Dobak William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (ENG)
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Reconstruction, 1865–1867
461
and slavery and pave the way for the state’s representation in Congress. Delegates
to the convention had to have been eligible voters in the 1860 election—that is,
white—and to have taken an oath of allegiance to the United States since the ght-
ing ended. During the next six weeks, he issued similar proclamations for Ala-
bama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina. These seven proc-
lamations, and the Unionist state governments established in Arkansas, Louisiana,
Tennessee, and Virginia during the war, set all the former Confederate states on the
road to reunion.
8
More pressing even than political matters was the business of tending and
harvesting that year’s crops, for the federal government was already feeding
thousands of destitute Southerners, black and white, and sought to reduce the -
nancial burden. Efcient management of the agricultural labor force would help
to diminish government expenditures just as surely as did the rapid mustering
out of Union regiments and might forestall a famine that was otherwise sure to
come with winter. Unfortunately for those who hoped to manage the laborers,
many of the South’s former slaves were absent from their home plantations that
spring and summer. Reasons for the mass movement were many. Some of the
migrants searched for relatives from whom they had been separated, whether
by slave sales before the war or by forced removal from the paths of advanc-
ing Union armies during the ghting. Other migrants wished to avoid the kind
of confrontation with former masters that the change from slave to free labor
was sure to bring. Still others merely sought safety in numbers within growing
black urban communities, for freedom meant that former slaves were no longer
protected property, but instead were fair game for any evil-tempered white man
with a deadly weapon.
9
Chaplain Homer H. Moore of the 34th USCI traveled across northern Florida in
May and June. When the ofcial announcement of freedom in the Department of the
South came in late May, he said, “large numbers of negroes left their homes, & began
ocking into the towns, causing great inconvenience to the Military Authorities, &
great danger to the growing crops.” Moore and two civilian ofcials set out across
the state to investigate conditions and to try to explain the workings of a free labor
system to former masters and former slaves alike. “In so far as it was the purpose of
our mission to induce the negroes to remain at home, & work for wages, we think
we were very successful,” he reported, “for having heard from their masters that
they were free, but still having to work very much the same as before, they naturally
believed they were imposed upon; & that to secure perfect freedom they must get to
some place occupied by U.S. troops. But hearing from us, unquestionable Yankees,
that they were free wherever they were, & that the Government would protect them,
8
Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1998), pp. 73–75; Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton,
1989), pp. 210–11, 216–22. Texts of the amnesty and state government proclamations are in OR, ser.
2, 8: 578–80, and ser. 3, 5: 37–39.
9
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf,
1979), pp. 305–16; Hahn et al., Land and Labor, pp. 7, 80; statistic in Dan T. Carter, When the War
Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1985), p. 157.
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
462
but that they would have to work nevertheless to live they became reconciled to the
new state of things.”
10
While only the tiniest fraction of former slaves—those whose masters had allowed
them to hire out their labor before the war—had any idea of the workings of a free labor
system, many former masters had little better understanding. One of the Northern re-
porters who ocked to the South in 1865 had an illuminating discussion with a former
slaveholder in South Carolina. “All we want,” the planter told him, “is that our Yankee
rulers should give us the same privileges with regard to the control of labor which they
themselves have. . . . In Massachusetts, a laborer is obliged by law to make a contract
for a year. If he leaves his employer without his consent, or before the contract expires,
he can be put in jail. . . . All we want is the same or a similar code of laws here.” The
reporter denied that such a law existed in any Northern state. “How do you manage
without such laws?” the planter asked. “How can you get work out of a man unless you
compel him in some way?” Even a leading politician like James W. Throckmorton of
Texas expressed privately his yearning “to adopt a coercive system of labor.”
11
Although Northerners had a better idea of how a free labor system operated than
the planters did, many of them, including high-ranking Army ofcers and Freedmen’s
Bureau ofcials, were unsure about the future of free labor in the South. At Memphis,
the eld agent reported in mid-August:
Many freed people prefer a life of precarious subsistence and comparative idleness
in the suburbs of the city, to a more comfortable home and honest labor in the
country. . . . I propose . . . to take efcient steps to remove that portion . . . who
have no legitimate means of support, and distribute them in the Country, where
their labor is wanted, and where they will have much better opportunities of leading
useful and happy lives.
