Dobak William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (ENG)
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Page
Vicksburg, Mississippi
........................................... 173
Col. Embury D. Osband
.......................................... 193
Brig. Gen. John P. Hawkins
....................................... 195
Federal shipping where the Yazoo River empties into the Mississippi
....... 200
Col. Edward Bouton
............................................. 211
Maj. Jeremiah B. Cook
........................................... 221
Helena, Arkansas, submerged by a ood in 1864
....................... 233
Union outpost at Fort Smith, Arkansas
............................... 239
Col. Samuel J. Crawford
.......................................... 245
Nashville was a rail center essential to Union advances
................. 260
Railroad bridge over Elk River
..................................... 264
Black recruits in Tennessee
....................................... 271
Part of the country in east-central Tennessee
.......................... 273
A typical federal blockhouse
...................................... 276
Dalton, Georgia
................................................ 280
Union troops aboard a train in northern Georgia
....................... 288
Part of the Nashville battleeld
.................................... 293
Sgt. Henry J. Maxwell
........................................... 296
New Berne headquarters of the Superintendent of the Poor
............... 303
Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild
........................................ 306
The 20th U.S. Colored Infantry receives its regimental colors
............. 311
Philadelphia recruits in early 1864
.................................. 313
General Wild led ve black regiments through northeastern North Carolina
.... 321
Charles City Court House
......................................... 325
Libby Prison
................................................... 327
The District of Columbia was still largely rural during the Civil War
....... 339
Belle Plain, Virginia
............................................. 340
Grisly relics of earlier ghting
..................................... 342
Slaves escaping to freedom
....................................... 342
Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s progress up the James River
............. 344
Many escaped slaves preferred to work as laborers rather than enlist
as soldiers
................................................... 347
Panoramic view of the ground across which the XVIII Corps attacked
...... 350
Chaplain Henry M. Turner
........................................ 353
Col. Delavan Bates
.............................................. 356
The explosion of the Petersburg mine
............................... 360
Confusion prevailed during the battle
............................... 362
The crater, not long after Union troops entered Petersburg
............... 365
Camp of a black regiment from Ohio
................................ 368
Union troops attack the Confederate line north of the James River
......... 374
Terrain across which Union troops attacked on 29 September 1864
........ 375
Christian A. Fleetwood
........................................... 379
An 1859 map shows the central position of Kentucky
................... 382
White and black troops dig the Dutch Gap Canal
...................... 391
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Swampy woods near Petersburg
.................................... 397
Map of Fort Fisher and environs from the Ofcial Atlas
................. 400
Union transports in a heavy sea, en route to attack Wilmington,
North Carolina
............................................... 404
Fort Fisher, North Carolina
........................................ 406
Recruiting agents from Northern states tried to enlist black Southerners
.... 412
Richmond, Virginia
............................................. 417
View of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
.................... 421
Brownsville, Texas
.............................................. 427
Maj. Edelmiro Mayer
............................................ 439
Mexican port of Matamoros
....................................... 449
The pontoon bridge at Brownsville
.................................. 452
Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard
....................................... 459
Men of the 107th U.S. Colored Infantry in front of the guardhouse at
Fort Corcoran
................................................ 467
The 113th U.S. Colored Infantry mustered out in April 1866
............. 486
The destruction of the shantytown near Fort Pickering
.................. 492
Illustrations courtesy of the following sources: cover, 2, 4, 35, 38, 71, 73, 81,
84, 260, 276, 280, 293, 325, 327, 342 (top and bottom), 347, 350, 368, 374, 375,
379, 404, 417, 421, 467, Library of Congress; 27, 33, 62, 107, 118, 125, 163, 170,
200, 239 (top), 271, 288, 303, 311, 344, 412, 427, 449, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper; 12 (bottom), 46, 48, 321, 353, 360, 362, 486, 492, Harper’s Weekly;
50, 56, 60, 77, 105, 126 (top and bottom), 130, 173, 193, 195, 211, 221, 245,
264, 306, 340, 356, 397, 406, 452, 459, U.S. Army Military History Institute;
53, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; 12 (top), 101, 146, 239 (bottom), 296,
339, 365, 391, 439, National Archives; 114, Western Reserve Historical Society
Library and Archives, Cleveland, Ohio; 233, Special Collections, University of
Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville; 273, Chicago Public Library; 313, Philadelphia
recruits (http://people.virginia.edu/~jh3v/retouching history/gure1.html); 382,
J. H. Colton, Colton’s Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography;
400, Atlas to Accompany the Ofcial Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies (vol. 1).
