Thunder at the Gates

THOSE WHO RETURNED HOME DID SO AS CHANGED MEN. THEY had spent almost two years in the company of one another, forging bonds in the crucible of war. Even those who had wives or fiancées before their enlistment faced the daunting task of reestablishing family relations with those on the home front, who were now nearly strangers, who could not understand what they had endured—even if these women and children had faced challenges of their own. Once the cheering stopped on Boston Common, the black veterans had to find employment or go back to what for the most part had been low-paying jobs. A majority of soldiers from the three Massachusetts regiments traveled home to states that denied them the right to vote. But they had proven their worth as soldiers to their nation—the federal government, after all, was happy to have them fight on against Native Americans—and proven their manhood, both to themselves and to their communities. Because they had been paid only at the end of the war, most black veterans had considerable cash in their pockets, so they were relatively better able than other black Northerners to improve their economic position, obtain federal or state patronage jobs, and advance the cause of political reform. They had stood their ground when faced by formidable odds at James Island, at Wagner, at Honey Hill, and at Olustee, and they were not about to be intimidated by white conservatives who wished to restore the antebellum social and political order.¹

ON THE DAY HE WAS MUSTERED OUT, NED HALLOWELL FOUND HIMSELF in the arms of a large, loving, and supportive family, including a brother who understood what he had been through. But although he was still young, Ned’s health, damaged by Confederate bullets and weakened by two exhausting years in the Carolina Lowcountry, never fully recovered. Because he did not wish to be treated as an invalid by his sisters, he chose to remain in Massachusetts rather than return to Philadelphia to work again as a stockbroker. He may also have wished to trade on his own name and reputation, rather than his father’s. So life in Medford in a partnership with brothers Pen and Richard as a wool merchant—always a respected occupation for a Quaker—it was to be.²

Shortly thereafter, Hallowell met Charlotte Bartlett Wilhelma Swett, a dedicated activist seven years his junior. Ned married Wilmina, as she preferred to be called, on February 2, 1869, in a simple Quaker service. They settled into Pierpont House at 51 Mystic Street in West Medford, just around the corner from Pen and Richard. While her husband labored in his new profession, Wilmina became a patron of the arts, serving as a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she became friendly with painter Winslow Homer. Hallowell remained a Quaker, if a not very conventional one, but Wilmina joined the Free Religious Association, a movement that sought to “emancipate religion from dogmatic traditions” while affirming “the supremacy of individual conscience and reason.” In later years, together with her brothers-in-law Pen and Richard, she became a financial backer of the Calhoun Colored School in Alabama. Even before the war, Ned had broken with his faith on the question of voting, and on February 17, 1880, the year after the state assembly granted women suffrage in school board elections only, Wilmina and her sister-in-law Anna Hallowell registered to vote.³

Tragically, Ned did not live to see his wife cast her first ballot. Nor did he get much time with his daughters Charlotte Bartlett, born on January 22, 1870, and Emily, born on June 5, 1871. A little less than two months after Emily’s birth, the ailing veteran passed away. “Gen. Edward N. Hallowell died at his residence in West Medford Wednesday afternoon at the age of 34,” the Boston Journal announced the next day, July 28, 1871. Obituaries published from Philadelphia to Maine, and as far south as Virginia, spoke of his service in the Twentieth Massachusetts and especially the Fifty-fourth. “He was a brave man and a good citizen,” the Lowell Daily Citizen and News observed. In honor of “the late Brevet Brigadier-General,” ordered Governor William Claflin, Hallowell’s death was “officially communicated to the militia throughout the Commonwealth.”⁴

Ned predeceased his parents by a number of years, a common if tragic reminder that the war’s death toll did not cease in the spring of 1865. Morris Hallowell, his father, lived until 1880, and Ned’s mother, Hannah Penrose, outlived her son by twenty-eight years, dying at the age of eighty-seven in 1899. The decade between 1900 and 1910 found Wilmina still living in Pierpont House with her unmarried daughters, both of whom became typists and teachers. Wilmina died on December 18, 1919, and was buried beside her husband at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Charlotte died at home on Mystic Street in 1943, and Emily lived on until the age of ninety-six, dying in 1967. The two sisters, who never knew their father, were buried under a common tombstone next to their parents.⁵

As for the Shaws, they too mourned the early death of their son Rob and their son-in-law Charles Russell Lowell. “I have passed through the state where you now are,” abolitionist Lydia Maria Child counseled Frank seven years after the events at Wagner, “that of looking for peculiar spiritual significance in the Bible.” Frank was still searching for the next great reform crusade that might fill the void left in his life by Rob’s absence when he contracted pneumonia in the fall of 1882. He died only a few days later. After Frank’s death, Effie and Sarah purchased adjoining brownstones in Manhattan on East Thirtieth Street. In 1892, Effie founded the New York City Consumers’ League, a society dedicated to improving conditions for the growing number of female sales clerks, while Sarah devoted her time to the anti-imperialist movement opposed to American colonization in the Philippines. But Rob was never far from his mother’s thoughts, and in 1870 she sent a check for $500 to the Reverend Robert Clute, who was raising funds to rebuild St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Darien, Georgia. Sarah wished that she could “rebuild the whole pretty town in his memory,” she wrote Clute, “for I believe during his short and happy life he never had any greater trial of his feelings than the destruction of Darien.” Sarah died “very peacefully,” Effie told a friend, on New Year’s Eve in 1902, at the age of eighty-seven. Her last words were: “Rob, Rob, where are you? Why don’t you come and get me?” Effie herself died three years later, in 1905, and while her obituary in the New York Times praised her labors “in the cause of charity and reform,” it also devoted ample space to “her brother, Col. Robert G. Shaw,” who died “at the head of his colored regiment.”⁶

Effie’s sister-in-law outlived her by only three years. Annie Haggerty Shaw, who had fled to Switzerland, was denied even the comfort of raising a child—unlike Wilmina Hallowell and Effie Lowell—and devoted most of her days to religious charities. Newspapers later reported that she became “an invalid” around middle age, but it was not the custom of the time to report why, and the deeply private Annie—who had once asked Rob to burn all of her letters—corresponded only sporadically with Effie. In the fall of 1904, the sixty-nine-year-old widow relocated to Boston, bought a house at 111 Commonwealth Avenue, and, according to the Boston Herald, “settled in it for the winter.” She chose never to visit the monument erected to her husband and the Fifty-fourth—perhaps seeing his visage as he and the men marched away from Boston was simply too painful—but to residents of the city with long memories she remained “Mrs. Robert Gould Shaw.” She died in her home three years later, on March 17, 1907. Her numerous obituaries all described her as “the widow of Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the young hero, who at the age of 26 commanded the Fifty-fourth regiment of Massachusetts volunteers and was buried with his Negro soldiers at Fort Wagner.”⁷

Yet another young widow who never remarried was Ellen Gooding, who, like Annie Shaw, had been wedded too briefly to start a family. After her husband marched off to Readville, Ellen remained in her father’s home, but by 1870 she had moved in with her younger brother, Charles Edward Allen Jr., and his wife Amelia. On April 5, 1864, less than two months after receiving news of her husband’s death, Ellen applied for a pension. Later that month the government agreed, granting her an allowance of $8 each month. Evidently, Ellen never learned that James actually died at Andersonville, as her pension application listed him as “killed at the battle of Olustee in the State of Florida on the Twentieth day of February.” (In fact, Corporal Gooding was yet alive, and would be for another three months.) Ironically, since the Fifty-fourth was still refusing their lower salaries at that date, a deceased James Henry Gooding was worth more to his wife than if he had been alive. The haste with which she filed for a widow’s pension reveals the hardships faced by the wives of the soldiers in the state’s black regiments. The payments ceased when Ellen died at the age of sixty-six on April 24, 1903, from “mitral regurgitation [and] cardiac dilation,” a disorder of the heart.⁸

