Dissection Articles On Blacks And The Civil War

Article 14

THE JACKSONVILLE MUTINY

B. Kevin Bennett

AT 1200 HOURS on December 1, 1865, six soldiers from the 3d United States Colored Troops (USCT) were led from the guardhouse at Fort Clinch, Fernandina, Florida, and executed by a firing squad drawn from white troops at the garrison. The six soldiers, privates David Craig, Joseph Green, James Allen, Jacob Plowden, Joseph Nathaniel, and Thomas Howard, were executed for mutiny, the last ser- vicemen in the American armed forces to be executed for this offense.! Inasmuch as the Civil War period marked the first time in American history that blacks served in the military in appreciable numbers, the Jacksonville Mutiny is a tragic but instructive beginning milestone from which the progress of the black soldier within the military justice system can be measured. As a result of large scale operations and resultant massive casualties, the Civil War created a manpower crisis, which in turn led to the enlistment of large numbers of blacks into the Federal military and naval services. Free blacks served in a limited capacity in the Revolution and War of 1812, their participation limited by the relatively small number of free blacks (and by the prejudices of society). The Civil War, however, was the first real opportunity for blacks to join organized military units and to strike a blow for the freedom and status of their race. Recruitment for the military was spurred on by the exhortations of black leaders like Frederick Douglass, who declared, “let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship.” In

1 In 1882, three Indian Scouts (Sgt. Jim Dandy, Corp. Skippy, and Sgt. Dead Shot). who were attached to the 6th U.S. Cavalry, were executed on the charge of mutiny. These individuals were in ao auxiliary status as scouts, and the offense for which they were convicted should have been charged as murder. These scouts joined with a party of hostile Indians in a firefight that resulted in the death of an officer and six soldiers. See General Court Martial Order 12 of 1882.

From Civil War History, Vol. 38, No.1, 1992, pp. 39-50. © 1992 by The Kent State University Press. Reprinted by permission. 85

 

 

4 .:. THE CIVil WAR: Civil War Period

response, bl~cks turned out in large numbers. By the end of the war, over two hundred thousand had joined the Union anny and navy.:!

One of the earliest units formed was the 3d user, which was organized at Camp William Penn near Philadelphia in July 1863. Comprised of escaped slaves and freedmen from the various northern states, it was, like all black units, officered by whites.) Mtcr a brief period of basic training, the regiment embarked in August 1363 for Mor~ ris Island, South Carolina, where it served in the trenches before Fort Wagner (a cam- paign recently made famous by the movie Glory). Having suffered substantial casual- ties during this campaign, the regiment was transferred in February 1864 to Jacksonville, Florida, which was occupied by Union forces. From then unlil the end of the ‘war the men served on outpost duty, continually fighting skirmishes and mounting raids and expeditions into the Confederate-held inte- rior of the state. After the cessation of hostili- ties, the regiment continued to be stationed in Florida on occupation duty. Assigned the unenviable chore of trying to reestablish and uphold federal authority in a hostile environ- ment. the soldiers of the 3d user found the duty marked with endless hours of boredom and frustration. In the absence of the excite- ment and Challenge of combat. many of the soldiers turned to alcohol and chafed under the continuing restrictions of military disci- pline.

Commanding the regiment was twenty- three-year-old Lt. Col. John L. Brower. a na- tive of New York City. Unlike most white officers assigned to black regiments, Brower had no previous enlisted military experience when he obtained a direct commission as a captain in August 1863. Rather, it appears that he obtained his commission through po- litical connections. Brower had only recently been promoted. assuming command on Sep- tember 12, 1865, when the former regimen- tal commander, Colonel Bardwell, was promoted to the position of military district commander.4 Unfortunately for the enlisted rank and file, it appears that in addition to his inexperience, Brower was something of a martinet. Despite the fact that the 3d user had served honorably as a combat regiment and was shortly due to muster out. Brower was determined not to slacken military dis-

cipline. While strictness and control were necessary to keep troops in line during bat- tle, this inflexible discipline only served to exacerbate an already strained relationship between most of the officers and the enlisted men of the 3d UScT. lndications of this dis- conlent was evidenced in a “letter to the edi- tor” from a black soldier to a black religious publication. Decrying the contemptuous and canous treatment of black laundresses and camp followers by white officers of the 3d USCT, he noted, “We have a set of officers here who apparently think that their commis- sions are licenses to debauch and mingle with deluded freewomen under cover of darkness. The conduct of these officers is such that their presence among us is loath- some in the extreme.”s

For their part, _ the officers were conR cerned about the growing insubordination and drunkenness of troops. While willing to serve in black regiments despite the negative connotations attached to such an assignment, the officers were by and large a cross section of the society from which they were drawn. While they may have desired the abolition of slavery and respected the fighting quali- ties of their black troops, rare indeed was the individual officer untainted by some form of racism. From letters and journals it seems that most white officers considered blacks just o.ne step removed from barbaR rism. As recent descendants of primitive peo- ples, black soldiers, so their officers felt, lacked self-control and discipline. “The Ne- gro is very fanciful and instable in disposi R tion.” stated one officer. White officers greatly feared that their troops could go wild and riot at any time.6 Just as the fear of brutal violence in slave revolts terrified Southern- ers, so too it made the Northern while offi- cers uneasy with the possibility of anned mutiny. One officer in a black regiment wrote his wife, ‘”I do nol believe we can keep the Negroes from murdering everything they come to once they have been exposed to bat- tle:’1 Additionally, it seems that some offi- cers were at a loss on how to teach and administer diSCipline to their troops. As one enlightened regimental commander pointed out, “Inexperienced officers often assumed that because these men had been slaves be- fore enlistment, they would bear to be treated as such afterwards. Experience proved to the contrary. Any punishment re-

,’it: sembling that meted out by overseers caused :0; irreparable damage.”s Given the volatile en. “~~~ vironment that existed within the regiment, ‘;-0

-::’,\” it did not require much for the long-simmer. ing discontent to explode into confrontation. The incident providing the spark occurred on .;r Sunday, October 29. 1865, two days before ::~ the regiment was to be mustered out. X;’

From the testimony recorded in various ~il, court-martial transcripts, it appears that dur • .):~ ing the midmorning hours of Sunday, OCtOR ber 29, an unnamed black soldier was apprehended while attempting to pilfer mOR 8′ lasses from the unit kitchen. The arresting :’.:~ officer was Lieutenant Greybill, who was !i acting as Officer of the Day. GreybiIl then “j; undertook to puniSh the soldier by having “;{:: him tied up by his thumbs in the open regi_ “:~;’ mental parade ground.” When the prisoner -, t resisted the efforts of Greybill and LieulenR *: ant Brown (the regimental adjutant) 10 tie ‘(,: him up, Brower arrived on the scene and the :’ •••.•.• ·.0 •. ~.· ••.. 1·. prisoner was bound “after some difficulty.”‘O .

During the time that the prisoner was be·’ ‘\ ing strung up, a crowd of enlisted men gath. ered and threatened to free him. Pvt. Jacob”: ~;l Plowden, a fortYRfour-year-old fanner slave’:'<~ from Tennessee, began “talking loudly” and: Ii’ disputed the authority of the officers to pun~ “:~ ish a man by tying him up by the thumbS. ‘s Plowden, who was aneged to “have been ,’;;’ considerably in his liquor;’ stated, “it was a.~~1 damn shame for a man to be tied up like ~,;;:l that, white soldiers were not tied up that wa)<h} nor other colored soldiers, only in our regi~ :{;,\;’ ment.” He further announced that “there W3S,;t:,i’ not going to be any more of it, that he would,~~: die on the spot but he would be damned if;~ : he wasn’t the man to cut him down.”11 Plow:”:;)?; den was not alone in his attempts to incite,~; the crowd. Pvt. Jonathan Miller began mov-;~ ing among the crowed, Shouting “Let’s take~sl§ him down, we are not going to have anY’1~1 more of tying men up by the thumbs.”!:! ;:S,~’

According to an eyewitness account byif~( another officer, a group of about 35 unarme~.f~~ enlisted men started advancing toward the;zl three officers and the prisoner. Pvt. Richard~1′ Lee was in the lead, telling the crowd to~1 “Come on. the man has been hanging ther~t~ long enough.” Brower, standing by the sid~’f! of the prisoner, waited until the group wa~~;l within 15 feet. Drawing his revolver, he fircd~; into the crowd. 1\vo of the shots struck PV!lY;; Joseph Green in the elbow and side. and heg

2. Steven A. Channing, Confederate Ordeal (New York: Time-Life Books, 1984), 145. 3 Late in the war, several blacks were commissioned as officers to serve in black regiments. Additionally, several regiments of free blacks raised early in the war by General Butler and Sen. Jim Lane were officered by blacks. These officers, however, were replaced with whites. 4 Military Service Record, John L. Brower, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as NA). 5 RHB to the editor, A. M. E. Tlte Cllristian Recorder, August 6, 1864. 6 Joseph Glatthaar. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1989), 84.

