Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (40 page)

By early 1864, black women were ready to go it alone and establish their own relief organization, the Ladies’ Committee for the Aid of Sick Soldiers. Led by Henry Highland Garnet’s wife, Julia, the committee requested and received permission from the commander at Riker’s Island to establish a kitchen connected to the hospital; in no time, the women were feeding some sixty soldiers. The organization’s membership contained names I expected, wives of activists like Garnet and John Peterson, schoolteachers like Sarah Ennalls and Fanny Tompkins. I was heartened to see Philip’s sister Sarah Maria White, and his niece Elizabeth Thompson, on the list. But I was astonished to read the name of one of the two men who had agreed to help the committee: in addition to Garnet, who was serving in his capacity as chaplain, the other was “Philip A. White, Auditor.”
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Philip and Garnet were as unlikely allies as John Jay and George Templeton Strong.

Philip was beginning to take a greater interest in his race. Maybe it was the influence of the apparently more progressive women in his family. But I think it was also because he was now convinced that citizenship for all was close at hand. Philip, I believe, saw citizenship as his right and was ready to fight for it for himself and his peers. In 1860, he had joined James McCune Smith’s drive for black male suffrage in the state by adding his drugstore to the list of places to pick up ballots. Now he could appreciate to the fullest the broader efforts others had shouldered—civil war and military service—to bring citizenship to all black Americans, free-born and newly freed. That was a goal toward which Philip could work.

I searched in vain for names of members of the black elite on the lists of the Twentieth, Twenty-sixth, and Thirty-first Regiments, but I finally found two New Yorkers serving in other state regiments. They happened to be brothers-in-law. Peter Vogelsang, who married Theodocia DeGrasse, enlisted as a solider in the famed Fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment. John DeGrasse, brother of Isaiah, Theodocia, and Serena, served as an assistant surgeon with the First North Carolina Volunteers. They began their military careers with different regiments, in different states, holding different positions, but early 1864 found them on the same battlefield in Olustee, Florida. For one, service would bring acceptance and glory, and for the other rejection and humiliation.

Boston’s white abolitionist community had worked hard to raise the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. Governor John A. Andrew had authorized its formation. Prominent antislavery leaders helped in recruitment, including the parents of its first commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Troops were composed primarily of free blacks, among whom were two of Frederick Douglass’s sons. Shaw’s father personally recruited the forty-six-year-old Peter Vogelsang. Shaw was dubious that a man that age would be able to pass the required physical exams, but in no time Vogelsang rose to become sergeant of Company H. The Fifty-fourth left Boston in May 1863, and on July 10 and 11—just as the draft riots were erupting in New York City—the regiment launched its assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Shaw was killed along with 116 of his men; another 156 were wounded or captured.
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Vogelsang was not among them. Several companies from the Fifty-fourth had been sent to James Island as a diversionary tactic. On July 16, Confederate forces attacked and forced a retreat. Nevertheless, the soldiers of the Fifty-fourth stood their ground long enough to prevent a complete rout. Forty-two men were killed, and Vogelsang was severely wounded. In a letter written to the
Liberator
from his hospital bed, he made light of his own predicament, but sorrowfully recorded the death and destruction around him. His company, Vogelsang reported, had been cut off from the rest of the regiment but continued
fighting. He had “the satisfaction of dropping one little fellow” and taking his gun as a trophy. Then “the rebs came so thick and fast, and on horseback, too, that it was ‘Sauve qui Peut.’” A good runner, Vogelsang “did his prettiest and managed to outrun the rest of his party.” He swam across a creek, hid in the tall grass, then raised himself to see what was going on, “when ‘crack,’ ‘whiz,’ and I could just see a fellow (about the width of ‘West Broadway’ from me) on horseback, who had just given me ‘my dose.’” Badly wounded, Vogelsang lay helpless in the mud, water, and his own blood for hours until rescued. Once in the hospital boat, medical staff cut off his clothes, wet his wounds—“a big hole in my left chest”—covered him with tent-cloth, and told him to drink whiskey every four hours. He knew he was among the lucky
when the casualties from Fort Wagner were brought on board. “Such a sight,” Vogelsang lamented. “Blood, mud, sand and water, broken legs and arms, some dying and some dead.”
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Peter Vogelsang (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

Vogelsang recovered by February 1864, in time to march to Olustee, where the Fifty-fourth was ordered to help Union forces cut off supplies to the Confederate army. It was there that his regiment met up with his brother-in-law’s. John DeGrasse was an assistant surgeon with the First North Carolina Volunteers (renamed the Thirty-fifth Regiment of the United States Colored Troops). The youngest DeGrasse sibling, he received his medical degree from Bowdoin College in 1849, opened a practice in New York City, but then moved to Boston. In a truly progressive move, the Massachusetts Medical Society admitted him as a member in 1854. In spring 1863, DeGrasse mustered in as an assistant surgeon at New Berne, North Carolina. Unlike the Fifty-fourth, the Thirty-fifth was composed mainly of former slaves, but its commander came from yet another prominent New England abolitionist family: Colonel James Beecher was the younger half brother of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When fully staffed, the regiment’s medical team consisted of a head surgeon, two assistant surgeons, and a hospital steward. Their duties ranged from ensuring the cleanliness of the soldiers’ bedding and clothing and supplying them with enough food and drink to more medical tasks: operating on wounds, changing dressings, treating diseases like smallpox, whose symptoms were high fever, nausea, vomiting, and muscle aches, or scurvy, caused by a deficiency of vitamin C.
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I don’t know how Vogelsang performed at Olustee, but his brother-in-law John DeGrasse insisted that he had fulfilled his duties, was “untiring in my efforts in caring for the wounded,” and stayed on the battlefield until dark. The head surgeon of his regiment, Dr. Henry Marcy, supported by the hospital steward Delos Barber, maintained that he had not. Instead of attending to the wounded, they charged, DeGrasse had become intoxicated, retired to his quarters in a drunken stupor, and could not be roused. A court-martial ensued.

