Dobak William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (ENG)

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The South Atlantic Coast, 1863 –1865

Confederate opponents overcame obstacles that had long bafed the troops of

a backwater beachhead.

The need to recruit more black soldiers was much on the mind of General

Foster that winter as he prepared to relinquish command of the Department of the

South to go on medical leave. Thousands of black Georgians had followed Sher-

man’s army to the sea, and Foster saw a chance to “raise two or three regiments”

from the men among them. By mid-January, he had lled his existing regiments

of U.S. Colored Troops to the statutory minimum and recruited “several hundred”

men besides. He asked the adjutant general to assign him numbers for “at least

four” new regiments. Yet Foster had to admit on 1 February that “recruiting of ne-

groes does not progress well.” Only four hundred fty men had enlisted, for which

Foster blamed General Saxton, who had “created some disorder by his harangues

before mass meetings of negroes, which he called in Savannah.” The Union occu-

pying force would prohibit any more mass meetings, Foster promised. Meanwhile,

OR, ser. 1, 44: 848, 855; vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 377 (“heavy details”). W. Nelson Diary, 13 Jan 1865,

Michigan State University Archives, East Lansing; A. Reed to Dear Mother, 11 Jan 1865, A. Reed

Papers, DU; Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, pp. 269–70.

This wagon track through woods was typical of country roads throughout the

South—indeed, the United States—in the mid-nineteenth century. Along such roads,

Union troops in South Carolina advanced inland in April 1865.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

Foster’s superintendent of volunteer recruiting, Brig. Gen. Milton S. Littleeld,

would continue his work in the department.

General Saxton’s role in recruiting, and the conict it generated, stemmed

from a meeting on 12 January between General Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin

M. Stanton, and twenty black clergymen and lay leaders in Savannah. They an-

swered questions from the general and the secretary about their opinions regarding

slavery, the war, black enlistment in the Union Army, and how black people would

prefer to live after the war. In response to their answers, Sherman published his

Special Field Orders No. 15 four days later. The orders restricted residence on the

Sea Islands and nearby abandoned farms on the mainland to former slaves only, ex-

cept for “military ofcers and soldiers detailed for duty.” General Saxton became

“inspector of settlements and plantations,” charged with assuring residents’ title to

their land pending nal action by Congress. His other duties included “enlistment

and organization of the negro recruits and protecting their interests while [they

were] absent from their settlements.” The Department of the South, however, al-

ready had a superintendent of volunteer recruiting in General Littleeld. Not until

14 February was the difculty straightened out, with Saxton succeeding Littleeld

as superintendent. Even this late in the war, the government seemed incapable

of organizing the U.S. Colored Troops without creating overlapping and conict-

ing authorities. As a result of this confusion, the rst of the new regiments in the

Department of the South, the 103d USCI, did not complete its organization until

March 1865 and the other two, the 104th and 128th USCIs, until April.

Long before spring, while the XVII Corps was moving inland to rejoin the

rest of Sherman’s army in its march north, the Union force that had been watch-

ing Charleston Harbor for the previous two years nally occupied the city. On the

morning of 18 February, Lt. Col. Augustus G. Bennett, 21st USCI, sent Capt. Sam-

uel Cuskaden, 52d Pennsylvania, to reconnoiter the ruins of Fort Sumter. Rowing

toward the fort, Cuskaden met a boatload of Confederate bandsmen from Fort

Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, who told him that they had been left behind in the

evacuation of the city and its defenses. Cuskaden sent his original boat crew on to

raise a U.S. ag over Fort Moultrie and had the Confederates row him back to Mor-

ris Island to report to Bennett. After securing the harbor forts, a small Union force

landed in Charleston itself about 10:00 a.m. While Bennett sent for the mayor to

arrange the city’s surrender, he heard explosions as the Confederates blew up sup-

ply depots and warships. Late that afternoon, his own regiment, the 21st USCI,

came ashore to begin patrolling Charleston as a provost guard.

Meanwhile, the small force that remained in Florida tried to stay active. “I’ve

just popped in here with 7 Cos. of my Regt after a raid of eight days,” Colonel

Beecher wrote from St. Augustine in May 1864. “We took a steamer up St. John’s

River. . . . Then across the County to east side. . . . Got out of rations–Shot beef &

stole potatoes & Horses—Scared Secesh into ts . . . & played the mischief gener-

ally.” In ofcial correspondence, Beecher was more subdued, noting the condition

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 1002 (“raise two”), 1005 (“at least”), 1007 (“recruiting”).