Less successful in her pension application was Cynthia Downing Smith, the mother of Private John Smith. In 1890, Congress passed the Dependent Pension Act, which erased the previous link between an allowance and service-related injuries so that almost any deceased or incapacitated veteran, or their family, received a pension. Perhaps Cynthia hoped that the army would take pity on her as “a subject for charity,” or that over the intervening decades they might have forgotten how her son died. “Cynthia Smith is a poor woman,” her friend Ester Perkins swore, “having no property to aid in her support, and no means of support as she is too old to do any kind of labor.” Cynthia was not in luck. “Rejection,” scribbled a clerk in the Pension Office. “Soldier’s death in no way due to his military service. Was hung for a crime.”⁹

A NUMBER OF THE VETERANS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENTS had great difficulty finding their place in civilian life after the guns fell silent, often owing to their psychological or physical wounds. After his years spent as an enslaved domestic and then as a manservant, Nicholas Said was never able to put down roots, and he continued to wander in the decades after the war. He had enlisted, he once told a journalist, “because all his folks seemed to be doing so.” But he never came to feel at ease in the Fifty-fifth and, almost alone among his fellows, had no desire to advance in the ranks. He decided to resume teaching, but not in Detroit, where he had worked in 1862. Instead, he returned to the South, having found himself more comfortable among the heavily black population of the Lowcountry than in Michigan. He settled in Charleston, where he rented a room at a boardinghouse on Calhoun Street that catered to prosperous African Americans. How long Said stayed in Charleston is unclear. In an account he elsewhere contradicted, he remembered that he “left Charleston for Savannah, Georgia, in the commencement of 1870.” Said was again restless.¹⁰

Said remained in Savannah for just a few days, but while there he “conceived the idea of writing [his] Biography or rather adventures.” He also began a speaking tour across Georgia, lecturing to black audiences on “Africa and its resources.” He “soon got tired of that business” and took another teaching job in Culloden, a small town in the central part of the state. He taught there for six months, devoting his evenings and Sundays to writing his memoirs. As was customary for authors who lacked publishing connections, Said sought to defray printing expenses by obtaining subscriptions through advance sales. Yet another speaking tour carried the veteran of the Fifty-fifth back to Florida. By the time he reached Tallahassee in May 1871, he had funds enough to open an account with the Freedman’s Savings and Trust. Bank managers routinely described depositors’ features as a form of identification, and the clerk duly listed his age as thirty-four, noted his place of birth as “Soudan, African,” and characterized him as “dark.” Said gave “Teacher” as his occupation, but when asked about his residence, he replied only: “Traveler.” The impressed clerk had evidently heard about Said’s speaking tour, as he wrote on the bottom of the account book: “This is the wonderful Nickolas Said doubtless.”¹¹

Published in 1873 by the Memphis firm of Shotwell and Company, The Autobiography of Nicholas Said; A Native of Bornou, Eastern Soudan, Central Africa ran to 224 pages but contained not a single word about his time in the Fifty-fifth. Having decided to teach and travel in the South’s black belt rather than in the relatively more welcoming but whiter North, Said evidently thought it prudent to hide his military service. Freedmen’s Bureau reports were filled with stories of the violence and hostility heaped upon black soldiers. As one white doctor in Virginia threatened, “We will not allow niggers to come among us and brag about having been in the yankee army.” Said’s otherwise richly detailed memoir summarized eight years of his life into sixteen fraudulent words: “The succeeding seasons from 1858, to 1866, were passed alternately in Italy, Germany, France, and England.” He shifted his arrival into Maine with the Rochussens ahead by seven years to the month by claiming that they “landed in Portland in December 1867.” Otherwise, the Autobiography reveals that Said either had a nearly photographic memory for dates, details, and even the names of ships or had kept a diary or daybook over the years, as all of those specifics can be corroborated. By erasing two of the most momentous years of his extraordinary life, Said preserved his ability to live in the former Confederacy, but at the cost of denying history a private’s account of everyday life in the Fifty-fifth.¹²

Said’s omission, however, did little to protect him from the animosity of Southern whites, since his literary abilities put the lie to widely held theories of black inferiority. Even before his Autobiography was printed, critics doubted that the exotic stories he told in his public lectures were close to the truth. “A semi-civilized party of the African persuasion named Nicholas Said, who has been traveling over Georgia the past year or two,” snipped the Macon Weekly Telegraph, “is devoting his valuable time at present to swindling the newspapers” with stories of his early years. A Savannah editor joined in, adding that “if Nicholas Said, the wandering African celebrity, does not wish to be called a humbug, he should quit drinking whiskey by the wholesale.” Nor were these doubts reserved to Southern journalists. The Columbus Daily Enquirer scoffed that Said’s inappropriately housed lecture at Temperance Hall featured a staggered rate for entry, with “admission for Democrats 50c., for Radicals 75c, [and] no charge for freedmen.”¹³

For the better part of the next decade, Said vanished from view, publishing no more and delivering no further lectures. Census takers in 1880 found him living in Brownsville, Tennessee, teaching school and renting a room from twenty-nine-year-old Cincinnati Jordan and his wife Mary. As was typical of the era, the census official simply guessed at his age, placing him around forty and so shaving a few years off his age, and they misspelled his surname as “Side.” Said died two years later, on August 6, 1882, at roughly the age of forty-six. He had evidently kept in touch with at least one officer from his regiment, since the only extant record of his death was the notation that Charles Fox inscribed into the brief history of the Fifty-fifth that the white officer had penned fourteen years before.¹⁴

In contrast to Said, Henry Jarvis soon learned where he belonged. Having escaped from a man he once described as the meanest master on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the disabled veteran—he had taken three balls at Honey Hill and lost his right leg as a result—remained in the Boston area for five years. The army fitted him with an artificial leg “made by Palmer & Co. [of] Boston,” but because surgeons had sawed away the bone “at the upper third of his thigh,” Jarvis found it easier to hobble about on crutches. (He was just one of 30,000 U.S. veterans to receive an artificial limb after the war.) Henry found himself among the many returning veterans who crowded into the seaport, but few Boston shippers wished to take a chance on an incapacitated former oysterman. In 1870 he returned to Virginia, living first on his pension in a soldiers’ home in Hampton—quite near Fort Monroe, his destination in 1861—and then retracing his steps back across the Chesapeake Bay to the hamlet of Cheapside on the Eastern Shore. Private Augustus Brooks, who had helped drag Jarvis off the battlefield in 1864, joined his friend there.¹⁵

