Dobak William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (ENG)
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Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865
421
Springeld, Illinois. On 16 April, one of Grant’s aides sent a telegram to Ord in
Richmond: “Please send . . . immediately one of the best regiments of colored
troops you have, to attend the funeral ceremonies. . . . One that has seen service
should be selected.” Weitzel’s choice was the 22d USCI, a regiment raised in Phila-
delphia that had taken part in the previous year’s ghting around Petersburg and
Richmond. “We felt highly complimented,” Assistant Surgeon James O. Moore
told his wife, “to be among the rst organized troops to march thru Richmond &
now . . . to participate in the funeral obsequies of the President.”
98
The regiment embarked before dawn on 18 April and reached Washington at
about noon the next day. Marching north from the wharf as all the church bells in
the city tolled and cannon red every sixty seconds, the 22d USCI met the funeral
procession at Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, making its way east from
the White House to the Capitol. “Halted[,] wheeled into col[umn],” one ofcer of
the regiment noted, “and became the head of [the] procession. After funeral [the]
men were quartered at Soldiers’ Rest. Ofcers at Hotels.” A Washington newspa-
per commented that the troops “appeared to be under the very best discipline, and
displayed admirable skill in their various exercises.”
99
Three days later, they boarded a boat for Charles County, Maryland, to join
the hunt for the president’s assassin. Surgeon Moore surmised that they had been
sent because the men of the regiment “would be more likely [than white troops] to
get information from the colored population.” Ofcers and men spent the next four
days splashing through swamps until, on 26 April, news reached them of the assas-
98
OR, ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 3, pp. 797 (quotation), 816; J. O. Moore to My Dearest Lizzie, 20 Apr
1865, J. O. Moore Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
99
NA M594, roll 8, 22d USCI; (Washington) Daily National Intelligencer, 20 April 1865.
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., spring 1865
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
422
sin’s death. They returned to their landing place on the Potomac and waited there
until late May, when they took ship again for City Point, Virginia.
100
While the 22d USCI camped by the Potomac, arguments ew along the James
about the future of the XXV Corps. Maj. Gen. George L. Hartsuff, commanding
at Petersburg, complained to Weitzel on 13 May about the conduct of Weitzel’s
men, especially “destruction of buildings and . . . exciting the colored people to
acts of outrage against the persons and property of white citizens. Colored soldiers
. . . [have] straggled about advising negroes not to work on the farms,” and offer-
ing to arm the former slaves. Weitzel replied that the destruction was the work of
“black and white cavalry, which . . . did not belong to my corps,” or of “convicts
in soldiers’ clothing” who had been freed by retreating Confederates during the
evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond. He enclosed a telegram in which Ord
had told him: “I do not consider the behavior of the colored corps . . . to be bad,
considering the novelty of their position and the fact that most of their company of-
cers had come from positions where they were unaccustomed to command” and
that occupation duty offered “perhaps the rst great temptation to which [the] men
were exposed. In the city of Richmond their conduct is spoken of as very good.”
101
That was not what Ord had said to Halleck three weeks earlier, when Halleck
succeeded him in command of the Department of Virginia. On 29 April, Halleck
had told Grant about Ord’s poor opinion of Weitzel’s troops, adding the next day:
“On further consultation with . . . Ord, I am more fully convinced of the policy of
the withdrawal of the [XXV] Corps from Virginia. Their conduct recently has been
even worse than I supposed yesterday.” General Meade agreed, telling Grant that
his troops, “hearing of marauders, . . . succeeded in capturing a camp with several
wagons loaded with plunder. The party consisted of negroes, mostly belonging
to this army.” Even though white cavalry commanders had received warnings to
“use great care that no depredations are committed” and Ord himself had removed
Col. Charles Francis Adams Jr. from command of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry
(Colored) for letting his men “straggle and maraud,” even though ofcers of the
22d USCI, riding in the country near Richmond, had met a group of cavalrymen
(race unspecied, therefore probably white) looting a house and had driven them
off; still blame settled on the men of the XXV Corps. The recent gang rape and
court-martial did nothing to dispel it.
102
Throughout the war, Halleck had favored sweeping solutions and peremptory
orders. In the fall of 1861, rather than deal with escaped slaves and the claims of
their supposed owners in Missouri, he had issued an order that barred commanding
ofcers from admitting any black people to military posts. When he arrived in Vir-
ginia in the spring of 1865, his plan for getting crops planted and preventing fam-
ine later in the year was to prevent recently freed black people from moving to the
cities, forcing them to work on the land. With the war over and black men admitted
to the Army, the quickest way for him to dispose of complaints about their miscon-
100
NA M594, roll 8, 22d USCI; J. O. Moore to My Dearest Lizzie, 23 Apr 1865, Moore Papers.