Ibid., pp. 61 (“military ofcers”), 62 (“enlistment”); vol. 47, pt. 2, pp. 37–41, 186, 424. Dyer,

Compendium, pp. 252–53.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1018–20; vol. 53, pp. 60–61.

The South Atlantic Coast, 1863 –1865

of railroads reconnoitered, a steam sawmill with a boiler in apparently good condi-

tion, salvageable naval stores, “live oak ship knees, about fty above water, easy of

access. . . . I suppose the lot to be valuable.” He reported the suspected presence of

a “considerable rebel force scattered round” and recommended a raid to disperse

it and to secure about six hundred head of cattle that roamed outside Union lines.

Nothing came of Beecher’s proposal. General Foster, commanding the depart-

ment, needed reinforcements for his move against the Charleston and Savannah

Railroad (see pp. 72–76, above), and he ordered General Birney at Jacksonville

to join him with the 7th and 35th USCIs. After the unsuccessful conclusion of

Foster’s South Carolina operation, Birney and both regiments returned to Florida

and at once mounted an operation from the beachhead to which a defeated Union

army had withdrawn after the Battle of Olustee. The 7th, 8th, and 35th USCIs, ac-

companied by two white infantry regiments (one of them mounted), a battalion of

cavalry, and a battery of artillery, both white, attacked the railroad south of Bald-

win, the town through which they had passed ve months earlier while advancing

toward and retreating from Olustee. To reach the railroad, they boated twenty-ve

miles up the St. John’s River to Black Creek and another four miles up Black Creek

to “an obscure landing concealed by woods” so small that it took three nights to

disembark the entire force. By 24 July, all the troops were ashore and building a

“frail and oating” bridge, “made mostly of fence rails,” across a branch of Black

Creek south of Middleburg. There, a force of nearly one hundred mounted Con-

federates attacked them. The 35th USCI drove them off, and the cavalry battalion

gave chase. The next day, the Union troops continued their drive. The infantry built

a bridge over the swollen North Fork of Black Creek while the horses swam the

stream. Once across, the mounted troops dashed ahead to destroy trestles on the

two rail lines that intersected at Baldwin. “It was after midnight when the work

at the railroad ceased,” General Birney reported. “The day’s work had been enor-

mous.” On 27 July, Union troops occupied the railroad junction at Baldwin for the

rst time since their retreat from Olustee in February.

The 3d USCI occupied the town of Palatka on the St. John’s River some sixty

miles upstream from Jacksonville. Its commanding ofcer was encouraged to pa-

trol to the south and west, to go even as far as Ocala, two-thirds of the way to the

Gulf, if he encountered no opposition. The 9th, 26th, 34th, and 102d USCIs and

the 29th Connecticut were ready to embark at Hilton Head to reinforce that effort

when word arrived that Generals Grant and Halleck had already agreed to move a

brigade of black infantry from the Department of the South to the siege of Peters-

burg. Instead of sending ve black regiments to march halfway across Florida, the

Department of the South ordered General Birney with the 7th, 8th, and 9th USCIs

and the 29th Connecticut to Virginia.

General Hatch arrived on 3 August to take Birney’s place as commander of

the District of Florida. He brought with him the 34th and 102d USCIs. Hatch con-

ferred with Birney, whom he thought “very sanguine” about the prospects of offen-

J. C. Beecher to Frankie darling, 5 May 1864, Beecher Papers; Col J. C. Beecher to Capt M.

Bailey, 22 Jun 1864 (quotations), and 24 Jun 1864, 35th USCI, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 1, pp. 420–21 (quotations, p. 420), and pt. 2, p. 195.

Ibid., pt. 2, pp. 199, 202–03.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

sive operations in the district, and began to ponder a raid toward Gainesville. On 15

August, the 34th, 35th, and 102d USCIs left Baldwin at daybreak accompanied by

twenty mounted infantry and three artillery pieces. They marched south along the

railroad for about ten miles and destroyed half a mile of track before camping for

the night. Continuing south along the line for the next three days, they burned an

estimated fourteen tons of cotton and a large steam-powered cotton gin and mill.

On 19 August, the expedition turned northeast and marched to Magnolia on the St.

John’s River, arriving toward sundown. It brought with it, General Hatch noted,

“about 75 contrabands, and some few horses and mules.”

Even before Hatch’s raid got under way, Grant had demanded more troops

from the Department of the South for his operations in Virginia. General Foster

sent three white regiments from South Carolina, but he in turn demanded that

Hatch, in Florida, return the 102d USCI. This reduced Hatch’s command to the

Ibid., pt. 1, pp. 428 (“about 75”), 430, and pt. 2, pp. 212, 215 (“very sanguine”).