Comer House, 1971). 259. “:;:,ji 9 The punishment of tying up by the thumbs, while not prohibited, was iooke,4d upon with great disfavor by most commanders. A number of departfllCn1a!\1 commanders. had banned the practice at the time of the incident. The puniS.h~:”.i’~ ment caned for the offender to be stripped to the waist and strung up by t1\~ thumbs for several hours so that only his toes were tOUChing the ground. llusf obviously was a painful punishment that could easily result in dislocal,~~~ thumbs. -;T4 10 Transcript of General Court-Martial of Pvt. Richard Lee, 001477, Rec,~~:~ Group 153, NA. ‘.qJi

7 Ibid., 86. 8nlomas W. Higginson.Army Llle ill a BJack Regimellt (Williamstown, Mass.:

11 Transcript of General Court-Martial of Pvt. Jacob Plowden, ibid. ~ IZ Transcript of General Court·Martial of Pvt. Jonathan Miller, ibid. ,~

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iKfell wounded in the parade ground. Pande- t~inonium broke loose, and the crowd rc- ~&cated with a number of soldiers yelling UllOo get your guns, let’s shoot the Son of a h¥Biich.”J) lt~::, :While a number of the soldiers dispersed ~~iuter the firing-some 15 to 20 did, in fact, If,~’,.,ig,’-e”t their weapons and return to the parade ~;arca where they opened fire on Brower and fi’.ther ofj’icers-Dreybill departed the camp !{~1[) obtain assistance from the town, several ~\’sboIS whistling close behind himY The ad- t~’;Julant, Lieutenant Brown, mounted his horse f:;in:nd proceeded to the section of camp where ~’;,:Company K was located. There he attempted ~;}io have the company fall in so as to quell g\ the mutiny_ As the company was forming, ~;’::’5evera1 of the armed mutineers, Privates Har- ~j~y, Howard, and Nathaniel, also arrived in ~i;”the area. Several shots were fired at Brown ~tl””hereon several soldiers forcibly subdued _ti~,Nathaniel and Howard and took their mus- ~~;~kets away. The company by this time was ,%0,;’ gathering about Brown, querying him as to ~~:whal was going on. During this confusion g~;;’Har1ey took Brown’s service revolver from t:t; ,its holster and attempted to take him pris- f}!’:oner. In ~ “!atter of minutes, however, the i\,> noncommissIOned officers of Company K S’ ‘,bad restored order in that area. ls lJ,i,’- At the time Uris was occurring, Lieutenant E (,:’Fenno came out from his quarters to inves- ;L- ligate the firing. He was quickly surrounded I!~ ,

by several enlisted men whom he attempted r to question. He met with curses and “im- E ‘,proper language” from Pvt. Calvin Dowrey. b ‘,Fenno responded by drawing his saber and j): . slashing Dowrey on the left arm, slightly ‘Ii

,~,~,.” .. , wd.oundindg him. Whalile Fcnno’sld~ttentDion was ,,’ ,lstracte by sever other 50 lers, owrey J~;: returned with a fence rail and walloped F Fenno on the right side of the head. While ~\> Fenno was attempting to pick himself off the :–r: ground, another unknown soldier forced him ~~:T down again into the dirt with a buttstroke of rJ:k his muskel TIle soldier with the musket then ir&~~;’ disappeared into the crowd, and several sol- lith:!diers took the fence rail away from k}::k:, Dowrey 16 ~;~’ Me~while, a fairly brisk firefight took t~~:,:place at the regimental parade ground be- ~ji/tween Brower and several of the mutine~rs. ~’;.:;The gunfire abruptly ended after an esti- g~\}:,;,:mated 30-40 shots when Brower’s finger ~~’~fi:,Was shot off. Pvt. Richard Lee, one of the ‘I:, original instigators, yet one who bad not ~;’,~en up anns~ rushed over to Brower and, it~iUl lhe help of several others, escorted him

to the relative safety of the cookhouse. Sev- eral of the mutineers followed dose behind, notably Pvt, James Allen, who yelled, “Let me at him, let me shoot the son of a bitch.”11 Lee tried to ward the pursuers off, warning them to “stop their damn foolishness.”1B As Brower was seeking refuge in the cook- house, Captain Walrath arrived with a num- ber of troops, who disanned the mutineers and quelled the disturbance. Brower then left the cookhouse and started for town, aided by several enlisted soldiers. A number of mutineers who had not been apprehended followed a short distance behind, shouting threats and insults. The mutiny had pretty much spent its force at this point, although Allen did take Captain Parker prisoner, tying him up in the officer’s tent. Colonel Bard- well, the fanner regimental commander, ar- rived as the mutiny was winding down. Inasmuch as Bardwell was wen respected by the troops, he was able to settle the situation, obtain aid for the wounded, and effect the immediate release of Parker.11} With respect to the immediate cause of lhe mutiny, it ap- pears that Pvt. James Thomas took advan- tage of the confusion and worked furiously to release the prisoner; however, just when lIe had succeeded in cutting the post down he was apprehended at gunpoint by Captain Barker.Zll

As was to be expected, fifteen of the sus- pected mutineers were confined, and charges drafted and preferred against them. With a speed that would please many a modem day prosecutor, a convening order was issued on October 30, 1865, with the court-martial scheduled to convene on October 31, 1865. The proceedings were a general court-mar- ‘ tial, composed of seven officers headed by the provost marshal of the 3d USer, Maj. Shennan Conant.ll The accused were all of- fered but declined the assistance of counsel and proceeded to trial representing them- selves. The separate trials began on Oelober 31, 1865, and ran until November 3.

By the time of the Civil War, three kinds of court-martial had evolved in the anny: general, regimental, and garrison. Of those, only a general court-martial could try offi- cers and capital cases, impose sentences of death, dishonorable discharge from the ser- vice, forfeiture of more than three months pay, or any lengthy period of imprison- mentY A general court-martial could be con- vened only by the president, the secretary of war (acting under the order of the president), a general officer commanding an army, or a

14, Jacksonville Mutiny

colonel commanding a separate department. Exceptions made during the Civil War al- lowed the commander of a division or sepa- rate brigade (as was true in this case) to appoint such a court.23

Of the fifteen soldiers who were to stand trial, fourteen were charged with mutiny, a violation of Article 22, Articles of War. Mu- tiny was defined as the unlawful resistance or opposition to superior military authority, with a deliberate purpose to subvert the same or to eject that authority from office.l4 The remaining accused, Pvt. Archibald Roberts, was charged with a violation of Article 99, conduct prejudicial to the good order and military discipline. Roberts did not take part in the actual mutiny but afterwards was over- heard to say, “Lt. Colonel Brower, the God- Damned Son of a Bitch, he shot my cousin. Where is lIe, let me see him.”25

The maximum punishment for mutiny in time of war, rebellion, or insurrection was death by shooting. Unfortunately for the ac- cused, Florida was still considered to be in a state of rebellion, notwithstanding that the last organized Confederate forces had sur- rendered in May 1865. Since a state of rebellion was considered to exist, the court- martial that was convened had the authority to assess a death penalty, and this “state of rebel1ion” status also limited the amount of appellate review that would be afforded to any soldier sentenced to death. In times of peace any death sentence was required to be transmitted to the secretary of war, who would review it and present it to the presi- dent for his consideration along with his rec- ommendation.u If a state of war or rebellion existed, tlIe division or department com- mander had the power to confirm and exe- cute sentences of death. He could, if he so desired, suspend the execution of a death sentence so as to allow review by the presi- dent and the condemned an opportunity to petition for clemency. This suspension and review process Was not required while a “state of rebellion” eKistedY

In regard to the composition of the court- martial, black troops were afforded one ad- vantage in that they were usually tried by officers assigned to black regiments. Al- though not specifically required by regula- tions, the practice was first instituted by Maj. Gen. Benjamin E Butler to shield the black troops from abuse and prejudice?!! While this was obviously a prudent safeguard for the black troops in general, it was of dubious value in a mutiny case such as this where

11 13 lb’d ~:’ ~; T~script of General Court-Martial of PvI. Thomas Howard, ibid. fiR:,: 16 Transcript of General Court·Martial of Pvt. Joseph Nathaniel, ibid. l~:~:\-17 Transcript of General Court·Martial of Pvt. Calvin Dowrey, ibid. ~~\: IB Transcript of General Court·Martial of Pvt. James Allen, ibid. fA$i’:,- 19 Transcripl of General Court-Martial of Pvt. Richard Lee, ibid.

22 Du Chanet. How Soldiers Were Tried, Civil War TImes II1ustrnted, Feb. 1969, p, 11. 23 William Winthrop, Military Law and Precedents (Washington. D.C.: GPO, 1868),79, 24 lbid., 578. 25 General Court·Martial Transcript of Pvt. Archibald Roberts, 001477, RG 153, NA ~t~’ 20 Transcript of General Court·Martial of Pvt. Joseph Green, ibid.

rt~~i 21 Transcript of General Court·Martial of Pvt. James Thomas, ibid. ~f’: 1 Spe:i~l Order 189, District of East Florida, 1st Separate Brigade, Oct 30,

rill,: 865, Ibid,

Rb

26 Du Chanc1. How Soldiers Were Tried, 12. 27 Winthrop, Military Law and Precedents, Article 65, p. 618. 28 Glatthaar, Forged ill Battle, 199.

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4 .:. THE CIVil WAR: Civil War Period

the prosecution witnesses were for the most part offh;ers from the same regiment.

The trial procedure for general court- martinis and utilized in the Jacksonville cases was as follows: first, the judge advo- cate read the order assembling the court and asked the accused jf he had any objections to being tried by any member of the court. Following the negative response received in each case, the judge advDcate administered the oath to each member of the court, and the president administered the oath to the judge advocate. The judge advocate then read the charges, the general nature of the offense, and the specifications. The accused would then entcr his plea of guilty or not guilty. The witnesses for the prosecution were then sworn in and questioned by the judge advocate, the court, and the accused. After all its witnesses bad testified and were cross-examined, the prosecution rested its case. Then the defense witnesses and the ac- cused were sworn in, questioned, and cross- examined. Before the court was closed, the accused had the opportunity to make a state- ment, either oral or in writing. This slate- ment, though not considered evidence, could be considered by the court in its delibera- tions. Mter “having maturely deliberated upon the evidence adduced;’ the court an- nounced its findings, and, if the accused was found guilty, the sentence. Decisions on guilt required only a simple majority; a sentence of death, however, needed a two-thirds majority. The summarized transcript was authenticated by the judge advocate who would then forward the court record to the officer having authority to confirm the sen- tence.:!.9

Once commenced, the Jacksonville trials were carried out with great dispatch. The longest appears to have been four hours in length, the shortest, one hour. Starting with four court-martials on October 31, three were held on November 1, three on Novem- ber 2, and five on November 3. TWenty-two witnesses provided testimony in the various court-martials, the most appearances being logged by Lieutenant Brown, the prosecu- tion’s star witness. Indeed, Brown seems to have possessed an uncanny ability to remem- ber the faces and mutinous acts of quite a number of individuals. From the testimony offered it appeared that he was most eager to provide damning evidence against the various accused. Particularly in the case of Pvt. Joseph Nathaniel, his questionable tes- timony that Nathaniel fired upon him cost Allen any chance of escaping the death pen- alty. The defense strategy, to the extent that

there was one, was first to show that a sol- dier had not taken up anns. If that fact was beyond controverting, then it was crucial to show that he had not fired at the white of- ficers during the mutiny. This act clearly was the dividing line between a death sentence and a lengthy prison tenn. In his testimony, Brown swore that a shot that had whistled over his head came from Nathaniel’s weapon. The two black noncommissioned officers who had apprehended Nathaniel and taken his weapon testified that they had not wit- nessed Nathaniel discharging his musket. Further, they checked his musket for signs of firing and found it capped and loaded.30

Despite the obviously exculpatory nature of this evidence, the court-martial panel either discounted or disregarded it and found Nathaniel guilty of firing at Brown.

