There was in our regiment a very young recruit, named Sam Roberts, of
whom Trowbridge used to tell this story. Early in the war Trowbridge had
been once sent to Amelia Island with a squad of men, under direction of
Commodore Goldsborough, to remove the negroes from the island. As the
officers stood on the beach, talking to some of the older freedmen, they
saw this urchin peeping at them from front and rear in a scrutinizing
way, for which his father at last called him to account, as thus:--
"Hi! Sammy, what you's doin', chile?"
"Daddy," said the inquisitive youth, "don't you know mas'r tell us
Yankee hab tail? I don't see no tail, daddy!"
There were many who went to Port Royal during the war, in civil or
military positions, whose previous impressions of the colored race were
about as intelligent as Sam's view of themselves. But, for once, I had
always had so much to do with fugitive slaves, and had studied the whole
subject with such interest, that I found not much to learn or unlearn as
to this one point. Their courage I had before seen tested; their docile
and lovable qualities I had known; and the only real surprise that
experience brought me was in finding them so little demoralized. I had
not allowed for the extreme remoteness and seclusion of their lives,
especially among the Sea Islands. Many of them had literally spent their
whole existence on some lonely island or remote plantation, where the
master never came, and the overseer only once or twice a week. With
these exceptions, such persons had never seen a white face, and of the
excitements or sins of larger communities they had not a conception. My
friend Colonel Hallo-well, of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, told
me that he had among his men some of the worst reprobates of Northern
cities. While I had some men who were unprincipled and troublesome,
there was not one whom I could call a hardened villain. I was constantly
expecting to find male Topsies, with no notions of good and plenty of
evil. But I never found one. Among the most ignorant there was very
often a childlike absence of vices, which was rather to be classed as
inexperience than as innocence, but which had some of the advantages of
both.
Apart from this, they were very much like other men. General Saxton,
examining with some impatience a long list of questions from some
philanthropic Commission at the North, respecting the traits and
habits of the freedmen, bade some staff-officer answer them all in two
words,--"Intensely human." We all admitted that it was a striking and
comprehensive description.
For instance, as to courage. So far as I have seen, the mass of men are
naturally courageous up to a certain point. A man seldom runs away from
danger which he ought to face, unless others run; each is apt to
keep with the mass, and colored soldiers have more than usual of this
gregariousness. In almost every regiment, black or white, there are a
score or two of men who are naturally daring, who really hunger after
dangerous adventures, and are happiest when allowed to seek them. Every
commander gradually finds out who these men are, and habitually uses
them; certainly I had such, and I remember with delight their bearing,
their coolness, and their dash. Some of them were negroes, some
mulattoes. One of them would have passed for white, with brown hair
and blue eyes, while others were so black you could hardly see their
features. These picked men varied in other respects too; some were
neat and well-drilled soldiers, while others were slovenly, heedless
fellows,--the despair of their officers at inspection, their pride on a
raid. They were the natural scouts and rangers of the regiment; they had
the two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, which Napoleon thought so rare.
The mass of the regiment rose to the same level under excitement, and
were more excitable, I think, than whites, but neither more nor less
courageous.
Perhaps the best proof of a good average of courage among them was in
the readiness they always showed for any special enterprise. I do
not remember ever to have had the slightest difficulty in obtaining
volunteers, but rather in keeping down the number. The previous pages
include many illustrations of this, as well as of then: endurance of
pain and discomfort. For instance, one of my lieutenants, a very daring
Irishman, who had served for eight years as a sergeant of regular
artillery in Texas, Utah, and South Carolina, said he had never been
engaged in anything so risky as our raid up the St. Mary's. But in truth
it seems to me a mere absurdity to deliberately argue the question of
courage, as applied to men among whom I waked and slept, day and night,
for so many months together. As well might he who has been wandering for
years upon the desert, with a Bedouin escort, discuss the courage of the
men whose tents have been his shelter and whose spears his guard. We,
their officers, did not go there to teach lessons, but to receive them.
There were more than a hundred men in the ranks who had voluntarily met
more dangers in their escape from slavery than any of my young captains
had incurred in all their lives.
There was a family named Wilson, I remember, of which we had several
representatives. Three or four brothers had planned an escape from the
interior to our lines; they finally decided that the youngest should
stay and take care of the old mother; the rest, with their sister and
her children, came in a "dug-out" down one of the rivers. They were
fired upon, again and again, by the pickets along the banks, until
finally every man on board was wounded; and still they got safely
through. When the bullets began to fly about them, the woman shed tears,
and her little girl of nine said to her, "Don't cry, mother, Jesus will
help you," and then the child began praying as the wounded men still
urged the boat along. This the mother told me, but I had previously
heard it from on officer who was on the gunboat that picked them
up,--a big, rough man, whose voice fairly broke as he described their
appearance. He said that the mother and child had been hid for nine
months in the woods before attempting their escape, and the child would
speak to no one,--indeed, she hardly would when she came to our camp.
She was almost white, and this officer wished to adopt her, but the
mother said, "I would do anything but that for _oonah_," this being
a sort of Indian formation of the second-person-plural, such as they
sometimes use. This same officer afterwards saw a reward offered for
this family in a Savannah paper.
