“THE SOUL AND SPIRIT OF [CHARLESTON,] THAT HEROIC CITY lives on,” insisted a Confederate journalist on April 11, two days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces at Appomattox Court House. “When the sons of South Carolina, now in the army, read of the desolating passage of a hated foe over the fields and cities of their native State, they will swear a deep oath [to fight on] until they have met those blue rascals of Sherman’s face to face, and settled accounts with them once and for all.” Although the Confederacy was rapidly collapsing, that was not mere bravado. Richmond and Charleston had fallen, but General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, roughly 28,000 strong, remained in the field in North Carolina, and Jefferson Davis planned to shift the war to the trans-Mississippi. Davis cabled Johnston, ordering him to disband his infantry, then re-form them at a designated rendezvous point to fight on as guerrillas. Much of South Carolina either remained under Confederate control or had lapsed into chaos. Few whites in Charleston and Richmond had resigned themselves to defeat, so some U.S. Army companies needed elsewhere had to remain as occupying forces. The soldiers of the three black Massachusetts regiments were far from finished with their labors.1
Early April found Ned Hallowell and most of the Fifty-fourth still stationed in Georgetown, some sixty miles up the coast from Charleston. Nestled behind Pawleys Island on Winyah Bay, the “sleepy little town,” as Hallowell described it, provided his men with quick access to the plantation districts to Georgetown’s north and west. On April 3, Ned wrote to Pen that while his orders were to “drive in Contrabands and distribute proclamations” of freedom, the “real object is to fight guerrillas and destroy the country generally.” Daily raids into the hinterland led to the liberation of both slaves and foodstuffs, and Ned assured his mother that he would never starve “in a country as well stocked with chickens & rice as this seems to be.” The Fifty-fourth continued to drink well too, digging up the cellar floors in each plantation they overran. “There are hundreds of bottles of splendid wine in these old mansions,” Hallowell marveled. “What lords these people must have been, with their thousands of acres & hundreds of slaves!” Although he admitted enjoying “some of the most refined juice of the grape Europe ever exported,” particularly savoring an 1839 Madeira, the industrious Quaker in him detested wealth accumulated from the sweat of others. “It was high time a revolution had smashed their luxury,” he reasoned, and he was content to lead his men in the smashing.2
Also on April 3, Alfred Hartwell received orders to take a detachment from the Fifty-fifth, along with white soldiers from the New York Fifty-fourth, and march north toward Lake Moultrie. Soon enough, Hartwell found that they had no further need to inform black Carolinians of their emancipation. As the Fifty-fifth marched through the countryside, black refugees ran out to greet them. “At one house we passed,” Garrison wrote, “three or four colored women came out to see us go by, who were barefooted.” More black women than men remained in the Lowcountry, Garrison noted, as masters had often tried to drag their most valuable bondmen with them when they fled upcountry. “They were so delighted and astonished” at seeing black soldiers “that they fairly danced with joy, turning round and round, and jumping up and down.” Most asked if the regiment was heading to Charleston, before rushing “back to their shanties [to] grab a bundle, and fall in the rear of us.” A few elderly blacks told Garrison that “they would come with us if they were not so old, or had not children to care for.” By the time the Fifty-fifth returned to Charleston in mid-April, an awaiting William Lloyd Garrison proudly assured his wife, the regiment brought with them “1200 slaves, now freemen.”3
The editor of the Liberator had traveled to Charleston to witness the April 14 rededication ceremony at Fort Sumter, set to take place four years to the day from its 1861 capitulation. George reached the city in time to join his father, who had arrived with Senator Henry Wilson and with the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, whose son James was a colonel with the Thirty-fifth USCT. At eleven that morning, a small flotilla of ships sailed out toward the ruined fort. Among them was the Planter, a stolen Confederate transport, once again piloted by former slave Robert Smalls and carrying Dr. Esther Hill Hawks and the recently liberated Robert Vesey, an aged carpenter who was the son of the black abolitionist hanged by city authorities in 1822. The various guests and dignitaries scrambled onto a wharf recently constructed on the fort’s western side, and a flight of steps led them down to the parade ground. An honor guard of soldiers drawn from the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, “the survivors of the assault on Sumter,” formed neat lines on either side of the flagstaff. Those atop Sumter’s south wall could gaze below at what remained of Fort Wagner, where so many in the honor guard had lost comrades nearly two years before.4
That evening, General Quincy Adams Gillmore hosted a celebratory dinner. Fireworks lit the sky. Just around ten-fifteen on that Good Friday, actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth entered the president’s box at Ford’s Theater in Washington and, with a single bullet from his derringer, assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Word reached Charleston of the president’s death on the morning of April 19. Black Americans “sobbed and cried in the streets,” one journalist reported, shouting, “My God! My God! Our friend is gone.” Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fox remembered that “scarcely a colored person could be met in the streets, who had not assumed, in some form or other, the badge of mourning.” Fearing retribution, most white Charlestonians condemned the assassination or wisely avoided gloating in public. One exception was the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, who refused Unionist demands to conduct a special service for the murdered president.5
HALLOWELL AND MOST OF THE FIFTY-FOURTH, WHO REMAINED IN the field above Georgetown, would not hear of Lincoln’s assassination for another four days. Instead, on April 5, the young colonel took his brigade—now consisting of a majority of the Fifty-fourth and thirteen companies from two USCT regiments—and left the port, setting off on a march nineteen miles north. As they moved along the Sumterville Road, Hallowell dispatched companies to burn bridges across the Black River. Small groups of Confederates appeared from time to time, firing a few shots before disappearing back into the woods, but Hallowell’s men suffered no casualties. On April 9, just below Sumterville, they encountered approximately 500 entrenched Confederates, backed by three artillery pieces. But the Southerners were hungry and tired militiamen, and Hallowell’s far larger force had little difficulty in pushing up the road. The Confederates fled, leaving behind their wounded and dead, as well as their artillery.6