After Jarvis had reached Massachusetts in 1863, he learned that his wife had remarried. Now, upon his return to the Eastern Shore, he discovered that her new husband had died. As far as the proud veteran was concerned, she should have waited for him, and he wanted nothing more to do with her. Instead, on the day after Christmas in 1872, the thirty-six-year-old Jarvis married Mary Jane White of Elizabeth City County, age twenty-one. Still furious with his first wife, Jarvis assured the Reverend William Thornton that he was a “widower.” As Mary Jane explained later, “in old slave times the negro men slaves lived with the Slave women, [but] they were not lawfully married and were frequently separated at the will of old or new masters,” a historically accurate statement that skirted the question of why Henry did not wish to have his first wife back. Jarvis bought five acres with a small house with his pension, and Mary Jane bore him three children. Mary Jane could read, and she tried to tutor her husband, but he thought it inappropriate for “a woman to be a teachin’ her husban’ [as it] ain’t accordin’ to scripture.” The devout teacher was more successful, however, in prodding Jarvis into thinking more about the hereafter. Jarvis finally “got de glory in [his] soul.” But that had limits. When once asked whether he had forgiven his old master, Jarvis insisted that he had. “But,” the old veteran added, “I’d gib my oder leg to meet him in battle.”¹⁶

As time passed, Jarvis’s war-related injuries grew worse. He had taken a ball in one arm as well, and that limb eventually became useless. His rheumatism became so problematic that his wife “had to turn him over in bed.” Brooks’s wife, Georgianna, lived nearby and helped when she could, but by 1890 Mary Jane “had to dress him [for] he is nearly totally disable [and] he Cant do Eny Work at all.” Private Henry Jarvis died on March 9, 1890, around the age of fifty-eight, yet one more veteran whose military service robbed him of an old age. His youngest son, Ellison, had just turned six. Mary Jane received a widow’s pension of $30 each month under the 1890 law and earned another $2 each week “by Washing, Ironing and Scrubbing.” She lived to be seventy-five, dying in her son William’s Norfolk house on August 23, 1926.¹⁷

Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr. also found his proper place in life. Upon being discharged in early August, Adams retired to Newport to regain his health and to plan his future with fiancée Mary Elizabeth Ogden. From the moment of their first meeting in 1863, Adams had regarded Mary Elizabeth—known to her friends as Minnie—as “so charming and attractive a person” as he had ever encountered. Quite possibly, Adams also saw the courteous Minnie as his natural foil, as his father had recently reprimanded him for his chronic rudeness. It could not have hurt that her father, Edward Ogden of New York, was a man of vast inherited wealth who could open doors in the business world unknown even to the Adams family. They wed on November 8, only three months after Adams’s return from the war, and spent the next eleven months on a grand tour of Europe. The young couple enjoyed Paris and Rome, but only “after a fashion!” Adams admitted. “That I failed, and failed woefully, to avail myself of my opportunities, goes without saying, for it was I!” Whatever his critics might say about him, Adams, like all of the men in his family, possessed the gift of honest self-knowledge.¹⁸

Armed with his father-in-law’s business connections, Adams secured a seat on the Massachusetts Railroad Commission. He also maintained an interest in national politics, though he remained incurious about the concerns of American blacks and even disdainful of their efforts at political reform. Charles Sr. regarded President Ulysses Grant as an unqualified spoilsman, and in both 1872 and 1876 Charles Jr. and Henry publicly supported their father’s unsuccessful bids for the Republican nomination. “Universal suffrage,” the former colonel lectured in 1869, “can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice:—it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast, an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf; and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.” A good many early free-soilers, of course, had despised the institution of slavery without ever caring much for the enslaved. But Adams was atypical of the young Harvard men who had stepped forward to lead black troops, the majority of whom grew to appreciate their men and remained true to the reformist tendencies of their early days. In fact, Adams was not merely indifferent but openly hostile to Reconstruction reforms, perhaps because he regarded the freedmen’s demands for economic rights as similar to the claims advanced by the Irish immigrants who built Northern railroads. “We cannot live forever on the dry husks of the anti-slavery agitation, or upon the animosities of the late war,” Charles wrote Henry in 1870. “That long battle is over.”¹⁹

If nothing else, Adams’s military service had earned him a measure of independence from his imperious father. Mary Elizabeth bore him five children, three daughters and two sons. Breaking with the family tradition of naming one son after the father, the couple instead named the girls Mary, Elizabeth, and Louisa, after Charles’s late sister, while the twin boys were christened John and Henry. Both boys graduated from Harvard in 1898. “Nothing tells like being contemptuous,” he once remarked to Henry while trying to explain his personal philosophy. Adams devoted his final years to writing history, serving as president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and condemning the German people in 1914 as “the common enemies of mankind.” He died of pneumonia on March 20, 1915, and was buried in Quincy.²⁰

Far prouder of his military service was disabled veteran William H. Carney. The numerous wounds he had received at Wagner—one ball remained too far inside his body for safe extraction—ended his career, and he was granted an honorable discharge on June 30, 1864. Like Henry Jarvis, Carney had labored as an oysterman before the war, and as with Jarvis, that profession was no longer possible for him. He had once briefly considered a career in the ministry, but evidently his experiences in the war turned his thoughts away from religion. Even before being mustered out, Carney had contacted Massachusetts general R. G. Pierce about “obtaining a situation” in the state’s military bureaucracy. When nothing came of that, he tried again, inquiring as to a position as a messenger for the assembly. But hampering his chances was the fact that the Virginia runaway was still barely literate; his two missives were filled with misspellings, and he even managed to mangle the general’s surname into “Purse.” Carney instead returned to New Bedford, where, on October 11, 1865, he wed twenty-two-year-old Susanna Williams. Census takers listed Williams, three years Carney’s junior, as a mixed-race Virginia native, and so it is possible that Susanna too had somehow escaped slavery before the war and found her way to the coastal town, known in the antebellum period as the “fugitive’s Gibraltar.”²¹

Carney found work with the post office as a “Letter Carrier,” even though he needed two crutches to move about. A daughter, Clara, was born in June 1876, even as Carney, as one doctor remarked, remained “a constant sufferer from gunshot-wounds received while in the Army.” The fourth ball had damaged Carney’s left hip, while the second, in his right leg, caused “nearly complete loss of knee-jerk” by the late 1880s. The troubled joint led to rheumatism, which he treated with “Alkaline and tonics.” By 1900, Clara, now twenty-three, supplemented the family’s income as a “Music teacher at home” in their house at 128 Mill Street.²²

Carney’s wartime heroism was never forgotten in New England. Nor was he anxious to let his countrymen forget, and he proved a popular speaker on the veterans’ circuit, addressing civic organizations. The lectures and the black press kept his name before the public, as did a lengthy 1889 interview he gave about the assault on Wagner. Congressman John Simpkins continued to lobby for a fitting award. Eight African Americans had already been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and in the spring of 1900 President William McKinley announced that Carney would be the ninth. (Because his bravery predated those awards already handed out for meritorious service in 1864 and 1865, Carney became, technically, the first black Medal of Honor recipient.) His medal, bestowed on May 25, was “awarded for most distinguished gallantry in action.” The citation, which in fact undercounted the number of wounds he had received on July 18, 1863, read: “When the color sergeant was shot down, this soldier grasped the flag, led the way to the parapet, and planted the colors thereon. When the troops fell back he brought off the flag, under a fierce fire in which he was twice severely wounded.” By the start of the twentieth century, the phrase “the old flag never touched the ground” became one of the most popular across the North, and Carney’s words, one New Englander remarked, were “known by every schoolboy in the land.”²³

William Carney’s heroism at Wagner not only earned him the Medal of Honor but inspired the patriotic song “Boys the Old Flag Never Touched the Ground,” composed shortly after his death by Henry Mather and George Lothrop and published as sheet music with Carney’s face on the cover. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