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Foreword
The impetus for Freedom by the Sword came from Brig. Gen. (Ret.) John S.
Brown, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Military History from 1998 until his retirement in
2005. William A. Dobak, an authority on the history of black soldiers in the nine-
teenth century and an award-winning historian at the Center of Military History,
took charge of the project beginning in 2003.
The years since then have seen the U.S. invasion of Iraq and our country’s sub-
sequent involvement there and in Afghanistan. These events, as well as a year that
Dobak spent drafting chapters for a book in the Center’s Vietnam series, helped
to shape his view of the Civil War, the importance of guerrilla operations in that
conict, and the role of the U.S. Colored Troops in it.
This is primarily an operational history of the Colored Troops in action. Other
works have dealt with such subjects as the Colored Troops and racial discrimina-
tion, the soldiers’ lives in camp and at their homes, and how these men fared as
veterans during Reconstruction and afterward. Instead, Freedom by the Sword tells
what they did as soldiers during the war. This book is about American soldiers,
ghting under the ag of the Union to preserve that Union and to free their en-
slaved brothers and sisters. Despite formidable obstacles of poor leadership and
deep prejudices against the very idea of African Americans being armed and sent
into battle, these men rallied to the colors in large numbers and fought. It is thus
a quintessentially American story. It is also perhaps the only book to examine the
Colored Troops’ formation, training, and operations during the entire span of their
service, and in every theater of the war in which they served. By doing so, it under-
scores the unique nature of their contributions both to Union victory and to their
own liberation. That there are lessons here for the modern soldier goes without
saying, for however much the technology of war evolves, its essence changes little.
Washington, D.C. RICHARD W. STEWART
31 March 2011 Chief Historian
xii
William A. Dobak received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in Ameri-
can studies in 1995. His published dissertation, Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Mili-
tary Money and Economic Growth, 1853–1895 (1998), won the Edward A. Tihen
Award from the Kansas State Historical Society in 1999.
After receiving his degree, Dobak joined the staff at the National Archives.
While there, he and coauthor Thomas D. Phillips worked on The Black Regulars,
1866–1898 (2001). This work received the Western History Association’s Robert
M. Utley Award for 2003 as the best book on the military history of the frontier
and western North America. In 2002, he joined the staff of the U.S. Army Center
of Military History. In 2003, he began work on Freedom by the Sword: The U.S.
Colored Troops, 1862–1867. Since completing the manuscript, he has retired from
federal service and is now engaged in several other historical projects.
The Author
xiii
Edward L. Pierce was a special agent of the United States Treasury Department,
appointed in 1862 to supervise the federal government’s attempt at plantation man-
agement on the South Carolina Sea Islands. The aim of this project was to grow and
market cotton to help defray the cost of waging the Civil War. Just as important in
the eyes of the occupiers was the need to organize and regulate the labor of the local
population, former slaves whose masters had ed the islands at the approach of a
Union naval and military expedition the previous fall. After a year on the job, Pierce
published his reections in a magazine article. “Two questions are concerned in the
social problem of our time,” he wrote. “One is, Will the people of African descent
work for a living? and the other is, Will they ght for their freedom?” By the end of
the article, Pierce had answered both questions in the afrmative.
1
That anyone in 1863 would have asked “Will they ght for their freedom?”
shows how thoroughly white Americans had forgotten the service of black soldiers
during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Much the same thing happened
after 1865. Although more than two hundred thousand black men served the Union
as soldiers and sailors, and three contemporary black authors published books about
them, the fact that black Americans had fought for the nation slipped once again
from the public consciousness. Thus, by 1928 a biographer of Ulysses S. Grant could
write: “The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far
as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own.” In the twenty-ve
years that followed, two historians devoted chapters of larger works to the black mili-
tary role in the Civil War, but not until Dudley T. Cornish’s The Sable Arm appeared
in 1956 did the U.S. Colored Troops receive book-length treatment.