Ruins of Charleston after the Confederate evacuation

The South Atlantic Coast, 1863 –1865

3d, 34th, and 35th USCIs and ve white organizations: three infantry regiments,

a battalion of cavalry, and a battery of artillery. The department remained “purely

on the defensive,” as Halleck advised. The scale of operations dwindled until, late

in January 1865, the commanding ofcer of the 3d USCI thought it worthwhile to

report that he had sent out forty men “to bring in a [Unionist] family and household

goods, and hoping to capture a rebel soldier lurking about the neighborhood of the

house to which the party was sent.” He did not report whether his patrol succeeded

in nding the lone Confederate.

As Charleston’s besiegers nally occupied the city, other troops from the

Department of the South moved inland behind Sherman’s XVII Corps. Colonel

Beecher had recovered from the wounds he received at Honey Hill, and he rejoined

the 35th USCI on 18 February. The regiment crossed the Edisto River on a mile-

long railroad trestle that had been burned for fty yards in the middle. The troops

brought planks, laid them end to end, and then moved in single le across the gap.

Succeeding days brought them to more bridges, some burned before Beecher’s

regiment reached them, others burned by the regiment after it crossed. Private

dwellings suffered too. “It grieves me to see such splendid houses and such furni-

ture burnt up,” Beecher told his ancée. “But we can’t take it along, and up they

go. Tonight the whole horizon is [lighted?] up splendidly. No less than four grand

conagrations going on at once. I shall get to be a regular brigand. . . . These plant-

ers have lived most luxuriously, but they have got to rough it now.” Not far from

Beecher, Captain Nelson and the 102d USCI were approaching Charleston from

the southwest, out-marching the wagon trains that bore their rations. “The men

did not suffer much for want of them,” Nelson wrote, “as there is enough to eat in

the country, which they helped themselves to pretty freely.” After a long time in

a coastal enclave, the troops of the Department of the South adapted easily to the

ways of Sherman’s army. “We have ransacked every plantation on our way and

burnt up every thing we could not carry away,” Private Reed told his mother.

Still operating as the Military Division of the Mississippi, Sherman’s force

moved into North Carolina. From near Fayetteville, Sherman wrote to General

Gillmore in mid-March, telling him of “a vast amount of rolling stock” in north-

eastern South Carolina that the federal advance had left undamaged. Burned rail-

road bridges had immobilized the cars and locomotives, but Sherman wanted them

destroyed before the Confederates could repair the bridges and rescue them. Gill-

more was to send a force of about twenty-ve hundred men, Sherman wrote, tak-

ing them from the garrisons of Charleston and Savannah if necessary. “All real

good soldiers must now be marching,” he told Gillmore. “The men could march

without knapsacks, with a single blanket, and carry eight days’ provisions, which,

with what is now in the country, will feed the command two weeks.” Gillmore

sent two brigades, one of white regiments from New York and Ohio, the other,

commanded by Colonel Hallowell of the 54th Massachusetts, composed of Hal-

lowell’s own regiment and the 32d and 102d USCIs. With them went part of a

battery of artillery, a detachment of cavalry, and some men of the 1st New York

Ibid., pt. 2, pp. 231 (“purely on the defensive”), 247, 321; vol. 47, pt. 2, p. 142 (“to bring in”).

J. C. Beecher to Dearest, 19 Feb 1865, Beecher Papers; Nelson Diary, 24 Feb 1865; A. Reed

to Dear Mother, 25 Feb 1865, Reed Papers.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

Engineers, long in the trenches before Charleston but now ready to march cross-

country, building bridges or destroying them. The entire force numbered some

twenty-seven hundred men.

The two brigades and their supporting troops moved by sea to Georgetown,

farther north on the South Carolina coast than Union troops had operated before.

On 5 April, they struck inland toward Columbia, destroying any cotton gins and

cotton they found and exchanging shots with Confederate skirmishers from time to

time. They reached the town of Manning three days later. Along the way, they re-

ceived rations and ammunition from naval vessels in the Santee River. At Manning,

they discovered a mile-long causeway with six bridges across the Pocotaligo River

and an adjoining swamp, all of the bridges more or less burned. By midnight, the

men of Hallowell’s brigade had the bridges repaired sufciently to bear the weight

of infantry. They crossed at once and bivouacked two miles farther on. At dawn

on 9 April, they moved ahead while the engineers nished repairing the bridges to

allow the passage of horses and guns.