The award, granted thirty-seven years after the battle, eased Carney’s finances in later years but also, ironically, hastened his demise. Carney was offered the position as messenger for the Massachusetts secretary of state, and so for the next eight years he and Susanna resided in Boston. But his legs continued to trouble him, and in the fall of 1908 he was getting into a crowded elevator in the State House when he stepped aside to make room for one more. Carney’s leg was somehow “crushed” by the door. He died two weeks later, on December 9, in Boston’s City Hospital.²⁴

His passing received more attention in the national media than that of any man in his regiment since Shaw’s death—more than Ned Hallowell’s even. The black press devoted banner headlines to the story, praising him as “Brave Negro Soldier” or “Noted Colored Hero,” and all of them ending “with the words often quoted in Massachusetts: ‘The old flag never touched the ground.’” Black Americans “have lost one of their oldest and most renowned soldiers,” commented Julius Taylor, the editor of Chicago’s Broad Ax. “A character such as William H. Carney adds more to a Negro’s contribution to militarism than half of the speeches that might be made relating their exploits.” The white press covered the story of Carney’s tragic accident too, as did one of his old officers. Sixty-nine-year-old Pen Hallowell drafted a lengthy obituary for the Boston Evening Transcript. “It is fit that the last act, the act which cost his life, should be one of courtesy,” Hallowell observed. “In stepping aside to make room for another his leg was caught and crushed. Sergeant William H. Carney was a gentleman. Peace to him!”²⁵

Susanna moved back to her Mill Street home in New Bedford, which Clara continued to use for music lessons. Census takers found the two, then ages sixty-four and thirty-three, living quietly in 1910. Ten years later, Susanna was deceased and Clara resided alone, as she was when census takers knocked on her door in 1930. She died in 1939 at the age of sixty-three. As was the case with Charlotte and Emily Hallowell and Carlotta Lowell, Clara evidently chose never to marry.²⁶

Carney’s obituary was just one of many essays Pen Hallowell wrote in the years after he resigned his commission in the fall of 1863. He purchased an elegant home at 50 Mystic Street in West Medford, Massachusetts—a home large enough to encompass a family like the one in which he was raised—and began a new life as a wool merchant with his brothers. Hallowell had met Sarah Wharton Haydock in Manhattan in July 1861, and although he regarded her, seven years his junior, as a “kid,” he had given her a photograph of himself, and she remained on his mind throughout his time in the war. They married on January 27, 1868, in a simple Quaker ceremony at her father’s house in Manhattan, and spent their honeymoon in Antietam, where Pen had been shot six years earlier. Sarah and Pen settled into life in West Medford, where in 1866 they were joined by Ned and Richard and their wives. Six children followed, starting with Anna in 1871 and ending with Susan Morris in 1883.²⁷

Shortly after Ned’s death, Pen quit the wool business and went into banking, taking a senior position with the National Bank of Commerce. But Hallowells were ever activists at heart, and along with his brother Richard and sister-in-law Wilmina, he helped finance the Calhoun Colored School in Alabama. Mostly, he devoted his off hours to writing letters and editorials on the war, its memory, and the ongoing struggles of African Americans. On one occasion, Hallowell condemned segregation in Boston by noting that Shaw and his men were buried side by side in the sands of Morris Island; as he put it, “There was no segregation at Fort Wagner.” Another time he contacted the chairman of a local hospital whose institution had refused to hire a highly qualified black nurse, fuming that “the founder of Christianity would slam the door of opportunity in the faces of these people.” When in 1909 he read that President William Howard Taft had remarked that black bureaucrats and officials “should not be forced on unwilling white communities,” Hallowell published a lengthy piece in the Boston Herald wondering if it was then fair for “white postmasters and other officials” to be “forced upon unwilling negro communities.” Why the president thought it important “to know officially the color of a citizen” was beyond Hallowell’s comprehension. “However, let us not be too much disgusted and discouraged by William H. Taft, a type of reactionist, and Booker T. Washington, a type of submissionist,” the seventy-year-old banker wrote. “Let us rather remember that the dark days of Slavery were succeeded by the bright days of Liberty.”²⁸

Pen Hallowell reserved his utmost disdain, however, for Woodrow Wilson, the Virginia-born Democrat who taught government at Princeton University before moving into politics. Pen was particularly incensed by the fourth edition of Wilson’s A History of the American People, which covered the war years. Not content merely to pepper the Boston Herald with letters on the topic—although he did that too—the well-connected Hallowell sent two missives to publisher Henry Wilbur, complaining about what he regarded as a book that “abounds with apologies for slavery.” Wilson’s volume, Hallowell huffed, said not a single word about “Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and utterly ignores the arming of the blacks in the North, a movement which contributed 186,000 men to our cause.” Instead, Wilson spent several pages on Jefferson Davis’s last-minute decision to use “slaves as armed troops,” an effort that raised roughly thirty-five men. (In an aside, Hallowell added that he wished Davis had raised more, as those regiments “would have deserted en masse to the Yankees.”) The volume, at least, helped explain Wilson’s “present attitude toward the race problem” and his support for segregation. For Southern reactionaries, “it would be a toss-up whether to vote for Jefferson Davis, were he alive, or for Woodrow Wilson.”²⁹

By that point, Hallowell was seventy-five and still putting in long days at his bank. After contracting pneumonia, he died on April 11 and was cremated after a Quaker service in his native Philadelphia. Former Massachusetts governor Eugene Foss attended, and Pen’s old comrade from the Twentieth, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., now a Supreme Court justice, wrote to say that his death laid “a great space bare for him,” as Pen was his “oldest friend [and] the most generously gallant spirit and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” African American historian Benjamin Griffith Brawley dedicated his Social History of the American Negro to “The Memory of Norwood Penrose Hallowell, Patriot.” The many newspaper accounts of his life devoted considerable space to his roles in the two infantry regiments. “So gallantly did he bear himself at the head of this regiment, and so well did his colored soldiers fight in battle,” observed the Boston Herald, “that public opinion in the North and deep-seated prejudice in the South became reconciled to Gov. John A. Andrew’s move in organizing the negro soldiers.” Sarah lived on until 1934, dying at the age of eighty-eight.³⁰

WHILE PEN HALLOWELL SPENT HIS LATER YEARS DEFENDING THE SOCIAL changes brought about by the war, a large number of black veterans threw themselves into the fray, either by becoming activists themselves or by seeking to change society through political office. Of the 1,510 identifiable men of color who held office during Reconstruction, at least 130 first served in the nation’s military. Although he never sought office, James Monroe Trotter was among the most energetic of activists. Upon being mustered out, the former second lieutenant, now all of twenty-three, returned to Chillicothe, evidently to marry Virginia Isaacs, the sweetheart of his teenage years. Two months James’s junior, she had been born free in Cincinnati. Trotter was anxious to relocate to Boston, where he could combine teaching with activism. The couple rented a home at 105 Kendall Street, and while Trotter applied for positions, he found work as a clerk with the post office. As was all too common in the nineteenth century, their first two children died while infants, and believing that the insalubrious urban conditions had contributed to their deaths, Virginia returned home to Ohio to give birth to their third child, who was born on April 7, 1872, and christened William Monroe. Two healthy daughters followed in 1874 and 1883. By then, the family had moved back to Massachusetts, settling in suburban Hyde Park in Boston’s predominantly white South End and buying a house valued at $6,000.³¹