Six weeks later, a new Bureau ofcial in the city noted that “quite a large number of va-
grants were arrested by the colored troops, & by force of arms, were sent to the country
to work on plantations.”
12
At the same time that black soldiers at Memphis were rounding up reluctant plan-
tation labor, a Freedmen’s Bureau inspector found successful cotton crops in Arkansas
counties where black regiments had guarded the workers for more than two years.
Three ofcers from those regiments were serving as Bureau agents at places the in-
spector visited. Near Helena, he noticed that cotton “on the small leases worked by
colored lessees on their own accounts is decidedly superior to that cultivated by them
as hired hands.” Freedmen on a plantation that had belonged to Confederate Brig. Gen.
Gideon J. Pillow hoped to clear enough money from the 1865 crop to buy the land they
had been farming. Near Pine Bluff, a government farm with 876 residents, “mostly
disabled men, women and children,” managed to farm 250 acres of cotton and 150 of
10
H. H. Moore et al. to N. C. Dennett, 12 Jun 1865 (E–521), NA Microlm Pub M752, Registers
and Letters Received (LR) by the Commissioner of the BRFAL, roll 20.
11
John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities (New York:
Arno Press, 1969 [1866]), p. 573; Throckmorton quoted in Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom:
Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 49.
12
Brig Gen D. Tillson to Capt W. T. Clarke, 18 Aug 1865 (T–54) (“Many freed”), NA T142, roll 27;
Brig Gen N. A. M. Dudley to Capt W. T. Clarke, 30 Sep 1865 (D–66) (“quite a large”), NA T142, roll 25.
Reconstruction, 1865–1867
463
corn. “The cotton . . . elicits the praise of every body, and old planters say it is as ne
a crop as was ever produced on the farm.” Free labor seemed successful where former
slaves had been allowed self-direction in their work, but one inspector’s report could
not have been expected to budge the deeply ingrained prejudices of so many white
Southerners and Northerners alike.
13
In the summer of 1865, with the year’s crops still growing and the efcacy of free
labor still unproven, Southern planters clung stubbornly to old beliefs. As a captain
of the 113th USCI reported from Monticello, Arkansas, “many of the rebels do not
conceed that the ‘negro’ is yet free.” Similar reports came from all over the South.
A chaplain at Beaufort, South Carolina, told the department commander that local
planters viewed the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime measure that had lapsed
with the Confederate surrender. West of the Appalachians, although Union soldiers
had occupied parts of Tennessee for more than three years, a captain of the 83d USCI
reported that “slavery, or the next thing to it,” was widespread. At Helena, Arkansas,
which federal troops had also held since 1862, Capt. Henry Sweeney of the 60th USCI
offered an even gloomier view. Black Mississippians who brought complaints to his
ofce, he told the assistant commissioner for that state, said “that there was nothing in
the worst days of slavery to compare with the present persecutions.”
14
Indeed, white Southerners bent every effort to impose a new social and economic
order that resembled the old as closely as possible. President Johnson’s provisional
governors called state conventions to repudiate secession and slavery, but the elections
that followed relied on voter qualications that had been in force before the war, when
all voters had been white men and most of them secessionist. The results were not
surprising. When the new Mississippi legislature convened in October, its members
quickly passed a set of laws to govern black residents that together became known
as the Black Code. The principal law bore the title “An Act to confer Civil Rights on
Freedmen,” but most of its sections limited, rather than conferred, any rights that for-
mer slaves hoped to enjoy. First among these was the prohibition of freedmen leasing
or renting farmland. This measure forced the overwhelming majority of former slaves,
who were too poor to own their own land, to work on the large farms and plantations
that were then being returned to possession of their former owners by the president’s
program of amnesty and individual pardon.
