ALTHOUGH OVERJOYED TO RETURN HOME TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS in the fall of 1865, the veterans of the three Massachusetts units soon discovered that they missed their wartime mates: the cheerful comradery, the hard-earned esprit de corps, and the friendship and support of men who understood what they had endured. They also took justifiable pride in what they had accomplished, not only at Wagner and Olustee but in their principled stand against a discriminatory pay scale and a War Department that regarded them as manual laborers unfit for command. As a black editor later remarked, “The history of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts is the grandest heritage the Afro-American possessed and one of the brightest portions of the history of the American soldier.” Even as they returned to their old lives, or built new ones, those who had survived the war refused to lose touch with their comrades. And they demanded that the nation they had helped preserve remember their sacrifices.1
Of course, other veterans, both white and black, felt the same. What was remarkable was that many white veterans not only accepted but embraced their black comrades. Just one year after the war, veterans in Decatur, Illinois, founded the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a fraternal organization and advocacy group that quickly branched into hundreds of posts across the North. A handful of these remained as racially segregated as the army had been, but the GAR leadership—Republicans all—lobbied for black voting rights and back pay for former slaves who had been denied signing bonuses. Most white officers joined posts that commemorated the black regiments they had been mustered out of rather than those they had originally joined. Black veterans returned the favor. Black Pennsylvanians who had journeyed to Readville formed the Shaw Post, designed to “perpetuate his Memory and to cherish his bravery and loyalty to his country and flag.” And especially in New England, even predominantly white GAR posts were proud to accept members from black regiments, particularly if they had been wounded in action. When William Carney tried to join New Bedford’s largely white Rodman Post, the group’s president declared: “We have Ft. Wagner’s hero here, who round his body wound the flag he bore when wounded and ‘it never touched the ground.’” Veterans from the Fifth Cavalry joined Hartford’s Taylor Post, as did several soldiers from the Fifty-fourth.2
As the first black regiments to be raised in the free states, as well as the first to enjoy any visibility among the press and Northern politicians, the Massachusetts units justifiably believed that had they faltered in their first test, the tens of thousands of black recruits who followed would have been barred from service. By the war’s end, 178,975 African Americans, constituting one-twelfth of all the soldiers who fought for the United States, had filled 145 infantry regiments, seven cavalry units, 13 artillery groups, and one engineering battalion. An astonishing 74 percent of Northern black men of military age enlisted to fight for a nation that denied them citizenship. Of the total number of enlistees, however, 140,313 were black Southerners recruited either in the loyal slave states or from the Confederacy. James Henry Gooding was among the 2,751 blacks killed in action; far more, 65,427, died of disease or went missing. “Only two short years have elapsed since stern, hard necessity, and the loyalty of the colored man, have led hundreds of thousands to strike hands with us, and bid us God-speed,” remarked one soldier from the Fifty-fifth. “When I look back to the years ’61 and ’62, it makes me stronger in my belief that time brings all things right.”3
Fort Wagner “was their Bunker Hill,” Senator Charles Sumner remarked in December 1865. “Though defeated” in that July battle, “they were yet victorious,” as “the cause was advanced.” Northern whites who had scoffed at the notion that black men could make effective combatants “learned to know colored troops, and they learned to know themselves,” and from that day on, “nobody doubted their capacity or courage as soldiers.” Pen Hallowell also dedicated many of his later writings to the proposition that the courage of the Massachusetts regiments had not merely opened the doors to thousands more black recruits but turned the tide against the Confederacy. “When we remember that Grant lost 60,000 men in 60 days, a number equal to Lee’s effective army at that time, it well becomes a question worthy [of] the serious attention of the historian” what might have happened had not black soldiers been permitted to enlist. Thomas Wentworth Higginson expressed similar thoughts when asked to comment on the view, so prevalent among Democratic officers, that “the chief obstacle” to black soldiers came from common soldiers. Rather than point a finger at Washington, as well he might have done, Higginson instead blamed “civilians at home.” But after the summer of 1863, he believed, nothing was “more remarkable than the facility with which the expected aversion of the army everywhere vanished before the admirable behavior of the colored troops.”4