Trotter, who was so light in color that an 1870 census taker mistook him for white, remained active in Boston’s black public life. In 1878 the onetime music student published Music and Some Highly Musical People as a tribute to African American accomplishments and to demonstrate, as he observed in the preface, that musical aptitude was “not in the exclusive possession of the fairer-skinned race.” Trotter also remained close to writer and activist William Wells Brown, who had recruited for the two Massachusetts regiments in 1863, and in 1875 Trotter and Brown organized a commemoration at Faneuil Hall to mark the passing of Senator Charles Sumner. In 1882 a white man was promoted over Trotter to become the branch’s chief clerk. Although his income was solid enough to allow him to purchase a home, the former lieutenant, who had helped persuade the men of the Fifty-fifth not to accept a racially based salary, promptly resigned in protest.³²

Furious that he was denied a patronage position controlled in New England by Republicans, and equally angry about President Rutherford B. Hayes’s withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, Trotter publicly broke with his party and embraced the term “Independent.” Few black Republicans followed his lead, even if the white Democrats Trotter endorsed were hardly typical of their national party. In the same year he resigned his clerkship, Trotter threw his energies into former senator Benjamin F. Butler’s Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign. Having been a Democrat in the 1850s, Butler shifted to the Republicans after famously defining runaways as “contraband” at Fort Monroe. But by 1882 he was once again calling himself a Democrat. Butler won his race, and Trotter was rewarded by being appointed recorder of deeds in Washington by Democratic president Grover Cleveland, replacing Republican Frederick Douglass and becoming the first black New Englander to receive a high-ranking federal position. “The Democrats and Republicans in Congress are almost equally perturbed by it,” observed the Boston Evening Transcript, “the former objecting to Mr. Trotter’s color, and the Republicans objecting to his politics.”³³

Trotter’s health suffered while in Washington, and in 1887 his employee Rosetta Douglass informed her father that “he has been lying very ill of pneumonia.” The Republicans recaptured the White House the following year, and Trotter lost his position to former senator Blanche K. Bruce. He died of pneumonia at the age of fifty on February 26, 1892. As ever, obituaries listed his service in the Fifty-fifth, and the black-owned Cleveland Gazette forgave him for his political apostasy with a lengthy tribute. Trotter lived long enough to see his son attend Harvard University, where William Monroe became the first black student in Cambridge to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key. Had Trotter lived even into his sixties, he would have seen his son launch the Niagara Movement (with W. E. B. Du Bois), found the National Equal Rights League, edit the Boston Guardian, carry on an active correspondence with Pen Hallowell, and engage in a well-publicized debate on segregation with President Wilson.³⁴

Lieutenant Peter Vogelsang was another veteran who balanced activism with a career that provided for his family. After being mustered out on September 2, the forty-seven-year-old Vogelsang prepared to return to the New York City area. During the war, his family had relocated to Duffield Street in Brooklyn. His eldest son, George Peter, now twenty-four and working as a clerk, lived with his siblings Maria and John and his maternal aunt, Maria Margaret DeGrasse, who had helped care for his children during Vogelsang’s absence. Maria had been an elder sister to Vogelsang’s wife Theodosia, who had died of tuberculosis in 1854. Still single at forty-nine, Maria had been courted by her brother-in-law prior to his enlistment, and when he returned from the South she traveled to Boston to greet his ship. Just five days later, the Reverend Havens of Boston performed the ceremony joining “Lieut. Peter Vogelsang to Maria. M. De Grasse, all of Brooklyn city.”³⁵

Vogelsang briefly returned to working as a hotel clerk, but in 1869 he secured a position as a messenger and doorman with the New York Customs House, a position that paid $1,000 per year. Vogelsang’s antebellum jobs and the highly literate letters he posted during the war to the Weekly Anglo-African indicate that he probably deserved the rank of clerk with the city, which drew a higher salary of $1,400, but such positions were reserved for white men. Jobs with the Customs House were controlled by the Republicans and doled out to loyal party members and deserving veterans, and the black lieutenant was an avowed Grant man. One journalist claimed that there was “no man who knows so many distinguished public men,” including “every politician, merchant, or other habitual caller” at the Customs House, as did Vogelsang. Although known for his fierce heroism on the battlefield, the reporter added, Vogelsang was as “polite as a French diplomatist,” the “personification of good humor,” and a man “who could say ‘No’ to a persistent office seeker with as much grace as another man would have said ‘Yes.’”³⁶

When necessary, the old soldier could be a tough doorman. In one instance during the fall of 1885, collector Edward Hedden was accosted by a businessman, much “under the influence of liquor,” whose license to keep a lunch stand in the Customs House had not been renewed. The exchange grew heated, and when Hedden rang his bell to call for assistance, the salesman threatened to punch “the Collector’s head.” The “intruder found himself suddenly seized by Peter Vogelsang,” the New York Herald reported, “and incontinently bounced.” Although sixty-eight, Vogelsang remained a formidable adversary, a trait much in demand in postwar Manhattan, which possibly also explains why a series of collectors preferred to keep Vogelsang near to hand rather than upstairs in a clerk’s office.³⁷

Vogelsang reserved his evenings and weekends for politics and community activism. Just as his father had, he joined and frequently led a variety of black self-help organizations and fraternal orders. He was one of the founders of the Morning Star Lodge, the Grand Masters Council No. 27, and the Brooklyn Patriarchie No. 22. He twice served as an officer in the William Lloyd Garrison Post, was “an old member” of the African Mutual Relief Society and the Boyer Lodge (a Masonic order named for the former Haitian president), and volunteered as secretary of the Ogden B. Fund. On Sundays he and Maria attended Brooklyn’s Bethel Church, where he sat in the section reserved for members of the GAR, or Grand Army of the Republic, a national fraternal organization with hundreds of branches. As the son of a native of St. Croix, Vogelsang served also as secretary of the enormous “welcome-home” ceremony staged at the Cooper Institute in 1870 to celebrate the return of American minister E. D. Bassett. Two years later, when white Republicans began to abandon the increasingly corrupt Grant administration, Vogelsang stood with other black activists who remained loyal to the president owing to his crackdown on Southern vigilantism. At a meeting of the “Colored Men of Brooklyn in Council,” Vogelsang was elected a vice president of a group that pledged allegiance “to the party by which the principles of equal liberty for all were inaugurated” and promised to help coordinate the Grant campaign in “King’s County and other places on Long Island.”³⁸

In 1884, for the first time since James Buchanan’s election in 1856, the nation voted a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, into the White House. Upon taking office in March 1885, Cleveland appointed Daniel Magone, the former chairman of the Democratic state committee, as Manhattan’s new collector. Wielding the Civil Service Act of 1883 as a weapon, Cleveland and Magone removed both incompetent employees and effective, longtime personnel whose chief crime was that they were Republicans. Especially hard hit were black treasury workers, who were replaced with white Democrats. Vogelsang, now sixty-nine, was probably not much surprised when he was dismissed in June 1886. For “nearly a quarter of a century [he] had been the special messenger and usher attached to the Collector’s office,” lamented the New York Herald. “Peter was one of the noted characters of the Custom House.” The editor of the New York Freeman was blunter still. “The change of politics alone was the cause of his removal, along with other colored men who held positions in the same department.” By 1888, only five black men worked for the Port of New York, and only as messengers or porters.³⁹