101
OR, ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 1, pp. 1148 (Hartsuff), 1160–61 (Weitzel, Ord).
102
Ibid., pt. 3, pp. 811 (Meade), 1016 (Halleck). Asst Adj Gen to Col E. V. Sumner, 16 Apr 1865
(“use great care”), Entry 6977, 3d Div, XXIV Corps, LS, pt. 2, RG 393, NA; J. O. Moore to My
Dearest Lizzie, 9 Apr 1865, Moore Papers; Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 2
vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1920), 1: 267 (“straggle and maraud”).
Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865
423
duct was to remove them from his department. On 18 May, after consultation with
Halleck, Grant ordered Weitzel to prepare his command to take ship for Texas.
103
By that time, hundreds of thousands of soldiers of every rank, black and white,
were eager to get out of uniform. Some ofcers, who found themselves better off
in the Army than they had ever been in civilian life, wanted to remain. “You had
better approve applications to resign when there is no great advantage in retaining
the ofcer,” Ord told Weitzel in early May, “as we can get rst rate men now from
the white troops being mustered out. I have already had applications of ofcers . . .
highly recommended to transfer to Colored Corps—and there is nothing gained by
retaining discontented ofcers.”
104
Unlike an ofcer, an enlisted men could not submit a resignation on the
chance that it would be accepted. Sixty-three ofcers managed to resign from
regiments of the XXV Corps between 9 April, when Lee surrendered, and 25
May, when the rst transports sailed for Texas, but all enlisted men except those
declared unt by a surgeon were obliged to wait for their discharges until their
regiments mustered out of service. In 1864, when thousands of white soldiers
who had volunteered in 1861 refused to reenlist for another three years, entire
regiments disappeared from the Union Army. The white volunteers of 1862
would be ready for discharge in the fall of 1865; but since nationwide recruit-
ing of black soldiers had only begun early in 1863, even the longest-serving
veteran among them had nearly a year of his enlistment left by the spring of
1865, if the government should decide to retain his regiment. Other black regi-
ments, raised in 1864, might continue to serve well into 1867. That the troops’
obligation was completely legal did nothing to improve their mood.
105
Black soldiers worried especially about their families. The white regiments
of 1861 and 1862 had recruited and organized locally, and local committees
made arrangements to help sustain their dependents. West of the Appalachians
and in Union beachheads along the Atlantic coast, many black soldiers’ fami-
lies lived in contraband camps maintained by the federal government. About
half of the soldiers in the XXV Corps, though, came either from the free states
or from unseceded Maryland, where such institutions did not exist. Even the
equalization of pay for black and white soldiers in 1864 was only of small help,
for six or eight months might pass between paymasters’ visits. The 114th USCI
saw no pay from 1 September 1864 until 20 April 1865. Irregular pay damaged
the morale of black and white soldiers alike, in all parts of the South. General
Ord suggested that soldiers’ wives could be appointed laundresses in their hus-
bands’ companies, for each company in the Army was entitled to several laun-
dresses, paid by deductions from the men’s pay. Laundresses could accompany
their husbands to Texas, the government bearing the expense of their travel,
103
OR, ser. 1, 8: 370; vol. 46, pt. 1, pp. 1005–06, 1168–69, 1172–73.
104
Maj Gen E. O. C. Ord to Maj Gen G. Weitzel, Entry 5046, Dept of Virginia and Army of the
James, LS, pt. 1, RG 393, NA.
105
The number of resignations was calculated by consulting records of the 1st and 2d USCCs;
7th, 8th, 9th, 19th, 22d, 23d, 29th, 31st, 36th, 38th, 41st, 43d, 45th, 109th, 114th, 115th, 116th, 117th,
118th, and 127th USCIs; 5th Massachusetts Cavalry; and 29th Connecticut Infantry in Ofcial Army
Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Adjutant
General’s Ofce, 1867), vol. 8.
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
424
which it would not do for ofcers’ wives. Although this solution might work
for soldiers whose wives were already close by, it clearly would not help those
whose families were in Maryland or the North.