15
The Mississippi legislature also decreed that former slaves had to obtain
proof of residence and occupation in the form of annual contracts for farm la-
borers or licenses for self-employed workers. Other laws dened vagrancy so as
13
Lt Col D. H. Williams to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 18 Sep 1865 (W–4), NA M752, roll 22;
Nathan C. Hughes and Roy P. Stonesifer, The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 142–43; Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Wartime Genesis
of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 622–50; Hahn
et al., Land and Labor, pp. 681–96.
14
Barker quoted in Maj W. G. Sargent to Capt G. E. Dayton, 31 Aug 1865, NA Microlm Pub
M979, Rcds of the Asst Commissioner for the State of Arkansas, BRFAL, roll 23; Capt H. Sweeney to
Col S. Thomas, 11 Sep 1865, NA M979, roll 6; Chaplain M. French to Maj Gen Q. A. Gillmore, 6 Jun
1865, Entry 4109, Dept of the South, LR, pt. 1, Geographical Divs and Depts, RG 393, Rcds of U.S.
Army Continental Cmds, NA; Capt R. J. Hinton to “General,” 8 Sep 1865 (H–90), NA T142, roll 26.
15
William C. Harris, Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1967), pp. 130–31; Edward McPherson, ed., The Political History of the United
States of America During the Period of Reconstruction (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972 [1871]),
p. 81.
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
464
to limit the mobility of black laborers and consigned black orphans and some
other children to unpaid labor, euphemistically called apprenticeship, until a
girl’s eighteenth birthday or a boy’s twenty-rst. Yet another forbade black civil-
ians from possessing “re-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk, or bowie-
knife.” The penalties were forfeiture of the weapon and a ten-dollar ne. Local
companies of the state militia, largely composed of Confederate veterans, began
enforcing the law. Black people were alarmed. “They talk of taking the armes
a way from (col) people and arresting them and put[ting] them on farms next
month,” Pvt. Calvin Holly of the 5th United States Colored Artillery (USCA)
wrote directly to General Howard from his post at Vicksburg. “They are doing
all they can to prevent free labor, and reestablish a kind of secondary slavery.”
16
Still other Mississippi legislation governed the testimony of black witnesses,
limiting their competence to cases that involved at least one black party. During
the fall and winter, legislatures of other Southern states enacted similar laws.
South Carolina charged black shopkeepers one hundred dollars for an annual
license. The most sobering feature of these laws was that they were not drafted
by ignorant rabble-rousers but by some of the most respected jurists in the South.
They reected the opinion of the most educated and well-to-do white men.
17
The passage of laws by state legislatures was no business of the Army’s.
What concerned federal occupiers was the preservation of public order, for much
of the South continued under martial law until President Johnson declared the
rebellion at an end on 2 April 1866. Even then, General Howard received instruc-
tions that the Freedmen’s Bureau might resort to military tribunals “in any case
where justice [could not] be attained through the medium of civil authority.” The
disorders that concerned the Army were violent for the most part and fell into
several broad categories: those that occurred between white plantation owners
and black laborers; rowdy misbehavior, when individual whites bullied freed-
people, or attempted to; and, nally, the kind of violence for which the South
became notorious, organized bands of night riders whose purpose was to terror-
ize the black population into subservience. To counter this violence, those black
regiments that were not guarding federal property or fortications moved detach-
ments of one or two companies into scattered county seats across the South. As
a staff ofcer at Shreveport, Louisiana, told the commanding ofcer of the 61st
USCI, the purpose of the troops was “to keep the country quiet, arrest criminals,
protect the weak and defenceless from wrong and outrage, and generally to en-
force obedience to the laws and orders.”
18
The relationship of plantation owners to their workers had become that of
employers to employees rather than that of masters to slaves, but planters were
slow to adapt to changed circumstances. They had “the idea rmly xed in their
minds that the negroes will not work[,] are impatient with them, and see no
16
McPherson, Political History, pp. 29–32 (“re-arms,” p. 32); Holly quoted in Ira Berlin et al.,
eds., The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 755–56.
17
McPherson, Political History, pp. 31, 36; Carter, When the War Was Over, pp. 187–92; Foner,
Nothing But Freedom, pp. 49–53; Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South
Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 15–16.