Marie Vogelsang died that same year, and Vogelsang moved in with his son John. His old wounds had begun to bother him, and since 1879 the army had listed him as “partially disabled” and increased his pension. The loss of his wife and position hastened the end. He died of a stroke on Monday, April 4, 1887, less than ten months after being dismissed. “His death removes from our city a valiant soldier, a useful and painstaking friend, a humble Christian, a kind father, and devoted husband,” the Freeman commented in a lengthy obituary. “He won his title before Fort Wagner, where his regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, under Col. Shaw, took such a prominent part; and for coolness and distinguished bravery on the field he was recommended by the officers for promotion.” The editor listed the many societies, charities, and lodges he had served, praised his activities as “distinguished by promptness, honesty and ability,” and rightly remarked that his death “closed the eventful career of this distinguished citizen.”⁴⁰

NO VETERAN OF THE THREE BLACK REGIMENTS REACHED THE POLITICAL heights achieved by Lieutenant Stephen A. Swails. Nor did any of the other tens of thousands of black men who had served during the Civil War. After the war, the thirty-three-year-old Swails initially remained in Charleston, courting Susan Aspinall, the light-skinned daughter of mariner Albert Aspinall and a woman twelve years his junior. To make ends meet he took a position with the Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress the previous March and largely staffed by officers and veterans. The couple married on April 18, 1866, in the home of an abolitionist white minister, Reverend Joseph B. Seabrook. The bride’s friend Mary McKinley assured the reverend that Susan had never been married, and the groom also vowed that he was single. Although technically true, his oath to Seabrook ignored the sad reality of Sarah Thompson and their children.⁴¹

Within two years, the Swails family, which soon included son Florian and daughter Irene, were living in Kingstree, Williamsburg County, a district with twice as many black residents as whites. There the former waiter bought a house on the corner of Main and Brooks Streets for $800 and began to read law. Like any aspiring attorney at the time, Swails found a senior lawyer who accepted him as an apprentice, tutored him in the basics of jurisprudence, and at length recommended him to an informal board of local attorneys, who then approved his request to hang out his own shingle. Swails also began to edit a newspaper, the Williamsburg Republican, a banner that trumpeted his political affiliation. Swails quickly made a name for himself as a young man on the rise. After Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act in March 1867, which required the defeated Confederate states to call conventions to craft new constitutions, Swails put his name forward as delegate. Congress demanded that delegates be chosen on the basis of universal male suffrage, and a good number of black men were elected, including Swails and Robert Smalls, whom Swails had first met in June 1863 when his regiment arrived in the low country. The light-skinned veteran was still unknown enough in Charleston, however, that the editor of the Courier identified him as a white man “of Northern birth.”⁴²

Just as Swails began to prepare for his first run at political office in 1868, the Democratic editor of the Daily Albany Argus dredged up his unsavory prewar reputation. In a story widely reprinted in the conservative press from Cleveland to South Carolina, the editor reminded voters of Swails’s earlier days in Cooperstown and Elmira. “He was a vagabond; he was one of those mean, cunning, drunken, thieving ‘niggers,’ that almost every northern village has.” The lengthy exposé recounted Swails being fired from his job for “habitual drunkenness and dishonesty” and told how, after getting Sarah Thompson pregnant, he abandoned her and their child for a life in the military. The Argus also charged that Swails had “hunted after a white man in this place, while he was on one of his drunks, with a large knife.” Not content to stop there, the editor, perhaps unwisely, also dismissed the twice-injured officer as merely being “wounded in some skirmish,” an absurd understatement that surely infuriated black veterans in Swails’s district and made it easier for voters to disregard the other allegations as Democratic lies. Perhaps black Republicans simply could not see the dissolute youth in the tough, ambitious veteran who chaired political meetings and encouraged them to stand firm for the party of Lincoln. “After the ballots were counted, Swails won his first term in the South Carolina state senate.”⁴³

Along with the Reverend Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a former army chaplain and Freedmen’s Bureau agent, Swails, at considerable danger to himself, attended the Republican national convention as a Grant delegate. In the elections that fall, Randolph was installed in South Carolina’s state senate, only to be assassinated soon after. Swails’s political visibility was such that shortly after taking his seat in the senate, his was one of the four names of black men being discussed for an open seat in Congress. “The colored voters in South Carolina have resolved to fill the places the State is entitled to with men of their own class,” noted one Pennsylvania editor. In the end, fellow state senator and South Carolina native Joseph Rainey was tapped to fill the First District’s congressional chair in Washington. But for a new arrival who just three years before was patrolling the streets of Charleston, Swails’s rise made for heady drink.⁴⁴

Swails quickly earned the enmity of white conservatives with his demands for equal political, social, educational, and economic rights. Swails was determined that his constituents would receive a decent education, possibly because he had never received one himself. South Carolina had been one of the four Southern states to flatly outlaw black literacy before the war, and Robert Smalls, who was also sensitive about his lack of formal schooling, had written provisions into the new state constitution for education to be free, integrated, and compulsory for all residents. By the early 1870s, thanks to elementary schools funded by the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen’s Bureau, some older pupils were ready to take the next step. The South Carolina College in Columbia had closed during the war for lack of students and briefly functioned instead as a Confederate hospital. The college reopened in late 1865 as a university, and four years later, assemblyman William J. Whipper, a black veteran from Beaufort, introduced a law banning racial discrimination in admissions. When the trustees responded by claiming that former slaves were not yet prepared for higher education, the legislature fired the directors and, as one hostile newspaper huffed, replaced them with a “mob of carpet-baggers and negroes,” including Stephen Swails. As the editor added, “It is evidently the intention of the African element to capture the University after the solemn assurances given some time since that this institution should be left to the uses of whites.” Despite such fights, conservative Democrats could not imagine why black Carolinians demanded antidiscrimination laws.⁴⁵

For those whites who longed to restore the old order, the democratic reforms of the Reconstruction years had to be resisted at all costs. White vigilantes and Ku Klux Klansmen fought back, and by 1870, Swails reported, “you cannot speak without a guard if you are a Republican.” In the spring of 1873, Swails journeyed to Washington with Lieutenant Governor Richard Gleaves to urge Grant to travel south and investigate conditions for himself. Two years before, the president had signed both the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Force Act into law and suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties—although not Williamsburg—but since then he had requested the resignation of his crusading attorney general, Amos Akerman, whom Grant’s cabinet had come to regard as unnecessarily obsessed with the Klan. The president assured the two that he hoped to “do so at some future time [and] regretted he would not be able at present to take such a tour” of the South. “General Grant declines a carpet-bag invitation,” sneered one hostile editor.⁴⁶

Expecting no further assistance from Washington, Swails decided that black Carolinians would have to be responsible for their own protection. He had been the second-in-command of the state militia, but when former state assemblyman Robert Elliott Brown was elected to Congress, Swails was elevated into command and accepted the rank of major general. After white vigilantism worsened in Georgetown—a town Swails was familiar with from the last days of the war—he and Adjutant General H. W. Purvis called out the state national guard and marched them toward the coast. Swails also lobbied the War Department not to remove from the state any more regular troops, who were being ordered to the Mexican border and to the Indian wars in the Dakotas. “Swails, who is a brigadier of militia and a nigger,” one Democratic editor scoffed, “was certain the troops could not be safely removed now.”⁴⁷