Another troubling feature of Brown’s and several other officers’ iestimony WiiS the is- sue of Lt. Colonel Brower firing into the un- armed group of soldiers. During the first few court-martials, all the officers including Brown testified that Brower had fired into the crowd and that the soldiers were un- armed at the time. On the second day of the proceedings, however, Brown asserted that Brower had fired warning shots into the air. Perhaps realizing the inconsistency of this testimony with the wounds suffered by Pri- vate Green, both Brown and GreybiH later claimed that the crowd was anned at the time Brower opened fire. 31

Curious also was the part played by Brower in the court-martials. He testified in only one, that of Pvt. Joseph Green. Brower did not testify about the events leading up to the mutiny, nor did he discuss the specif- ics of his actions or the mutiny. He testified that Green advanced upon him will) a mus- ket and that he had fired to disable Green. Green disputed that account, claiming that he had not taken up anns until after he was shot.3:!. Shortly after testifying, Brower was mustered out and quickly shipped back home to New York City. In light of this, onc cannot help but wonder what transpired be- tween Brower and his superiors in the two days between the mutiny and his mustering out. Considering his incredible overreaction by opening fire combined with his allowing punishments that, while not specifically pro- hibited, were looked upon with great disfa- vor, one has to suspect that lhe command was anxious to be rid of an embarrassment.

Given the expedited nature of the pro- ceedings and the sentences handed down, one might readily conclude that the trials were nothing more than “kangaroo courts.”

Notwithstanding the brevity of the trials the fact that the accused were not sented by counsel, it appears that the dent, Major Conant, endeavored to each accused a full and fair hearing. a fonner noncommissioned officer 39th Massachusetts Volunteers, ~~~~:i:;::~i:l asked questions of the various ‘” an effort to ascertain facts and consistencies. Unfortunately. the same anced approach was lacking from the advocate, Lieutenant Knight. he was required to assist the accused in iting favorable testimony when they represented by counsel, but his were leading and seemed designed to only incriminating evidence.))

When the last court-martial had journed on November 3, thirteen of cused had been found guilty of AilGthcr, Private Roberts, was convicted conduct prejudicial to good order. Only accused, Pvt. Theodore Waters, was tcd of the charge of mutiny. Privates den, Craig, Allen, Howard, Green, Nathaniel were sentenced to execution shooting. Private Dowrey received a tence of fifteen years at hard labor with vates Morie and Harley receiving ten A sentence of two years at hard adjudged against Privates Lee (both and Alexander), Miller, and Thomas. received a relatively light sentence months’ confinement. All received able discharges and total forfeiture of

Upon the conclusion of the trials, mission of mustering out the remainder the regiment was completed. The court cord was authenticated and forwarded for

view on November 10 to thh~e,s~~~~:~~: commander, Maj. Gen. John I viewing the records, Foster declilled ercise any leniency, approving each of guilty and adjudging sentence. ingly, Foster disapproved the findings guilty with respect to Private on the record that there was im;uB5cient C’I dence pli Foster set the execution date cember 1, 1865, between the hours of and 2 P.M. and further designated the of imprisonment as Fort Jefferson, on Dry Tortugas Island in the Florida

The court records of the pnlccediingi were apparently forwarded to the ~U’ ___ c Military Justice in Washington, vember 13, 1865, but no actual of the cases appears to have after the executions. This was eviirlenCl,d the troubling case of Pvt. David of the soldiers sentenced to death.

29 Winthrop, Military Law alld PrecedelllS, Article 65, p. 618. 30 Transcript of General Court-Martial of Pvt. Joseph Nathaniel, 001477, RG 153, NA.

34 General Orders 39, Dept. of Florida, Nov. 13, 1865, 001477, RG 153, 35 Fosler had earlier risen to prominence as an officer in the besieged of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

31 Transcript of General Court~Martial of Pvl. Sam Harley, 001477, RG 153, NA. 32 Transcript of General Court-Martial of Pvt. Joseph Green, ibid. 33 Winthrop, Military Law alld Precedents, Article 35, p. 592.

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36 Transcript of General Court-Martial of Pvt. Thomas Waters, 001477, 153, NA. 37 This wns the same infamous prison where the alleged Lincoln ,onspilcnto~ Dr. Samuel Mudd and Michael Q’Llughlin, were incarcerated.

 

 

r~’ th. ‘ ffi\Ji Craig’s service file is a letter from his ~ster father H. C. Marchand, dated Decem-

~ “~r 10, 1865, to U.S. Sen. Edgar Cowan “.:a:)’requesting that the sentence of execu-

,ion be suspended pending a review and lfiWestigation of the casc. Craig, a twenty- !b\Re:’year-old laborer from Pennsylvania, had ffie’en raised by Marchand. The letter indi- !~lited that Marchand had received correspon- t,leilce lhe previous day from Craig indicating fhjs dilemma and proclaiming his innocence ~{n”.that “he [Craig] had been excused to take ~i~c guns from some of the mutineers and [then was arrested.”3/1 In response to th~ con- fgrCssional inquiry, a telegraph was sent to ~;General Foster to suspend the sentence and hfu “transmit the record [or review. Unfortu- ~~~tely the telegraph and suspension were too ~:1au~ as the executions had been carried out F:”~ine days earlier. Foster replied by telegraph ~:,on’D,ec.ember 16 informing the War Depart- ~:Jncnt of the execution and the fact that the 1” ~fuurt records had been forwarded on No- I:’:~ember 13. There is an additional handwrit- f:!,ten notation on the telegraph: “Senator ~;~£:owan infonned, Dec 20.”39 Apart from the t3:’~iJe5tion of the late delivery of Craig’s letter g\:nnd the belated legal review is the mystery i:t9f what happened to the record of Craig’s ~~~~urt-marital. Among all the records arising r1if!om the Jacksonville Mutiny. his record alone [<:ffias either been lost or destroyed. ~.f{F, Fortunately for the imprisoned soldiers ri}Jhe legal process did not end with the deaths 5f{;;bf their six comrades. In December 1865, a t~:/review of the court-martial records was ac- i%~;’:C?mplished by the judge advocate general of ~*J me army, Joseph Holt. Although his review ~~:’Y.as limited to strictly procedural matters, a [{f1c:~rther review on the merits was conducted ~{i.by’ the Bureau of Military Justice in late [$;::)866, which resulted in the prison sentences ~~iof the surviving mutineers being commuted. ~>:iPvL Jonathan Miller was released in Novem- ~t~:ber 1866, and the others, Privates Calvin ~ .. ~;\i

Dowrey, Marie, Harley, Thomas, and Alex- ander Lee, were discharged in January 1867. Pvt. Richard Lee had previously died from typhoid fever.4U

From that point the lives of the partici- pants in the mutiny slip into obscurity. Of the officers, there remains no further record of Lt. Col. Brower as he failed to file for a pension. Lieutenant Brown returned to Indi- ana, married, and died in 1912.41 Major Conant left active duty immediately after the trials. Interested in promoting the welfare of newly freed blacks, he accepted a position with the Freedman’s Bureau in Florida. He later returned to New England and died in Connecticut in 1924.42 Of the black muti- neers who survived prison, even less is known. Having been dishonorably dis- charged they were ineligible to apply for a military pension, thus no recorded informa· tion is available. About the only postscript is a letter contained within the ilk of Pvt. Jacob Plowden. Dated in 1878, it was written by his brother on behalf of Plowden’s minor son Jesse, attempting to collect any arrears in pay due Plowden.

In light of the severe sentences handed down, it appears that the court-martial failed to consider as mitigating the egregious ac· tions of the commanding officer. By his condoning the use of a disreputable and in- flammatory punishment and in imprudently firing into a group of unanned soldiers, he essentially provoked an armed mutiny from what appeared to be insubordination. While it is perhaps too easy to criticize the com- mander’s actions, less drastic methods could have been used to quell the initial distur- bance. Nor were the harsh sentences meted out that unusual in the context of the black soldier in the Civil War. While blacks com- prised 9 percent of the total manpower in the Union Army, they accounted for just un- der 80 percent of the soldiers executed for the offense of mutiny during the Civil War

14. Jacksonville Mutiny

period. 43 Based upon this statistical data, the appearance of disproportionate punishment and racial bias in mutiny cases is clearly sug- gested. Additionally, one has to question the fairness of these court-martials given their composition, the absence of defense counsel, and the rapid fashion in which they were tried and the sentences carried out. While the concept of due process was not well defined, even by the minimal standards of the time, an element of fairness was lacking.

In reviewing the transcripts and the tes- timony offered, however, there seems to be little doubt that Privates Plowden, Green. Howard, and Allen were among the group of soldiers that took up arms and fired upon their officers. Additionally there was no dis- pute that Privates Nathaniel, Marie, and Al- exander Lee took up anns; however, there was considerable evidence that they did nol fire their weapons. In the case of Lee, which was tbe shorte..<;jt court-martial, the accused merely proffered that he had been drunk dur- ing the mutiny and did not remember a thing. With respect to the cases of privates Harley, Dowrey, Richard Lee, Miller, anrl Thomas, the court was probably justified in finding them guilty of mutiny for their vari- ous acts in inciting, assisting, and attempting to free the prisoner. Likewise there was no dispute that Roberts had uttered the disre- spectful language about Brower in public hearing and was guilty of conduct prejudi- cial to good order. Therefore, with the ex- ception of the unusual case of Craig, it seems likely that the findings of guilty on the charges of mutiny were supported by the evidence.

The Jacksonville Mutiny was a tragedy. Black soldiers had achieved remarkable gains through their noteworthy participa- tion in the Civil War, not the least of which WilS the end of slavery. Their gains in the administration of military justice was less evident.

ij:-:,38 H. C. Marchand to Sen. Edgar Cowan, Dec. 10, 1865, Military Service ~±~q~ecord of PvL David Craig, NA. ~k” Gen. John Foster to Col. J. A. Hardie, Dec. 16, 1865, Military Service it”(~:.~ecord of Pvt. David Craig, NA.

