WEARY AFTER THE LONG MARCH, THE BLACK INFANTRYMEN FELL to their knees, dropping their muskets and pulling off their heavy gear. Their white colonel, twenty-eight-year-old Alfred Hartwell, a Massachusetts native and a Harvard man, consulted his hand-drawn map and guessed them to be on the outskirts of Pineville, a South Carolina village of roughly 100 buildings. That morning, April 3, 1865, Hartwell had received orders to take a detachment of the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth Volunteer Infantry Regiment and head upland toward Lake Moultrie in search of Confederate cavalry. After firing a few shots at a mounted party riding in advance of Hartwell’s infantry, the Confederates vanished, but not before lynching a number of runaway slaves they found hiding in a swamp. The discovery of the bodies brought the soldiers to their feet, and by the time they reached the gates of a plantation owned by Charles Porcher, the company was in no mood to be charitable to those yet loyal to the collapsing Confederacy. A former captain in his regiment’s sister unit, the Fifty-fourth, Hartwell was experienced enough to appease his revenge-minded soldiers by arresting the sixty-three-year-old Porcher, whom he denounced as “an original and most decided rebel,” while his men fanned out to inform Porcher’s human property of their freedom. One officer demanded to know whether Porcher was hiding “any wine in his cellars,” and after the unrepentant slaveholder lied to the unit—the wines were found in his attic—the soldiers and Porcher’s newly freed slaves helped themselves to the bottles; “one or the other” group, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fox later admitted, “while in liquor,” set fire to Porcher’s house and outbuildings.1
Although Hartwell’s orders merely called for the Fifty-fifth to search for remaining Confederate forces in the interior, the black soldiers gloried in serving the cause of liberation. Months before, Sergeant James Monroe Trotter had observed that “we found the old system of slavery in full operations as it had always been.” As they overran Carolina plantations Hartwell demanded that soon-to-be former masters “blow their horns, to summon the slaves from their work up to the house.” An officer—typically a black sergeant—then made a speech, “informing them they were free.” There was “joy on those plantations, I need not tell you,” Lieutenant George Garrison informed his father, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Trotter would explain to the freedpeople that they could leave for Charleston if they wished, but that if they planned to remain on the estate, the army would assist in drawing up “a written agreement to compensate for labor done.” A former slave himself, Trotter remarked that “the former slaveholders wince under this new order of things. It seems to hurt them sorely—having to treat as intelligent free men and women [those whom] they have tyrannized over with impunity.” Trotter was not much surprised that the planters he dealt with were respectful “and were very skillful in concealing whatever bitterness they may have felt when seeing a ‘nigger’ with shoulder straps.” The black sergeant could laugh at this, but only because he wore “a good Colt revolver” on his hip.2
Having taught school in the Midwest before the war, Trotter understood all too well that it was not just Southern whites who despised the idea of a black man with stripes on his uniform, or even a black man in uniform. For two years, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth—and now the first Northern black cavalry regiment, the Massachusetts Fifth—had battled Northern racism when not assaulting impregnable Confederate fortifications. The nearly 5,000 men who served in the three regiments recognized that the problems facing the nation were not all the result of secession. Most of the recruits hailed from states that denied them the right to vote, banned their children from public schools, and allowed thugs to beat them when they boarded streetcars and trains. Trotter and his fellows had signed on to crush the Confederacy and put an end to the enslavement of 4 million blacks, but also to win for themselves the full rights and privileges of American citizens.