In 1872, Swails was elected president pro tem of the state senate, a position that allowed him to control the flow of bills and shape legislation, and it also gave him considerable patronage power. (His family joined him in Columbia, where Marie, a third child, was born in January 1873.) When Democrats complained about the cost of Reconstruction reforms, Swails replied that the real debate should be over priorities rather than money. Democrats from Charleston, he replied, sought funds otherwise earmarked for the militia to restore the city’s Military Hall, a prewar symbol of racial control and currently a haven for white vigilantes. “It would be a Godsend if the Military Hall in Charleston was burned down,” Swails snapped. Carolina Democrats quite literally fought back, turning out at one 1878 Republican rally in their old Confederate uniforms and tearing “down the United States flag with their sabres,” trampling it underfoot, and tearing “it in shreds.” Just days later, on October 5, several whites fired two shots at Swails as he spoke in Kingstree. The shooters perhaps intended to miss, but if they hoped to intimidate the former lieutenant, they were disappointed. Swails again boarded a train for Washington, where he and Congressman Rainey called on an unreceptive President Hayes, warning him that without federal soldiers, “the Republicans of South Carolina would not be allowed a fair opportunity to express their sentiments at the November election.”⁴⁸

“Terrorism in South Carolina” read the October 15 headline in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette. One week before, the state Democratic Executive Committee, accompanied by a band of Red Shirts—as the paramilitary supporters of the former Confederate cavalryman and current governor Wade Hampton styled themselves—disrupted a Republican meeting and warned Swails that he was “required to leave Williamsburg in ten days.” In the resulting melee, the Red Shirts shot and killed a black Republican. Swails attempted to reach the safety of the courthouse, but riders cut him off and threatened that he would be killed if he did not abandon the county. Swails again left for Washington, after which the mob beat “the Rev. Pinckney, the colored Deputy-Postmaster.” In the nation’s capital, Swails cautioned one journalist that although Republicans enjoyed solid majorities in the Lowcountry districts, the Democrats would surely win in light of “the terrorism prevailing.” It was a prescient claim. Although black voters courageously turned out on Election Day—a particularly brave act in a time when casting a ballot was a public affair—the Democrats announced that they carried Williamsburg by 600 votes. The U.S. elections supervisor, who was black, was denied “admission to the room occupied by the election managers.” Only seven African Americans in the county voted Democratic, one resident assured a reporter, but whites wanted “to get [Swails] out of the way until after the election,” and with him gone, stealing the election “was easier.” Swails left his family behind, and three months later, in January 1879, Susan gave birth to another son, Stephen Jr.⁴⁹

A federal district attorney issued arrest warrants for seventeen men for election fraud, but “the affidavits were mostly made by negroes,” one journalist jeered, and none of the accused ever faced trial. Swails took a position in Washington as a clerk with the Treasury Department, but he continued to hope that he might return to the state that had been his home for the past sixteen years. Evidently, his family remained in South Carolina. In 1881 he decided to test the waters by announcing that he would “spend his vacation among old friends at Kingstree.” The editor of the Kingstree Star, the Republican’s Democratic rival, warned that if Swails “came back, it would be at his peril,” adding that the “Democratic party cannot countenance such a procedure.” Undaunted, Swails returned, delivering a speech in the town’s AME church that conservatives denounced as a “most bitter and diabolical race harangue.” Threatened once more that his presence in “our midst will not be tolerated,” Swails returned to his Treasury desk. When the death of Congressman Edward Mackey in 1884 left a vacancy in the House of Representatives, Swails’s old supporters advanced his name, claiming that his residence in Washington “would add greatly to his usefulness as a Congressman.” Swails still qualified as a resident of the district because he continued to own his home in Kingstree. In the end, the nomination went to Robert Smalls. Four years later, despite not having lived in the state for nine years, Swails received the Republican nomination in the Third District, but being unable to campaign, he lost the election to Democrat James Cothran.⁵⁰

The year before, in 1887, Swails had applied for a pension and been granted $7.75 each month. Although only fifty-five, the twice-shot veteran’s health began to deteriorate. At some point he returned to Kingstree, and this time his enemies left him alone. He was able to see his daughter Marie graduate from Charleston’s Avery Normal School in 1896, and his son Florian marry the following year. On May 12, 1900, after Swails, then sixty-eight, began to suffer from “acute dysentery” and his temperature rose to 102, Susan called on Dr. D. C. Scott, who remained at his patient’s bedside until death came on May 17. The deceased, Scott recorded, had “developed symptoms of congestion of the brain [and] rapidly became worse and died in 5 or 6 hours in a comatose condition.” Fearful that his grave might be desecrated, Susan had his body shipped back to Charleston, a city he had helped to liberate, where he was buried in the Humane and Friendly Society Cemetery. For a man who had faced allegations of corruption, upon his death, his Kingstree house was valued at $749—slightly less than what he had paid for it decades before—and his other “personal property” was worth only $265, for a total of $1,014. Susan Swails lived another four years, dying at the age of sixty-four in December 1903.⁵¹

THE WAR’S OFFICIAL END HAD FOUND FORMER SERGEANT MAJOR Lewis Douglass laboring as a sutler in the Lowcountry; with the end of the actual fighting, he returned home to Rochester by way of Talbot County, Maryland. Hoping to find his son a position with the Freedmen’s Bureau, Frederick Douglass contacted Senator Charles Sumner in late April 1865, reminding the Massachusetts Republican that Lewis “took part in the memorable and disastrous, though glorious assault on Fort Wagner.” Now, however, his “health having broken down in the service,” Lewis desired a clerkship in Washington. But either Sumner lacked the influence he had wielded just weeks before, prior to Lincoln’s assassination, or Lewis’s rudimentary penmanship—his letters failed to display the elegant handwriting that graced Charles’s missives—cost him the clerkship. Instead, after a brief but financially unrewarding bout with the Maryland chapter of the Equal Rights League, Lewis took a job teaching in Rochester, while he continued to press Amelia for a wedding date.⁵²

Lewis found teaching dull, however, and in the spring of 1866 he and his brother Frederick Jr. fled west to Denver. They went to work selling dry goods to miners and settlers with their father’s old friend Henry Waggoner, who ran the Red, White, and Blue Mining Company. Lewis promised his father that he was laboring as hard as he ever had. “In my business I am up early and late.” But he thought the “business promises much, [as] it is the only kind of business paying at all in Denver.” The “boys have taken hold in good Earnest,” Waggoner assured their father. “Lewis, I take to be a young man of strong, clear sense.” Where Frederick appeared a bit “more cautious, reflecting hesitation,” the twenty-six-year-old Lewis “seems to drive right a head at the object aimed at.” One year later, Lewis had been promoted to secretary of a different silver mining company.⁵³

Lewis never intended to remain in the West, and having put aside some money, he returned east in search of Amelia. While ice skating with friends in New Jersey in February 1868, he was set upon by white toughs, who quickly discovered that they had picked on the wrong veteran. Lewis had been careful not to pack one skate, and donning it like a glove, he “very successfully stopped” one attacker “by splitting his head with the skates.” The group attempted to circle behind Douglass, but when another lunged forward, Lewis sliced upwards and “took his thumb nearly off.” The veteran who had once sprinted down the beach toward Fort Wagner was not about to be intimidated by a group of “cowards,” and perhaps also in recounting the story he wished to remind his onetime fiancée that he remained a vigorous, capable man of business.⁵⁴

At length, Amelia relented. The two were married on October 7, 1869, in the Syracuse home of her father, the Reverend Jermain W. Loguen, shortly after Lewis served as a delegate to the Washington Colored Men’s Convention. Lewis’s parents and brother Charles were in attendance, giving him “courage when I promise to obey you,” he remarked, “and who will stand up with you when you promise to command me.” After waiting for so long, Douglass little cared whether the ceremony was “conducted with the least possible display,” and he reassured Amelia, telling her not to worry “that any arrangements you may make will meet with my disapprobation.” The two enjoyed a happy and content life for the next thirty-nine years, their marriage ending only with Lewis’s death. But of course there would be no children.⁵⁵