Officers and decorated soldiers from elite units were in great demand as speakers after the war, and both white and black men associated with the Massachusetts regiments sought to remind the public of their valor. Henry Monroe, a New Bedford musician who had become a minister after returning to civilian life, delivered a series of lectures on “Camp Fires of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts.” Reverend Monroe’s talks featured a stereopticon—a slide show of projected photographs on glass—to illustrate “the charge on Wagner” and “the pathos of brave deeds and heroic deaths.” Virginia congressman John Mercer Langston, once a recruiter for the Fifty-fourth, spoke about black soldiers at an 1891 Emancipation Day rally in Rochester, accompanied by the surviving musicians from the regiment’s band. Former captain Luis Emilio announced that he planned to write a history of the Fifty-fourth and urged former comrades to forward him stories and photographs. Published in 1891 as A Brave Black Regiment, the memoir was expanded three years later as A History of the Fifty-Fourth. Advertisements quoted the late Governor Andrew, who had died shortly after leaving office in 1867: “To any given thousand men in arms there never has been committed a work so full of glory as was carried out by the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.”5
The black press wasted few opportunities to mention the regiments, no matter how tangential they were to the story at hand. When forty-eight-year-old George Haynes, a North Carolina–born carpenter, had the misfortune to lose “$58 of his pension money from his pocket,” the editor of the Cleveland Gazette played to the sympathy of his readers by noting that Haynes had “lost both eyes and one arm in the war” to a “premature explosion” while serving in “the old Fifty-fourth.” In 1869, Charles Lewis became one of the first two black men to win election to the Massachusetts assembly, and the faraway editor of the San Francisco Elevator crowed that his election was his just due as “a member of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, who lost a leg in service.” And in one of those curious human interest stories treasured by Victorian readers, two black Kansas newspapers reported that Jonathan Moore, a white veteran from Michigan, had bequeathed $5,000 to Daniel Prime. Moore had been wounded in the leg while fighting on the Carolina coast, and Prime, a sergeant with the Fifty-fourth, tore off his shirt, tied it into a tourniquet “to stop the flow of blood, and carried the lieutenant to the rear.” Moore spent decades trying to learn “the name of the man who had saved his life” so that he might reward him in his will.6
Obituaries unfailingly noted which deceased veterans had served in one of the three regiments, especially as Jim Crow segregation set in during the 1890s. Joseph T. Wilson, a pioneering journalist and historian who in 1888 wrote The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States, was memorialized as a veteran of the Fifty-fourth and “in its best sense an agitator.” Reverend Monroe died in 1891, still delivering lectures on the conflict, and editors praised his service “with that historic regiment until mustered out after the war.” Frank Welch, a Connecticut barber who finished his term as a first lieutenant, was remembered in 1893 as one of just “thirty-nine [black] officers” to rise into commissioned ranks in the army. Three years hence saw the death of the Reverend J. R. B. Smith, who, like Emilio, had lied his way into the Fifty-fourth at age sixteen before being ordained in the AME Church and becoming “prominent in the G.A.R. and the Republican party.” Charles Potter had endured Wagner only to be injured in the July 1865 riot in Charleston, and his 1916 obituary paid homage not only to his years in the Fifty-fourth but also to his participation in commemorative events staged by the regiment’s survivors. When Pennsylvania postmaster S. Clay Miller died in 1915, a black editor in Wilkes-Barre took care to note his “brilliant Civil War record and [that he] was decorated for gallantry in the attack on Fort Wagner.”7
LONG BEFORE WHITE AMERICANS ON EITHER SIDE OF THE MASON-DIXON Line began to memorialize battlefields and town squares with statues and markers, soldiers in the Fifty-fourth and their abolitionist allies began to discuss a fitting memorial for Rob Shaw. On September 15, 1863, just two months after Shaw’s death, Charles Russell Lowell dined with John Andrew, who promised the young officer that he “meant to live long enough to see erected in Charleston a monument to honor Shaw.” Lydia Maria Child’s 1863 “Tribute to Colonel Shaw” inspired others to consider the creation of some sort of permanent memorial, as did sculptor Edmonia Lewis’s bust of Shaw. When the bust was displayed in Boston’s Mercantile Hall for the benefit of black veterans, it stood before “a three-quarters length portrait of the lamented Colonel