Upon the Altar of the Nation (55 page)

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Authors: Harry S. Stout

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In the weeks following Fort Wagner, word of black bravery reached African American churches throughout the North. The
Christian Recorder
printed a letter from James Lynch, their correspondent in South Carolina, who visited the wounded “colored heroes” in the hospital and proudly reported : “I never saw men so cheerful in suffering in my life. It seems as though every man had counted the cost and fought and bled from the deepest inwrought convictions of duty.” As for the commander, Robert Shaw, he “was buried in a pit with twenty-five of his men. The Colonel if he had chosen wouldn’t chose another grave. This young hero—though fallen in battle, has written his name on the hearts of the colored race, and his deeds of valor—his zeal in the cause of liberty will give the historian of this war his brightest page.”
19
 
In American memory, as shaped by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s magisterial memorial on Boston Common, the Fifty-fourth is the most famous colored regiment to fight in the Civil War. But they were not alone. Corporal Henry S. Harmon of the Pennsylvania Third United States Colored Troops described the role his regiment played at Wagner, digging trenches under intense enemy fire right up to the parapet of the fort.
The regiment was “backed by the 54th and the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers [Colored].” Aware of white racist criticism, Harmon wrote the citizens of Philadelphia, informing them of the troops’ bravery: “When you hear of a white family that has lost father, husband, or brother, you can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden. We too have suffered and died in defense of that starry banner which floats only over free men.” He then closed on a providential note: “We expect some warm work here before long, but with the help of the God of battles, who knows the justice of our cause, we hope to go through without wavering, and though many of us must find graves in this land, I feel assured that the name of the colored soldier will stand out in bold relief among the heroes of this war.”
20
When the Union War Department informed Lincoln that some of the captured black soldiers were sold as slaves, he promised retaliation in kind on Confederate prisoners.
21
Fortunately, the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts eluded capture, or their fate would have been the same as those captured at Milliken’s Bend.
In a letter to his future wife, Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis, a sergeant in the Fifty-fourth, described the fight at Fort Wagner and the bravery of the troops: “This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me.... How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here. My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die I die in a good cause.”
22
Fort Wagner persuaded many racist and skeptical white Northerners that African Americans could fight well and bleed for their country alongside whites. Soon after the war was concluded, a writer for the
New York Tribune
looked back on that day as pivotal:
It is not too much to say that if this Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hundred thousand colored troops for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field, or would not have been put in for another year, which would have been equivalent to protracting the war into 1866. But it did not falter. It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill had been for ninety years to the white Yankees.
23
The analogy to Bunker Hill is not overdrawn. The only way to know if armies can fight is to let them fight. What white Americans learned at Bunker Hill, African Americans learned at Wagner—or, more accurately, relearned, for they too fought nobly alongside white patriots in the Revolution.
 