Anny Posts (National Archives Microfilm Publication M617, Roll 542), NA . .11 Military Service Records, Cyrus W. Brown, NA 42 Military Service Records, Sherman Connnt, NA.

It:.” Monlhly Returns from Fort Jeffe~on, Florida, File 10-27·1, Returns from

I ~40. F?Z . .. ,

43 Robert 1. Alotta, eMl War Justice: Union Army Executions under Lincoln (Shippensburg, Penn.: While Mane, 1989), 26.

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Article 15

j

The image of the American Civil War as a ‘white man’s fight’ became the national nann almost as soon as the last shot was fired. Susau-Mary Grant looks at the experience and legacy of the conflict for black Americans.

PruDE AND PREJUDICE

IN THE AMERICAN ! 1 1 I

CIVIL AR

… You can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden. We too have suffered and died in defence of that starry banner which floats only over free men …. I feel assured that the name of the colored soldier will stand out in bold relief among the heroes of this war …. (Henry S. Harmon, 3rd U1Iited States

Colored Infantry, October 1863)

Far better the slow blaze of Learning’s light,

The cool and quiet of her dearer fane, Than this hot terror of a hopeless fight,

This cold endurance of the final pain, Since thou and those who with thee

died for right Have died, the Present teaches, but in

vain! (Pmll Laurence Dunbar, ‘Robert Gould

Sham’)

I n 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very special monument to that War

was erected opposite the Statehouse in Boston. Designed by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it de- picted in· profile the figure of Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-year-old white officer of the North’s showcase black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, leading his men through Boston on their way to South Carolina in 1863. An Un- usual piece of sculpture, Saint-Gaudens had worked hard to avoid representing

the black troops in any kind of stereo- typical manner, portraying them instead as noble patriot soldiers of the American nation. Both in its novelty and in its sen- timent the monument remains impres- sive according to the art critic Robert Hughes, ‘the most intensely felt image of military commemoration made by an American.’

However, the Saint-Gaudens monu- ment in no way reflected the general mood of the American people towards those black troops who had fought in the conflict, as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s response to Shaw’s sacrifice reveals. BetWeen 1863, when Henry Harmon expressed his optimism about history’S treatment of the black soldier, and 1897, the American nation had all but forgotten that black troops had ever played a role in the Civil War. Both Saint-Gaudens and Dunbar were work- ing at a time when segregation was be- ginning to bite in the South with the ‘Jim Crow’ Laws, but the exclusion of black troops from the national memory of the Civil War began long before the 1890s. In the Grand Review of the Armed Forces which followed the ces- sation of hostilities very few blacks were represented. Relegated to the end of the procession in ‘pitch and shovel’ brigades or intended only as a fonn of comic relief, neither the free black sol- dier nor the former slave was accorded his deserved role in this poignant na-

1

J ]

,1

‘i tional pageant. Rather than a war foughtj for liberty, in which the role of the Afd rican-American soldier was pivotal, the’:~ image of the American Civil War as .1 ‘white man’s fight’ became the nornr’J almost as soon as the last shot was’,1 fired. 1

The relationship between the black;! soldier and the ‘land of the free’ has al,;! ways been ambiguous. The involvement;! of black troops in America’s wars fro,riiiJ colonial times onwards followed a d~J~ pressing pattern. Encouraged to enlistin) times of crisis, the African-AmericaJ!~ soldier’S services were clearly unw~~~ come in time of peace. Despite this, ~~1 link between fighting and freedom (ofj Mrican-Americans was forged in t~~~ earliest days of the American nationl~1 and once forged proved resilient. Duri9!:i the colonial era, South Carolina enad~~j legislation that offered freedom to slav~,l in return for their “military services. ~~ the conclusion of the American ReVOlq.,.~.f .• tion military service was regarded ~s,;~ valid and successful method of achte,W~ ing freedom for the slave, as well as, important expression of patriotism ruJr# loyalty to the nation. iPi

It was unsurprising, therefore, t “” when hostilities commenced belW North and South in 1861 blacks tbro out the North, and some in the South t sought to enlist. However, free bl. who responded to Abraham Lineal call for 75,000 volunteers found t

90 This article first appeared in History Toda)~ September 1998, pp. 41-48. © 1998 by History Today, ltd. Reprinted by permission.

 

 

tlleir services were not required by a North in which slavery had been abol- ished but racist assumptions still pre- vailed. Instead they were told that the war was a ‘white man’s fight: and of- fered no role for them. The notable black leader, Frederick Douglass, him- self an escaped slave, summed the mat- ter up:

Colored men were good enough to fight under Washington. TIley are not good enough to fight under McClel- lan. They were good enough to fight under Andrew Jackson. They are not good enough to fight under Gen. Halleck They were good enough to help win American independence but they are not good enough to help pre- serve that independence against trea- son and rebellion.

Douglass further recognised that unless ,the issues of arming free blacks and of freeing the slaves were addressed, the Union stood slim chance of success. The Union, however, showed little sign of heeding his warnings. In the early months of the conflict the Natiollal [Il- telligellcer reinforced the view that the war ‘has no direct relation to slavery. It is a war for the restoration of the Union under the existing constitution: Yet un-

the pressures of conflict it became ~”.’ ‘inClrea:sinlgly difficult to maintain such a

TIlis wa:s particularly true generals in the field who found

dhemsdves having to deal with both the population and a growing

ilj;nlllnber of slaves who, dislocated by the were making their way to Union

(“,;lim,.. Whilst the Federal Government If@. prev”ric:at,:d on the question of anning

for a variety of mainly political reasoDls, the Union generals found them-

with a problem that required ‘IlIUD”diate resolution. Consequently, the

moves towards both anning blacks freeing slaves during the American

War came not from Washington from the front line.

Initial steps in this direction proved though an important precedent

far as the slaves were concerned was early on in the conflict. In 1861 Ben-

A. Butler, in charge of Fortress in Virginia, declared that all

who escaped to Union lines were :On’tra\Jand of war’ and refused to up-

the tenns of the Fugitive Slave which bound him to return to their

Butler’s policy did not have of an impact on attitudes in Wash-

15. Pride and Prejudice in the American Civil War

ington, but it did reinforce the views of those who felt that slavery was of great military use to the Confederacy and ought to be attacked on those grounds alone. In Missouri in 1861, John C. Fre- mont, commander of the Department of . the West, declared all slaves owned by Confederate sympathisers to be free. Lincoln insisted that Fremont modify his announcement to bring it into line with the 1861 Confiscation Act, which removed slaves only from those actively engaged in hostilities against the Union.

In late March 1862, Major General David Hunter, commander of the De- partment of the South, emancipated all slaves held in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, and forced as many escaped male slaves as he could find into mili- tary service. Not only was Hunter’s an- nouncement rejected by Lincoln, but the aggressive manner in which he went about recruiting blacks for the Union army served only to alienate the very people he was attempting to help. Thoma:s Wentworth Higginson, the white officer in charge of what became the First South Carolina Volunteers, was in no doubt that the suspicion his troops expressed towards the Federal Government was the natural legacy of bitter distrust be- queathed by the abortive regiment of General Hunter.’ More successful were the efforts of Jim Lane in Kansa:s. A for- mer US Senator and a brigadier general in the Union army, Lane chose simply to ignore the War Department a:nd raised a black regiment, the First Kansas Col- ored \blunteers, in 1862. This regiment was finally recognised the following year, by which time it had already seen active service against the Confederacy.

Although the War Department sanc- tioned the recruitment of black troops in August 1862, black regiments were not properly raised until after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of Ja:nuary 1st, 1863. The decision came at a time when the war was not going well for the Union, and coincided with the first draft in the North. In some ways this helped. Racist objections to the arming of blacks could easily, if cynically, be countered on the grounds that it was better that a black soldier die tha:n a white one. As John M. Broomall, Congressma:n from Pennsylvania noted:

I have never found the most shaky constituent of mine, who, when he was drafted, refused to let the blackest

negro in the district go as a substitute for him.

Abraham Lincoln acknowledged such sentiments in his famous letter to James Conkling, written in August, 1863, in which he defended his emancipation de- cision. ‘You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem will- ing to fight for you,’ Lincoln noted, ‘but no matter …. I thought that whatever Negroes could be got to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white sol- diers to do, in saving the Union’. He concluded:

.. . there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well.poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great con- summation; while, I fear, there will be some while ones unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, lhey have strove to hinder it.

For many blacks, Lincoln’s latter point was the important one. They were in- itially confident that their acceptance, however reluctantly granted, by the Un- ion army offered them the opportunity both of short-tenn military glory and longer-tenn acceptance into the nation as a whole. Af, Frederick Douglass put it:

Once let the black man get upon his person the br<lss letters US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he ha..<;; earned the right to citizenship in the United Slates.

Corporal James Henry Gooding, a for- mer seaman and volunteer in the Mas- sachusetts 54th, anticipated that ‘if the colored man proves to be as good a sol- dier as it is confidently expected he will, there is a permanent field of employ- ment opened to him, with all the chances of promotion in his favor.’ The First Ar- ka:nsas Colored Regiment had an equally optimistic view of the future. TIley gleefully marched into battle sing- ing, to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’:

We have done with hoeing calion, we have done with hoeing com, We are colored Yankee soldiers, now, as sure as you are born; When the masters hear us yelling, they’U think it’s Gabriel’s honi, As it went sounding 00.

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4 ~ THE CIVIL WAR: Civil War Period

They w~ll have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin, They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith nnd kin, They will have to give us house-room, or the roof shall tumble in! As we go marching on.