18
Capt B. F. Monroe to Colonel [Lt Col J. Foley], 24 Jul 1865, 61st USCI, Entry 57C, RG 94,
NA; McPherson, Political History, pp. 13–17 (“in any case,” p. 17).
Reconstruction, 1865–1867
465
way to induce faithfulness but by a resort to there old usages—the lash,” Maj.
George D. Reynolds of the 6th USCA reported from Natchez. Near Vicksburg,
the colonel of the 64th USCI wrote, “old masters . . . would abuse and shoot their
[former] slaves on the slightest provocation.” Since black laborers no longer rep-
resented a substantial capital investment, some plantation owners inicted whip-
pings more severe than those they had laid on before emancipation.
19
Although Bureau agents tried to investigate as many reports of wrongdoing
as they could, black soldiers sometimes took matters into their own hands. Near
Columbia, Louisiana, where “the cruel punishment of all colored people [was]
indulged in to the heart’s content” of white residents, Col. Alonzo W. Webber
reported, men of the 51st USCI threatened the life of a former slaveholder who
had “shot and killed one of his negroes.” The man’s former slaves had reportedly
told the soldiers about the incident and urged them to act. White residents were
“making a great howl over” the incident, the ofcer reported, for although they
“believe[d] it to have been originated by their own slaves,” they wanted a docu-
mented disturbance as a means of getting rid of a Union garrison in their midst,
especially one made up of black soldiers.
20
Incidents of fraud were also common. In North Carolina, Chaplain Henry M.
Turner of the 1st USCI told readers of the Christian Recorder that “freedmen . . .
have been kept at work until the crops were gathered, under the promise of pay or
part of the crop, but when the time for reward came, they were driven away, with-
out means, shelter or homes.” Many freedmen and their families gravitated to
Raleigh, the state capital, where they came under the care of Brig. Gen. Eliphalet
Whittlesey, former colonel of the 46th USCI, who was serving as assistant com-
missioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
21
While labor relations gave rise to a great deal of violence during the months
just after the Confederate surrender, any encounter between persons of different
races could spark an incident. An Army uniform was no guarantee of immunity
from an attack; rather, it might provoke one if the soldiers were few in number.
An ofcial inquiry into a street affray in Vicksburg elicited this statement from
one of the participants, Pvt. Berry Brown of the 5th USCA:
I was coming a cross the road . . . and three white men were going along the
road, one of them was ahead of the other two. And as I crossed the road he triped
me up. I then got up and asked him what he ment by triping a person up when
he was not medling with him. He then said you god dam black yankee son of
a bitch I will cut your dam guts out, and drew out his knife. . . . The orderly
Sergeant then came down to see what the fuss was about when he commenced
cuting at the orderly Sergeant. One of the boys then knocked him down with
19
Maj G. D. Reynolds to 1st Lt S. Eldridge, 31 Aug 1865, NA Microlm Pub M1907, Rcds of the
Field Ofces for the State of Mississippi, BRFAL, roll 34; Col S. Thomas to Maj Gen O. O. Howard,
12 Oct 1865, NA M752, roll 22; Hahn et al., Land and Labor, pp. 40–41, 80–81.
20
Col A. W. Webber to Capt S. B. Ferguson, 12 Sep 1865 (L–270–DL–1865), Entry 1757, Dept
of the Gulf, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; Hahn et al., Land and Labor, p. 165 (“the cruel punishment”).
21
Christian Recorder, 2 September 1865.
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466
a brick, and he got up and came after me again, and then I knocked him down
with a brick.
The investigator concluded, “I shall endeavor to teach the inlisted men . . . to avoid
if possible difculty with citizens, yet I will at the same time teach them never to
do so at the expense of their dignity and mand-hood and to disgrace the uniform
they wear.” Although such attacks made up only a small part of the violence di-
rected against freedmen, they became more frequent in the last months of 1865.
In December, reports appeared of black soldiers shot dead by white civilians at
Atlanta and in Calhoun and Hinds Counties, Mississippi.