THOSE WHO ENLISTED IN EARLY 1863 UNDERSTOOD THAT IT WAS BY no means certain that their sacrifice would convince white Americans to accept their claims. A good many Northern freemen had fathers or uncles who had served in previous wars. Roughly 5,000 black men had joined the Patriots during the Revolution, but significantly, those soldiers disproportionately hailed from those New England states that were home to few African Americans overall. (Another 15,000 Africans and African Americans, mostly from the South, sided with the Loyalists as the best path to freedom.) Only Massachusetts permitted slaves to volunteer in exchange for their freedom, and many, such as Peter Salem, fought at both Concord and Bunker Hill. Several other Northern states allowed bondmen to enlist as substitutes for their masters, which typically resulted in freedom—provided they survived the fighting. Black veterans had prayed that the Revolution might offer not merely new opportunities for freedom but also full participation in the new political order. When Massachusetts crafted its new state constitution in 1780—even before slavery was abolished in the state—it rewarded black veterans by allowing all freedmen the right to vote. Slavery in the North collapsed fastest in those states that had lower proportions of blacks, but also in those that had high numbers of black veterans, who often returned from the war armed and prepared to liberate wives and children and to sue for political rights when necessary. Now their sons hoped to force an unwilling nation to finally recognize those rights.3
Because of that recent history, from the moment the first black man enlisted, Northern Democrats feared the obvious connection between military service and future demands for federal citizenship. “The only motive for adopting the black soldier system was the fanatical idea of negro equality,” fumed a New York publisher, “and the determination of the radicals to do everything possible to raise the negro to the social and political level of the white.” Despite disastrous setbacks for the U.S. Army at both battles of Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, and again in December 1862 at Fredericksburg, most Democrats appeared to prefer an endless bloodbath to the prospect of black voting rights. So worried was the Lincoln administration about appeasing Northern racists that it was not until the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863 that his War Department permitted Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew to begin raising black regiments. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke across the North in favor of Andrew’s proposal, the vitriol reached ugly new lows. “Fred Douglass sounds the war cry to the darkeys of New York,” sneered a Cleveland editor. “Let us imagine Fred standing on an eminence near Rochester, a perfume bottle in one hand,” speaking to the black recruits, as “the swords of the charcoal officers protrude between their legs like monkey’s tails.” That Douglass, born a slave in Maryland, had become a respected, elegantly dressed, and eloquent antislavery orator clearly outraged the Ohio publisher, but perhaps his real fear was that black soldiers would aim “their muskets North, South, East and West” and not merely at the Confederate military.4
The theory that black soldiers and veterans could not be adequately controlled by white officers was also raised on Capitol Hill, especially by politicians from the border slave states that had not seceded. “You put one white man to command a thousand negroes at the South,” charged Kentucky congressman John J. Crittenden, but “will he restrain them? Will it not result in servile war?” The aged Crittenden, a former senator and attorney general who had condemned the Emancipation Proclamation, had sons fighting for both the U.S. and the Confederacy. His son Thomas Crittenden, despite remaining loyal to the Union, had owned eleven slaves in 1860, and the congressman hoped to end the war with the smallest possible modification of white supremacy.5
In contradiction with the notion that black males, if provided with a rifle, would wage a war of racial extermination against all whites regardless of region, other critics insisted that African Americans were too cowardly to make effective soldiers. When James Grace, a recruiting officer for the Fifty-fourth Infantry, attempted to promote the regiment in New Bedford, the city’s “rougher element” jeered him, laughing that “he thinks the negroes will fight!” The whaling town was renowned as a safe haven for runaway slaves, yet even there whites assured Grace that “they will turn and run at the first sight of the enemy.” One Manhattan journalist added that while black soldiers would respond when faced with Confederate bayonets, just “as the most timid animal might fight in a corner,” all “sensible” people agreed that “fifty thousand white men are worth more to any army than five hundred thousand negroes.” Even many Southern whites, despite long memories of Nat Turner’s fiery 1831 rebellion, claimed—or at least pretended to claim—that they had nothing to fear from black soldiers. “Cuffee won’t fight,” North Carolina’s Catherine Edmondston maintained. “He is afraid of cold iron & shot terrifies him.” Such bravado conceivably reflected efforts to bury fears that their own bondmen yearned to take up arms against them, but in early 1863 it was widespread enough to suggest that most Southern whites were unconcerned about the prospect. When told that the North was considering black recruits, Confederate War Department clerk John B. Jones merely shrugged, confident that black men would promptly flee the battlefield and “we shall get their arms.”6