The newlyweds relocated to Washington, where Lewis, his father, and activist and restaurateur George T. Downing had already announced “the publication of a first class Weekly Journal in the interest of the colored people of America.” Until the group could raise the necessary funds, Lewis took a job in the Government Printing Office at $24 per week, where he was harassed by members of the Typographical Union for having never been a member. After Douglass responded that his earlier turns at setting type had been in wartime Rochester, when he “had not attained his majority,” it became clear that the real problem was his race. Even as Douglass pursued legal action against the union, he found time to be elected a member of Washington’s “Legislative Assembly,” as the city council was then called. Finally, by the spring of 1873, Lewis had put enough money aside to start the New National Era, on which he served as senior editor. Constant reminders of his color complicated his daily existence, however. During the previous year, when Lewis, Charles, and “several colored veterans”—among them Swails—attended the national convention in Pittsburgh as Grant delegates, the hotel manager refused them rooms. But the veteran never forgot his fellows. Although a solid Republican, Lewis publicly endorsed Trotter’s controversial appointment as recorder of deeds, despite the fact that Trotter had replaced his own father.⁵⁶

In his final years, Lewis prospered in Washington’s booming real estate market. He enjoyed spending time with Charles’s large number of sons, who lived nearby. But by the time he reached his midsixties, Douglass’s health took a sudden downturn, and only then, in 1907, did the proud veteran finally apply for a pension. He was granted $28 each month. Amelia and Charles were both by his bedside when he died of “chronic nephritis”—inflammation of the kidneys and urinary tract, a condition probably related to his 1863 injuries—in his Seventeenth Street home on September 19, 1908, at the age of sixty-seven. The Veterans Administration paid the undertaker’s costs and bought a casket. Amelia lived until 1936, dying in the same house of a heart attack at the age of ninety-three.⁵⁷

Charles, the youngest of the Douglass offspring to survive childhood, outlived Lewis by a dozen years. After being mustered out of the Fifth Cavalry, he had returned to Rochester, where he helped to tend the family gardens, which almost constituted a small farm. But he had enjoyed his brief time in Washington, where the black community had grown rapidly during the war. When his brothers journeyed west in 1866, Charles, the longtime army clerk, got a position with the Freedmen’s Bureau. His neat, precise script earned him the praise of his superiors, especially General Oliver O. Howard, who ran the new government agency. Within a month of his arrival in Washington he became, as he bragged to his father, only “the second colored man in the Government that has been given a first-class internship.” As fascinated by the political world as his father, Charles loved the partisan flavor of the city. But even more, he enjoyed the civil liberties that Washington granted to black men; New York State, by contrast, continued to deny the franchise to black men without property. “I can get along better here than in Rochester and have more rights,” Charles reminded his father. “I will become a voter here.” When a slate of black candidates was successful in the 1867 elections, Charles was jubilant and took part in a torchlight procession through the city.⁵⁸

By then, Charles had married. His bride was Mary Elizabeth Murphy, or Libbie, born four years after him, in 1848. Their first child, Charles Frederick Douglass, was born in Washington in June 1867, shortly after he obtained his clerkship. Five more children followed, with the last, Edward Douglass, born in 1877. But the children were often unwell, and only the second, Joseph Douglass, would outlive his father; Edward did not even survive two years. The tragic losses put a strain on the marriage, and when Lewis stayed with his brother’s family in the summer of 1869, just before his own wedding, he grumbled to Amelia that because “of a disposition of Charley’s wife to be exceedingly disagreeable,” he had moved into a nearby boardinghouse. During one low point in the marriage, an “all fired up” Libbie hinted to her father-in-law that Charles had been unfaithful, an allegation that he denied on the grounds that Libbie was routinely jealous of female clerks he worked with. Charles and Libbie had the ability to produce children, but their growing family did not always lead to happiness.⁵⁹

Because the Bureau remained under a steady barrage of criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill, Charles fretted about his job security. But if the Bureau was discontinued, he hoped at least that he might continue on with its “Educational Department.” Charles was wise to plan ahead: in 1872, when Congress abruptly cut off the Bureau’s funding, he took over “the supervision of two school buildings now being erected in the county, and in connection with my clerical duties.” When even that began to look insecure, Charles accepted a position as clerk to a commission investigating the acquisition of the newly independent Dominican Republic. In 1875, Grant elevated him to the rank of consul. But he hated life on the island and regarded the “Dominicans [as] a savage set.” After only one year, he complained to his father that it “seems that under any circumstances I am to fail at my undertakings, and my life is to be one series of blunders.” Even so, he remained in his post for another year.⁶⁰

Libbie died in September 1878, the year after they returned to Washington, and two years later, census takers found the widower running a cigar store. Later that same year, he married again, this time to Laura Antoinette Haley, and one year after that she gave birth to Haley George Douglass, a healthy child who would live until 1954. Haley would go on to attend Harvard, but Charles took particular pride in Joseph, who even as a teenager earned a reputation as one of the “finest violinists in Washington” (much to the enjoyment of Joseph’s grandfather, who also played the violin). By 1887, Charles was again employed as a clerk, this time at the pension office, where he processed forms for fellow veterans—including his mentally unstable brother-in-law, Nathan Sprague—and the following year he celebrated Joseph’s marriage to Atlanta’s Fannie Mae Howard. Reporting on the wedding, the black-owned Washington Bee praised Charles’s son as perhaps the best classical musician in the city. Lewis had spent his final years in the real estate business, so it was surely no accident that his admiring younger brother followed the same path, founding the Highland Beach resort on the Chesapeake Bay, a summer community, one black journalist marveled, with “over 150 beautiful cottage sites for sale to reputable members of the race.”⁶¹

Charles Douglass died on November 23, 1920, at the age of seventy-six. The numerous obituaries all remembered his military service, with the Boston Herald praising his involvement in two of the Bay State’s historic regiments. One journalist mistakenly promoted him in death, calling him “Major Charles R. Douglass.”⁶² Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for Douglass, and indeed for all of the men he had served with, was provided by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poet had once shared a stage with Joseph Douglass, and his father, Joshua Dunbar, had served beside Charles in both the Fifty-fifth and the Fifth Cavalry. In “The Colored Soldiers,” Dunbar wrote:

In the early days you scorned them,

And with many a flip and flout

Said “These battles are the white man’s,

And the whites will fight them out.”

Up the hills you fought and faltered,

In the vales you strove and bled,

While your ears still heard the thunder

Of the foes’ advancing tread. . . .

Ah, they rallied to the standard

To uphold it by their might;

None were stronger in the labors,

None were braver in the fight.

From the blazing breach of Wagner

To the plains of Olustee,

They were foremost in the fight

Of the battles of the free. . . .

They were comrades then and brothers,

Are they more or less to-day?

They were good to stop a bullet

And to front the fearful fray.

They were citizens and soldiers,

When rebellion raised its head;

And the traits that made them worthy,—

Ah! those virtues are not dead. . . .

And their deeds shall find a record

In the registry of Fame;

For their blood has cleansed completely

Every blot of Slavery’s shame.

So all honor and all glory

To those noble sons of Ham—

The gallant colored soldiers

Who fought for Uncle Sam!⁶³