Two days later, Hallowell ordered Lieutenant Stephen Swails to march several companies to Wateree Junction, where rumors placed eight locomotives and as many as fifty boxcars. By the time the small group reached the rail lines, night was setting in. One of the engines had its steam up, and sharpshooters fanned out in hopes of picking off any engineers who might try to escape with at least one train. Swails led nineteen men forward, leaping over a trestle and vaulting into the engine cab. Waving his hat in triumph, Swails took a ball in his right arm, fired by one of his own sharpshooters, who in the darkness mistook the light-skinned New Yorker for a Confederate engineer. As had many soldiers by the final year of the conflict, Swails had grown accustomed to being shot, or shot at, and he merely tied his arm into a sling while continuing to bark orders. Swails packed the wounded aboard the steaming train, while his men worked to connect the captured cars. As they backed the train away from the junction the soldiers set fire to the trestle and bridges, and after it became clear that they had attached too many cars, they uncoupled most of them, setting fire to them one at a time. The group returned to Hallowell’s camp the next morning, the fit marching down the tracks and the wounded riding on what Captain Luis Emilio cheerfully dubbed “Lieutenant Swails’s locomotive.”7
The bandaged Swails was still with the Fifty-fourth on April 18 when Hallowell led them out of Camden, northeast of Columbia, along the Statesburg Road. “From some contrabands,” Emilio wrote, the regiment learned that roughly two miles up the road, a large number of Confederates had thrown up a breastwork of cotton bales at a place called Boykin’s Mill, alongside an impassible swamp. As the Fifty-fourth had discovered far too many times in past years, such a Carolina bog diminished their numerical advantage by requiring them to attack in nearly single file. Hallowell sent a small force of scouts ahead, and one of them, Private Stephen Morehouse, returned with the sobering news that “there’s a lot of Rebs through there in a barn.” The soldiers slowly crept ahead until a bend in the road revealed several mills, each fed by a stream too deep to ford, “forming a sort of island,” Emilio thought. Behind the bales, they discovered, was the so-called Orphan Brigade, a unit of Kentucky infantrymen who had opted to march south when their state remained loyal to the Union.8
With their way forward blocked, Company F attempted to flank the Confederates by inching across a ruined bridge, but anticipating that, the Kentuckians fired a volley that killed Corporal James Johnson, a young barber from Oswego, New York, and mortally wounded Corporal Andrew Miller, a blacksmith from Elmira. The company retreated, but only to regroup and join the 102nd USCT, who were advised by “an old white-headed negro” of a place to ford the stream about a quarter of a mile behind the Confederate barrier. The Kentuckians were prepared for that too. As Company A rose from the brush to wade across the stream, a Confederate ball struck Lieutenant Edward Stevens in the head, killing him instantly. Stevens pitched forward into the water, his body seemingly too close to the Kentucky sharpshooters to be safely recovered. But Stevens, who had left Harvard during his senior year to serve in the Fifty-fourth after hearing of Shaw’s death, was popular with his men, who “promptly presented themselves for that duty.” They recovered his body and buried Stevens just behind their lines. At the age of twenty-one, Stevens would be the last U.S. officer to die in the war.9
While black soldiers continued to search for weak spots in the Confederate flanks, Lieutenant Lewis Reed led a single-file rush toward the Kentuckians’ front. “The charge was a plucky affair,” Emilio remembered, “under exceptionally adverse conditions.” With their front line collapsed, the Confederates turned and ran. Hallowell ordered the mill burned, and as his men watched the flames those companies he had sent to the flanks rejoined the brigade. The final advance cost the regiment six casualties, but no deaths. Especially lucky was Private Clayton Johnson of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Johnson had been briefly hospitalized after Wagner with a shell fragment, and at Olustee, a tree branch shattered by Confederate guns had fallen on his head. During the fight at the mill, a minié ball snipped the little finger from his left hand. Although they could not know it, Boykin’s Mill was to be the final battle on South Carolina soil.10
Not that Hallowell thought his task finished. The Fifty-fourth advanced farther into the interior the next day. They encountered a small force near Rafting Creek, but the Confederates were easily flanked, he reported, and “driven in confusion through Statesburg.” On April 20, his brigade “destroyed fifteen steam-engines and a large number of box-cars” at Middleton Depot. After that, the march encountered no further resistance. One of Hallowell’s captains reported 60 Confederates taken prisoner—most of them probably deserters—5,000 bales of cotton burned, 100 cotton gins demolished, and 5,000 bushels of corn destroyed. The destruction of corn was hard to justify, given the growing number of white and black refugees, but upon hearing of Lincoln’s assassination on April 23, Hallowell was in no mood to be magnanimous. The march paused after word reached them “of an armistice between General Sherman and the rebel General Johnston,” but when those negotiations briefly broke down, the Fifty-fourth returned to their crusade with a vengeance. “Tonight we have heard of the resuming of hostilities, & we rejoice,” the twenty-eight-year-old Quaker informed his mother. “In a few days thy devoted son will be off again killing & destroying, avenging the murder of our leader.” Hallowell prayed the war would soon end so that he might return home, “but my soul is in it,” he confessed, “it is my duty, the race must be exterminated, unless they quickly get down upon their knees, we can trifle no more, we must hunt them down till there is not a vestige of a Rebel left in the land.” Shortly after Hallowell wrote those words, on April 29, Johnston formally surrendered all active Confederate forces in the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia, an act of capitulation that the still-fleeing Jefferson Davis denounced as treasonous.11
As word spread that the war was all but over, Hallowell marched his brigade back toward Georgetown, “rais[ing] merry Hell with the Rebs” as they returned to the coast. His men had run out of rations, so they helped themselves to “the best of sherry wine, and at the best of rebel swine.” But on Hallowell’s order, the destruction of private property stopped. “I didn’t steal anything on the march but a silver soup ladle to dip out punch with,” he laughed. In his report on the twenty-one-day expedition, General Edward Potter wrote that he could “not too highly praise the conduct of officers and men” who had endured long marches and almost daily skirmishes with “great dash and courage.” Potter singled Ned Hallowell out for special commendation, telling his superiors in Washington that Hallowell was “at all times prompt and efficient in the discharge of his duties.” On May 5, new orders reached Hallowell’s tent, instructing him to return to Charleston and rejoin the detachments of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth still in the city. Hallowell was given the responsibility of coordinating the “defenses of Charleston Neck, Saint Andrew’s Parish, and James Island.” Formal combat had ended, but the duties of occupation had only begun.12
WITH NOBODY SHIPPING HOME ANYTIME SOON, HALLOWELL AND John Andrew began to press the War Department for further promotions. They were assisted by a petition that had been circulated in Washington during the previous January and signed by ten former noncommissioned officers from black regiments, including “Lewis H. Douglass, late Sergeant Major 54th Massachusetts Volunteers [and] Charles R. Douglass, late Sergeant 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Volunteers.” The petitioners observed that while “many of the noblest of our race have sprung to arms with alacrity in defense of the Government,” other black men held back, rightly worried that “the hope of promotion [would be] denied them.” By this point, the majority of black men in the armed forces were former slaves, but the sergeants and surgeons who signed the petition were men of learning and relative prosperity, and they took pains to assure Secretary Edwin Stanton “that others of our educated men, anticipating the granting of commissions to colored men, have applied themselves to the study of military tactics.” The petition was signed or endorsed by a number of antislavery activists, including Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, and editor Horace Greeley.13