Still other Northerners feared that the morale of white soldiers, already low after the failed invasions of the South in the fall and winter, would suffer further from having to serve beside black men. Speaking before the House of Representatives in early February 1863, Congressman William Allen of Ohio worried that “no negroes in the free States will offer their services to these new regiments,” and so the Lincoln administration would be forced to rely on the fugitive slaves already crowding into Washington and Baltimore. The “soldiers now in the Army will never submit to this,” Allen warned. “They will leave the Army as rats desert a sinking ship.” Certainly no “high-minded” whites would consent to serve as officers of black units, he sneered; the entire proposition was “absurd and ridiculous.” No less than General John A. Dix, a New York free-soiler, cautioned Governor Andrew that white soldiers might regard black regiments as insulting to their manhood. If “the twenty millions of white males” in the North could not subdue a far smaller number of Confederates, he counseled, then the rebellion “would never be suppressed,” and the use of Northern freemen or Southern runaways “would prove utterly fallacious.”7
Initially, at least, such fears proved justified. A good number of soldiers complained to their officers, their parents, and their congressmen about what they regarded as the radical transformation taking place in the Union’s war aims. Previously, Lincoln had waged a war for reunion only, but as of the first day of 1863 the administration championed black freedom as well. “I can tell you we don’t think mutch of [the Proclamation] hear in the army,” groused Ohio private Chauncey Welton, “for we did not enlist to fight for the negro.” Now that the War Department had taken the next logical step and was considering Governor Andrew’s request, Welton reported, “men are deserting evry day from our regment.” Private James Brewer, although he endorsed emancipation as a military tactic, wrote that he was “awfull mad about Negroe arming,” which he dismissed as “a burlesk on the white man’s Soldiering.” Quite possibly, Welton’s and Brewer’s grammatical shortcomings hinted at the concern of many middle-and working-class whites that liberation might lead to an African American exodus out of the South and so pose economic competition for white veterans across the North. “Is there a member here who dare say that Ohio troops will fight successfully or fight at all,” Congressman Samuel Cox queried the House, “if the result shall be the flight and movement of the black race by millions northward to their own State?”8
On occasion, the racist fears of Northern Democrats were founded on even less convincing rationales. The Chicago Times charged that with Congress preparing to institute a draft, Andrew’s request to raise black regiments was merely a way for its white residents to avoid military service. Massachusetts “mainly provoked the war,” the Times alleged, and was “instrumental in converting it into a negro emancipation crusade,” yet now Andrew planned to entice black men from the free states to complete “her quota” while its wealthy white men “will purchase their exemptions.” Not to be outdone, Kentucky’s Garrett Davis rose in the Senate to suggest that as New England was home to so few black men, it would have to resort to reopening the Atlantic slave trade to fill the regiments. The strangest allegations appeared in the pages of the Detroit Free Press. Fearful that Lincoln might lose his reelection bid in 1864, its editor insisted, Republicans in Congress contrived to “surround [Lincoln] with nigger soldiers; to take control of the militia from the States, and confer it absolutely upon him.” Once the black soldiers supported Lincoln’s dictatorship with “bayonets,” the president intended to “clothe him[self] with power to suspend habeas corpus whenever he pleases” and to “subjugate and eliminate the local banks.”9
Fearing that their moment of opportunity might be lost, black activists and abolitionists picked up their pens in response to the lengthy list of white fears and accusations. Among the most eloquent was twenty-four-year-old James Henry Gooding, a North Carolina–born slave turned Massachusetts mariner. President Lincoln had called for the end of slavery in his Proclamation, Gooding wrote in the New Bedford Mercury in the spring of 1863, but it “depends on the free black men of the North, whether it will die or not.” Without the help of African Americans, Gooding feared, the war might well be lost. But even if the United States proved victorious and only white men served, “language cannot depict the indignity, the scorn, and perhaps violence, that will be heaped upon us.” Black men had to take the lead in killing slavery. “Now is the time to act,” he concluded. Gooding would be among the first to enlist in the Fifty-fourth.10
In early 1863, virtually all Americans—white and black, Confederate and Unionist, Republican and Democrat—understood that the three black regiments were to serve as a test case. Irregular efforts were then under way in Kansas and along the Carolina coast to arm blacks, but those actions were far from the public’s gaze and largely unwelcome to the War Department. Instead, the eyes of the United States were on Massachusetts. Should its soldiers succeed and fight brilliantly, that would open the door for other Northern states to begin recruiting African Americans and for the federal government to place blue uniforms on runaways and refugees in Washington and the border states. Should they live down to the dismal expectations of conservative Democrats, white soldiers, and more than a few moderate Republicans, that performance would not only put an end to the experiment but set off repercussions for American society for generations to come.