22
Besides white Southerners, another group that was often hostile to black sol-
diers and civilians was the body of white federal troops in the South. Most of
these men did not differ in their attitudes from the unfavorable national consensus
regarding black people, and they often used their authority as members of the
occupying force to annoy and injure black civilians and, at times, the black men
who were their own comrades in arms. One such incident occurred in Washington,
D.C., in October 1865. The 107th USCI had just arrived from North Carolina to
take up garrison duties around the capital and pitched its tents near the Soldier’s
Rest, a transit camp at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot, near the Capitol.
On the morning of 14 October, 3 ofcers and 1,576 enlisted men of the 6th U.S.
Cavalry arrived, having just turned in their horses before taking ship for Texas.
The ofcers quickly “left for points ‘up town,’” the quartermaster in charge of
the Soldier’s Rest learned, presumably in search of amusement. Within hours, “a
difculty occurred . . . followed by blows, showers of stones and one gun shot”
that killed a soldier of the 107th. Authorities summoned ve other regiments to
the scene before the riot subsided. Similar conicts occurred in Charleston, South
Carolina, and in other cities where black and white soldiers with too few ofcers
and too much time on their hands encountered each other.
23
Most of the violence directed against black people in the South came on im-
pulse from individual whites. According to one count of more than fteen hundred
attacks on black Texans during the years from 1865 to 1868, nearly 70 percent
were individual acts. The unpredictable nature of such violence made it all the
more intimidating, but what drew national attention to the campaign to subjugate
the freedmen was its most distinctive feature: groups of men who rode disguised,
22
Maj D. Conwell to Capt R. Wilson, 20 Dec 1865 (quotations verbatim), 5th USCA, Regimental
Books, RG 94, NA; Lt Col G. Curkendall to Brig Gen D. Tillson, 26 Dec 1865 (G–18–1866), NA
M752, roll 20; Maj Gen M. F. Force to Maj M. P. Bestow, 12 Dec 1865 (F–226–MDT–1865), Entry
926, Dept of the Cumberland, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; Lt Col M. H. Tuttle to 1st Lt W. H. Williams,
21 Dec 1865, 50th USCI, Entry 57C, RG 94, NA; Joe G. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–
1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 421.
23
Capt W. W. Rogers to Capt A. H. Wands, 15 Oct 1865 (R–655–DW–1865); Capt E. M. Camp
to Colonel Taylor [Col J. H. Taylor], 17 Oct 1865 (quotations), led with (f/w) RG–655–DW–1865;
Brig Gen F. T. Dent to General [Brig Gen A. V. Kautz], 14 Oct 1865; all in Entry 5382, Dept of
Washington, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA. 6th U.S. Cavalry return, Oct 1865, NA Microlm Pub M744,
Returns from Regular Army Cav Rgts, roll 61; Mark L. Bradley, Bluecoats and Tarheels: Soldiers
and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009),
pp. 66–67, 123–24; Robert J. Zalimas, “A Disturbance in the City: Black and White Soldiers in
Postwar Charleston,” in Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era, ed.
John David Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 361–90.
Reconstruction, 1865–1867
467
often at night. These local bands, often called “regulators,” did not belong to the
Ku Klux Klan—the Klan’s founding meeting did not come until the spring of
1866, and its popularity did not sweep the South until after the last black volunteer
regiments had mustered out—but their aims and methods were those adopted later
by the Klan, and many of the participants must have joined the new organization.
The Klan may have begun as a social group of fun-loving young men in Pulaski,
Tennessee, but racial concerns were inevitably uppermost in its members’ minds,
so their club was not long in adopting the program of race warfare that had begun
almost as soon as Confederate armies surrendered.
24
Terrorism directed against black Southerners grew naturally out of the lawless-
ness that prevailed during the dying weeks of the Confederacy. Away from towns
occupied by the armies of either side, bands of “guerrillas and stray robbers and
thieves,” as one Union general called the forces of disorder, thrived. Near Mor-
24
Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 3–21; Barry Crouch, The Dance of
Freedom: Texas African Americans During Reconstruction (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2007), pp. 95–117, esp. pp. 100–102; Paul A. Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The
Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1997), p. 204.
The 107th U.S. Colored Infantry served in Virginia and North Carolina before spending
its last year, 1865–1866, guarding ordnance stores and other public property around
Washington, D.C. In this cracked image, men of the regiment form in front of the
guardhouse at Fort Corcoran, across the Potomac from Georgetown.