Not everyone shared such optimism. One black New Yorker argued that it would be foolish for blacks to heed the Union’s call to arms since the race had no reason ‘to fight under the flag which gives us no protection.’ Initially, this pessimistic view appeared to be the more realistic. The white response to the raising of black regiments was far from positive, and inspired a backlash against the whole idea of emancipation. Not- withstanding racist arguments in favour of blacks ralher than whites being killed, most whites did not believe that blacks would make effective soldiers, seeing them as cannon fodder at best. Attitudes began to change only with the battlefield successes of several of the black regi- ments. Even before its official recogni’:’ tion by the War Department, Jim Lane’s black regiment had performed well in Missouri, prompting one journalist to write that it was ‘useless to talk any more about negro courage. The men fought like tigers, each and every one of them.’ Skirmishes between Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s First South Carolina and the rebels, and between Benjamin Butler’s Second Louisiana Native Guards and Confederate cavalry and infantry regiments were equally de- cisive in terms of proving that the black troops could and would fight, but did little to alter the northern public’s per- ception of the black regiments. The first major engagement for those came in the spring of 1863, with an assault on Port Hudson on the Mississippi in Louisiana. The assault itself was misconceived, and the Union army suffered a defeat, but for the black troops who had fought there Port Hudson proved a turning point of sorts. One lieutenant reported that his company had fought bravely, adding ‘they are mostly contrabands, and I must say I entertained some fears as to their pluck. But I have none now’. The New York Times was similarly im- pressed:

92

Those black soldiers had never before been in any severe engagement. They were comparatively raw troops, and were yet subjected to the most awful ordeal that even veterans ever have to

experience-the charging upon forti- fications through the crash of belching batteries. The men, white or black, who will not flinch from that will flinch from nothing. 1t is no longer possible to doubt the bravery and steadiness of the colored race, when rightly led.

If further proof were required that the black soldier had potential, one of the Civil War’s most bloody engagements, the battle of Milliken’s Bend, fought shortly after the Port Hudson defeat, provided it. Here, too, raw black recruits found themselves facing substantial Confederate forces. In the black units engaged, casualties ran to 35 per cent and for the Ninth Louisiana Infantry alone casualties reached 45 per cent. The cost was high but, as at Port Hud- son, white commanders declared them- selves impressed with the behaviour’ under fire of the black troops. Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of War, concluded that:

The sentiment in regard to the em- ployment of negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent Battle of Miliken’s Bend. Prominent officers, who used in private to sneer at the idea, are now heartily in favor of it.

At the same time as black soldiers were proving their valour on the Mis- sissippi at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend, the North’s most famous black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, was preparing to set off for its first major campaign and a place in the history books. Fort Wagner, on the northern tip of Morris Island in South Carolina, was the main defence both for Char- leston and for Battery Gregg which overlooked the entrance to Charleston Harbour. The taking of the fort would have been a significant prize for the Union forces, enabling them to attack Fort Sumter and hopefully Charleston itself. Originally, the plan had been to use the 54th in a minor supporting role, but its commander, Robert Gould Shaw, recognised the importance of being seen to take an active part in the forthcoming engagement and cam- paigned vigorously for his regiment to be given a more prominent place in the attack. He was successful, and the 54th received orders to head the attack on the fort on July 18th, 1863.

As with Port Hudson, the attack Fort Wagner, one of the most heavily fended of the Confederate doomed to failure, and the sustained heavy casualties. The chusetts 54th lost over half its men, eluding Shaw who was shot through heart as he took the parapet of the His troops held the ground he reached for barely an hour. Yet in more general battle against racism Waguer, like Port Hudson, was a cant success. The New York Tribune minded its readers that:

If this Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hun- dred thousand colored troops for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field .. .. But it did not falter. It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees .. .. To this Mas- sachusetts 54th was set the stupen- dous task to convince the white race that colored troops would fight,-and not only that they would fight, but that they could be made, in every sense of . the word, soldiers.

Thanks in part to the bravery of Massachusetts 54th, therefore, by end of 1863 the Union army had croited some 50,000 cans-both free blacks and slaves-to its ranks. By the end of war this number had risen to anmuldS§ 186,000, of which 134,111 were cruited in the slave states. Afri,:an·,;’ American troops comprised 10 per of the total Union fighting force, some 3,000 of them died on the field plus many more in the nn<m,er war camps, if they made Overal~ one third of all Afric:lO-Anleri-‘j cans who fought were casualties of Civil War.

The propaganda success of the saults on Port Hudson, Milliken’s and Fort Wagner were, however, part of the st9ry as far as the Africanj American troops were concerned. , fact that blacks had shown that theY, could fight in no way diminished ~he prejudice they experienced in the UnIOn army. Nor did it resolve the crux of lh~ issue which was that the war, for man) of the black troops, was in essence) very different conflict from that exp~n enced by the whites. In purely practtCn terms, the conditions experienced by ~ rican-American troops were far infen(

 

 

o those experienced by some white meso It is important not to overstate this, lowever. By the time the black regi- nents were raised and sent into the field he Civil War had been going on for llmost two years. Fresh recruits, there- bre, of whatever colour, found them- ;elves facing a rebel army with much nore combat experience. At Milliken’s Bend, for example, the most experi- mced officers had been in uniform for less than a month. Even worse, SOme of ,he black troops had received only two jays of target practice prior to the battle, and in a war where fast reloading was crucial for survival they simply lacked the necessary slall.

TIm African-American regiments also received a greater proportion of fatigue duty than many of the white regiments, thereby denying them essential fighting experience. The quality of weapons dis- tributed to them was also not always on a par with those the white regiments re- ceived, although again it is important to bear in mind that adequate weaponry was a problem for many regiments, both black and white. Medical care for the black regiments was equally inadequate, and a particular problem given the high rate of combat casualties in these regi- ments. Many of the black troops, being relatively new to the field, had little im- munity to the diseases that infected the camps, and the problem was com- pounded by a white assumption that blacks were not as susceptible to disease as whites. Finding surgeons to work with black troops was also difficult. Again} racism alone does not account for this. By 1863 there was a general shortage of physicians in the Union army, and those that could put up witll the rigours of camp life had long ago been snapped up by regiments formed earlier in the war.

Unfortunately, deliberately prejudi- cial policies compounded the more gen- eral problems that the African-American regiments faced after 1863. Most obvi- nusly, blacks were never promoted on a par with whites. Benjamin Butler, in ‘,mustering in the Louisiana regiments,

. had created a mixed officer class. Jim

. Lane in Kansas did likewise, and since : he Was acting against orders anyway he ,never troubled himself to defend his ac- f: fions. However, when Gove-mor Andrew :-sought to appoint black officers to the i>Massachusetts 54th and 55th, he was idold that white officers only would be taccepted. Similarly, when Jim Lane’s

15. Pride and Prejudice in the American Civil War

Kansas regiments were officially recog- nised, its black officers were not. In the South, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, on tak- ing over from Butler, promptly set about removing all the black officers, usually by forcing them to resign. In many cases the argument used to defend such bla- tant racism was that blacks lacked the necessary literacy skills and knowledge to cope with high command. In many cases, particularly as far as the contra- band regiments were concerned, there was an element of truth to the charge. The white officers were no more capable in this regard than the blacks: the only difference was that the \vhite officers were not being put under the micro- scope to the same extent. By the con- clusion of the war only one in 2,000 black troops had achieved officer rank, and these mostly by the indirect route of becoming either chaplains or physicians.

Of all the discriminatory policies to impact on the African-American regi- ments, however, the most damning re- lated to pay. At the outset there was no indication that the War Department in- tended to pay black troops less than whites. When Govemor Andrew was granted permission to raise the Massa- chusetts 54th, he was instructed to offer $13 per month, plus rations and cloth- ing, along with a bounty of $50 for sign- ing up and $100 on mustering out. However in June 1863, the War Depart- ment decided that black troops were en- titled to only $10 per month, of which $3 should be deducted for clothing. The reasoning was that the raising of black regiments came under the Militia Act of 1862, which specified the lower rate of pay On the grounds that it was intended for noncombatants.

The matter prompted an angry back- lash from black troops and many of the officers. Governor Andrew, embarrassed at the tum of events, offered to make up the difference out of his own pocket, but the 54th would not let him. There was a principle at stake. As one black vol- unteer put it:

Now it seems strange to me that we do not receive the same pay and ra- tions as the white soldiers. Do we not fill the same ranks? Do we not cover the same space of ground? Do we not take up the same length of ground in a graveyard that others do? The ball does not miss the black man and strike the white, nor the white and strike the black.

Corporal John B. Payne, of the Massa- chusetts 55th, declared his unwilling- ness ‘to fight for anything less than the white man fights for’. The issue of pay went beyond prejudice alone. It repre- sented the crux of the problem for those black regiments who fought in the Civil War, and threw into sharp focus many of the inconsistencies and contradictions that lay at the heart of Union war aims. The Union had, from the outset, been faced with two distinct yet linked prob- lems: the role of the free black and the future of the slave. Equality and eman- cipation were not synonymous, yet one could not be addressed without affecting the other. The question over the citizen- ship right of free northern blacks went hand in hand with the larger and more troubiing question of slavery-for many the root cause of the conflict. Northern blacks were well aware of this and, un- like northern whites, could not and would not avoid the wider implication of the conflict. Many blacks saw the Civil War as a battle for emancipation long before it became apparent that Lin- coln shared this view and far ahead of a northern public who regarded it as a war for the restoration of the Union as it had been, with slavery intact. Frederick Douglass, for one, was of the opinion that the future of the American Repub- lican experiment itself rested on the tri- umph of the black soldier and the freed slave. For Douglass, the evil of slavery had corrupted the white man as much as it had degraded the slave, and the Civil War was an opportunity not just to end the institution but to rededicate the nation to the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence. Freedom for both white and black depended not just on a Union victory but on complete reassessment of the national ideal. As he summed it up to a Boston audience in 1862:

My friends, the destiny of the colored American, however this mighty war shall terminate, is the destiny of America. We shall never leave you. The allotments of Providence seem to make the black man of America the open book out of which the American people are to learn lessons of wisdom, power, and goodness-more sublime and glorious than any yet attained by the nations of the old or the new world. Over the bleeding back of the American bondsman we shan learn mercy. In the very extreme difference of color and feature of the negro and

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– 4 .:. THE CIVil WAR: Civil War Period

the Anglo-Saxon. shall be learned the highest ideas of sacredness of man and the ful1ness and protection of hu- man brotherhood.

Ultimately, the problem facing both African-American soldiers and their spokesmen in the North was that their vision of the meaning of the Civil War clashed with that of the majority of whites. For blacks, the Civil War offered an opportunity not just to end slavery, but to redefine American national ideals. Their determination to fight in the face of hostility and prejudice left their dedi- cation to these ideals in no doubt what- soever. In this regard, their experience of the Civil War gave them a far more expansive, optimistic and demanding vi- sion of the nation’s future than it did many whites. As George Steph·ens of the Massachusetts 54th noted ‘this land must be consecrated to freedom. and we are today the only class of people in the country who are earnestly on the side of freedom’. This was not a message that whites wished to hear.