106
When the order to prepare for a move reached the troops, rumors bur-
geoned. Early in 1863, when the 1st South Carolina Volunteers received orders
for Florida, stories circulated that the men would be sold into Cuban slavery to
raise money for the war. This time, rumor had it that the men of the XXV Corps
would go south to pick cotton until the war was paid for. Ofcers assured their
men that it was not so, but many remained suspicious. Nevertheless, few de-
serted before boarding the transports, and only a handful of incidents occurred
that amounted to mutiny.
107
Embarkation began on 25 May and ended at noon on 7 June, when the
transport with General Weitzel and his staff aboard weighed anchor. Unlike the
responsibilities that faced the Union force in most of the occupied South, those
of the XXV Corps in southern Texas had less to do with the reestablishment
of civil government and protection of the rights of new black United States
citizens than with international diplomacy and simple law enforcement. During
the war, the regiments that belonged to the corps had spent periods that varied
from four months to eighteen months in Virginia, the least typical theater of
operations in the South. Before they mustered out, they would serve for similar
periods in the most unusual region of the postwar occupation—the Rio Grande
border with Mexico.
106
Maj Gen E. O. C. Ord to Brig Gen G. H. Gordon, 12 May 1865, Entry 5046, pt. 2, RG 393,
NA. For the 114th USCI, see W. Goodale to Dear Children, 20 Apr 1865, W. Goodale Papers,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 656–61;
Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, pp. 49, 291–92. Miller, Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois, pp. 153–54,
offers a good, brief summary of morale in the XXV Corps in May 1865.
107
OR, ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 3, p. 1262; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 723–27;
Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, p. 219; Miller, Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois, p. 153. For the rumor
about black soldiers being sold in Cuba, see Chapter 1, above.
When the Republic of Texas joined the United States in 1845, its admission
to the union allowed President James K. Polk to move an American army into the
southern tip of the new state, past the Nueces River and all the way to the Rio
Grande. Since Mexico had disputed Texan claims to the region south of the Nueces
throughout the ten years since Texas had achieved its independence, Polk’s aggres-
sive maneuver plunged the United States and Mexico into war. The Treaty of Gua-
dalupe Hidalgo ended the conict ofcially in early 1848, xing the international
boundary and the southern edge of Texas on the Rio Grande (see Map 9).
1
Slaves in Texas were few along the international boundary but more numer-
ous farther north in river valleys where cotton and sugar cultivation made “the
institution” protable. These staple crops left the state by way of its main seaport,
Galveston, which also served as a landing place for thousands of immigrants each
year. Galveston and its inland neighbor Houston together numbered more than
twelve thousand residents, black and white, in 1860. Farther south, on Matagorda
Bay, lay the state’s second seaport, Indianola, with some eleven hundred inhabit-
ants. Only 357 of the state’s 182,921 black residents lived south of the Nueces
River in a semiarid land where range cattle outnumbered people by at least ten to
one. More than one-third of this region’s black residents were free, a sharp contrast
with the rest of Texas. Fifty-three free men and women and only seven slaves lived
in Brownsville, a border town some twenty miles up the Rio Grande from the Gulf
of Mexico.
2
Brownsville and other towns along the lower Rio Grande continued to grow
during the years after the Mexican War. As merchants and ranchers from the
United States arrived in the region, they wrested economic and political power
from native Spanish-speakers. This ethnic conict occasionally erupted in gunre,
as during the “Merchants War” of 1851, which concerned trade; the “Cart War”
of 1857, touched off by freight rates; and, most serious, the “Cortina War” of
1859, occasioned by ill will between Spanish-speaking Tejanos and the ascendant
1
K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 4–7, 11–12,
17–21, 28–29.
2
U.S. Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Ofce, 1864), pp. 484–87, and Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Ofce, 1864), pp. 140, 144, 148; Daniel D. Arreola, Tejano South Texas: A
Mexican American Cultural Province (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 11–19.
South Texas, 1864–1867
Chapter 13
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
426
English-speaking Texans. Although this last outbreak, named for the landowner
Juan N. Cortina, involved only a few dozen men on each side, United States troops
had to quell the disturbance. Despite these violent episodes, Brownsville thrived
during the 1850s. By the end of the decade, its 2,347 residents made it the fth-
largest city in Texas.
3
On 2 February 1861, thirteen years to the day after diplomatic representatives
of the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the state
of Texas adopted an ordinance of secession from the Union. First on its list of
grievances were Northern schemes to abolish “the institution known as negro slav-
ery.” With that, the Rio Grande became the Confederacy’s only land frontier with
3
Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, pp. 486–87; Benjamin H. Johnson,
Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into
Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 10–25; David Montejano, Anglos and
Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), pp. 26–33;
Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2007), pp. 22–23, 35.
