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

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Conclusion

501

Americans on the path to citizenship. The military service that some two hundred

thousand of them rendered during the Civil War gave them and their descendants

an undeniable claim on that citizenship, as Lincoln recognized. “Any different pol-

icy in regard to the colored man,” he continued, “deprives us of his help, and this

is more than we can bear.” With black troops positioned all across the occupied

South, from the outskirts of Richmond to the mouth of the Rio Grande:

We can not spare the hundred and forty or fty thousand now serving as sol-

diers, seamen, and laborers. This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one

of physical force. . . . Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and

the Union goes with it. Nor is it possible for any Administration to retain the

service of these people with the express or implied understanding that upon the

rst convenient occasion, they are to be re-inslaved. It can not be; and it ought

not to be.

Yet within twelve months of Lincoln drafting that letter, a new administra-

tion had set aside his judgment and begun to abet just such a process. This was

not merely the result of Andrew Johnson’s personal views; other matters occupied

the nation’s attention, as well. During the war, the national debt had soared past

$2.5 billion in the dollars of that day, about half of the gross national product.

In the third quarter of 1865, it increased by another $60 million. Restoring the

economy to a peacetime footing and beginning to pay off that debt seemed to be

the most pressing tasks at hand. In Johnson’s rst annual message to Congress that

December, he praised “measures of retrenchment in each bureau and branch” of

the War Department that had brought expenditure down by 93 percent, from more

than $516 million the previous year to a projected total of less than $34 million.

These measures, including reduction of the cavalry force, “exhibit[ed] a diligent

economy worthy of commendation,” Johnson said. Meanwhile, Southern night rid-

ers terrorized freedpeople and evaded Union infantry.

In the end, the federal government was unwilling to pay the price necessary

to sustain the social revolution that it had begun so hesitantly during the war. In

the summer of 1865, it took steps to dismantle the military structure that it had

painfully, although not always carefully, assembled. Among the rst to go were

the mounted regiments, necessary to maintain order among the South’s disaffected

white population but expensive to maintain. In 1866, most of the remaining Civil

War volunteers turned over occupation duties to hastily recruited infantry regi-

ments of the Regular Army. The year after the last of the veterans mustered out, the

Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.:

Rutgers University Press, 1953–1956), 8: 1–2.

“Annual Message of the President,” 39th Cong., 1st sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1 (serial 1,244), p. 13;

New York Times, 3 October 1865. For public opinion on the national debt, see New York Times, 28

October 1865; Walter N. K. Nugent, The Money Question During Reconstruction (New York: W.

W. Norton, 1967), pp. 28–30; Robert T. Patterson, Federal Debt-Management Policies, 1865–1879

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), pp. 51–58; Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social

and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1964), p. 16.

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

502

number of lynchings in one state, Kentucky, nearly doubled, from eleven in 1867

to twenty-one in 1868.

Programs to ensure the well-being of freedpeople also lost the forceful backing

of public opinion. As the attention of federal ofcials shifted from the South to the

West, so did that of many Quakers and New England intellectuals who had formed

the backbone of the abolitionist movement. The object of these philanthropists was

not economic expansion, but reform of the Ofce of Indian Affairs. Civil service

reform and other causes also attracted the attention of former abolitionists. During

1869, while the states went through the process of ratifying the Fifteenth Amend-

ment to the Constitution, intended to safeguard the voting rights of black men,

reformers engaged in acrimonious debates about the voting rights of women. In

1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, the American Anti-Slavery

Society announced its own dissolution. After the achievement of their main goal,

the society’s members may not have seen a clear road ahead. Indeed, regarding

“the Negro’s . . . position in the political arena,” the editor of The Nation could

write as early as July 1865, “everybody is heartily tired of discussing his condition

and his rights.”

How did black soldiers themselves fare after they received their discharges?

Most lived quietly as private citizens. By 1890, when the federal census counted

53,799 surviving black Civil War veterans, more than twelve thousand of them

were still working as common laborers, with nearly twice that many employed in

agriculture, either as hired hands or as farmers in their own right. More than seven-

teen hundred were teamsters, and a like number domestic servants. Skilled laborers

included 1,250 carpenters, 596 masons, and 559 blacksmiths.