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
468
ganza, Louisiana, the opposing sides arranged an armistice in the spring of 1865
“to enable the rebs to catch and hang a band of outlaws who infest the woods near
our lines, re into steamboats, [and] plunder citizens,” 2d Lt. Duren F. Kelley of
the 67th USCI wrote to his wife. “The rebs caught four of them day before yester-
day and hung them on a tree. They got ten yesterday and I don’t know how many
they have got today. They are hanged as fast as captured.” After surrenders across
the South, disbanded soldiers on their way home added to the confusion. When
Confederate troops in North Carolina laid down their arms that April, “most of
[the] cavalry refused to surrender,” the Union general commanding the Department
of the South reported. He predicted that “they will scatter themselves over South
Carolina and Georgia & commit all sorts of depredations, particularly upon the
colored people.”
25
Union occupation authorities inclined at rst to blame disbanded Confederate
soldiers for the unrest that roiled the South. The commanding ofcer of the 75th
USCI, for one, noted “large numbers of armed men of the late rebel army roaming
about” near Washington, Louisiana. Fifty miles to the east, a captain of the 65th
USCI serving as provost marshal at Port Hudson drew up charges for the military
trial of a Confederate veteran who had been robbing and killing freedmen nearby.
Maj. Gen. Peter J. Osterhaus at Jackson, Mississippi, thought that the maraud-
ers’ abundant stock of military arms proved conclusively that they were “Rebel
soldiers.”
26
It was not long, though, before the occupiers began to detect other inuences
at work. Maj. Gen. Rufus Saxton, whose dealings with freedmen and their affairs
went back to the spring of 1862, reported in June that “guerrillas” around Augusta,
Georgia, included “young men of the rst families in the State, . . . bound together
by an oath to take the life of every able bodied negro man found off his plantation.”
Two months later, a lieutenant of the 4th United States Colored Cavalry (USCC)
told the ofcer commanding at Morganza, Louisiana, about “a secret society” of
Confederate veterans in a nearby parish “organized . . . to drive out or kill all per-
sons whom they term Yankees.” Americans’ well-known fascination with secret
societies suited perfectly the requirements of resistance to Reconstruction. Many
terrorists did not disguise themselves with masks or white sheets. A few simply
blackened their faces, donned cast-off Union uniforms, and told their victims that
they were U.S. Colored Troops. It was impossible for civil authorities to try them,
a district judge told the assistant commissioner, for the offenders “are unknown to
25
OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt. 3, p. 64 (“guerrillas”); Richard S. Offenberg and Robert R. Parsonage,
eds., The War Letters of Duren F. Kelley, 1862–1865 (New York: Pageant Press, 1967), p. 153. For
ofcial correspondence about outlaws and guerrillas in North Carolina, see OR, ser. 1, vol. 47, pt.
3, pp. 502, 543–45, 587; in Kansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, vol. 48, pt. 2, pp. 46, 346, 355–56,
571–72; in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, vol. 49, pt. 2, pp. 418–19, 504, 1256–57.
Maj Gen Q. A. Gillmore to Adj Gen, 7 May 1865 (S–1077–AGO–1865), NA Microlm Pub M619,
LR by the Adjutant General’s Ofce, 1861–1870, roll 410. A good, brief synopsis of lawlessness
throughout the South in 1865 is Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conict and Chaos in the
Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 203–11.
26
Lt Col J. L. Rice to Capt B. B. Campbell, 7 Jun 1865, 75th USCI, Entry 57C, RG 94, NA; Capt
A. D. Bailie to T. Conway, 30 Jul 1865 (B–36), and Charges and Specications, 1 Aug 1865 (B–39),
both in NA Microlm Pub M1027, Rcds of the Asst Commissioner for the State of Louisiana,
BRFAL, roll 7; Maj Gen P. J. Osterhaus to Capt J. W. Miller, 19 Aug 1865 (M–345–DM–1865),
Entry 2433, Dept of Mississippi, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA.