An 1859 map shows the central position of Kentucky between two future Confederate
states, Tennessee and Virginia, and four that remained in the Union, Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Missouri. Lincoln is reputed (but not proven) to have quipped, “I hope to
have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
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GULF OF MEXICO
Brazos Santiago
Palmetto Ranch
Eagle Pass
Isla del Padre
Fort Duncan
Fort McIntosh
Ringgold Barracks
Fort Brown
Fort Sabine
Victoria
Indianola
Matagorda
Trinity
Richmond
Nacogdoches
Reynosa
Edinburg
Roma
Mier
Rio Grande City
Laredo
Presidio del
Rio Grande
Monterey
Bagdad
San Antonio
Corpus Christi
Brownsville
Matamoros
Houston
Galveston
Beaumont
AUSTIN
TEXAS
MEXICO
LOUISIANA
SOUTH TEXAS
1864–1867
0
160804020
Miles
Map 9
South Texas, 1864–1867
427
a neutral country. Shipping boomed, with wagons carrying baled cotton across the
forbidding landscape of southern Texas to pay for munitions of war that entered
Mexican seaports. One merchant in England delivered forty-two hundred Eneld
ries for $24.20 each, for which he expected payment in cotton at thirty cents a
pound: in all, more than fteen tons of cotton. In the course of the war, as many as
three hundred fty thousand bales may have left the Confederacy by crossing the
Rio Grande. The Mexican town of Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, swelled to a
population of some forty thousand. Its seaport, Bagdad, also thrived.
4
A few weeks before Texas left the Union, rival Mexican parties known as Lib-
erals and Conservatives concluded a civil war of their own that had lasted for
more than two years. At issue was the constitution of 1857, a secular document fa-
vored by the Liberals that, among its other provisions, disestablished the Catholic
Church. Guerrilla warfare, massacres, and reprisals characterized the conict. By
the time the Liberals won, the country lay exhausted. An empty treasury caused
Benito Juárez, the new president, to suspend repayment of Mexico’s foreign loans.
This prompted the creditor nations, Britain, France, and Spain, to take direct ac-
tion. In December 1861, a naval eet from the three powers landed troops at Ve-
racruz and occupied the port. When Britain and Spain learned a few months later
that the French emperor, Napoleon III, intended to conquer the entire country and
install a puppet government, they withdrew their contingents. Lacking the legiti-
macy conferred by prominent allies, French troops nevertheless marched inland,
meeting erce resistance that blocked their path to Mexico City for a year and a
4
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Ofcial Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Ofce, 1880–1901), ser. 4, 3: 569–
70, 572–74 (hereafter cited as OR); Ernest W. Winkler, ed., Journal of the Secession Convention
of Texas, 1861 (Austin: Texas Library and Historical Commission, 1912), pp. 61–66 (quotation, p.
62); David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 178; Jerry Thompson and Lawrence T.
Jones III, Civil War and Revolution on the Rio Grande Frontier: A Narrative and Photographic
History (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2004), p. 17; Stephen A. Townsend, The Yankee
Invasion of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), pp. 5–7.
Brownsville, Texas, from across the Rio Grande. The bales of cotton stacked on the
Mexican shore indicate Brownsville’s economic importance to the Confederacy.
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
428
half. Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a relative of Napoleon’s by marriage, ar-
rived in the spring of 1864 to ascend the throne as emperor of Mexico.
5
In order to forestall French occupation of the mouth of the Rio Grande and to
stop the trafc in military stores and cotton, the Union’s Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P.
Banks dispatched a force from the Department of the Gulf to seize the lower river
in the fall of 1863. On 6 November, federal troops raised the United States ag
over Brownsville for the rst time since March 1861. The few hundred Confeder-
ates in the region withdrew north of the Nueces River, or up the Rio Grande toward
Eagle Pass. As they moved upriver, the route of Southern cotton for export had to
shift westward more than three hundred miles, adding further expense to already
heavy freight costs. With two contending parties, Union and Confederate, on the
north side of the river and two, the Liberals (Juárez) and the Imperialists (Maximil-
ian), on the south, the lower Rio Grande soon attracted a class of men whose ethics
were elastic, often in the extreme.
6
Events far from the Rio Grande valley also had a decisive inuence on Union
operations there, the kind of effect that outlying military departments on both sides
of the conict felt throughout the war. The failure of General Banks’ Red River
Expedition in the spring of 1864 and the withdrawal that summer of the XIX Corps
from Louisiana to Virginia led to the abandonment of all but one of the federal
beachheads in Texas in order to reinforce garrisons along the Mississippi River.