Ultimately, the nation as a whole chose to ignore both the sacrifice of the black regiments and the implications of their involvement in America’s greatest national crisis. As North and South came together over an increasingly se- lective interpretalion of what the Civil

94

War had been about, the opportunity to reconstruct the nation on a new basis of equality was thrown away. On Memorial Day 1871, speaking at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, Frederick Douglass lamented the call ‘in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it.’ In the end, the need to find some common ground between North and South encouraged the growth of a patri- otism that rejected the pride of those black troops who had fought and died for the nation.

On May 31s~ 1997, a hundred years after the Saint-Gaudens monument was first unveiied, a re-ut’:dication ceremony was held at the site. The day included an historical reenactment of Shaw’s troops leaving for the South and a speech by General Colin Powell in which he drew parallels between the Union’s decision to raise black regi- ments during the Civil War and the con- temporary army’s leading role in the fight for racial equality in America to- day. Despite Powell’s words, the many thousands of books written on the American Civil War to date and the cinematic success of the Hollywood film about the Massachusetts 54th, Glory, the war continues to be regarded by many

as a white man’s war. The overt of 1897 has dissipated, yet the cance of the black soldier in Arne,;”,’ bloodiest_ COl1f1ict continues to be played.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Ira Berlin, et aI., Slaves No More: Essays Oil Emancipation and the War (Cambridge 1992); Joseph T. Glatthaar, Battle: The Civil War Alliance Soldiers and Wltite Officers guinlMeridian Books, 1991); Hond(JO Hargrove, Black Union Soldiers in Civil War (MCFarland, 1988); James Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana rive Guards: The fllack l,’Jilitary F,np.,L” ence During the Civil War (LOUisiana; State University Press, 1995); Ervin lordan, Jr., Black Confederates Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia versity Press of Virginia, 1995); S. Redkey (ed.),A GrandAmty Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers i1l the Union Army, 1861-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Susan~Mary Grant is a lecturer ill his· tory at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the allthor of The Americar Civil War (UCL Press, forthcoming).

 

 

Article 17

r •

under I Could “colored” troops stand up to real combat?

A charge at New Market Heights settled the question once and for all

‘JO.IUA E. Aliyetti WAS mE FALL OF 1864, AND TIlE CON-

was gasping for its final . ..IL b”e”ths. Earlier in the year, Lieuten-

General Ulysses S. Grant had relent- pressed the Union Anny of the

‘P’Dtomalc against the Confederate Arnay ‘.olf NorthelTI VIrginia in a series of battles

the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Cold Harbor, and the Crater at

Peterslburg. In August, Admiral David sailed into Mobile Bay and

,nelotnlli2:ed the last Confederate port in Gulf of Mexico. On September 2,

Major General William T. Sher- captured Atlanta. Virginia’s pre- Shenandoah ‘klIey, the lifeblood

the Confederacy, was on its way to little more than a charred

Now, in mid-September, a deadly was about to occur, a

forgotten among the fumous .collflicts of the war, a battle that would ‘,pr’oviide a benchmark of valor, not only

the Civil War, but aIso for future ~gl’neratio!ls of American soldiers. It was

fight that would convince some of the

most stubborn skeptics that black men could rise to the call of battle as well as white men.

Major General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of the Arnay of the James,

had convinced Grant to allow hinl to break out of his stalemated position in the Bennuda Hundred area, near the James River, south of Richmond, Vir- ginia, to launch a two-pronged assauit

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Most of the fighting in the engagement at New Market Heights was done by black regiments, including Fleetwood’s 4th United States Colored Troops and the 22d U.S. Colored Troops.

From Civil W.lf Times lIIusfrafed, October 1996. 0 1996 by Cowles Magazines, Inc. Reprinted through the courtesy of Cowles MagaZines, Inc., publishers of Civil War Times Illustrated. 101

 

 

4 .} THE CIVil WAR: Civil War Period

against key forts and possibly break through to· Richmond itself. Butler’s plan had Major General Edward Ord’s XVIII Corps, less its 3d Division, cross- ing the James at Varina and attacking Fort Harrison. Major General David Ben Birney’s X Corps would cross at Deep Bottom and attack the Confederate position along the New Market Road, with its main effort directed against Fort Gilmer.

TIle 3d Division of the XVIII Corps would lead the attack against the Con- federate defense at an area along the New Market Road known as New Mar- ket Heights. For this assignment, Butler attached the division, under the com- mand of Brigadier General Charles J. Paine, to Birney’s X Corps, placing it on the left flank. The division faced a true test: the black troops who made up its nine regiments were freemen and for- mer slaves who had never been in com- bat, and their commander, although a Butler favorite. had never led a division- size unit into battle.

Butler was an avowed abolitionist and was one of the first to encourage the acceptance of black men into the army. In May 1861 he had labeled a few black deserters of a Confederate labor battalion “contraband of war” and con- duded that, as such, they could be “con- fiscated.” In 1862, when he commanded the Union troops occupying New Or-

leans, he hurriedly recruited three regi- ments of liberated slaves from southern Louisiana and had them in the field by November of that year to face a threat- ened Confederate attack.

In the faU of 1864, there were more than 100,000 black troops in the Union forces in about 140 all-black regiments. At the war’s end, almost 10 percent of the Yankees under arms would be black men. And while most people knew of the courage displayed by the black 54th Massachusetts Infantry the previous year at Fort Wagner, in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, Butler sensed that some units still distrusted black regi- ments. In discussing his plan with Grant, he stated, “I want to convince myself, whether, under my own eye, the Negro troops wiJI fight; and if! can take with the Negroes, a redoubt that turned Hancock’s corps on a former occasion, that will settle the question.”

On September 28, 1864, the 3d Di- vision rested at Deep Bottom, Virginia, awaiting the arrival of the X Corps. Like most Union divisions, the 3d consisted of three brigades, each with three regi- ments. Although the strength of the regi- ments fluctuated daily, on this day the division had about 3,800 effectives. All the commissioned officers were white, and the enlisted men black. Colonel John H. Hohnan commanded the 1st Brigade, which consisted of the 1st, 22d,

and 37th United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.). Colonel Alonzo G. led the 2d Brigade, with the 5th, 36th, and 38th U.S.C.T. The 3d Brigade, which was short one regiment (the 10th U.S.C.T. on detached duty) had Colonel Samuel A. Duncan in command of the 4th and 6th U.S.C.T. The 2d U.S.C.T. Cavalry would also take part in the ac- tion, but it was not attached to any bri- gade. Birney held in reserve the 7th, 8th, and 9th U.S.C.T., and the 29th Con- necticut Colored Infantry, all of which had been aSSigned to the X Corps.

The next morning, the division was in a line of brigades, ready to commence the attack. From right to left they were Duncan’s brigade (whose right flank tied in with the left flank of the X Corps’ 1st Division, commanded by Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry), then Draper’s brigade, and lastly, Holman’s brigade. Holman’s task was to keep left flank secure. The division would vance in coordination with the attack of the X Corps. Duncan’s tmops’~1 would lead, closely supported by and, if necessary, some of troops.

The plan called for a swift against New Market Heights. Some confirmed accounts have the troops vancing with unloaded rifles so would not stop to fire. The division pected to be going against im’xpedenc:ed’

At Deep Bottom, Virginia, along the James River, Federal soldiers rest at one foot of the pontoon bridge that Brigadier General Charles J. crossed with his division of black regiments to reach New Market Heights.

102

 

 

militia, but they would soon [rod that the butternut-clad infantrymen defend- ing the heights were the seasoned Texas

;(“‘”et,,,.,1S of Gregg’s Brigade, under the COlnmand of Colonel Frederick S. Bass. Supporting the Texans were the 3d Richmond Howitzers; the 1st Rock- bridge Artillery; and a cavalry brigade,

fighting dismounted, commanded by Brigadier General Martin W. Gary.

General Paine wanted to wait for Colonel Joseph C. Abbott’s 2d Brigade of Terry’s division, on his right, to move out and draw some attention from the Confederates before he committed his men, but there was no firing from that

17. Gallantry Under Fire

area. In a letter to his father dated Oc- tober 3, Paine wrole, “1 waited a good While to hear Terry begin because I wanted him to draw some of the enemy away from me if he c’d, but after wait- ing a good while and not hearing from Terry 1 started my column .. : .” The two regiments of Duncan’s brigade moved

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4 .:. THE CIVil WAR: Civil War Period

out with the three regiments of Draper’s brigade close behind and slightly to the left. The troops fanned a front about 400 hundred yards wide. Holman’s bri- gade moved to cover the flank, and the 22d U.S.C.T. sent out skinnishers.

Rebel pickets began firing at the movement in their front and then fell back to a fortified line of rifle pits at the base of the heights. It was then they re- alized the size of the attacking force. Terry’s three brigades and the rest of the X Corps finally began to advance, and the five-brigade front stretched to about 2,300 yards.

Duncan’s brigade entered a ravine and came under a more intense fire. To Dun- can’s right, Terry’s units were pinned down by an enfilade of artillery fire from the heights. In the ravine where Duncan’s force struggled, men began to fall from the Texans’ musket fire. “The enemy, in very heavy force …. were met with a terrific and galling fire,” read an article in the Richmo1Jd Enquirer on November 22. “Texans, mounting the works, shot them like sheep.” The artil- lery units on the heights were firing into the X Corps’ lines, but the 3d Division continued to press ahead.

Casualties mounted in Duncan’s bri- gade as it came to an abatis, a protrud- ing line of sharpened loblolly pine. Axmen were called to the front to cut through the dense wood. As they worked, 16 cannon on the heights bom- barded the stalled attackers. Many com- pany commanders fell as they tried to rally the men. Duncan himself had been wounded four times and was down.

Paine sent Draper a message to move his brigade to the right, “as we are get- ting the worst of it over there.” Draper’s regiments now came on over the same ground Duncan’s brigade had crossed. Through the dust and carnage, they surged through the first abatis only to encounter another line of obstacles the defenders had erected.

Meanwhile, except for the 22d U.S.C.T., which was still operating as skinnishers on the left flank, Holman’s brigade moved in as reserve behind Draper and Duncan, but received no aI- ders to engage. The 2d U.S.C.T. Cavalry was dismounted and deployed as skir- mishers to Duncan’s right. Effectively,

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the division was now advancing on a one-brigade front, about 1,100 men, half of them skinnishers.