In the past, Governor Andrew had taken advantage of black heroism to push the issue, and when word arrived in Boston of Boykin’s Mill and the second wounding of Stephen Swails, he wasted no time in issuing a new round of promotions. In early May, just days after the Fifty-fourth returned to Charleston, Andrew informed Stanton that as “Governor and Commander-in-Chief” of Massachusetts forces, he intended to elevate “Second Lieut. Stephen A. Swails of Elmira, to be First Lieut.,” in place of the fallen Edward Stevens, and to promote “Quartermaster-Sergeant Peter Vogelsang of Brooklyn to be Second Lieut.” This time there was no delay in Washington, and the two New Yorkers promptly received their new commissions. Although Robert Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, shared the concerns of many dark-skinned soldiers that Swails was “far from being a distinctly marked colored man,” he conceded that Swails could have chosen to pass for white, yet opted not to. “To Lieut. Swails himself we offer our hearty congratulations for his promotion,” Hamilton wrote, “the more so that his truthful adhesion to his descent has enabled him to gain a triumph for our people.”14
As the campaigns of the previous months gave way to the onerous duty of occupation, those black men who wore stripes had ample opportunity to prove their mettle. From the Fifty-fourth, Peter Vogelsang was promoted again, to first lieutenant, as was Frank Welch, a Connecticut barber who had been wounded at Wagner. James Monroe Trotter of the Fifty-fifth, who had been recommended for promotion the previous June, finally became a second lieutenant, as did John Freeman Shorter, a Washington-born mechanic who was nearly crippled from wounds received at Honey Hill. Shorter had just returned to the regiment, and his men “cheered the officer’s advent and at Headquarters we gave him a hearty welcome,” noted surgeon Burt Wilder. The black officers “have at last been permitted to wear straps on their shoulders and cords down the seam of their pants,” wrote a former chaplain from the Fifty-fifth. “The ball does move.”15
NED HALLOWELL WOULD DEMAND MUCH FROM HIS BLACK OFFICERS during the coming months, as his formal task of defending, policing, and maintaining order in Charleston ultimately amounted to using the two black regiments as armies of occupation to reconstruct the most troublesome city in the South. Within weeks of Lee’s surrender, Northern women began to clamor for the return of their husbands and sons, a demand that politicians who worried about the cost of maintaining an army of one million men were happy to oblige. Although which regiments would be mustered out, and when, was the prerogative of the War Department, the majority of black soldiers had no farms or businesses to return to. Even those Northern freemen, such as Stephen Swails, who held jobs before the war often preferred an officer’s pay in Charleston to a waiter’s apron back home. Hallowell settled into an abandoned mansion at 8 Meeting Street, “down near the Battery, hot & cold water with the most refined modern conveniences,” as he assured a worried sister, who urged him to resign his commission. “I would give my left hand to think it right, but I can’t,” he told his family. “I must stay with the men till they are mustered out.” Although major combat was over, “still there is much work for such as I to do & would feel very mean to leave the men in the lurch.”16
The men of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth took shelter in accommodations less grand than that of their colonel. Some bunked in the Citadel, an arsenal turned military academy that fronted Citadel Square, where the black troops conducted a changing of the guard each morning, accompanied by “martial music,” a ceremony, one officer wrote, that “always attracted numbers of colored people, young and old.” The editor of the Augusta Daily Constitutionalist groused that the military academy was being used as “barracks for the nigger soldiers.” Other companies camped on the grounds behind the Workhouse and the adjacent city jail. The former had been reserved for runaways and recalcitrant slaves—Denmark Vesey had been tried behind its walls in 1822—and until the city fell to American troops, the latter held prisoners taken on James and Morris Islands. The walls of both castlelike structures were thick, however, and provided refuge from the heat and sun as the spring grew increasingly warm. Vogelsang, who was among those lodged in the Citadel, spent his off hours helping to organize a black masonic lodge that met just across the square.17
The two regiments’ mission was complicated by the fact that Charleston lay in ruins. “Nearly all the mansions in this once proud part of the guilty city are windowless; many of them roofless,” the Liberator reported. “Except a few negroes who have nestled in the deserted chambers, they are tenantless.” The so-called Secession Hall on Meeting Street, where disunion had been declared in December 1860, was a charred shell, which one journalist judged to be an apt metaphor for the Confederacy’s fortunes. A soldier in the Fifty-fourth thought the destruction “a terrible retribution of Almighty God upon these candidates for Satan’s mansions,” but as black refugees from the countryside crowded into the city, it was not merely “the slaveholding aristocracy” who suffered. Reduced to army rations, the Fifty-fourth no longer ate well on purloined foods from rural estates. White grocers had fled the shelling, and the enslaved market women who had sold vegetables and eggs in the antebellum city each Sunday no longer resided on plantations just across the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, as they too had flocked into Charleston at the war’s end. Colonel William Gurney of the 127th New York Volunteers hurried a desperate missive to Manhattan’s Produce Exchange, begging for food. Hallowell confessed that he and his troops were “mighty glad to rest awhile” after their weeks of hard marching, yet he was “very sorry to be in Charleston, it’s an awful place!”18
As soon as the city had fallen, the army declared martial law and suspended the remaining civil authorities. In hopes of keeping the peace, the Fifty-fourth was ordered to patrol predominantly black neighborhoods, while Gurney’s white New Yorkers acted as military policemen in white areas. But unlike Northern cities, prewar Charleston had been segregated more by class than by race, and even near the Battery, where Hallowell slept in his elegant mansion, narrow alleyways housed black servants and artisans. Confederate veterans returned to the city to find their world turned upside down. Black residents strolled along the Battery’s seawall—a promenade banned to them before the war—while white veterans, a Northern journalist noticed, found “their streets patrolled by colored soldiers, and Massachusetts ones at that.” One white lady mourned that she rarely left her home, as “the streets are so niggery and Yankees so numerous.” Veterans who ran afoul of the law were marched off to jail by black officers, a reversal of old power relationships, another journalist remarked, that was “a little too much for Southern chivalry.” What Southern whites regarded as intolerable, black soldiers simply saw as “God’s inevitable law of righteous compensation.” By merely following orders and performing simple duties, one soldier explained to a reporter, they were “making reprisals on the South for years of wrongdoing to their race.”19