Since the main Confederate force in the region was confronting Sherman’s

army in North Carolina, Hallowell’s brigade reached Sumterville on the Wilming-

ton and Manchester Railroad “without serious opposition” that evening. The next

day, the regiments dispersed to begin their work. Moving east toward Maysville,

the 32d USCI burned seven railroad cars and a bridge. To the west of Sumterville,

the 102d USCI destroyed a bridge, four railroad cars, two hundred bales of cotton,

and a gin. In Sumterville itself, the 54th Massachusetts wrecked a machine shop,

disabled three locomotives, and burned fteen cars. During the next two days, sol-

diers of the brigade destroyed an estimated $300,000 worth of property.

By the end of another week, General Gillmore’s two brigades had driven their

Confederate opponents beyond Statesburg, a distance of some one hundred miles

inland. The Union raiders then retraced their steps to Georgetown on the coast, hav-

ing destroyed or disabled 32 locomotives, 250 railroad cars, and 100 cotton gins

and presses while burning ve thousand bales of cotton. More than three thousand

slaves had left their plantations to accompany the expedition. On their way back

to the seacoast, the soldiers learned on 21 April that the opposing armies in North

Carolina had concluded a cease-re. The next day came word of the Confederate

surrender in Virginia and on the day after that news of Lincoln’s assassination. On

25 April, the expedition reached Georgetown and went into camp. The Colored

Troops’ last operation in the Department of the South was over.

A striking feature of ofcers’ reports of this nal raid is the extent to which

Northern troops, black and white alike, continued to rely on information from

black Southerners while conducting local operations. The 54th Massachusetts had

been recruited across the North, the 32d USCI at Philadelphia, and the 102d USCI

in Michigan. All three were, in varying degrees, alien to the South. Captain Emilio

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1027–28, and pt. 2, pp. 856 (“vast amount”), 857 (“All real”).

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 1028; Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, pp. 292–94.

Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, pp. 295–98 (quotation, p. 295).

Ibid., pp. 307–08. “About three thousand negroes came into Georgetown with the division,

while the whole number released was estimated at six thousand.” Ibid., pp. 308–09. “The number

of negroes who followed the column may be estimated at 5,000,” Brig. Gen. E. E. Potter reported.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 1027.

The South Atlantic Coast, 1863 –1865

of the 54th Massachusetts credited “contrabands” with telling his regiment’s com-

manding ofcer about the extent of a swamp that lay in its path. The regiment got

through “under the guidance of an old white-headed negro.” General Potter direct-

ed a successful move against the enemy on 9 April after another black Carolinian

told him “that [a] swamp could be crossed on the enemy’s right.” Nine days later,

“a negro guide” helped to assure another victory for Union troops by leading them

through another swamp. Federal soldiers’ dependence on the local knowledge of

black Southerners began the day of the Port Royal landing in November 1861 and

continued through the raid from Georgetown to Sumterville forty-three months

later. This collaboration was essential to Union operations during the entire war,

not only on the Atlantic Coast but throughout the South.

During the war’s nal months, little of note happened in northeastern Florida.

In March 1865, Sgt. Maj. Henry James of the 3d USCI led a raid up the St. John’s

River. Twenty-four men of his own regiment and the 34th USCI, one soldier from

a white regiment, and “7 civilians (colored)” made up the party. Past Welaka, they

hid their boats in a swamp and struck westward about forty-ve miles until they

came near Ocala. On the way, besides burning a sugar mill and a distillery, they

managed to take four white prisoners and set free ninety-one black Floridians.

Returning, they drove off more than fty Confederate cavalry who attacked them

about twenty miles short of the river. The party’s loss during the ve-day expedi-

tion was two killed and four wounded. “I think that this expedition, planned and

executed by colored Soldiers and civilians, reects great credit upon the parties

engaged in it,” the regiment’s commanding ofcer wrote to General Gillmore, “and

I respectfully suggest that some public recognition of it, would have a good ef-

fect upon the troops.” The letter went to department headquarters, where, on 20

April, Gillmore praised the raid in general orders: “This expedition, planned and

executed by colored men under the command of a colored non-commissioned of-

cer, reects great credit upon the brave participants and their leader. The major-

general commanding thanks these courageous soldiers and scouts, and holds up

their conduct to their comrades in arms as an example worthy of emulation.” This

collaboration between 16 mostly Northern black soldiers (the 3d USCI was the

rst black regiment organized in Philadelphia), 6 Southern black soldiers from

the 34th USCI, 1 soldier from a white regiment, and 7 black civilians, combining

military training and local knowledge, exemplied the kind of success that the U.S.