Fire poured down from a palisade of fortified rifle pits that formed the main Confederate line below the crest of the hill. Beyond the second barrier, Four Mile Creek fanned a marshy area. The Federals had to wade the creek, and as they tried to refonn on the other side, many commenced firing. Draper later reported the fire “made so much confu- sion that it was impossible to make the orders understood.” Smoke and lead filled the air. A Lieutenant Bancroft of the 38th U.S.C.T. went down when a bullet passed through his hip as he slogged through the marsh. Unable to walk, he continued forward on his hands and knees, waving his sword and urging his men to follow. The leading units were now about 30 yards from the main enemy defense line, but the attacking force was in danger of collapse.

Draper tried to get his regimental commanders to rally around the colors and charge, but they and their men were falling all around him. The commander of the 5th Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel G. W. Shirtliff, fell mortally wounded. It was his third wound since the attack had begun. Elsewhere in the 5th, black soldiers rose from the ranks to replace lost junior officers. Sergeant Major Mil- ton Holland, a 20-year-old from Austin, Texas, now led Company C; Richmond- born 1st Sergeant Powhatan Beaty com- manded Company G; 1st Sergeant James Branson. a Virginia-born 19-year- old from Pennsylvania, led Company D; and 1st Sergeant Robert Pinn, an Ohio fanner, led Company l.

With disaster imminent, heroes of every rank snatched regimental colors and national standards from dying hands and led the bloodied’ mass into a smok- ing hell. Sergeant Major Christian Fleet- wood of the 4th U.S.c.T. seized the national colors after a second bearer had fallen, and they ended up in the hands of Corporal Charles Veal. Corporal Miles James of the 36th U.S.C.T. was wounded so badly in the ann that the limb was immediately amputated. James, with blood from the mutilated stump soaking his tunic, kept moving forward, loading and firing with one ann.

As the momentum of Draper’s deteriorated, the fire against his roared in undiminished intensity. For minutes chaos reigned on the balttlefiel& Then a few men from Duncan’s h”;~”~,’:, took up a yell, which caught swelled to a roar as the desperate rallied to its colors. The screaming engnlfed Draper’s brigade, and rush, the 3d Division carried the emeiS’ main line of defense. A officer mounted the parapet, and James Gardner of the 36th shot down. Gardner charged the barrier ran his bayonet through the man as Confederate defenders fen back.

The din of cannon and musket fire the right of the 3d Division rose in Birney, aware that his flank was ___ .””.,,,, with Paine in control of the heights with the subsequent easing of the enfi-, , lading fire against him, directed the Corps to attack Fort Gilmer. But eral Robert E. Lee, commander of Anny of Northeru Virginia, was brilliant ” at maneuvering troops behind his lines and managed to reinforce the fenders. Fort Gilmer held against a fe- ‘ ‘ rocious assault.

At the end of the battle, the Coonf,:d,;j: erate line was pUShed back. Ord’s captured and held Fort Harrison, sequently renamed Fort Burnham Brigadier General Hiram Burnham, was killed at the head of his 0″””‘1<. leading the attack. But the Ri’chroOIldii defense remained intact. Lee co,unterah£’ tacked the next day against troops amoed 1 with repeating rifles and was heavy casualties for his effort. He forced to pull back and reconstruct battered perimeter.

Butler’s plan marked Grant’s last rious effort to enter Richmond north the James. The siege of Richmond tinued another six months, until April’ 1865, when Union forces broke throullh:j Lee’s line at Petersburg. Eight days Lee surrendered his anny at Appornat’l tax Court House.

By the war’s end, more than 10″,U'”‘” black men had served in the anny. Their units had fought in 149 gagements and 39 major battles. DUiri~I!1 that time, 20 black men-16 sol,dler11 and four sailors-were cited for and awarded the Medal of Honor.

 

 

of those medals were WOn on Sep- 29, 1864, at New Market Heights,

men of General Paine’s 3d Division. 29th was truly a day of glory for

3d Division soldiers, but they paid that glory with the blood of hundreds men. Butler admitted years later that he

deliberately exposed his black units risk far out of proportion to the value their objective in the engagement at

Market Heights, but he had done in order to establish confidence in

reliability. Mler the battle, he at- .ten,pt”d to reward their heroic effort by .onleriing Tiffany’s of New York to strike

solid silver medal known as the Army the James Medal, which he laier pre-

sented to more than 200 of his troops. His unique recognition program, how- ever, created much controversy, and the army forbade the soldiers to wear the medal on their uniforms.

The 3d Division’s performance, however, was not controversial, as more widely accepted tokens of appre- ciation attest. One such token is the highway historical marker on Virginia Route 5, near New Market Road, which reads: “On 28 September 1864, elements of Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s Army of the James crossed the James river to assault the Confed- erate defenses of Richmond. At dawn, on 29 September, 6 regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops fought with ex-

17. Gallantry Under Fire

ceptional valor during their attack along New Market Road. Despite heavy casualties, they carried the earthworks and succeeded in capturing New Mar- ket Heights north of the road. Of the 16 Medals of Honor awarded to ‘Ne- gro’ soldiers during the .Civil War 14 were bestowed for this battle. ‘The ca- pacity of the Negro race for soldiers had then and there been fully settled forever.’ ”

Johll E. Aliyetti is a freelallce writer liv- ing in Royal Oak, Maryland,

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Article 16

Blacks Who Served the Confederacy

…. Craig J. Renner

ick Ford, twellhJ-six, leanted :’. the Civil War exploits of . his great-great-gralldfather, Jol/ll J.

Jellkills, from his great-gralldmother.

nHe was at the Battle of Gettysburg/’ Ford remembers. “He would tell her

. “bout it when she was a child. He break out in a sweat, get tears

his eyes when he talked about it.” Since then, he has spent a great

Ii::: .10,1 of time trying to confirm ,through military records his ances-

service in the war. nThe only I can document him being with

the First Maryland regiment,” says. The only thing he knows

sure is that Jenkins left his home Charles County in southern

crossed the Potomac that separates the Free State

Vrrgirria (and, at that time, Un- and rebel states), and was mus-

into Confederate service af{lUrid Petersburg in 1862. Ford has texltensively searched through rosters

Vrrginia soldiers and has found records, though incom-

for several soldiers with the John Jenlcins.

Ford isn’t sure which one is his “aLiVe, though, in part because of complicating factor in his search:

Jenkins was a free black man,

n and the [Vrrgirria Confederate en- listment] records don’t give any in- dication if a soldier was black or white/, says Ford.

A unique and often overlooked story in American history is the role free blacks and slaves played in the Confederate war effort. A wealth of historical and anecdotal records sug- gests that blacks’ support of the lost cause was considerable, though not overwhelming. and that their moti- vations were sometimes patriotic, more often pragmatic. The question of whether to use blacks as armed soldiers divided the rebel cause for most of the war. It remains a contro- versial issue 130 years later, even as a few historians–and an increasing number of African Americans like Rick Ford-try to assess the mean- ing of this forgotten factor in history.

Minority within a minority

D etennining the exact num-ber of blacks who served with or assisted rebel forces is impossible. Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., of the University of Vrrgirria, who has extensively studied the history of black Confederates, has estimated that approximately 15 percent of

slaves and 25 percent of free blacks in secessionist Vrrgirria supported the Confederacy.

In many cases, they enlisted and fought. At the Battle of Antietam in 1862, over three hundred fully armed and uniformed blacks were observed to be under the command of Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Describ- ing black soldiers that he directed, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest stated that n finer Confederates did not live.n But in the large majority of cases, they provided unarmed civil- ian labor for the rebel army by building fortifications, serving as cooks, and performing the countless other tasks necessary to fielding an army. Those who could provide skilled labor, such as blacksmiths, were often put into service as well.

That should not be surprising. says Ed Smith, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and another leading scholar in this field

nSupport is the better part of any military,n remarks Smith. nFor every guy out there shooting a gun, there’s another eight or ten backing him up. If your support lines aren’t right, you’re wasting ,the lives of brave men, because you didn’t prepare for the situation correctly.n For com-

This article originally appeared in 11le World & I, February 1997, pp. 162·191. Reprinted by permission of Tile World & I, a publication of the Washington limes Corporation. © 1997. 95

 

 

4 .:. THE CIVil WAR: Civil War Period

JUliO ZANGRONIZJZANGRONIZ PHOTOGRAPHY

Rick Ford (right) and his half brother, Kevin Craig, participate as Confederates in a living history presentation in Cedar Creek, Virginia.

manders on both sides, he points out, conscripting blacks became a military necessity.

Smith also believes that blacks provided another aspect critical to military success: knowledge of the

96

terrain of the South, especially Vir- ginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

“Many slaves, especially those connected to a wealthy household, had a far better understanding of the South than most whites,” contends

Smith. “The only people who eled extensively in the South were the wealthy and servants. So they would pick up .. tremendous amount of kno”,le(jpii through association.” He points that Jedediah Hotchkiss, the carllog;’ rapher for and close adviser Stonewall Jackson, was black.

To illustrate his point, Smith counts the story of Robert Smalls South Carolina, a black man who came a congressman from the metto State during RecOJ1stru(:tion.

“He [Smalls] was a very seaman. On one occasion, he ship out of a South Carolina and was abie to navigate it into water,” says Smith. “When Robert Lee learned of this, he was outrage<i Lee knew that this meant South was vulnerable to naval by the Union.” This was paJrticularly~ true of areas of VIrginia that be reached via the various inlets the Chesapeake Bay.

Still, for most of the war, UJ0CK5′.11 who served in Confederate did so in an unofficial capacity; bel political leaders and army cers, like their Union counterl’arts.;~[ were split on the question

whether to blacks in the ::;o<rrth.-iliJ em army.

In his book, COllfederaies and Yankees in Civil Virginia, Jordan

that Gen. Patrick Cleburne argueql!l that ending slavery and blacks would gain Britain’s su,JporlH and transfonn the Confederate into one seeking independence all Southerners. Contrarily, the ings of those who opposed the were best summarized by a WealU’r” Georgian, Howell Cobb: “If will make good soldiers, our theory of slavery is wrong.”

In March 1865, facing shortages of manpower and a!Inm;f~ certain defeat, the Confederate gress finally authorized the rais;il1gJ of 300,000 troops “irrespective color.” The directive also sti·pu’lat~\’JI that no slave would be forced .