Even when not out on patrol, the very existence of literate black men on Charleston’s streets was an outrage to Southern sensibilities. A Rhode Island journalist thought the Fifty-fourth “well behaved gentlemen” and asked a local resident why she complained “of them as insolent.” The soldiers performing provost-marshal duty, the woman replied, routinely stopped whites to examine their passes. That too was a stunning reversal of antebellum norms, in which African Americans had to carry documentation when they left their owners’ homes. “Oh, they won’t turn out of the sidewalk for you,” she added, “and they will go up to a white man and ask him for a light for their cigars.” The black soldiers no doubt knew they were flouting long-held social customs; their habit of politely stressing that they were the social equals of the former master class surely provided an extra measure of satisfaction. Angry whites were powerless to halt this social reformation and were reduced to threatening, one black soldier wrote, that if Union occupiers continued “to ask a white man for the countersign after [the] 10 o’clock p.m. [curfew], they will be compelled to leave the city. It is getting too hot for them.”20
Any evidence of black social advancement, no matter how innocuous, attracted the ire of white Charlestonians. When English-born reformer and journalist James Redpath, acting under his new authority as the first superintendent of public schools, seized two abandoned, half-destroyed buildings for an orphanage and school for black children, whites denounced the appropriation. Undeterred, Redpath named the institution the “Col. Shaw Orphan House” and asked congregants in a nearby black church to help repair the buildings and sew clothes for the children. On occasion, the soldiers had to battle the racism of Northern whites. After “a Copperhead [Democratic] clergyman of the 127th N.Y. Volunteers” attempted to placate local convention by announcing that black Charlestonians who attended the Citadel Square Baptist Church had to worship from the balcony, “and if they did not a guard would be there to compel them to go,” an unnamed black officer from the Fifty-fourth “led a party of four to five hundred colored persons” into the church and took seats in the front pews. Should any minister dare to complain, the soldier announced, his company “will see that he is enrolled for a chaplaincy in one of Jeff’s [Davis] broken party which may be en route for Mexico.”21
As the first black man to rise into the commissioned ranks, Lieutenant Stephen Swails found his days long and his roster of duties longer still. On July 1, he was detailed “as Acting Adjutant” for his entire regiment, and Major George Pope, the young former Brookline clerk who scribbled out his orders, thought to add that Swails “will be obeyed and respected accordingly.” That curious addendum indicated that even some white Union officers objected to taking orders from a man of color. At some point in his duties, Swails met Susan Aspinall. Born and raised in Charleston, the light-skinned, twenty-one-year-old Susan was the daughter of Albert and Mary Aspinall. Census takers in 1860 had characterized Albert as a “mulatto” sailor, and his prewar property was valued at an impressive $1,500. Although mixed-race, the Aspinalls evidently did not associate with the city’s “brown” elites. Swails had turned thirty-three the previous February, and faced with the prospect of returning to a troubled relationship with Sarah Thompson and a life as a Cooperstown waiter, the ambitious officer had found yet another reason to remain in the South.22
With the arrival of summer, the muggy, unhealthy weather added to the burdens of the occupying forces. Word reached Charleston on May 22 that James Henry Gooding had died at Andersonville the previous July, putting an end to any false hopes that he had endured captivity. Hallowell had more immediate concerns too. “This is our third Summer in this warm climate and it bids fair to be very sickly,” he wrote to the surgeon general of Massachusetts on May 1 in hopes of obtaining more doctors and medicine. “Even now our Surgeon finds it almost impossible to [do his] duty thoroughly,” he added, in part because the “large number of ‘Contrabands’ recently brought into the Department has created an unusual demand for Medical Officers.” Yellow fever struck that summer, and Charlestonians who had means to do so fled into the upcountry. James Williams, a young farmer from the Cincinnati area, lived through war only to die of pneumonia, the same fate to befall James Halpin, a Baltimore boatman.23
When not interring fallen occupiers, a company from the Fifty-fifth also ventured out to James Island in search of bodies from the skirmish of the previous July. The detail uncovered a number of decomposed corpses, one soldier noted sourly, “whose bodies were left lying where they fell by the barbarous rebels.” The soldiers heaped the bones into coffins and carried the remains to a bluff overlooking the city. “The escort was commanded by Captain Goodwin, who was wounded in the fight,” the Liberator reported, “and the pall-bearers were mostly men wounded at the same time.” Most of the missing had hailed from Ohio, and the state assembly shipped an Ohio flag to be draped over the coffins, a curious tribute from a Midwestern state that continued to deny its black residents voting rights. Members of the Fifty-fourth attended the ceremony, and as they walked down the hill toward the harbor, Corporal Charles J. Howard glanced out at Wagner and reflected on those friends who had not made it back up the beach when retreat was called. “It makes us sad to think of the many bereavements that have been experienced during this war,” he recalled. Howard reminded himself to “dry our tears,” for those who fell at Morris Island “have gone to reap their rewards in a better world.”24
THE RELENTLESS HOSTILITY OF WHITE CHARLESTONIANS TO THE black army of occupation began to erode the two regiments’ morale, with the incessant glares and angry words proving almost as hard to endure as the heat and the mosquitoes. One furious resident complained that Northern blacks were far more “ignorant & degraded” than former slaves, as they had never “had opportunities of spiritual instruction, or of forming attachments to their masters.” Due to the “defiant and discourteous spirit manifested in the city,” Lieutenant Charles Joy of the Fifty-fourth moved the curfew from ten to eight o’clock on July 12 and banned whites from “any discussions or assembling in groups on the streets or other public places, day or night.” Even so, two weeks later, Private Alfred Lee, a young Pennsylvania farmer who had been wounded at Wagner, finally reached his limit after a hot day of guard duty. Lee drank until “in a state of beastly intoxication,” and wandering into “the Public streets,” he “did aim a loaded musket at a number of Citizens.” The army briefly brought Lee up on charges, but as the white officers were equally weary of the local populace, he was eventually ordered back to his quarters to resume his regular duties.25
In one instance, a troubled soldier even led to friction between the two black regiments. Alfred Pelette of the Fifty-fifth deserted, but having no place to go, he remained in Charleston for several months. Hartwell finally ordered black sergeant Andrew Smith to “bring him in dead or alive.” Smith located the deserter and locked him in the guardhouse, only to hear that Pelette had escaped, evidently with the help of friends. When Smith again found the soldier, he was “with a crowd of men belonging to the 54th Massachusetts, thinking himself well protected.” Smith fired a shot just above Pelette’s head and, when the group of soldiers moved toward him, waved “his pistol in their faces.” At length, Hartwell had to intervene. Pelette was tried and sentenced to three years at hard labor, although he finally received a pardon from General Gillmore, but not before causing hard feelings between the two units.26