Here too, the black archives failed me. I found no mention of the court-martial in the DeGrasse family papers at the Massachusetts
Historical Society or in any histories of blacks in medicine. John suffered a much greater humiliation than his brother Isaiah ever had, and it was, I believe, a profound sense of shame that led to the suppression of the event from family and community memory. The military records at the National Archives contained, however, a full account of the proceedings.
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There were fourteen witnesses in all; five testified against DeGrasse, nine in his favor. Among those opposing him were James Beecher, the head surgeon Marcy, and the hospital steward Barber. Their testimony carried weight.

John Van Surlay DeGrasse (Museum of African-American History, Boston)

In all, there were five charges. Two were similar to the Olustee accusation: intoxication and dereliction of duty at Cedar Creek in June and then at Darby’s Station in July. The evidence against DeGrasse in all
three instances was that he was seen drinking, smelled heavily of liquor, sat in an “unsettled position on horseback,” became quarrelsome, and that once in camp fell into a deep sleep and could not be roused. In a statement at the conclusion of the trial DeGrasse rebutted the charges one by one. He began by expressing surprise, arguing that until this moment, some seven months after the battle of Olustee, nobody had ever complained to him about his supposed drunkenness. He then pointed to the many witnesses who testified that he was not intoxicated. Responding specifically to the Olustee charge, DeGrasse maintained that after the battle he had sent his horse ahead and stayed behind on the field alone with the stretcher corps until dark. After walking twenty miles to camp and suffering from “excessive fatigue,” he had indeed gone to bed. Knowing that the wounded soldiers Dr. Marcy wanted him to care for had been able to walk to camp, he felt their cases could wait until morning. Turning to the Cedar Creek incident, DeGrasse noted that Beecher was hardly in a position to assess his condition since he was at the head of the regiment while he, DeGrasse, was at the rear. If he was unsettled in his saddle, it was due to heat and exhaustion. Finally, when he reached camp, he had had a bath drawn and changed into clean clothes before going to sleep, hardly the behavior of a drunken man. And if Beecher claimed he could not wake him, soldier Freeman Grice had had no problem doing so.

The other two charges against DeGrasse involved “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” The first concerned taking liquor, specifically whiskey, from the medical supplies for his own personal use. DeGrasse readily admitted that he had done so, not for himself alone but for other officers and enlisted men as well, and not for personal consumption but as medical treatment for exhaustion. This was not a “misapplication,” he argued, but entirely within U.S. Government regulations.

The last charge, in some ways the ugliest, involved a civilian. DeGrasse was accused of having insulted a black woman working as a laundress on board a steamer by making unwanted advances toward her. Specifically, he had formed his fingers in the shape of a pistol, placed his hand under his jacket near his penis, and said something to the effect of
“See how you made it stand?” or “How stiff is it?” DeGrasse categorically denied the charge, and pointed out that the only black woman who had been on board the steamer at that time had sworn the event never happened.

DeGrasse was convinced that there were hidden motives behind the charges. Although he admitted he had no hard evidence, he pointed his finger at Henry Marcy, particularly at the “uncommon and untiring assiduity with which surgeon Marcy has worked up this case, his punctual and constant attendance here for the past five days, using every effort and all the means in his power, to procure a conviction—manifesting inside and outside the court as much interest as though it was a personal matter, or a suit where his money interest was at stake.”

I have no hard evidence either, but I would like to believe DeGrasse’s side of the story. The bulk of the testimony concerning his intoxication and dereliction of duty came from Marcy and the hospital steward. DeGrasse’s explanation that his behavior at Olustee and Cedar Creek was due to exhaustion made perfect sense. Moreover, whiskey, as Peter Vogelsang could testify, was a common medical treatment. Finally, his treatment of the black woman seems to befit a troublemaker more like the wayward James Hewlett rather than a prominent doctor, married man, and father of a newborn child.

Certainly, racism flourished among the white officers, and specifically the doctors, of the Thirty-fifth. I found evidence in an earlier incident involving DeGrasse and the other assistant surgeon, Daniel Mann, who served with DeGrasse in fall 1863. In October of that year, Mann wrote a letter complaining that DeGrasse had been placed “in the superior or at least most important position” and was “disposed to dispute my right to rank him.” The response from a white officer made clear what was at stake. The presence of “Mann (white) and DeGrasse (a Negro)” made for an “unfortunate combination,” he wrote, giving rise to “difficulties of a serious nature,” namely the decision to “elevate the Negro doctor over the white one.”
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