Colored Troops could achieve.

A few days after Gillmore issued his order, the Confederate commander in

Florida began negotiating a surrender with his Union opponent, Brig. Gen. Israel

Vogdes. By 12 May, arrangements were complete. Vogdes “found it necessary,” he

told his adjutant general, to send seventy-ve men of the 3d USCI to Baldwin to

guard surrendered property until it could be brought to Jacksonville. “I have given

them instructions to conne themselves exclusively to guarding the property and

to preserve the strictest discipline, not to interfere with citizens in any way unless

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1028 (“swamp”), 1030 (“negro guide”); Emilio, Brave Black

Regiment, pp. 301 (“contrabands”), 302 (“white-headed negro”).

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 3, p. 190; Col B. C. Tilghman to Capt T. J. Robinson, 20 Mar 1865, 3d

USCI, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

attacked, and it be necessary to protect the public property.” The tone of these

orders, delivered just a week after the Confederate surrender, typied the restraint

that would be enjoined on the U.S. Colored Troops as they took up occupation du-

ties across the recalcitrant South.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 3, p. 514.

Control of the Mississippi River was an objective that federal ofcials bore in

mind even before hostilities began. Commercially important since the days of the

rst trans-Appalachian settlements, the river was the route by which a large part of

the South’s chief export, cotton, reached the world. Toward the end of its course,

the Mississippi meets the Red River in low, at land between Natchez and Baton

Rouge. Because of the level terrain, parts of the ow of both rivers join to form a

distributary stream called the Atchafalaya River, which ows south to empty into

the Gulf of Mexico at Atchafalaya Bay while the Mississippi itself turns gradually

to the southeast. Every landowner’s lot in southeastern Louisiana included river

frontage, a vestige of the region’s French colonial heritage. Rivers and bayous sub-

stituted for roads, carrying planters’ produce and purchases to and from market.

They also provided routes for escaping slaves and, later, for raiding parties from

both sides in the Civil War. Throughout the region, levees and drainage canals

were, and still are, prominent features of the landscape (see Map 2).

Around the conuence of the Red River and the Mississippi and to the west

and south of it lay the “sugar parishes” of Louisiana. North of there, and up the

Mississippi past Memphis, the planters grew cotton. Both crops required plenty

of land and labor, and the lower Mississippi Valley was home to large plantations

and some of the highest concentrations of black people in the United States. In the

cotton-growing “Natchez District”—the ve Mississippi counties south of Vicks-

burg and the three Louisiana parishes across the river—nearly 106,000 black resi-

dents outnumbered the region’s whites by more than four to one. Only 407 of the

106,000 were free.

The population of New Orleans was quite different. The city’s 168,675 resi-

dents made it the nation’s sixth largest and the only thing approaching a metropolis

in the Confederacy. Charleston, the next most populous, was less than one-quarter

Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1985), p. 190; Martin Reuss, Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin

(Alexandria, Va.: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1998), pp. 19–23.

Sam B. Hilliard, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1984), pp. 34, 36, 38, 43, 71, 77; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History

of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 174–88; U.S. Census

Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Ofce,

1864), pp. 194, 270. Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District,

Southern Louisiana and

the Gulf Coast, 1862–1863

Chapter 4

Caloosahatchee R

Bayou La Fourche

GULF OF MEXICO

Bayou Teche

Atchafalaya R

Lake Pontchartrain

Old River

Lake Okeechobee

Fort Pike

Spanish Fort

Fort Jackson

Fort Pickens

Fort Barrancas

Fort Myers

Fort Jeerson

Depot Key

S hip Island

Ced ar Keys

Key West

Meridian

Pascagoula

Stockton

Biloxi

Thibodeaux

New Iberia

Blakely

Pollard

Bagdad

Lake Providence

Shreveport

Washington

Simmesport

Port Hudson

Morganza

Jackson

Clinton

Woodville

Grand Ecore

Opelousas

Donaldsonville

Plaquemine

Brashear

Algiers

Alexandria

Natchitoches

Pensacola

St. Marks

Newport

Natural Bridge

Savannah

Brunswick

Jacksonville

St. Augustine

Columbus

Selma

Mobile

Vicksburg

New Orleans

Natchez

Tampa

MONTGOMERY

TALLAHASSEE

BATON ROUGE

JACKSON

GEORGIA

FLORIDA

SOUTH

CAROLINA

ALABAMA

LOU ISIANA

MISSISSIPPI

ARKANSAS

TEXAS

THE GULF COAST

1861–1865

120804020

Miles

Map 2