Shaw, the hero-martyr of the assault on Fort Wagner.” At about the same time, Charles Sumner contacted Frank and Sarah Shaw, suggesting a work of art to commemorate Rob and “the cause in which he fell & the companions by whom he was surrounded.” The necessity of winning the war intervened, but in the fall of 1865, his memory on the matter jogged by the return of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth to Boston, Sumner returned to the idea. Placing an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser, he proposed this time that the monument be erected in Boston, near the steps that led up to the State House from Beacon Street, as “it was in the State House that the regiment was equipped,” while from that street “the devoted commander rode to death.” Sumner decided that “no common stone or shaft will be sufficient. It must be of bronze. It must be an equestrian statue.” Although he mentioned the men of the Fifty-fourth as well in a December speech, he clearly envisioned a statue of Shaw only, “there riding always.”8
While prosperous and influential Northern whites debated the proposition, Shaw’s black comrades began to raise funds for a monument. Although they had not yet received their promised wages, the survivors of Wagner pooled their meager resources, amassing $2,832. The newly arriving recruits of the Fifty-fifth added another $1,000. Black refugees and freedpeople in Port Royal passed the collection plate one Sunday and raised $27. “Think of it!” one congregant marveled. “I have seen larger and far more wealthy congregations give less when pressed,” yet “most of our congregation were women.” In September 1863, a black Baptist church in Beaufort collected $60 more. “The colored people seem to take a great interest in this effort to honor Col. Shaw’s memory,” a black journalist with the Beaufort Free South reported, “and we learn that a large sum has already been promised by the different colored regiments.” Higginson’s First South Carolina Volunteers added $583.50 to the fund, and black Floridians shipped $144.95 up the coast to the account’s treasurer. By the end of 1863, the committee had raised an impressive $4,647.45, all of it from unpaid soldiers or underpaid black laborers.9
The death of Governor Andrew in 1867 stalled the drive for a larger monument, although by that year the memorial’s fund had grown to $7,000, about one-third of what the monument’s backers guessed to be necessary. The Shaw family proposed an executive committee chaired by entrepreneur John Murray Forbes, who had also run the Black Committee that initially raised funds for the Fifty-fourth in 1863. But the project was again delayed as the family disagreed with the committee over the proposed design. The original proposal called for a freestanding equestrian statue, but to Sarah Shaw, Rob “had not been a great commander” on the order of a Grant or Sherman, “and only men of the highest rank should be so honored.” The thought was extraordinary, coming from Rob’s own mother, but then, even in 1863 she had wanted her son to lead black troops in the antislavery cause, not for his own personal glory. Consequently, Sarah also hoped that any memorial would pay equal tribute to the soldiers who fought beside him. “I want very much to have the names of all the men of the 54th killed at Fort Wagner & afterwards, put on the base at the back—it seems to me due the privates,” she confided to one committee member. It would be wrong “that it is only men with rich relations and friends who can have monuments.”10
The project stalled yet again in 1874 with Sumner’s death. Thirteen years later, in August 1887, the three black regiments held a reunion in Boston’s Tremont Temple. The veterans donned their carefully preserved uniforms and staged a parade in front of the State House, after which James Monroe Trotter delivered the main address. “His speech was a masterpiece of oratory,” reported one black editor, and although Trotter evidently said nothing about a proposed monument, former governor John David Long, who then spoke at Andrew’s grave, urged that it be completed. “There were flags and handkerchiefs out of every window in town,” a journalist observed of the reunited veterans, as “everybody seemed to wish them welcome.”11
A Boston GAR rally four years later kept up the drumbeat, with the editor of the black-run New York Age remarking that while “there are few of us who may not know who Robt. G. Shaw was and what interest he had to our race,” the Fifty-fourth yet lacked proper memorialization. The final prod, ironically, came from the South. In 1895, residents of Fort Mill, South Carolina—roughly 100 miles from where Wagner once stood—erected a monument to the “faith and loyalty” of the Southern slave during the conflict. A journalist with the Charleston News and Courier praised the simple granite shaft placed within the town square as a “most significant and unique” war memorial. For the handful of runaway slaves, such as William Carney, who had served with the Fifty-fourth, an honest monument dedicated to black warriors to counter a Southern fantasy about content, passive bondmen took on a new urgency—particularly since fewer and fewer veterans remained alive to see it erected.12