Reconstruction, 1865–1867
469
us except through negro testimony,” which was not admissible in court, “and we
cannot therefore punish them.” Before legislatures met that fall to revise the laws,
Southern states limited severely the competence of black witnesses, if they did not
rule out their testimony altogether.
27
White Southerners had a strong aversion to federal occupiers in general and
to black soldiers in particular, for the latter represented not simply military defeat,
but the beginning of a social revolution. “The negroes congregate around the garri-
sons, and are idle and perpetrate crimes,” the governor of Mississippi told General
Howard. “It is hoped the black troops will be speedily removed.” The governor an-
ticipated “a general revolt” of the freedmen, which he thought black troops would
support. From Clarksville, Tennessee, a state Supreme Court justice complained
to Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas about the 101st USCI stationed there. The regi-
ment’s commanding ofcer, the judge said, “regards himself as the guardian of the
negroes and this necessarily makes them insolent. . . . If the colored soldiers were
removed, the negro population would be more obedient to the laws.” It seemed
clear that the former rulers of the South intended “to accomplish by state legisla-
tion and by covert violation of law what they . . . failed to accomplish by Rebel-
lion,” the assistant commissioner for Missouri and Arkansas wrote. As a Bureau
ofcial in Tallahassee put it, white Floridians expected that after state conventions
met in the fall, “military forces will be withdrawn & the negroes will be again in
their power, to do with as they may see t.”
28
Unfortunately for the efcacy of the military occupation and the reputation of
the black regiments, there was a kernel of truth in some of the complaints about the
troops’ conduct. Like soldiers after other wars, veterans of the Civil War tended to
become unruly with the onset of peace. In one instance, the general commanding
in Alabama during the summer of 1865 had to ask that disaffected white regiments
of the XVI Corps be mustered out quickly and replaced by “troops that can be
depended on.” Two months later, an ofcer at Vicksburg placed an extra guard on
railroad yards to prevent looting by homeward-bound troops. In Georgia, a Bureau
ofcial reported that “the worst acts committed . . . upon negroes [near Augusta]
have been committed by . . . white soldiers.”
29
With time on their hands, black soldiers also misbehaved. A freedman showed
the Bureau agent at Helena his wounded scalp, cut by a brick in the hand of a sol-
dier of the 56th USCI during a street brawl. Along the river between Savannah and
27
Maj Gen R. Saxton to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 4 Jun 1865 (S–14) (“guerrillas”), NA M752,
roll 17; N. M. Reeve to Brig Gen D. Tillson, 27 Nov 1865 (“are unknown”), f/w Brig Gen D. Tillson
to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 28 Nov 1865 (G–37), NA M752, roll 20; 1st Lt J. W. Evarts to 1st Lt L. B.
Jenks, 22 Aug 1865 (f/w F–97–DL–1865), Entry 1757, pt. 1, RG 393, NA. On terrorists in blackface,
see Maj J. M. Bowler to Capt C. E. Howe, 15 Oct 1865, Entry 269, Dept of Arkansas, LR, pt. 1, RG
393, NA; Maj J. M. Bowler to Maj W. S. Sargent, 31 Oct 1865, NA M979, roll 23; Cimbala, Under
the Guardianship, p. 204.
28
W. L. Sharkey to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 10 Oct 1865 (M–45), NA M752, roll 22; J. O.
Shackelford to Maj Gen G. H. Thomas, 18 Jul 1865 (S–18), NA T142, roll 27; Brig Gen J. W. Sprague
to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 17 Jul 1865 (“to accomplish”), NA M979, roll 23; Col T. W. Osborn to Maj
Gen O. O. Howard, 21 Sep 1865 (F–4) (“military forces”), NA M752, roll 20.