2
Since then, historians have paid more attention to black troops’ service. James
M. McPherson’s The Negro’s Civil War (1965) and the massive documentary col-
lection compiled by Ira Berlin and his colleagues, The Black Military Experience
(1982), preceded Joseph T. Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle (1990). The years since
1998 have seen the publication of a battle narrative, a study of the Colored Troops’
1
Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (September 1863):
291–315 (quotation, p. 291).
2
Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military, pp.
10–26, gives a brief account of America’s black soldiers from 1775 to 1815. The three books by
nineteenth-century black authors are William W. Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion
(1867); George W. Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865
(1888); and Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx (1890). Bell I. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 1861–
1865 (1938), and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (1953), preceded Dudley T. Cornish,
The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865. William E. Woodward, Meet General
Grant (1928), p. 372 (quotation). David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory examines the process by which white Americans deleted black participation in the war
from the national narrative. See Bibliography for full citations.
Preface
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off-duty behavior, a book about black veterans, and an analysis of one subset of
their white ofcers, as well as a collection of essays (Black Soldiers in Blue, edited
by John David Smith). In addition, there have been regimental histories, studies of
the atrocities Confederates committed on their black opponents, and a narrative of
one of the earliest campaigns in which black troops took part.
3
Nevertheless, the focus of scholarship has not changed a great deal since 1997,
when Brooks D. Simpson observed that
historians have concentrated on the consequences of military service for blacks
and for the whites who commanded them. Scholars view the enlistment of
blacks as a laboratory for social change. . . . Yet there were other dimensions to
the role of black soldiers in the war. Generals had to answer questions involving
their use as combat soldiers, as support personnel working behind the lines, and
as an occupation force. These specic issues in turn place the issue of employ-
ing black troops in the wider context of civil and military policy during and after
the war. . . . By examining . . . the deployment of black regiments within the
context of large policies and problems of command, we gain a better sense of
the conicting pressures upon white commanders as they sought to grapple with
the implications of arming African Americans.
4
This book will tell the story of how the Union Army’s black regiments came into
being, what they accomplished when they took the eld, and how their conduct af-
fected the course of the war and the subsequent occupation of the defeated South. It
will deal with matters such as the organization, pay, and health of black troops only
so far as is necessary to tell this story. Most of the documentation comes either from
The War of the Rebellion: Ofcial Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,
published between 1880 and 1901, or from ofcial correspondence in the National
Archives, most of it unpublished. Since state laws in the South prohibited teaching
slaves to read and write and poor educational opportunities in the North had the same
effect, the overwhelming majority of the source material was written by whites.
Freedom by the Sword begins with a chapter that sketches national factors
that affected the formation of all-black regiments: the racial attitudes of white
Americans, the symbiotic relationship that developed between soldiers and es-
3
James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During
the War for the Union; Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Black Military Experience; Joseph T. Glatthaar,
Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Ofcers; Noah A. Trudeau,
Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865; Keith P. Wilson, Campres of Freedom:
The Camp Life of Black Soldiers During the Civil War; Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The
Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans; Martin W. Öfele, German-Speaking Ofcers in the U.S.
Colored Troops, 1863–1867; Richard M. Reid, Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black
Soldiers in the Civil War Era; John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American
Troops in the Civil War Era; Gregory J. W. Urwin, ed., Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities
and Reprisals in the Civil War; George S. Burkhardt, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter
in the Civil War; Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That
Changed the Course of the Civil War. See bibliography for full citations.
4
Brooks D. Simpson, “Quandaries of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Black Soldiers,” in
Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, eds. David W. Blight
and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), pp. 123–49 (quotation, pp.