Tempers rose with the temperature. In the Fifty-fourth, Private Samuel Benton, a Manhattan waiter, murdered Corporal William Wilson, a thirty-one-year-old Indiana soldier. Ned Hallowell sat on the court-martial, which sentenced Benton to hang, a punishment that was later commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. The Fifty-fifth fared no better. A black sergeant shot Private William Matthews for attempting to avoid arrest, and a long-standing feud between Privates Lewis Dickinson and John Shaw ended only when Shaw struck the Ohio farmer “on the temple with a thick sapling, fracturing his skull so that he died in a few moments.” Shaw too was to be executed, but in his case a flaw in the legal proceedings led to a reduced sentence. If black soldiers initially expressed little desire to quit the army, the pressures of serving as an occupying force prompted a change of heart, and the men of the two regiments began to look forward to following their white brethren back into civilian life at the first opportunity.27
That was not to be, owing in large part, ironically, to the racism of white Northern troops. Equally anxious to return home, soldiers in the 127th New York took their frustration out on local freedpeople. As the tragic draft riots of 1863 had demonstrated, a good many Manhattanites wished to retain prewar racial prerogatives. When newly freed blacks sought to challenge antebellum etiquette by not giving way on the sidewalks, New Yorkers shoved them into the streets with a “boot or perhaps the point of a bayonet,” a journalist for the Boston Commonwealth charged. Working-class soldiers were especially incensed by the relative prosperity of the city’s light-skinned elites, and they routinely kicked African Americans “out of their homes, knocked [them] down in the streets,” attacked them “with brickbats and bayonets, cut [them] with knives,” and smashed their stalls in the marketplace. The situation grew so dire that James Redpath finally wrote to General Oliver O. Howard, the commissioner of the newly created Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, and recommended that Colonel William Gurney be court-martialed unless he began to discipline his troops. The entire New York regiment should be withdrawn, Redpath added, as “unfriendly to the only loyalists whom S.C. has produced.”28
The War Department shipped the 127th home in late June, only to replace them with another New York regiment, the 165th. According to one captain in the Fifty-fourth, the new squad promptly fell into their predecessor’s habit of “robbing, clubbing, [and] stabbing colored citizens.” The long-simmering tensions erupted into violence on Saturday, July 8, after a company of New Yorkers were dispatched to patrol the market. The white soldiers later insisted that they were attacked by a knife-wielding James Bing, who sold eggs in his stall, while blacks swore that “the white soldiers were the aggressors.” Beyond dispute was that fifteen of the soldiers, “with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets,” began to chase Bing through the crowded marketplace. The soldiers killed Bing and soon found themselves surrounded by soldiers from the Fifty-fourth and the Twenty-first USCT. At least one New Yorker opened fire, wounding one of the black soldiers. “All that night confusion reigned in Charleston, and, at intervals, shots were exchanged,” General William Bennett reported of the event, which constituted the city’s first race riot. As the violence spread, with white and black soldiers involved in countless “street-broils,” the army gave up trying to count the wounded. “The disturbances were not confined to any particular locality,” Bennett observed, “but they prevailed throughout the city.”29
Although Bennett’s formal report claimed that it was “impossible to definitely ascertain the origins of this particular disturbance,” his subsequent actions indicated that he blamed the white soldiers. He ordered the New York regiment relocated to Morris Island, although they were not disarmed, as one black newspaper optimistically reported. As replacements, Bennett brought in the Forty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry. Until the ostensibly more pacific Pennsylvanians could restore order, General Gillmore instructed the Fifty-fourth to remain in their quarters at the Citadel. Bennett ordered the newly arrived white soldiers to enforce the curfew and warned “the enlisted men in this city that they behave insolently to no person, of whatever color.” He also required Charleston’s citizens to turn all firearms over to the army, so that they could be “stored away until more peaceful times.” On the face of it, the order was color-blind, but since many Confederates had drifted home with their weapons, the threat to arrest anyone “found carrying firearms” or even a sword clearly pertained more to whites than to black residents.30
When word of the riot reached Washington, General Grant, who remained the army’s highest-ranking officer, directed Gillmore to resolve the racial tensions in Charleston by discharging all of the white regiments of occupation in South Carolina. Grant’s recommendation was consistent with congressional hopes of saving money by mustering out white troops as quickly as possible, and in any case, since some of the white soldiers had served longer than the men of the Fifty-fourth, Grant reasoned, they deserved to return home first. By that date, there were 11,200 black soldiers and 2,800 white soldiers in the state. Gillmore urged Grant to amend the order so that only the 300 white New Yorkers would be relieved, leaving him with just over two regiments of white soldiers stationed in major South Carolina cities. Having not been allowed to enlist until January 1863 due to discriminatory policies in Washington, the men of the Fifty-fourth were penalized again, this time for the racism of their white comrades, by being among the last to be mustered out.31
WHILE HALLOWELL AND THE FIFTY-FOURTH STRUGGLED TO IMPOSE order and a measure of justice on Charleston, Hartwell and portions of the Fifty-fifth were tasked with the same responsibilities in the countryside around Orangeburg, a town roughly halfway between Charleston and Columbia. The move upcountry proved slower than expected, as the rail lines had either been destroyed by Sherman’s corps or not been cared for in months. The tracks were so overgrown with weeds and grass, one officer complained, that the wheels on the engine car slipped “as if they were greased.” The black companies, together with the 102nd USCT, finally reached Orangeburg on Sunday, May 21. As the men pitched camp, Charles Fox wrote, nearly 1,000 freedpeople crowded into the site, “to see the ‘Black Yankees,’ witness the parade, and attend the religious services of the day.” The former slaves were so captivated by Chaplain John Bowles’s sermon, and comforted by the presence of black troops, that as the sun began to set many began to settle in for the night, and Hartwell had to instruct his sergeants to “clear the camp of all strangers at retreat.”32
The Fifty-fifth had orders to administer the oath of allegiance to Southern whites, so that the state could prepare for its reentrance into the Union, and to set up a Commission of Labor, which was designed to instruct both landlords and laborers as to the new order of things in the postwar South. Captain Charles Soule, the acting chairman of the commission, guessed that within two weeks of his speaking tour around the county he had addressed 2,000 whites and 10,000 freedpeople. When speaking to former masters, Soule emphasized “the necessity of making equitable contracts with their workmen” and counseled them to stop using “corporal punishment” on their former slaves. When talking to blacks, Soule sought to explain “in plain and simple terms their new position as freedmen, their prospects, [and] their duties.” A white Harvard graduate, he cautioned former slaves “that all your working time belongs to the man who hires you.” Lieutenant Trotter, by comparison, was far more concerned about the behavior of ex-Confederates, and his plantation visits were designed “to see that they were treating properly the colored people.” Rather to his surprise, Trotter discovered that the planter class was “perfectly cowed down” and “completely satisfied that they are whipped.”33