29
Maj Gen C. R. Woods to Brig Gen W. D. Whipple, 20 Sep 1865 (A–443–MDT–1865), Entry
926, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; Maj E. B. Meatyard to 1st Lt C. W. Snyder, 10 Nov 1865, (M–394–DM–
1865), Entry 2433, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; Brig Gen E. A. Wild to Maj Gen R. Saxton, 14 Jul 1865, NA
Microlm Pub M869, Rcds of the Asst Commissioner for the State of South Carolina, BRFAL,
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
470
Augusta, Georgia, men of the 33d USCI looted houses. Thefts from garden plots
near Brookhaven and Vicksburg, Mississippi, became frequent as soldiers of the
58th and 108th USCIs tried to supplement the inadequate Army ration. An ofcer
at Brookhaven recognized the connection. “It is absolutely necessary in order to
maintain discipline, and prevent depredation,” he urged, “that supplies should be
forwarded more regularly.” Neither black nor white civilians were exempt from
pillage. In Nashville, a black street vendor complained to the Bureau that men
of the 15th USCI “forceably took from him watermelons” valued at twenty-one
dollars. A lieutenant of the 101st USCI serving as Freedmen’s Bureau agent at
Gallatin, Tennessee, wrote to the assistant commissioner to request the removal of
one company from his own regiment and the assignment of another to the garrison
there. The discipline of the company he wanted removed was so lax, he explained,
“that it is utterly impossible to have them perform their various duties correctly.
When they are sent on duty away from the Post, they cannot be depended upon.
Their lawless acts are becoming a disgrace to the public service.”
30
While black soldiers used their off-duty hours to supplement their diet,
often at the expense of black and white civilians, they also helped neighboring
freedpeople adjust to their new status, both with advice and in more substantial
ways. At Helena, Arkansas, men of the 56th USCI cleared ground and erected
buildings for an orphanage; at Okolona, Mississippi, black civilians elected two
noncommissioned ofcers of the 108th USCI as their nancial agents in starting
a school. Enlisted men and ofcers of the 62d and 65th USCIs—originally
the 1st and 2d Missouri Infantries (African Descent)—raised $5,346 toward
the founding of the Lincoln Institute, the forerunner of Lincoln University, in
Jefferson City.
31
The shortage of ofcers in the black regiments was one reason for a lack
of discipline that many observers noticed. This problem became apparent as
soon as the ghting died down and the troops took up occupation duties. Even
before the Freedmen’s Bureau organized fully, an inspector at New Orleans
warned that “a large number of ofcers” of the 81st USCI “have been detached
and placed on duties in this city,” in addition to ve assigned to various staff
jobs at Port Hudson. “The 81st is a very ne regiment,” he wrote, “and should
have the requisite number of ofcers to maintain its present reputation by con-
stant attention.” Three days after the inspector’s warning, a general in Louisi-
roll 34. Instances of misbehavior by troops of another American occupying force are in Earl F.
Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–1946, U.S. Army in World War II
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1975), pp. 323–25, 421–23.
30
Capt H. Sweeney to 1st Lt S. J. Clark, 13 Jul 1865, 56th USCI; Maj L. Raynolds to 1st Lt J.
A. Stevens, 6 Sep 1865, 58th USCI; 1st Lt C. Wright to Commanding Ofcer (CO), 108th USCI, 10
Jul 1865, and 2d Lt A. F. Cook to CO, 108th USCI, 30 Aug 1865, both in 108th USCI; Endorsement,
Lt Col N. S. Gilson, 21 Sep 1865, on Maj L. Raynolds to Lt Col J. W. Miller, 19 Sep 1865 (R–137–
DM–1865), 58th USCI; all in Entry 57C, RG 94, NA. 1st Lt A. J. Harding to Col R. W. Barnard, 16
Aug 1865 (“forceably took”), NA T142, roll 27; Brig Gen E. L. Molineux to Maj W. L. M. Burger, 22
Jun 1865, Entry 4109, Dept of the South, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; 1st Lt A. L. Hawkins to Brig Gen
C. B. Fisk, 2 Sep 1865 (H–102 1/2) (“that it is”), NA T142, roll 26.
31
1st Lt S. J. Clark to J. Dickenson and T. Harrison, 11 Jun 1866, 56th USCI, Regimental Books,
RG 94, NA; HQ 108th USCI, Regimental Order 137, 25 Oct 1865, 108th USCI, Regimental Books, RG
94, NA; W. Sherman Savage, The History of Lincoln University (Jefferson City, Mo.: Lincoln University,
1939), pp. 2–3.