The census also recorded 844 surviving black soldiers as clergymen. A com-

parative handful of veterans also went into politics at various levels. Of the men

named in this book, the only ofceholder was Prince Rivers, one of the noncom-

missioned ofcers who accepted the colors of the 1st South Carolina on New Year’s

Day 1863. The regimental surgeon described him as “black as the ace of spades

and a man of remarkable executive ability.” While in uniform, Rivers exerted his

inuence off duty to encourage the men of his regiment to save their pay. After the

war, he was a delegate to South Carolina’s constitutional convention and served

three terms in the legislature. There, he was no more venal than other members, in-

sisting that he and other members from the Piedmont sold their votes only to keep

Low Country delegates from getting all the money. Rivers also was involved in

George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and

“Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 307–08.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unnished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper

& Row, 1988), pp. 446–49; Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government

and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 496–500; Michael L.

Benedict, “Reform Republicans and the Retreat from Reconstruction,” in The Facts of Reconstruction:

Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, eds. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr. (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 53–77; The Nation quoted in David W. Blight, Race and

Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 53.

Report of the Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890, Part 2, 52d Cong., 1st sess., H.

Misc. Doc. 340, pt. 19 (serial 3,019), pp. 807–09.

Conclusion

503

railroad construction and in 1871 helped to found Aiken County, where he served

as a judge in later years.

Somewhat more typical of black veterans was Harry Williams of the same

regiment, who had led twenty-seven South Carolina slaves to freedom in Novem-

ber 1863. He moved to Savannah after the war and worked with his brother clean-

ing houses and ofces. He “taught a night school one year,” as he told a pension

examiner in 1889, “and he was in politicks and stumped as a speaker in political

campaigns and [was] interested in public affairs.” His political activities may have

been the reason he moved north after the 1876 presidential election heralded the

end of Reconstruction. Williams worked as a waiter and boarding-house keeper in

Philadelphia and a laundryman in New Jersey until his death in 1917.

About three thousand veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops enlisted in the six

new black regiments of the Regular Army in 1866 and 1867. While they repre-

sented only 2 percent of black Civil War veterans, they made up half the strength

of the new regiments and furnished them with most of their noncommissioned

ofcers. For the vast majority of these soldiers, a single enlistment in the regulars

was enough. One such was Henry James, former sergeant major of the 3d USCI,

who had led an expedition into the interior of Florida during the last days of the

war. In October 1866, he joined the 9th U.S. Cavalry. On a scout in western Texas

three years later, he contracted an infection of the urinary tract that necessitated his

discharge for disability. He died at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1895.

That was longer than most black veterans survived the war, as the federal cen-

sus of 1890 showed. Successful pension applicants tended to be among the longer

lived, for as successive Congresses expanded eligibility, the ranks of pensioners

grew. William A. Messley was one such applicant. As a rst sergeant in the 62d

USCI, Messley had taken command of a company at Palmetto Ranch, Texas, when

the commissioned ofcers were out of action. After the war, rheumatism crippled

him. He wrote to the Commissioner of Pensions in 1887: “Hundreds of Times have

I wished for death to relieve me of this Everlasting disease.” Yet he lived on for

nearly thirty more years, dying at Chicago in 1916. Dick Brown, taken prisoner in

September 1864 along with half of the 100th USCI, tried to continue blacksmith-

ing after the war, but rheumatism prevented it. “I have not been able to make more

than half a hand at my trade since my discharge,” he attested in 1891. “Some days

“War-Time Letters from Seth Rogers,” p. 7 (quotation), typescript at U.S. Army Military

History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.; Report of the Eleventh Census, Part 2, p. 807; Foner, Reconstruction,

pp. 62, 570; Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, p. 246; Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political

Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977),

pp. 76–80; Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction,

1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 27, 393–94.

Pension File SC738833, Harry Williams, Civil War Pension Application Files (CWPAF),

Record Group (RG) 15, Rcds of the Veterans Admin, National Archives (NA). Quotation from

applicant’s afdavit, 11 Jun 1889.

Pension File C2747723, Henry James, CWPAF; William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips,

The Black Regulars, 1866–1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), pp. 13, 24; Donald

R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press

of Kansas, 2004), p. 39.

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

504

I can do a good day’s work and then again I cannot work at all.” Nevertheless,

Brown lived to the age of 105, dying near Athens, Alabama, in 1926.