Southern whites “protested in terror against colored troops being sent out for this purpose,” Fox observed. But increasingly aware that many of the white officers came from money and harbored grave doubts about laboring people of any color, landlords appealed to men of their own race to intercede with their former slaves. “Throngs of planters” poured into Orangeburg each day, one journalist wrote, “begging Col. Hartwell to send officers to their various localities to make contracts between them and the freedmen, and to induce the latter to remain.” Those planters who hoped that racial solidarity might trump sectional loyalty had their prayers answered on May 22, when Hartwell issued a widely distributed circular. Although the young colonel did promise freedpeople that “no one will be allowed to abuse you like slaves,” he encouraged them not to leave for Charleston, as there they “could find nothing to do to get a living.” Many former slaves had taken to appropriating their former masters’ property as a form of back wages, but Hartwell wished them to understand that they “will not be allowed to take what does not belong to you,” and he urged black Carolinians to “make a bargain for work as soon as you can.”34
A journalist with the New-York Tribune denounced Hartwell’s circular as leaving the freedpeople “at the mercy of any proslavery military commander.” Certainly, the black officers and enlisted men under Hartwell’s command took a very different approach. Like Trotter, they devoted their energies to protecting the rights of black laborers. They demanded that contracts “be simply worded,” and one officer objected to a planter who wrote “freed by the acts of the military forces of the United States” into a labor agreement on the grounds that it gave “the appearance of an intention at some future day to contest the question of emancipation.” When freedpeople saw black soldiers riding toward them, they hastened to complain “of the brutality of their former owners.” Indeed, some landlords treated their workers like slaves, prohibiting them from leaving their estates without a pass, whipping their children for quitting the fields for Bureau schools, and threatening to shoot them for demanding wages or a share of the crops. When word reached the Fifty-fifth that a white planter had murdered a freedman in a labor dispute, a squad galloped off “to arrest the murderer.” Despite Hartwell’s circular, one white Carolinian complained of “the great difficulty in making contracts in this District on account of the refusal of the negroes to sign [them] except in the presence of a U.S. officer.”35
Defeated Confederates dreaded the interference of black soldiers, knowing they were powerless to intimidate armed and battle-hardened veterans. One planter complained of “two of the coloured soldiers” who arrived on his porch, asking permission to pick a few peaches from his trees. As they did so they questioned his laborers as to conditions on the estate and “expressed some disapproval (to the women) of their working in the hot sun.” The planter guessed, probably correctly, that “their visit was rather to spy out domestic arrangements, than to get peaches.” Other whites had returned from the war only to discover that their former slaves had moved into their mansions, which in some cases they had helped build. “Some have made the effort to remove them to their former homes,” one white officer reported, “but without success,” as the freedpeople grew stubborn “when they see a soldier approaching.” For the enlisted men of the Fifty-fifth, liberation and reform, not saving the Union, were the causes that had prompted them to sign up, and although formal combat had ended, they regarded their new battles with ex-Confederates as an extension of the war itself. While the “strictly military duties of the troops [were] of necessity very few,” a soldier admitted, they were “engrossed in their Efforts to obtain for the Freedmen their just due.” When Corporal Charles J. Howard encountered an aged former slave who swore he was 108 years old, the old man insisted that he “had been praying 75 years for this war to come, and God had answered his prayers at last.” A waiter in civilian life, Howard was far from his home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but he wrote that it “made me feel joyful to see one of his age so happy.”36
Much like the soldiers stationed in Charleston, the Fifty-fifth understood that the responsibility of occupation also meant assisting recently freed slaves with their transformation into freemen. “Arrangements are also to be made for the education of the children,” Trotter reported. “Soldiers are to be teachers.” The men took some glee in converting an abandoned building “formerly belonging to the Confederate Government at White Bridge” into a schoolhouse. During the previous year’s shelling of Charleston, the city’s orphan asylum had been relocated to Orangeburg. A number of white Northern women had arrived to assist with the asylum and the new schools, most of them funded by the American Missionary Association, but arriving also were white women from Charleston who hoped to find work as teachers with the Freedmen’s Bureau. A “goodly number” of them, Charles Fox observed, were “willing to consort with the Yankees, and even with officers of negro troops.” With black refugees crowding into Orangeburg as well as Charleston, Stephen Swails was not the only soldier to find romance in South Carolina. About a dozen enlisted men married local women that summer, Fox counted, and their brides were anxious to return “with the regiment to Boston” when their tour of duty finally ended.37
Also as in Charleston, the very presence of armed black men emboldened people who had long practiced obsequiousness as a survival tactic. Black troops on one occasion marched up to a predominantly white Baptist church and demanded access to the front pews. When refused, they returned to their camp for arms and then marched back with their muskets. The minister responded by locking his doors and refusing to hold services. “Was there ever such an outrage committed on any people by its own govt.?” fumed Henry William Ravenel. The soldiers “knew full well the peculiar & intense sensitiveness of the whites as to social distinctions.” He added that “it is not confined to the South, but equally felt at the North,” a fact that the Ohio farmers knew to be too true, but one that they intended to rectify after being mustered out.38
Mindful that they would not remain forever in South Carolina, the Fifty-fifth prepared local blacks to protect themselves. One soldier, known only to hostile whites as Johnson, urged freedmen to form “military companies” to defend their rights, their schools and churches, and their growing demands for land reform. Blacks in the district sought to arm themselves “as best they could,” an effort made easier by the actions of impoverished Confederate veterans who had returned home with their muskets. “Large numbers of arms and some ammunition have been sold [to] the negroes by whites,” planter James Bucher complained. “A low class of whom are in league with them.” In the months after Appomattox, upper-class whites continued to regard any act of self-preservation as tantamount to servile insurrection, just as they had during the antebellum era. Another terrified landlord worried that the armed blacks “intended to kill every white man they could find, and take what they wanted.” No such rebellions shook the countryside, but the presence of the Fifty-fifth would not soon be forgotten by many Carolinians.39