The final design placed a mounted Shaw amid his men in a huge bronze relief. “I think the change from a statue to a bas-relief permits us to make it a memento for those who fell at Fort Wagner,” Forbes acknowledged. The contract went to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was paid $22,000, a sum that drained the treasury of all but a few hundred dollars. The artist, curiously, chose not to use the visages of any real veterans, despite the fact that Carney, delivering mail just down the road in New Bedford, was a New England celebrity and popular GAR speaker. The monument was completed in time for its proposed May 31, 1897, unveiling.13
The remaining members of the three regiments prepared to celebrate a memorial that they understood was as much for themselves as it was for their fallen commander. Many also probably guessed that it would be their final major reunion. “To the surviving officers of the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Mass. Infantry, and the Fifth Mass. Cavalry Regiments,” read the elegantly printed circular mailed out by Stephen Swails and Pen Hallowell. Hallowell directed those who planned to attend to “wear uniforms, with sash, belt, and sword, but not side-arms.” Aware that some veterans had fared better in life than others, he added that “all survivors, however, will be welcome, whether with or without uniforms.” Frank Shaw had died in 1882, but Sarah Shaw and Rob’s sisters—Anna, Susanna, Ellen, and Josephine Shaw Lowell, all of whom had seen their brother march away in 1863—planned to attend. The elderly Forbes was by this time too weak to appear, but the committee invited Booker T. Washington to serve as the day’s principal speaker, with William James—brother of Garth Wilkinson James, who had died in 1883—as a secondary orator. “The monument is really superb, certainly one of the finest things of this century,” William’s brother Henry gushed. Black newspapers as far west as Wichita retold Shaw’s story, glorying in the fact that the “memory of the first commander of an Afro-American regiment is about to be honored.”14
The march by the unveiled monument began just after noon. Although the bas-relief commemorated only the men of the Fifty-fourth, the parade “of colored heroes and their white commanders,” as the Boston Herald observed, included roughly 200 veterans representing all three regiments. The marchers snaked through the city streets, past the memorial, and concluded at Faneuil Hall, where the fifty-eight-year-old “Col. Hallowell and his staff reviewed them” as they marched into the building. Charles Francis Adams Jr. put aside his disdain for his men long enough to ride before the veterans of the Fifth Cavalry. William Carney was given the honor of bearing the flag, and behind him marched Lewis Douglass and Stephen Swails. Farther back yet walked George Garrison and the Reverend William Jackson. At Faneuil, Washington delivered an address that one editor described as “unremarkable,” an overly charitable assessment given Washington’s patronizing observation that the “full measure of the fruit of Fort Wagner and all that this monument stands for will not be realized until every man covered with black skin shall by patient and natural effort, grow to that height in industry, property, intelligence and moral responsibility” where no white American “could deny him his rights.” But George T. Downing, an activist and in-law of the late Peter Vogelsang, saved the evening by denouncing “the bigotry and injustice which he said were shown toward colored people at the present time, not-withstanding their heroism and bravery during the war.” As the evening’s speeches drew to a close a grateful Sarah Shaw turned to Saint-Gaudens: “You have immortalized my native city, you have immortalized my dear son, you have immortalized yourself.”15
Surviving members of the three black regiments returned to Boston in 1897 for the unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. Lewis Douglass, Stephen Swails, and William Carney—carrying the tattered American flag—marched in the procession; Pen Hallowell reviewed the troops. The rear of the relief bears the words of Charles Eliot: “The Black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union Cause. Served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops. Faced threatened enslavement if captured. Were brave in action. Patient under heavy and dangerous labors. Cheerful amid hardships. Together they gave to the Nation and the World undying proof that Americans of African descent possess the pride, courage and devotion of the patriot soldier.” Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