Large questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. Colored Troops and their

inuence on the outcome of the Civil War require several answers. On the in-

stitutional level, the recruitment of black soldiers and the organization of their

regiments developed during a period of about two years, from the rst efforts of

individual Union generals to the nal opening of Kentucky for black enlistments in

1864. The process went as well as could be expected, given the means of commu-

nication that were available and the Lincoln administration’s wary approach to the

entire subject of emancipation during its rst year and a half in ofce. Some abnor-

malities continued until the end of the conict, with the adjutant general himself

supervising black recruiting in the Mississippi Valley and communicating directly

with the Secretary of War even after a separate bureau had been created in his own

Washington ofce to oversee black troops throughout the country. Far more impor-

tant to the soldiers themselves, Congress failed to state unequivocally that their pay

would be equal to that of white troops rather than to that of black laborers, and the

War Department, on the advice of its solicitor, failed to rectify the oversight. In the

spring of 1864, Congress began a series of halting steps to correct the inequality,

but it did not extend full pay to all black regiments until March 1865.

Matters of that sort aside, from the standpoint of numbers alone, black soldiers

constituted about 12 percent of the Union’s men under arms by the end of the war.

Besides representing a signicant addition to federal armies, their presence in the

Union ranks denied to the Confederacy the labor of some eighty thousand former

slaves recruited in the South who might have been forced to work for the enemy if

they had remained in bondage. Their enlistments also nearly equaled the number of

soldiers drafted by the Union and thus helped to quell anticonscription protest and

to ensure the continued functioning of Northern industry and agriculture.

Black soldiers’ service varied from headlong assaults on the Confederate lines

around Richmond to garrison duty at river ports or along railroad lines that were

important to Union strategy. As with white Union troops, their prociency im-

proved with training and experience. Maj. Gen. Godfrey Weitzel’s ranking of the

regiments under his command in 1865 demonstrates the importance to the troops’

abilities of time spent both on the parade ground and in the eld. Regimental of-

cers were keenly aware that post commanders’ orders detailing their men to fatigue

duty interfered with military instruction, and they sought a remedy through ofcial

complaints. Often, these were successful. The absence of a contiguous front line

and the constant threat of violence made it imperative that men knew at least how

William A. Messley to Commissioner of Pensions, 18 Feb 1887, in Pension File SC908536,

William A. Messley, and Deposition, Dick Brown, 19 Mar 1891, in Pension File SC569893, Dick

Brown, both in CWPAF; Report of the Eleventh Census, Part 2, p. 801.

The Militia Act of 17 July 1862, OR, ser. 3, 2: 280–82, established the ten-dollar wage for

black laborers. The Enrollment Act of 3 Mar 1863 (3: 90), promised that new soldiers would be “on

the same footing, in all respects, as volunteers for three years.” See also Cornish, Sable Arm, pp.

190–95.

Cornish, Sable Arm, p. 288; William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-

Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press,

2001), pp. 141–47.

Conclusion

505

to load and re their weapons and to form line of battle. The determinants of per-

formance were training and practical experience.

The most enduring accomplishment of the Union’s black soldiers was to assert

their right to full citizenship and, by extension, that of all their kin. Lincoln recog-

nized this claim as early as March 1864, when he urged the new governor of Loui-

siana to extend the franchise to “the very intelligent” among the freedmen, “and

especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.” This was merely a private

suggestion, he told the governor, but hundreds of black Southerners reached the

same conclusion independently during the months that followed. “We want two

more boxes, beside the cartridge box,” Sgt. Henry J. Maxwell told a convention at

Nashville in August 1865, “the ballot box and the jury box.” In the years to come,

black veterans in other parts of the country would base petitions for full civic

participation on their military service during the war. They had answered fully the

question that Treasury Agent Edward Pierce had posed in the summer of 1863:

“Will they ght for their freedom?” Another century and ve more wars would

pass before most Americans began to acknowledge the answer.

Maj Gen G. Weitzel to Col C. H. Whittlesey, 26 Nov 1865, Entry 2063, U.S. Forces on the

Rio Grande, Letters Sent, pt. 2, Polyonymous Successions of Cmds, RG 393, U.S. Army Continental

Cmds, NA. On fatigue duty, training, and discipline, see above, Chapters 2–5, 7, 9, 11, 12.

Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7: 243; Colored Tennessean (Nashville),

12 August 1865; Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (September

1863): 291–315 (quotation, p. 291). Petitions of black veterans and remarks of black orators are in

Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 817–18, 822–23; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So

Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 532–33, 537–38.

Documentation for this book comes mostly from ofcial sources written soon

after the events they record. Personal letters add further detail to the narrative.

Secondary sources corroborate and aid the interpretation of evidence furnished by

contemporary sources. I have avoided memoirs and reminiscences, for time tends

to dull the edge of memory. Although there is no guarantee that an ofcial report

was entirely truthful, the Articles of War forbade ling false musters or returns and

offenders were to be cashiered, that is, “utterly disabled to have or hold any ofce

or employment in the service of the United States.” This tended to encourage a

degree of honesty not always found in accounts rendered by old men who are not

under oath.

In selecting sources, I have tried to cite the most easily accessible version of a

document that exists in both manuscript and published forms: for instance, when a

manuscript report or letter housed at the National Archives also appears in The War

of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Ofcial Records of the Union and Confederate

Armies—published in 128 volumes between 1880 and 1901 and widely available in

two paper reprints, a CD-ROM, and an online edition—I have cited the published

version (commonly abbreviated OR, for Ofcial Records). The Adjutant General’s

Ofce in the War Department was responsible for compiling the Ofcial Records,

and most of the editorial work was done by Army ofcers detailed from their

regiments. Compilers took reports and correspondence from War Department les to

document military operations (Series 1 of the Ofcial Records, fty-three volumes

bound as 111); prisoners of war and related matters (Series 2, eight volumes); Union

recruitment, including the draft (Series 3, ve volumes); and records of the

Confederate government (Series 4, four volumes). Some of the documents were

returned to their original les; others were not. This latter class constitutes the ninety-

one shelf feet of the National Archives’ “Civil War Records Retained by the War

Records Ofce” (Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Ofce, Entries

729–33). The idea of “objective” or “scientic” history written by professionals was

in its infancy during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, conned for the

most part to a few graduate schools, and the editors of the Ofcial Records therefore

felt free to alter punctuation and paragraphing, practices which compilers of modern

Revised United States Army Regulations of 1861 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing

Ofce, 1863), p. 488.

Bibliographical Note

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

508

documentary collections avoid. Readers planning to consult the Ofcial Records

extensively should read the Adjutant General’s own history of the editorial project in

the General Index volume of the series, as well as Dallas D. Irvine’s essay, “The

Genesis of the Ofcial Records,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24 (1937):

221–29.

The compilers of the Ofcial Records did not return the documents they used

to the War Department les from which they were taken, but kept them separate.

During the 1940s, the National Archives received old War Department documents.

Archivists classied the manuscripts that formed the basis of most of the Ofcial

Records as Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Ofce, Entry 729,

Union Battle Reports.

Other manuscript documents consulted while writing this book were:

National Archives, College Park, Maryland

Record Group 217, Records of Accounting Ofcers of the Department of the

Treasury

Entry 732, Settled Case Files for Claims Approved by the Southern Claims

Commission

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Manuscripts

Record Group 15, Records of the Veterans Administration

Civil War Pension Application Files

Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Ofce

Entry 44, Orders and Circulars

Entry 57, Muster Rolls of Volunteer Organizations, Civil War

Entry 57C, U.S. Colored Troops Regimental Papers

Entry 159BB, Generals’ Papers and Books, Lorenzo Thomas

Entry 159DD, Generals’ Papers and Books, Daniel Ullmann

Entry 159GG, Generals’ Papers and Books, David Hunter

Entry 352, Colored Troops Division, Letters Sent

Entry 360, Colored Troops Division, Letters Received

Entry 363, Letters Received by Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas

Entry 519, Carded Records, Volunteer Organizations, Civil War

Entry 729, Union Battle Reports

Regimental Books, Civil War Volunteers

Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and

Abandoned Lands

Entry 642, Georgia: Reports of Murders and Outrages

Record Group 108, Records of the Headquarters of the Army

Entry 35, Letters Sent and Received by General Grant

Record Group 153, Records of the Judge Advocate General’s Ofce

Entry 15, General Court Martial Case Files

Record Group 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–1920

Part 1, Geographical Divisions and Departments

Bibliographical Note

509

Entry 269, Department of Arkansas, Letters Received

Entry 323, Department of Arkansas, Monthly Retained Copies of

Inspection Reports

Entry 926, Department of the Cumberland, Letters Received

Entry 1141, Department of the Cumberland, Organization of Colored

Troops, Letters Sent

Entry 1149, Department of the Cumberland, Records of Capt. R. D.