THE FIFTH CAVALRY EXPERIENCED MANY OF THE SAME TRIALS AS AN occupying force in Richmond. Even more than in South Carolina, white Virginians insisted that the end of the war meant nothing more than a formal end to slavery, and that former masters should be able to reassert other kinds of controls. Joseph Mayo, who had served as Richmond’s mayor during the 1850s, was reelected to his old post, and according to the abolitionist press, Mayo “re-appointed his rebel policemen, who were notorious and famous negro hunters.” He also reinstituted the old pass system, in which freedpeople had to obtain a pass from a white employer just to be able to “attend to their daily occupation.” Although the city’s black leaders promptly appealed to Republicans in Washington, most African Americans instinctively turned to the Fifth, especially since a majority of the cavalrymen had been born into slavery. The soldiers were happy to oblige. In yet another reversal of antebellum norms, one cavalryman demanded to see a white traveler’s pass. When the furious matron huffed that he was as “ill-bred as old Lincoln himself,” the soldier “cursed” at her, shouting: “You haven’t got things here no long as you did. Don’t you know that?”40
The mayor found allies in a few Union officers from white regiments, who also fretted about the social interaction between freedpeople and black soldiers. One reported that the Fifth held “very bitter feelings toward the rebels.” But when complaints to white officers proved largely ineffective, Richmond whites instead began to protest that far from being a “force for the preservation of order,” the cavalrymen were stealing and robbing the local populace. Though he still generally disdained his own men, Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr. thought the allegations without merit, but to appease the mayor he clapped a “heavy guard” around his camp so that nobody came or left without authorization. Still, senior officers believed that there was evidence enough to place Adams under “arrest for neglect of duty in allowing [his] command to straggle and maraud” on April 16. He was ordered to report to Fort Monroe to answer charges.41
Later that afternoon, Adams arrived at the fort, where, as he complained to his father and Governor Andrew, he remained “apparently utterly forgotten and unnoticed” for eleven days. After mailing out a number of missives, all without response, Adams finally obtained an interview with General Edward Ord. Adams wisely chose “not to defend [his] regiment,” but rather “simply to demand facts on which to punish officers and men.” As he suspected, they had none, and the sympathetic Ord quickly defended Adams as “an ill-used, injured man to whom redress was due.” On April 27—one month shy of Adams’s thirtieth birthday—Adjutant General Edward Smith ordered him “relieved from arrest and [to] resume command of the 5th Mass. Cavy.” By then, the young patrician was sick of the army and weary of his men, complaining to his father that they “are as hard a pack to manage as any I ever had to handle.” Although Adams would return home having forged no lasting friendships with men of any race, he was particularly out of sorts with the black cavalrymen. “I no longer wonder slave-drivers were cruel,” he remarked. “I no longer have any bowels of mercy.”42
He would soon find himself free of his men. Sporadic resistance to federal authority continued in faraway Texas, and for the War Department, shipping the Fifth to the West could reduce racial tensions in Richmond while at the same time probably spelling the end of Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith’s cavalry forces. As did Ned Hallowell, Adams thought it “would not do for a Colonel to set the example of resignation in the face of a distant and dangerous expedition,” and he prepared for Texas. But his two weeks’ residence near swampy Fort Monroe had made him sick, and on May 29 he received twenty days’ leave to return to New England. Adams “dragged [himself] to [his] horse,” reaching Quincy five days later, “much reduced in weight, wretchedly weak, mentally depressed and quite broken in spirit.” Adams’s doctors dosed him with liberal amounts of opium, which eased his intestinal cramps but acted on his “nerves [and] drove [him] almost to insanity.” He would never return to his regiment.43
On June 28, Doctor Ebenezer Woodward examined Adams and found him “suffering from chronic diarrhea, and general disability” due to “attacks of dysentery and malarial fever, the gradual results of long military service.” Another doctor seconded that diagnosis in late July, declaring Adams an “invalid in Quincy.” Several days later, on July 21, Adams formally tendered his resignation to the secretary of war, providing documentation that his condition “utterly precluded [his] doing any further service for an indefinite period.” Stanton agreed and signed his discharge papers on August 1. And so, Adams concluded, “after an active service of three years, seven months and twelve days, [he] turned to civilian occupations.” Or, as his diplomat father, at long last finally satisfied with his son, put it: “This act of the drama is over.”44
THE FIFTY-FOURTH BEGAN TO FEAR THAT THEY TOO WOULD SEE FURTHER service in the West. In early June, word reached Charleston that Governor Andrew and Adjutant General William Schouler intended to start discharging soldiers in state regiments who had signed on in the months just after Bull Run, starting with those whose terms of service were to expire in the early fall. That meant that the Fifty-fourth, Schouler explained, “mustered May 13, 1863,” and the Fifty-fifth, “mustered June 22, 1863, both colored, have a year longer to serve.” Faced with further service, perhaps in Texas or in the upper Midwest, where a series of Sioux uprisings had recently led to the largest mass execution in army history, Hallowell began to favor General Rufus Saxton’s suggestion that he remain in the South “for the purposes of assisting the Freedmans Bureau.” Ned longed for home, but Saxton, a reformer and abolitionist, played on Hallowell’s crusader sensibilities by emphasizing the ongoing need to settle freedpeople on abandoned lands along the coast. If the choice was between that and the Indian wars, Hallowell told his father, he would most likely “consent to it.”45
Inexplicably, on the morning of Thursday, August 10, orders arrived from General Gillmore stating that both black regiments were about to be mustered out. “I will keep you posted as to our movements,” an overjoyed Hallowell wrote his parents; “we are ordered to get ready to GO HOME” and would probably sail by early August. “Hip Hip sing out wild belles, I am wild with delight.” Robert Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, was ecstatic too, informing his readers that “there will be a time when these boys come home.” But as the army was still in need of soldiers to occupy parts of what had been the Confederacy, Gillmore also requested that his senior staff “nominate such officers of their commands as are in their opinion deserving [of] appointment in other colored regiments.” Gillmore could not provide assurances that such nominees would receive appointments higher than second lieutenant, which eliminated the two men most interested in remaining with the army: First Lieutenants Swails and Vogelsang.46