IN THE DAYS SURROUNDING THE EVENT, BOSTON NEWSPAPERS AGAIN recounted the details of the assault on Wagner. But within one year, after Congress declared war with Spain over Cuba, it was as almost as if white Americans had to be reminded once more of black valor during the previous conflict. In a replay of 1863, only Massachusetts and Ohio urged black men to enlist, while New York State, fumed one black journalist, took the position that “its Afro-Americans have no place in the national guard, or in politics, or in almost anything else.” In Mobile, Alabama, white soldiers “tried to lynch a Negro in their camp.” As the editor of the black-owned Cleveland Gazette wondered, why must the nation be crippled by these old divisions when it should be fighting as a united country? “In our civil war 186,000 colored troops were enlisted,” the editor wrote, “and the conduct of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts at the assault upon Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, proved that the Negro, well led, makes a heroic soldier.”16
The need to remind the nation that black soldiers fought to end slavery—and indeed, that slavery had caused the bloody conflict in the first place—became more pressing still in 1913 as the fiftieth anniversary of both Gettysburg and Wagner arrived. Aged white veterans from both sides gathered at Gettysburg, symbolically shaking hands across the low stone wall that marked the furthest point of the Confederate advance on the battle’s third day. Black soldiers, by comparison, had little interest in gestures that erased the abolitionist nature of the Massachusetts regiments or ignored Confederate atrocities. Banner headlines in black newspapers repeated that Shaw was “Buried with His Niggers,” and blacks in Indianapolis named a public school in Shaw’s honor, placing a large tablet above the main door “showing in relief the intrepid colonel leading America’s dusky sons against the bonds of humankind.” While only a small number of veterans of the three units remained alive in 1913, those who could do so again met that August in Faneuil Hall, where they heard former state attorney general Albert Pillsbury recount for the audience that during the war black soldiers had not waited for whites to grant them their rights but had seized the opportunity to assert their manhood and citizenship. “When you are fit to have your rights you will take them,” Pillsbury shouted, “and until you take them you are not fit to have them.”17
Within the year, the Great War was upon Europe, and even as Americans hoped to stay out of the conflict they once more debated the proper role of black men in the military. In 1863, some conservatives had argued that African Americans would not make for proficient combatants, while others worried, correctly, that black veterans would leverage their service into demands for political rights. By 1915, any white politician who questioned the former was sure to be reminded of Wagner, but few Democrats anywhere in the nation—and certainly not President Woodrow Wilson—cared to advance the cause of civil rights. The sons of deceased veterans, such as Salem Whitney, whose father had died during the siege at Wagner, gave interviews in which they expressed their willingness to serve. One speaker at Savannah’s “Emancipation Celebration” noted that when Abraham Lincoln had finally turned to “the young men of our race,” black soldiers had “flocked to the Fifty-fourth,” even from those states that refused them the vote. Boston activists, including William Monroe Trotter, attempted to ban showings of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation by pointing out the problem of showing a film that demeaned black soldiers in the city that had erected a memorial to “a white officer who lost his life while leading a Negro regiment.”18
After a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland in May 1915, Americans assumed that a congressional declaration of war would be imminent. The War Department worked to discourage black enlistments, and one governor announced it folly to train black men at Southern camps. Black editors responded by wondering how the army could reach its stated quota if “the sign is up, ‘No colored man wanted.’” When the “Fifty-fourth Massachusetts stormed Fort Wagner in ’63 it established for all time the fact that the colored soldier could fight and fight well,” the Washington Bee and the Trenton Evening Times editorialized. A black regiment “planted its blood-stained banner on the ramparts of Fort Wagner,” observed another editor.19
After Congress declared war in April 1917, there were roughly 10,000 black regulars in the army, including two cavalry regiments and two infantry units, all of them led by white officers. The newly created Selective Service system drafted more than 370,000 African Americans. But when it became clear that the Wilson administration intended to employ them only in labor battalions or as cooks and stevedores, black activists returned to the legacy of the Fifty-fourth. In view of the policy that “white soldiers and negroes in the National Army cannot mingle” with one another, Cyrus Adams, the editor of the St. Paul Western Appeal, reminded his readers that “the gallant Colonel Rob Shaw” was buried beside his men. Black soldiers were good for more than working with picks and shovels, Benjamin