Mussey

Entry 1708, Department of Georgia, Letters Sent

Entry 1756, Department of the Gulf, Letters Received, 1862–1865 and

1866–1867

Entry 1757, Department of the Gulf, Letters Received, 1865–1866

Entry 1767, Department of the Gulf, Special Orders

Entry 2269, Department and District of Key West, Letters Received

Entry 2433, Department of Mississippi, Letters Received

Entry 3290, Department of North Carolina and Army of the Ohio, Letters

Received

Entry 4109, Department of the South, Letters Received

Entry 4112, Department of the South, Letters Received Relating to

Freedmen

Entry 4495, Division of the Southwest and Department of the Gulf, Letters

Received

Entry 4720, Department of Tennessee, Letters Received

Entry 4790, Department of Texas, Letters and Miscellaneous Reports

Received

Entry 5046, Department of Virginia and Army of the James, Letters Sent

Entry 5063, Department of Virginia and Army of the James, Letters

Received

Entry 5382, Department of Washington, Letters Received

Entry 5515, Military Division of West Mississippi, Letters Received

Part 2, Polyonymous Successions of Commands

Entry 86, 1st Division, II Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 345, X Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 359, X Corps, Special Orders

Entry 376, 1st Division, X Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 512, XXV Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 517, XXV Corps, Letters Received

Entry 518, XXV Corps, Miscellaneous Letters Received

Entry 520, XXV Corps, General Orders

Entry 522, XXV Corps, Special Orders

Entry 525, XXV Corps, Letters Received Relating to Troop Movements

Entry 533, XXV Army Corps, Letters, Orders, and Reports Received by

1st–3d Divisions, December 1864–January 1866

Entry 539, XXV Corps, Letters and Reports Received by the Inspector

General

Entry 549, 1st Division, XXV Corps, Letters Sent

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

510

Entry 646, Military District of Washington, Letters Received

Entry 649, Military District of Washington, Special Orders

Entry 1659, 3d Division, XVIII Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 1860, Defenses of New Orleans, Letters Received

Entry 1976, U.S. Forces at Morganza, Letters Received

Entry 2014, District of Northeast Louisiana, Letters Sent

Entry 2063, U.S. Forces on the Rio Grande, Letters Sent

Entry 2073, U.S. Forces on the Rio Grande, Letters Received

Entry 2254, South Carolina Expeditionary Corps, Letters Received

Entry 2844, District of Memphis, Special Orders, January 1863–September

1865

Entry 4357, 3d Division, V Corps, Orders and Circulars

Entry 5122, 4th Division, IX Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 5178, 2d Division, X Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 5195, 2d Division, X Corps, Special Orders

Entry 6300, XVII Corps, Letters, Reports, and Orders Received

Entry 6946, 2d Brigade, 3d Division, XXIV Corps, General Orders

Entry 6977, 3d Division, XXIV Corps, Letters Sent

Entry 7026, 3d Brigade, 3d Division, XXIV Corps, General Orders

Entry 7035, 3d Division, X Corps, Letters Sent

Part 4, Military Installations

Entry 25, Post of Alexandria, Letters Sent

Entry 402, Post of Donaldsonville, Letters Sent

Microlm Publications

M594, Compiled Records Showing Service of Military Units in Volunteer Union

Organizations

M617, Returns from U.S. Military Posts, 1820–1916

M619, Letters Received by the Ofce of the Adjutant General, 1861–1870

M665, Returns from Regular Army Infantry Regiments

M711, Register of Letters Received, Adjutant General’s Ofce

M744, Returns from Regular Army Cavalry Regiments

M752, Registers and Letters Received by the Commissioner of the Bureau of

Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (BRFAL)

M798, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Georgia, BRFAL

M803, Records of the Education Division of the BRFAL

M826, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Mississippi,

BRFAL

M869, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of South Carolina,

BRFAL

M979, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Arkansas,

BRFAL

M999, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Tennessee,

BRFAL

M1027, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Louisiana,

BRFAL