived unit. With the arrival of black troops in the city on April 3, the thirty-five melted into the cheering crowd—and into history as the basis for the modern myth of black Confederates.⁵²

On April 10, rumors reached Adams and the men of the Fifth that Lee had surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Grant the day before at Appomattox Court House. “So much for my experiences,” Adams lamented, “so far in the most interesting bit of campaigning it has yet been my fate to take part in.” Other Southern armies remained in the field, but Lewis Douglass, back in Rochester, guessed that “by the 1st of July this ‘cruel war’ will so far as any more pitched battles are concerned be over.” If so, the abolitionist press wished it known, many of the final victories were due to the soldiers in the three black Massachusetts regiments. “The whole number of colored troops which have been credited to Massachusetts, during the war,” William Lloyd Garrison reported, “including the Fifty-Fourth Infantry, Fifty-Fifth Infantry, [and] Fifth Cavalry, and their recruits, is 4731.” Governor Andrew “believed in colored men,” Garrison added, while “others did not. We assumed the hazards of the enterprize, but the country reaps the reward of its brilliant and assured success.” J. C. Malone, a cavalryman with the Fifth, agreed: “The colored soldiers in this four years struggle have proven themselves in every respect to be men.” Denied basic civil and political rights throughout the United States, black men nonetheless “fought for the freedom of a country whose liberties were threatened by traitorous slaveholders and their infamous allies, the Copperheads [Democrats] of the North.” As did most white soldiers, Adams supposed the “war is really over,” and he was ready to ship home. Malone, however, understood that the struggle for liberty was far from over, and that his war was merely entering a new phase.⁵³