THE STORY OF THE FIFTY-FOURTH, OR AT LEAST THE FIRST FEW months of its history, has appeared in fiction and film, from Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband,” a short story first published in late 1863, to the 1989 movie Glory. Because Bob, Alcott’s fictional former slave, dies at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, in the regiment’s second battle, her story concludes just as later recruits such as Trotter were arriving at Readville, Massachusetts, the site of the regiment’s training. Alcott’s tale might have formed the basis for the pervasive misconception that the saga of the earliest black troops ended only six months after enlistments first began. Glory adheres to that truncated narrative, suggesting that the history of the Fifty-fourth concluded that July night on the parapets of Fort Wagner. Of the six main characters in the film, only Robert Gould Shaw actually existed. The other five are either composite characters or are so loosely based on real soldiers that the screenwriter gave them fictional names. Men who played central roles in the regiments, such as Frederick Douglass’s sons Lewis and Charles, earn not so much as a cameo appearance. In reality, while the assault on Wagner was a defining moment, a majority of the regiment fought on until the end of the war and even served as an occupying force in Charleston until the fall of 1865. Having enlisted less to preserve the Union than to win the peace, the men of the Fifty-fourth fought on in the years after Appomattox, either by renewing their prewar activism or by going into politics and serving in Southern state assemblies.
Curiously, although black soldiers in the Union army have been the subject of numerous studies, no complete history of the three Massachusetts regiments exists. There are two accounts of the months leading up to the battle on Morris Island, where Fort Wagner stood, but both are outdated, in more senses than one. Above all, both focus on Robert Gould Shaw at the expense of the black men who served under him. Neither book says anything about the volunteers who later transferred into or enlisted in its sister infantry and cavalry regiments. Many other books have chronicled why soldiers fought in this conflict, but they invariably focus on the white combatants; for white Northern soldiers, at least, their most powerful motivation was the salvation of the Union. By comparison, the soldiers described in this volume enlisted to assert their claim, and that of their race, to state and federal citizenship. Others sought to demonstrate their manhood and sense of self-worth, while still others—especially those in the Fifth Cavalry—hoped to march back into their native South and liberate those loved ones they had left behind.
This book tells the story of these three interconnected regiments by following the lives and careers of a small number of soldiers. Some had been born into slavery, and others were sons of privilege. Most survived the conflict, and some did not. Although no account set during the turbulent Civil War era can ignore decisions made by presidents and congressmen and generals, my focus is on these individual officers, infantrymen, and cavalrymen. Their saga began well before the guns of Sumter, continued into the battles of the Reconstruction era, and even stretched into the first decades of the twentieth century. History told from the top down tells us much about why the Civil War came to be. But the story of these fourteen men tells us instead just what the war was like, particularly for those soldiers who embraced black liberation as their paramount goal, sought to transform a white man’s war into a revolutionary struggle for freedom, and then ventured their lives on the battlefield in pursuit of that dream.