Texas and its cotton were alluring targets for a Union expedition, but the agricul-
ture and commerce of a dozen loyal states, from western Pennsylvania to Kansas,
depended on federal control of the Mississippi.
7
As Union troops withdrew from the Texas coast, a Confederate force reentered
Brownsville on 30 July, once again affording cotton shipments a short but still
arduous route to Mexico. Only the federal post at Brazos Santiago, near the mouth
of the Rio Grande, remained. It was a secure position on an island, approachable
from the mainland by only one route. In the fall of 1864, four regiments constituted
the garrison: the 91st Illinois and the 62d, 87th, and 95th United States Colored
Infantries (USCIs). The 62d had begun its existence as the 1st Missouri Colored
Infantry, organized near St. Louis in December 1863. The 87th and 95th USCIs
were Louisiana regiments, raised in and around New Orleans as part of General
Banks’ Corps d’Afrique.
8
At the beginning of November 1864, a new commanding general arrived at
Brazos Santiago: Brig. Gen. William A. Pile, who had helped Adjutant General
Lorenzo Thomas recruit black troops, including the 1st Missouri Colored Infantry,
5
Enrique Krause, Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (New
York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 169–74; Paul Vanderwood, “Betterment for Whom? The Reform
Period, 1855–1875,” pp. 371–96 in The Oxford History of Mexico, eds. Michael C. Meyer and
William H. Beezley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially pp. 375–83.
6
Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority, p. 177; Townsend, Yankee Invasion of Texas, pp. 14–19;
Ronnie C. Tyler, “Cotton on the Border, 1861–1865,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73 (1970):
461–63. Examples of rascality on both sides of the border in early 1864 are in OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt.
2, pp. 8–10, 216–17.
7
Stephen A. Dupree, Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General
Nathaniel P. Banks in the West (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), pp. 6–7.
8
OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1, pp. 185–86, and pt. 4, pp. 266–67, 366; Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium
of the War of the Rebellion (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959 [1908]), pp. 1718–19, 1733, 1736–37.
South Texas, 1864–1867
429
a year earlier. Pile found conditions at Brazos Santiago far from satisfactory and
blamed his predecessor in command, the colonel of the 91st Illinois. The previous
ordnance ofcer, Pile reported, had been “inefcient and negligent. In this he took
pattern from the Comdg Ofcer of these Forces. The whole command except the
62d USCI (just arrived) being without discipline . . . and performing their duties
very inefciently.” The garrison lacked a shallow-draft boat for travel along the
coast; its horses were “broken down and diseased,” left behind by the expedition
that had seized the island a year earlier; hospital patients lay in tents that were often
blown down and shredded by squalls from the Gulf of Mexico; the commissary
ofcer sold Army beef to civilians; the quartermaster provided passage to New
Orleans on government steamers for civilians who paid in gold. Pile set to work at
once to clean house.
9
He ought to have known better than to expect that any supplies he requested,
such as lumber to build a windbreak for the hospital tents, would come at once to
a backwater outpost like Brazos Santiago. After a month on the island, Pile asked
for another infantry regiment to replace the 91st Illinois and additions of cavalry
and heavy artillery to his command. “If I had 500 cavalry I could inict material
damage” on the Confederates at Brownsville, he wrote to Department of the Gulf
headquarters in New Orleans. “Is it desired that I do anything on the mainland? I
would like to take a command to Brownsville, if it is the intention of the military
authorities to occupy this coast; if not, I desire to be transferred to another com-
mand.” Pile’s letter passed on to even higher headquarters, the Military Division
of West Mississippi. There, Maj. Gen. Edward R. S. Canby remarked that “the
rst duty of an ofcer is to do the best he can with the means at his command, and
not to ask to be relieved because his superior ofcers may nd it impracticable or
inexpedient to increase his resources.”
10
Despite Canby’s rebuke, Pile received a few things he had asked for. On 26
November, in one of the consolidations that befell understrength Louisiana regi-
ments, the enlisted men of the 95th merged with those of the 87th. The new orga-
nization at rst received the number 81, until word arrived that there was already a
regiment of that number. Since the consolidation had left the number 87 vacant, the
new regiment became the 87th USCI (New). Slow communications and conicting
regional authorities ensured that such confusion occurred repeatedly throughout
the war. The decision to discharge nearly three-quarters of the ofcers of the old
87th and 95th, retaining only fourteen of the forty-eight, seemed to conrm Pile’s
assessment of their aptitude. Late in December, the 91st Illinois left Brazos San-
tiago for New Orleans, trading places with the 34th Indiana.