General Grant perceived the strategic value of black soldiers as clearly as anyone. In a letter to Lincoln he observed: “This [arming of black soldiers], with emancipation of the negro is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.... They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us.”
While Grant referred primarily to the military and strategic consequences of arming black soldiers (most former slaves), the ideological consequences were, if anything, even greater. Perhaps even more than Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the willingness of black soldiers to fight and die helped to transform the moral meaning of the Civil War from a war for Union to a “crusade” for freedom. With black soldiers under arms, white Northern opposition to emancipation (in particular Democratic opposition) now meant opposition to the Northern army—a box not easily escaped. This vulnerability was not lost on the Republicans, and it would further the drumbeat for African American participation in the war. Resounding Republican victories in the 1863 elections, including, most dramatically, the trouncing of Vallandigham in Ohio, confirmed the political capital to be gained by enlisting black soldiers.
On the home front, Northern sermons moved beyond their praise of emancipation and commentaries on the issue of slavery and the Bible to comment on black soldiers’ admirable qualities as warriors. In his Thanksgiving Day sermon to the First Congregational Church of Albany, Ray Palmer spoke of the change in sentiments accompanying black soldiers in the field:
To a great extent, to our shame it should be spoken, they have lived among us as under band. But at last their manhood has been recognized. They have been summoned, as men, to go forth for the defence of our common country ; and they have not only bravely fought beside our sons and brothers in the field, but have dared with them the deadly breach and mingled their blood with theirs on the fiercely contested height.
24
On the battlefront, African American soldiers participated eagerly in Thanksgiving. Among them was Corporal James Henry Gooding, who had fought bravely at Fort Wagner. With Charleston now under siege he had occasion to describe the religious observance:
The air was just cool and keen enough to make one feel that it was a genuine old New England Thanksgiving day.... It was a scene long to be remembered—a grand army assembled on the verge where old ocean roars, to render homage and thanks to the Great Giver of victory. The gilded star and waving plume of warring chief stood side by side with the humble citizen soldier or quondam slave! The famed cathedrals of the Old World never presented a scene more grand, majestic, and impressive than the volunteer soldiers of a great and powerful Republic, gathered in a solid mass, with the arching dome of heaven for their temple, acknowledging their dependence on the mighty King of kings. We had no rich toned and powerful organ to lull the warring passions into submissive reverence; but the waves on the sea-beat shore seemed to partake of the majesty of the hour, and in low and gentle ripples made music on the sands. Every head was bared as the Post Band commenced to play some of the good old Orthodox airs of home—no doubt reminding many there assembled, of the day as observed at home.
25
On February 20, 1864, black regiments again distinguished themselves in another noble but losing cause at Olustee (Ocean Pond) in Florida. From their base in Jacksonville, General Truman Seymour’s Tenth Corps, which included several black regiments led by the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, moved inland to Baldwin, where they were surprised by a Confederate counterattack. In a desperate holding action, the Fifty-fourth maintained their position “at all costs,” waiting until dark to allow for an orderly Federal retreat to Jacksonville. The Eighth U.S. Colored Infantry also fought and suffered more than three hundred casualties.
For Sergeant Major Rufus S. Jones of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the battle again proved black bravery under fire as only fire can prove. The Confederate attack came so suddenly that sergeants had no time to take off their sashes, making them sitting ducks for Confederate fire. For the first time, black soldiers faced white soldiers eyeball to eyeball on common ground.
Unfortunately for Seymour’s army, the attack came so suddenly that only half of his men were loaded with ammunition. When their top two officers and many soldiers fell, the Eighth moved to the rear of the Fifty-fourth and helped them hold their position. After the battle, surgeons picked up wounded black soldiers before white, fearing what would happen if they were captured. For Jones, “it looked sad to see men wounded coming into camp with their arms and equipments on, so great was their endurance and so determined were they to defend themselves till the death. I saw white troops that were not badly wounded, that had thrown away everything.”
26
A former slave, Susie King Taylor, labored as an unpaid and untrained nurse among wounded black soldiers and, in her memoir, described how she overcame the horrible sights of the battle:
It seems strange how our aversion to seeing suffering is overcome in war,—how we are able to see the most sickening sights, such as men with their limbs blown off and mangled by the deadly shells, without a shudder; and instead of turning away, how we hurry to assist in alleviating their pain, bind up their wounds, and press the cool water to their parched lips, with feelings only of sympathy and pity.
27
New York was the last Northern state to actively enlist black recruits, the lateness stemming from the resistance of its Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour. But by March 1864 three black regiments enlisted as the Twentieth U.S. Colored Troops and paraded through New York City as “white and colored ladies wave[d] their handkerchiefs.” The irony did not escape a writer for the
Christian Recorder:
I think that some of the same rabble, who were in the pro-slavery melee of July 13, 1863, were made to shed tears of repentance on beholding the 20th regiment of Colored Troops off Riker’s Island, as they marched through the streets of this great city in glorious array, onward to the defence of their country, God, and the right, notwithstanding the outrages they suffered a few months past at the hands of the ... copperheads.
28
By 1864 Confederates were also aware that black soldiers performed admirably. The response was predictable. On April 12 the intrepid and brutally racist slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest led a Confederate cavalry division on a mission to reduce Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and block Federal navigation along the Mississippi. The fort was defended by 262 black soldiers from the Eleventh U.S. Colored Troops and 295 whites. Together they were no match for the superior numbers and tactical genius of Forrest.
By afternoon, Forrest had his fifteen hundred men in position and took the fort with light casualties. Despite Confederate denials at the time, evidence has since shown that many Federal troops, and in particular the black troops, were murdered after they had surrendered and laid down their arms. In later congressional testimony, eyewitnesses described rebel troops shouting, “No quarter! No quarter! Kill the damned niggers; shoot them down!” Claims of black soldiers buried alive may have been inflated, but it is clear that scores of black soldiers and some white compatriots were “massacred” after their surrender—an act of cold-blooded murder.
29
Forrest himself avoided censure because he “neither ordered nor condoned the massacre.” Left unsaid was the fact that he did not need to. What he needed to do was order the protection of prisoners. It was a lesson in moral avoidance that Northern generals would also learn perfectly.
On June 12 Sergeant Ransom recorded in his prison diary that some new “negro soldiers” arrived at Andersonville from the Eleventh U.S. Colored Troops. They told “hard stories,” he wrote, against the Confederacy at Fort Pillow: “Many were wounded after their surrender.”
30
After the murder of black prisoners at Milliken’s Bend and Fort Pillow, black soldiers vowed “no quarter” on their own part and fought under the banner “Remember Fort Pillow.” With black soldiers now in combat, and no quarter given on either side, the Civil War had turned the corner toward a race war. At the battle of Brice’s Cross Roads on June 10, Federal forces were routed by Forrest’s corps. The white Yankees ran in defeat, but the black soldiers refused to surrender, emptying all their ammunition and then engaging the Confederates with bayonet and clubbed muskets.
31
As hatreds seethed in both directions, Confederate troops shrank from combat against black soldiers just as much as black soldiers dreaded to be captured. The war within a war pitted blacks against Confederates, both uncertain of any mercy in defeat and desperate to avoid surrender. Both, in the words of black soldier Joseph T. Wilson, “accepted the portentous fiat, victory or death.”
32
The race issue existed not only between Confederate and black Union troops but within the Northern armies themselves. Commissary Sergeant Richard W. White of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry described how, en route to Florida in March 1864, a white Irish soldier “took on himself the prerogative of calling one of our men a nigger” and prompted a near riot. With memories of the New York draft riots freshly in place, the enraged black soldiers sought to teach “Pat” a lesson. But violence was avoided when the Fifty-fifth’s protective commander, Colonel Fox, ordered the white soldier arrested and sent to the provost guard. A relieved White concluded, “A few cases like this will teach these fellows to attend to their own business and let other folks alone.”
33
At the same time, Northern outrage at Fort Pillow was immediate and, ironically, did much to win white sympathy for black soldiers under arms. In a letter to “My Dear Mr. Bradlee,” Luis Endicott expressed the opinion of many when he observed, “What a dreadful thing the Fort Pillow affair was. It only shows us, what this horrid war will eventually run into. I think if after a thorough investigation of the facts on this case, the killing of the negros and whites after surrender is fully confirmed, Mr. Lincoln should certainly retaliate—two for one.”
34

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