While the men packed and prepared for departure, they were relieved of garrison duty and relocated across the river to Mount Pleasant. “Make thy arrangements to be in or about Boston some time in August so as to welcome the 54th back to the State of their adoption,” Hallowell notified his family. In recompense for his meritorious service, the War Department promoted Ned to Brevet Brigadier General—a rank that conferred honor, but without real authority or a raise in salary—so he was now, he chuckled, “thy affectionate Genl. Hallowell.” Late in the evening of August 21, Hallowell bundled his men aboard the steamers C. F. Thomas and Ashland, which set sail the next morning at five o’clock. Left behind were fifty-nine men too sick to travel and Lieutenant Stephen Swails, who chose not to return home to Elmira, opting instead for a new life with Susan Aspinall. He collected his final pay and was “honorably discharged” in Charleston three days later on August 24.47
At nine o’clock on the morning of September 2, the steamers docked at Boston’s Commercial Wharf. Andrew thought it proper for the Fifty-fourth to retrace their steps of sixteen months before, after they had quit Readville. The streets were “thronged with people,” Captain Luis Emilio marveled, “who greeted the veterans with repeated cheers.” Back in May 1863, a handful of whites had turned out to jeer or had watched quietly. This time Emilio witnessed nothing but “great enthusiasm.” At last the regiment snaked onto the Common, where they were met by Andrew, Mayor Frederic Lincoln, and former sergeant William Carney. The soldiers formed into a neat square around Hallowell, who first, in the sentimental fashion typical of the time, thanked his officers “for the efficient and manly way they had performed their service.” He then addressed the enlisted men, praising them for their courage and remarking, with considerable understatement, that “whenever a ‘forlorn hope’ had been called for, the Fifty-fourth had been ready and prompt to respond.” When they had sailed for the Sea Islands, Massachusetts had been the only state “to recognize them as citizens,” but “now the whole country recognized their soldierly qualities.” Perhaps soon, Hallowell hoped, the nation might also reward them with citizenship. Their blood had “enriched the soil” of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and they had shown “themselves to be men, without respect to color or former condition.”48
Never one for public speaking, the twenty-eight-year-old Hallowell paused, drinking in the glorious day. Now, Hallowell shouted, it was time for farewells. He was “glad to disband them,” he promised, but equally “sorry to part from them.” From the early spring of 1863, he had been at Camp Meigs, together with his brother and Rob Shaw, “and he knew they looked upon him as their friend.” For his part, he “felt sure that wherever he might go, he would find friends among colored soldiers and colored men.” His men responded with “repeated cheers,” and then, Captain Emilio scribbled into his journal, “the regiment was disbanded.” Company C, most of them from New Bedford, departed in a group, but without the young sea cook who had rallied them nearly two years before. Upon reaching the port, they were welcomed by black veterans known as “the Carney Guards” and the city’s band. Altogether, 1,442 black and white men had served in the Fifty-fourth. Ninety-three, including Shaw, had been killed or died shortly after being wounded; 43 had been declared missing. Another 107 had died from disease or accident, and 34, including Gooding, had died while prisoners of war.49
Several weeks later, on August 24, the Fifty-fifth broke camp and boarded “a long train of rickety baggage cars” in Orangeburg. White soldiers from the Fifty-fourth New York drew up in line to wish them off. The two regiments, one black soldier later remembered, “had long been brigaded together.” They had “marched, drilled, fought and encamped side by side, and loud and hearty were the parting cheers they gave each other.” Most of the regiment sailed out of Charleston aboard the Karnak and the Ben Deford—the same steamer that had ferried the Fifty-fourth down the coast two summers earlier—while a few companies awaited transportation at Mount Pleasant. After a rough passage, in which the Ben Deford was twice struck by lightning, the steamer reached Gallops Island in Boston Harbor, where the men awaited final payment and discharge.50
On Monday, September 25, the Fifty-fifth, as a thrilled William Lloyd Garrison wrote, were warmly “received by the people of Boston.” Andrew was in Manhattan, as was Pen Hallowell, the regiment’s “first accomplished commander,” so their places were filled by Senator Charles Sumner and Alfred Hartwell. Some veterans of the Fifty-fourth had remained in the city for the ceremony, and Garrison was elated to “be permitted to see [his] son in the flesh.” As with the welcome for the Fifty-fourth, the city’s sidewalks and windows were “occupied by many ladies,” Garrison reported in his Liberator, “who joined with the other sex in commending the Union soldiers passing in solid column through the avenue.” The regiment then “quietly disbanded,” Charles Fox remembered, with the Ohio farmers “taking the afternoon trains for their homes at the West.” Of the 1,226 who had joined the regiment, 62 men had died in battle, and another 120 had perished of disease. Only one man died while in Confederate hands.51
Most of the Fifth Cavalry, absent Adams and Charles Douglass, shipped out to Texas, only to find that Edmund Kirby Smith had surrendered on June 2 before fleeing into Mexico and then on to Cuba to avoid what he assumed would be prosecution for treason. By October, they had boarded transport ships in New Orleans for Boston. They too enjoyed a final ceremony, if a far smaller and frostier one, occurring as it did just days before Christmas. A healed Charles Francis Adams Jr. donned his old uniform and led the regiment through Boston’s streets. Those few soldiers from the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth who lived in Boston or the vicinity turned out to march just behind them. In all, 1,386 cavalrymen had served in the Fifth; only 5 had died in battle. Another 121 died from accidents and disease, and 2 more perished while in Confederate custody.52
Not surprisingly, the abolitionist and black-run press devoted a fair amount of ink to the three regiments’ mustering-out ceremonies. Louis Charles Roudanez, the publisher of Louisiana’s first black-owned newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, ran a lengthy story on Peter Vogelsang’s rise through the ranks of “the regiment, until it was disbanded with satisfaction to his superiors.” Ominously, however, the White House did not offer its own encomium. In an October speech, President Andrew Johnson praised white soldiers as his “countrymen” and “his fellow citizens,” but in what amounted to an afterthought, he referred to black soldiers only as “his friends.” Without the two Massachusetts infantry regiments, Roudanez observed, “the war would not have ended yet,” for without their courage at Wagner, the United States might not have raised an additional “two hundred thousand [black] men.” However reluctant Johnson might have been to characterize black veterans as full citizens, Roudanez added, “they are the countrymen of the gallant Colonel Shaw, who fell at their head before the walls of Wagner.” Where was the American, he wondered, who in the presence of these regiments, and in “the sight of the shattered flags, hesitated to call these gallant sons and saviors of his country, by the name of countrymen or fellow-citizens?”53
For the Douglass brothers, and for James Monroe Trotter and Peter Vogelsang, who regarded their military service as merely one stage—albeit a defining and bloody one—in their longer, ongoing struggle for justice and democracy, and for Stephen Swails, who planned to exchange his lieutenant’s stripes for a politician’s suit, the so-called accidental president’s tepid praise revealed how the postwar era was to be defined as much by the antebellum decades as by the final years of the war, which had appeared so full of promise to the veterans of the three black regiments.