11
Pile got another of his wishes in February 1865, when he received orders to
join General Canby’s expedition against Mobile. Arriving in New Orleans, he re-
quested the assignment of two regiments to the expedition: the 81st USCI, which
9
OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 4, pp. 448–49, 676 (“broken down”); Brig Gen W. A. Pile to Maj G. B.
Drake, 28 Nov 1864 (“inefcient and”), Entry 5515, Mil Div of West Mississippi, Letters Received
(LR), pt. 1, Geographical Divs and Depts, Record Group (RG) 393, Rcds of U.S. Army Continental
Cmds, National Archives (NA).
10
OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 4, pp. 767–68.
11
Dyer, Compendium, pp. 1085, 1133, 1737; Ofcial Army Register of the Volunteer Force of
the United States Army, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Adjutant General’s Ofce, 1867), 8: 267–68, 276
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
430
he had recently inspected at Port Hudson and thought was “perhaps the best col-
ored regiment in this department,” and the 62d USCI at Brazos Santiago, “also a
well drilled and disciplined regiment and well tted for eld service.” He asked
that they be sent “if necessary, in the place of other regiments not in so good condi-
tion, and that one of [them] be assigned to my brigade.” Such praise came not from
a politician or newspaper correspondent, nor from a politically appointed major
general at the head of a geographical department, but from a brigadier seeking to
improve his own command with troops whose performance could make or mar
his reputation and perhaps even cost him his life. This time, authorities refused to
grant even part of Pile’s request. The two regiments he asked for remained at their
stations in Louisiana and Texas while Pile and his brigade set off for Mobile on the
last major campaign of the war.
12
The 62d USCI spent the winter on Brazos Santiago. Its commanding ofcer,
Lt. Col. David Branson, took measures to maintain and improve regimental disci-
pline and morale. He admonished “several ofcers” of the regiment for hitting the
men with their sts or the at of a sword. “An ofcer is not t to command who
cannot control his temper sufciently to avoid the habitual application of blows
to enforce obedience,” he wrote. “Men will not obey as promptly an ofcer who
adopts the systems of the slave driver to maintain authority as they will him who
punishes by a system consistent with . . . the spirit of the age.” Branson allowed
that “generally, the men who have received such punishment have been of the
meanest type of soldiers; lazy, dirty & inefcient.” Still, he insisted, “such treat-
ment will not produce reform in them, while it has an injurious effect on all good
men, from its resemblance to their former treatment while slaves.” By mid-April,
Branson reported the regiment “in a good state of discipline [and] in excellent
health,” while having “attained an unusual degree of efciency in Battalion Drill
and in the Bayonet Exercise.” He asked for 437 recruits to augment the 543 men
that remained of the 1,050 who had entered the ranks of the regiment during its
sixteen months of service. Eighty-six of the missing men had died of disease be-
fore they left Missouri. More than two hundred lay buried at Port Hudson and Mor-
ganza, Louisiana, where the health of the regiment had suffered severely. Scores
more had died elsewhere in the state.
13
In April 1865, news of the Confederate surrender in Virginia traveled by tele-
graph, reaching St. Louis within twenty-four hours. Separated from the telegraph
by miles of enemy-held territory, soldiers at Union beachheads on the Gulf of
Mexico received that news, and word of the surrender in North Carolina, a week
or more later. While Confederate generals in Alabama made similar arrangements,
those west of the Mississippi River considered their situation. Maj. Gen. John B.
(hereafter cited as ORVF). For the organization, consolidation, and disbandment of Corps d’Afrique
regiments, see Chapters 3 and 4, above.
12
OR, ser. 1, vol. 48, pt. 1, pp. 846, 964 (quotations).
13
62d United States Colored Infantry (USCI), General Orders (GO) 36, 9 Nov 1864; Lt Col D.
Branson to Adj Gen, USA, 20 Apr 1865; Company Descriptive Books; all in 62d USCI, Regimental
Books, RG 94, Rcds of the Adjutant General’s Ofce (AGO), NA. NA Microlm Pub M594,
Compiled Rcds Showing Svc of Mil Units in Volunteer Union Organizations, roll 212, 62d USCI;
Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982), pp. 513–14; Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the
American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 116–17.