 

 

COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF ‘THE CONFEDERACY, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Above: Jefferson Shields, Stonewall Jackson’s cook, displays his rebel medals in a photo taken after the war. Several blacks served in the Confederate leader’s inner circle. Above right: J.B. White and lohn Terrill of the Sixth Tennessee Cavalry.

and all would be given their ~,tree,doJm upon being honorably dis- ~i;chill:ge,d. Notably, however, it did

im:lude any provisions for the !\zfreedOlm of a slave’s family and 8Mfailed to draw the British govem- i,lj;llleJlt into supporting the rebellion.

But in some respects, the debate tied up the Confederate Con- had already been decided in

field, argues Smith. Most rebel were state militias, he notes.

since the secessionist ideal the fought for was based on the

,cpJ~ce’pt of states’ rights, “these reserved the right to do pretty whatever they wanted. And

were not going to let a bunch politicians in Richmond tell them composition of their units.” As a

blacks served as individuals, servants with masters who had

and in predominantly or ll-t,lac’k units as early as 1861, and

were present as Confederates at the major battles of the wac.

Pragmatic patriots

I n examining the role of blacks in tlle Confederacy, the question immediately arises: Why would blacks defend a society in which they were being enslaved? Most at least privately agreed with the feel- ing of one slave, who is reputed to have said during the debate over whether to officially arm blacks, “Just give us the guns, and you’ll see what side we point them at.”

The motivation of black rebels was explained by historian Benjacnin Quacles. He said that free blacks “had a sense of community responsibility whim impelled them to throw their lot with their neighbor,” despite their personal dislike of slavery.

Historian Smith agrees. “The as- sumption is that all blacks were slaves and all slaves were mis- treated, so therefore somebody who fought for the Confederacy had to

be out of his mind,” argues Smith. But he contends that blacks in the South fought for the Confederacy out of feelings of patriotism, loyalty, friendship: “all the reasons you would fight for your country.

“To ma1ce this story true, you have to downplay the coercion,” he contends. “They weren’t sure how it would h1m out for them, so they took a chance. People don’t take chances today. That kind of commit- ment of blind faith, hoping that the fuhrre will reward us or our sacri- fice, is no longer the American way.”

To buttress tllis point, Smith points out that over five thousand blacks served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, though they had no more rights or liberty than blacks in the Sou th during the Civil War. Moreover, in doing so, the soldiers in the Wac for Independence rejected an offer of immediate freedom made ,by ti,e king of England. “If you can fight

97

 

 

4 .:. THE CIVIL WAR: Civil War Period

for the independence of the colonies without any guarantee you would benefit from it,” argues Smith, “then it shouldn’t surprise you that blacks could fight for the independence of the South.”

Jordan believes that motivations have to be examifled on a case-by- case basis. Some were genuinely pa- triotic; most, he feels, were mOTe pragmatic. Free blacks” stood to lose an awful lot,” he observes. Jordan asserts that they remained loyal to the Confederacy to protect their property interests (some free blacks owned land, and a few owned slaves), join what they thought was the winning side, or deter a victori- ous South from taking away their freedom.

According to Jordan, free blacks in the South often had their loyalty tested by Confederate soldiers dressed in Union garb. “Some had a customary response when asked who they supported,” Jordan re- counts. “They’d say, ‘I’m on God’s side: and leave it at that.”

Ford’s search has not revealed what inspired his great-great-grandfather to leave home and cross the Potomac River, but he suspects Jenkins got caught up in the antifederal fervor that swept southern Maryland when the war broke out. “1 have no idea [why he joined]; I wish 1 knew. The majority of people in southern Maryland had a nasty idea toward anyihing that wore, blue. I assume he did, too.”

Monuunental skirnrlsh

REgardless of the number and motivations of blacks who re-ained loyal to the Confeder- acy, the issue of acknowledging their service remains as controversial today as it was for rebels during the war.

Greg Eanes is a Gulf War veteran, journalist, and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) chap- ter in Nottoway County, Vrrginia, about fifty miles south-west of Rich- mond.

After reading a book on Virginia’s black Confederates by James Brewer,

98

Eanesl who is white, realized that many Afro-VIrginian Confed- erates came from Not- toway County. During the Civil War, the town of Burkeville in par- ti~ular was a main rail junction serving rebel forces in Petersburg.

In 1993, at the be- hest of the local SCV chapter, Eanes initiated an effort to build a monument honoring Nottoway blacks who had served the lost cause. Eanes saw the project not just as an educational endeavor that would put the Confederacy in what he feels is its proper historical perspective but as a measure allowing the county to move ahead and overcome past racial dilierences.

“History should not be a divisive thing,” says Eanes. “These men served their coun-

THE EllEN S. BROCKENBRQUGH LIBRARY, THE MUSEUM OF THE co””o”,w,,:iJ Confederate surgeons with a body servant, Ben Harris, in a tal{en during the war.

try. They deserve to be recognized.” Initially, his plans for the monu-

ment went smoothly. In August 1993, his request to erect a statue memorializing the soldiers was unanimously approved by the Not- toway County commissioners, in- eluding two African Americans.

But resistance to the proposed monument grew quickly after the head of the county chapter of the NAACP opposed the memorial. And emotions qUickly began to rise. One local critic referred to Eanes and SCV members as “neo-Nazis” and equated the memorial with Jews being forced to commemorate the Holocaust.

It was just the kind of reaction Eanes and the SCV feared. “The feedback in the county [to the monu- ment] was mixed,” he remarks. “But some who opposed it also opposed the way we were being treated.”

In September 1993, the local e1el::ledlil officials responded to the co,rrmJv”rsy by establishing a commission to sider Eanes’ request. Two of the members were vocal critics of the morial, including the critic who called Eanes a hatemonger. In October of that year, the panel reco=ended ~ that the proposal be rejected.

Though the project is now on what, Eanes calls “permanent hold,” he·· still believes the fight was worth- while, in part because he feels it has, helped launch a debate about the I role blacks played in the Confeder- j acy. “In that respect we’ve won, be· i cause it has created a greater! awareness. Journals [in places] as, far away as England have men-: tioned the controversy.”

In recent years, local SCV chap-: ters and the national organization: have paid increasing attention to rec- ognizing local black heritage. Some scholars in Confederate circles are

ri

 

 

16. Forgotten Rebels

PETER HOlDENfTHE WOHLD AND I

Anlerican University professor Edward Smith began studying blacks’ role in the Confederacy after reviewing wartime corre~ spondence.

~’il,s1″,ptiall about their motivations for so, saying that while most

cm.emheJrs, like Eanes, are genuinely to take the sling out of the

blacks, others may be using shield to preempt

criticism of the Confederacy. In the end, Eanes feels the Nottoway

monument controversy had ‘SOlneimlpo,rtant, smaller victories. Dur-

deb’ate, “a black friend of mine me, ‘Even I was taught that if you a Confederate flag in the back win- of a truck, it meant redneck.’ And

‘Look back at what you just said. were taught.’ II

acknowledging black participation in the seces- sionist effort remains, in

places, a controversial subject,

in academic circles it is still largely dismissed.

Smith recalls the case of a student who was researching a paper on the topic a few years ago. “She told me she had told another professor about the subject she was working on. And the professor told her, ‘Dr. Smith is crazy. There weren’t any blacl<s who fought for the Confederacy: I told the student to look for herself,” he remembers. The student, he points out, ended up writing the papeL

Smith says he is undeterred by such skepticism. He became interested in the topic while reading the letters of slaveS and free blacks written during the war. “When you start plowing into the let- ters, you see blacks out of the stereo- type you’ve been introduced to and begin to realize there is an untold story;” he ob5elVes.

But in conversation, the frustra- tion he feels over the lack of cover-

age given the topic becomes evident. Black media outlets, Smith feels, won’t talk about these Confederates “because it gives a different focus on [a] history that they have already de- cided is one way.”

The result, he says, is confusing. “Kids are introduced to history in such a way they [don’t] even begin to speculate if there is anything else out there. If you tell the average black kid that [Union generals] Grant and Sherman didn’t like blacks, they would think you were crazy.”

Historians, he thinks, are failing to present both sides of the contro- versy. “Our job is to present things people may not have access to,” he states. “A lot of that may be stuff you don’t like. But if you are going to be true to the profession, you have to do it. History is pretty in a lot of ways and ugly in a lof of ways, but the whole story has to be told.”

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4 .;. THE CIVIL WAR: Civil War Period

A monument in Canton, Mississippi, commemorates blacks who served the Confederacy.

Back in southern Maryland, Rick Ford is just trying to piece together the whole story of his ancestor’s service. He knows, for example, that Jenkins died in 1912 and was buried

100

at the Holy Ghost Church in the town of Issue in sou them Charles County. But the grave was never given a headstone, and because Jenkins was buried in the middle of

a snowstorm, Ford’s mother couldn’t direct precise burial place.

Locating the site will be <1il:f:ictul says Ford. “I can’t find his obiituElri in the county pape!; and the doesn’t have any records of going back that fro: We may find it.”

Since finding out about his neJ:it;””” Ford has participated as a C(lnf’edci ate in several battIe and living history presentations, eluding one at Gettysburg. He izes his participation is often viE’W.~d~ with shock by blacks, who may he is giorifying a nation and a that subjugated blacks.

“I know they feel it brings backal bad memory,” he says. “But whole reason for civil war wElsn’t! about slaves; the main reason separating was states’ rights. Not people are willing to accept blacks were Confederates, but I

Additional Reading Hubert Blackerby, Blacks in Blue and Grdy:

Afro-American Seroice in the Civil War; Por- tals Press, Columbia, Maryland, 1979.

James H. Brewer, TIle Confederate Negro: Vir: ginia’s Craftsmen and Military IAborer~ 1861-1865, Books on Demand, Ann Arbo~ Michigan; originally published by Duki University Press, Durham, North Cam lina, 1969.

Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Canfedaates and Afro YUllkees i” Civil War Virginia, Universiti Press of Virginia, Charlott~svil1e, 1995. .

Benjamin Quarles, TIle Negro in tire Civil Wm Little, Brown, Boston, 1953.

Richard Rollins, ed., Black Southerners in Gro! Essays on AjrcrAmen·cuns in Confederate AI mies, Journal of Confederate History S( ries, vol 11, Southern Heritage Pres: Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1994.

Craig J. Renner is an editor of the CII ture section of THE WORLD & I.