123–24).
xv
caped slaves as Union armies moved south, and the development of federal pol-
icy in regard to emancipation and military recruiting. The balance of the book
falls into ve parts, arranged to correspond more or less with the advance of
federal armies into Confederate territory. The rst section therefore deals with
the Department of the South, where a Union force secured a beachhead in No-
vember 1861. There, ofcers found more than thirty thousand black residents,
whom they rst organized as civilian laborers and later recruited as soldiers.
The second section of the book treats the Department of the Gulf, where Union
troops landed at New Orleans in April 1862. The sugar plantations of southern
Louisiana furnished troops that eventually operated along the Gulf Coast, from
the mouth of the Rio Grande to central Florida. The focus of the third section is
on the rest of the Mississippi drainage basin. Four chapters cover the territory
between Fort Scott, Kansas, and northwestern Georgia. North Carolina and Vir-
ginia are the subject of the fourth section. Most of the black regiments raised in
the free states served in these two states; in other parts of the South, black sol-
diers’ service seldom took them so far from home. The fth section of the book
deals with the black regiments’ activities between the time of the Confederate
surrender and their muster out. One chapter sketches their efforts on the lower
Rio Grande in response to political turmoil in Mexico, while the other considers
their responsibilities while the last regiments of Civil War volunteers turned over
occupation duties in the defeated South to the Regular Army.
The narrative includes extensive quotations from contemporary documents,
diaries, and private letters. These appear with the original spelling and punctua-
tion as much as possible, with minimal use of bracketed explanation. Expressions
of racial bigotry occur frequently; they illustrate the prevailing moral climate of
nineteenth-century America and often shed light on the minds of the authors.
When referring to ofcers’ ranks, I use the rank that appears beneath the
writer’s signature on a letter—often a brevet, or acting, rank. In the case of
Wineld Scott, the commanding general in 1861, whose brevet as lieutenant
general dated from the Mexican War, I use “Lt. Gen.” Since the narrative de-
scribes military operations rather than the careers of individual ofcers, there
is no attempt to distinguish between rank in the Regular Army and in the U.S.
Volunteers.
Research for the book required a fair amount of travel. Librarians and ar-
chivists at the institutions named in the bibliography extended courteous and ef-
cient assistance. Staff members of the National Archives, at both College Park,
Maryland, and Washington, D.C., deserve special mention; without their expert
and energetic help, research for this book would not have been possible. Also
helpful were the staffs of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly
the Illinois State Historical Library), the Bowdoin College Library, the Hough-
ton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University, the Kansas State Historical
Society, the New Bedford Free Public Library, the Rhode Island Historical So-
ciety, the libraries of the University of South Carolina and Syracuse University,
the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., and the Western Reserve Historical
Society. I visited all these sites, although the sources housed there do not appear
in the nal version of the text. W. Bart Berger, Richard B. Booth Sr., Lucy B.
xvi
Daoust, and John G. Saint, descendants of Civil War soldiers, made available
typescripts of their ancestors’ letters or diaries.
At the U.S. Army Center of Military History, William M. Hammond went
through successive drafts of the manuscript with a sharp pencil. Among the au-
thor’s colleagues, Bianka J. Adams, Andrew J. Birtle, and Edgar F. Raines each
read one or more chapters and Mark L. Bradley read the entire rst draft. Friends
of the author—James N. Leiker, Thomas D. Phillips, and Frank N. Schubert—also
read the rst draft. Schubert served on the panel that reviewed the entire second
draft, as did Leslie S. Rowland, of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at
the University of Maryland, and Col. Versalle F. Washington, U.S. Army. I would
also like to acknowledge members of the Publishing Division who worked on this
book, including editors Diane M. Donovan and Hildegard J. Bachman, cartogra-
pher S. L. Dowdy, and layout designer Michael R. Gill. Any errors or inaccuracies
in the text are, of course, the responsibility of the author.
Patricia Ames, Lenore Garder, and James Knight were librarians at the U.S.
Army Center of Military History during much of the time I spent researching and
writing this book. I dedicate it to them.
Washington, D.C. WILLIAM A. DOBAK
31 March 2011
FREEDOM BY THE SWORD
THE U.S. COLORED TROOPS, 1862–1867