Turner insisted in a New Jersey newspaper, adding: “I will only need to remind you of his actions around such places at Fort Wagner.” As in the past, most of the editorials that alluded to Wagner were printed in the Northern press, but a handful of courageous black editors in Georgia and Mississippi bluntly noted that during a time when white Southerners fought against the United States, “black soldiers fought and died for the Union at Fort Wagner.” The Omaha World Herald published an essay on “Traditions of Our Negro Soldiers,” recounting the history from “Peter Salem at Bunker Hill [to] Carney at Fort Wagner,” while the Cleveland Plain Dealer claimed that the assault on Wagner “set the standard for the new negro division—or divisions.” Chicago’s Broad Ax guessed that half a million black men would serve “before this world’s war is over [and] will outshine his glory at Fort Wagner.” Hoping to drive home the point about black courage, the GAR post in New Bedford changed its name to the Sergt. William H. Carney Camp. In the end, roughly 380,000 black men served in the war, a higher number than during the Civil War, although only 42,000 saw combat.20
As always, white conservatives feared that black veterans would expect political rights in exchange for their sacrifice, as had men like Swails and Vogelsang in earlier years, and they responded to the modest gains registered by black activists during the war years with race riots in Omaha, Chicago, and Tulsa. At the same time, Southern whites increasingly lost interest in festivities honoring national reconciliation, such as the anniversary celebration in Gettysburg in 1913, and instead began to emphasize their Civil War–era victories over those black soldiers who had stood with the United States. In August 1917, white Floridians celebrated the “Battle of Ocean Pond,” as they called the battle at Olustee Junction. During the previous month, whites from Georgia and South Carolina converged on Morris Island to commemorate the “Repulse of the Federal troops in their assault on Fort Wagner.”21
Black journalists and their progressive white allies were quick to respond. On the 115th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, William Monroe Trotter, together with a Shaw descendant and the National Equal Rights League, called for a “nation-wide observance” dedicated to the “spirit of Douglass’ efforts for his race and rights.” Designed to advance specific reform measures, the group suggested that three days be set aside to mark the history of the struggle, with one of them being “Fort Wagner [Day] July 18.” Each July, black-owned newspapers retold the story of how the Fifty-fourth “stood like heroes in the midst of carnage and evoked from their superiors the heartiest thanks for their courage.” In 1925, the year when as many as 60,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched from the White House to the Capitol, veterans in Norfolk erected a large granite column topped by a statue of the young William Carney, Virginia’s most decorated black soldier. Placed in the black section of the segregated West Point Cemetery, the monument’s base contained a number of marble plates bearing the names of black Virginians who had perished on behalf of their country.22
Black Americans never forgot the heroism of the Fifty-fourth. In this photograph, “Black Family by Fireplace,” from his 1920 series “Southern Negroes,” photographer Lewis Hine captured the image of a well-dressed, middle-class Georgia couple reading to their daughters. Above the mantelpiece is a Curtis and Cameron print of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, black Americans once more prepared to fight for a country that refused them equal rights or decent housing and that, in some parts of the nation, restricted their right to register and vote. Correctly worried that once again Washington intended black men for little more than service regiments, black editors as far west as Los Angeles reminded readers of the now-thirty-one black Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, starting with “Sgt. William H. Carney.” At this point, no veterans of the regiments remained alive. The last two survivors were Eli Biddle and Ira Waterman. Biddle had been a seventeen-year-old painter when he signed on in Boston. Wounded at Wagner, he became a Methodist preacher after the war and died in Boston in 1940 at ninety-four. Waterman was a nineteen-year-old Sheffield farmer when he enlisted in the fall after Wagner. He died at the age of ninety-seven on July 31, five months before America’s entrance into World War II.23
With more than 125,000 African Americans serving overseas in that war, the old question—which white Americans seemingly wished to revisit with every conflict—of whether blacks would make effective combatants appeared at last resolved. But they had fought in segregated units, as they had in every campaign since the spring of 1863. The promotions of Swails and Vogelsang into the ranks of commissioned officers, as controversial as that had been, had not signaled an end to racial barriers in the U.S. Army, since nobody in the War Department ever expected them to lead white troops—with one exception. General William Birney, the son of slaveholder-turned-abolitionist James G. Birney, had published a lengthy editorial in the Liberator in early 1865 insisting that the “best way to put an end to [racism] is to unite men of different colors in the same grand emotions of patriotism.” Having seen action at Chancellorsville, Birney had transferred to the Twenty-second USCT in South Carolina. To employ black officers only in black regiments, Birney concluded, would merely “deepen and strengthen the guilty prejudice now existing.” The white officers who had served with him in the Twenty-second, he observed, had learned to put aside “their former bitter prejudice.” At the very least, Birney hoped, if the army had to remain segregated, “let there be a black regiment in each brigade,” so that soldiers might learn to fight alongside those of a different race. Although Birney was admittedly a man of solid antislavery credentials, his editorial was an indication of how rapidly Northern opinion had shifted on black soldiers. But two months later the war ended, and with it any possible move toward military desegregation.24
If none of the soldiers of the three pioneering black regiments lived long enough to see an integrated military, that did not stop activists from invoking their memory. In 1943 the previously all-white Marine Corps began accepting black recruits, and during that same year the War Department mandated that black officers be trained in integrated facilities. The black press continued to push for more. “Between the years 1863 and 1926,” observed the black-owned Los Angeles Tribune, “soldiers serving in all-Negro outfits were awarded 31 Congressional Medals of Honor,” dating back to the “54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry” and their “gallantry at Fort Wagner.” At the war’s end, labor leader A. Philip Randolph urged President Harry Truman to issue an executive order desegregating the U.S. armed forces, as a draft bill for military integration had stalled in Congress. Eighty-three years after Birney’s editorial, Truman at last decided the time had arrived. In Executive Order 9981, he observed that it was “essential that there be maintained in the armed services of the United States the highest standards of democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country’s defense.” The black soldiers who had refused racially based pay and demanded the right to rise in the officer corps could not have said it better.25
A CENTURY AND A HALF AFTER THE THREE REGIMENTS WERE MUSTERED out, the meaning of the war remains disputed, at least among the general public. So too does the legacy of the black units. In 2014, during the bicentennial of the February 1864 Battle of Olustee, the Florida chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans requested that the National Park Service (NPS) permit a monument to soldiers from the Fifty-fourth to stand beside the 1912 obelisk erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy. NPS officials agreed and began to conduct hearings. The idea was condemned by the Sons of the Confederacy, and especially by Republican state assemblyman Dennis Baxley, who fretted that a marker honoring those black soldiers who fought in Florida to preserve the United States constituted “revisionist history.” Michael Givens, the commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, added that a second marker “will disrupt the hallowed grown [sic] where Southern blood was spilled in defense of Florida,” a statement that ignored the complicated truth that North Carolina native James Henry Gooding, who was shot at Olustee, also shed “Southern blood” on that landscape. The issue remains unresolved.26
Just over a year later, on June 17, 2015, a white vigilante opened fire in Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME Church, killing nine congregants who had gathered for bible study and prayer. The killer had photographed himself holding a Confederate flag, and the murders set off another round of debates about the banner’s meaning. As Confederate flags began to come down across the South, Bostonians awoke on Monday, June 29, to find a Confederate battle flag hanging from the tip of Rob Shaw’s sword on the Saint-Gaudens memorial. Passersby attempted to pull down the flag but only managed to shred it; a visitor from Lowell succeeded in untying it just before police arrived. “Such an expression of hate is not acceptable,” one Bostonian complained. “Obviously it’s pretty upsetting to see,” observed another. “When somebody puts something in a spot like that, obviously they are trying to send a message, and it’s an upsetting message.”27
Silent and resolute, the bronze soldiers and the young colonel on horse-back take no notice. They have seen worse, from the racism of the antebellum home front through the hard fighting of the war and into the dark days of Reconstruction-era Klan vigilantism. They stare straight ahead and continue their long march into history.