I used to think that I should not care to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" hi
our camp; it would have seemed tame. Any group of men in a tent would
have had more exciting tales to tell. I needed no fiction when I had
Fanny Wright, for instance, daily passing to and fro before my tent,
with her shy little girl clinging to her skirts. Fanny was a modest
little mulatto woman, a soldier's wife, and a company laundress. She had
escaped from the main-land in a boat, with that child and another. Her
baby was shot dead in her arms, and she reached our lines with one child
safe on earth and the other in heaven. I never found it needful to give
any elementary instructions in courage to Fanny's husband, you may be
sure.
There was another family of brothers in the regiment named Miller. Their
grandmother, a fine-looking old woman, nearly seventy, I should think,
but erect as a pine-tree, used sometimes to come and visit them. She and
her husband had once tried to escape from a plantation near Savannah.
They had failed, and had been brought back; the husband had received
five hundred lashes, and while the white men on the plantation
were viewing the punishment, she was collecting her children and
grandchildren, to the number of twenty-two, in a neighboring marsh,
preparatory to another attempt that night. They found a flat-boat which
had been rejected as unseaworthy, got on board,--still under the old
woman's orders,--and drifted forty miles down the river to our lines.
Trowbridge happened to be on board the gunboat which picked them up,
and he said that when the "flat" touched the side of the vessel, the
grandmother rose to her full height, with her youngest grandchild in her
arms, and said only, "My God! are we free?" By one of those coincidences
of which life is full, her husband escaped also, after his punishment,
and was taken up by the same gunboat.
I hardly need point out that my young lieutenants did not have to teach
the principles of courage to this woman's grandchildren.
I often asked myself why it was that, with this capacity of daring
and endurance, they had not kept the land in a perpetual flame of
insurrection; why, especially since the opening of the war, they had
kept so still. The answer was to be found in the peculiar temperament of
the races, in their religious faith, and in the habit of patience that
centuries had fortified. The shrewder men all said substantially the
same thing. What was the use of insurrection, where everything was
against them? They had no knowledge, no money, no arms, no drill, no
organization,--above all, no mutual confidence. It was the tradition
among them that all insurrections were always betrayed by somebody.
They had no mountain passes to defend like the Maroons of Jamaica,--no
unpenetrable swamps, like the Maroons of Surinam. Where they had these,
even on a small scale, they had used them,--as in certain swamps round
Savannah and in the everglades of Florida, where they united with the
Indians, and would stand fire--so I was told by General Saxton, who had
fought them there--when the Indians would retreat.
It always seemed to me that, had I been a slave, my life would have been
one long scheme of insurrection. But I learned to respect the patient
self-control of those who had waited till the course of events should
open a better way. When it came they accepted it. Insurrection on their
part would at once have divided the Northern sentiment; and a large part
of our army would have joined with the Southern army to hunt them down.
By their waiting till we needed them, their freedom was secured.
Two things chiefly surprised me in their feeling toward their former
masters,--the absence of affection and the absence of revenge. I
expected to find a good deal of the patriarchal feeling. It always
seemed to me a very ill-applied emotion, as connected with the facts and
laws of American slavery,--still I expected to find it. I suppose that
my men and their families and visitors may have had as much of it as
the mass of freed slaves; but certainly they had not a particle. I
never could cajole one of them, in his most discontented moment, into
regretting "ole mas'r time" for a single instant. I never heard one
speak of the masters except as natural enemies. Yet they were perfectly
discriminating as to individuals; many of them claimed to have had kind
owners, and some expressed great gratitude to them for particular favors
received. It was not the individuals, but the ownership, of which they
complained. That they saw to be a wrong which no special kindnesses
could right. On this, as on all points connected with slavery, they
understood the matter as clearly as Garrison or Phillips; the wisest
philosophy could teach them nothing as to that, nor could any false
philosophy befog them. After all, personal experience is the best
logician.
Certainly this indifference did not proceed from any want of personal
affection, for they were the most affectionate people among whom I had
ever lived. They attached themselves to every officer who deserved love,
and to some who did not; and if they failed to show it to their masters,
it proved the wrongfulness of the mastery. On the other hand, they
rarely showed one gleam of revenge, and I shall never forget the
self-control with which one of our best sergeants pointed out to me, at
Jacksonville, the very place where one of his brothers had been hanged
by the whites for leading a party of fugitive slaves. He spoke of it as
a historic matter, without any bearing on the present issue.
But side by side with this faculty of patience, there was a certain
tropical element in the men, a sort of fiery ecstasy when aroused,
which seemed to link them by blood with the French Turcos, and made
them really resemble their natural enemies, the Celts, far more than
the Anglo-Saxon temperament. To balance this there were great individual
resources when alone,--a sort of Indian wiliness and subtlety of
resource. Their gregariousness and love of drill made them more easy to
keep in hand than white American troops, who rather like to straggle or
go in little squads, looking out for themselves, without being bothered
with officers. The blacks prefer organization.
The point of inferiority that I always feared, though I never had
occasion to prove it, was that they might show less fibre, less tough
and dogged resistance, than whites, during a prolonged trial,--a long,
disastrous march, for instance, or the hopeless defence of a besieged
town. I should not be afraid of their mutinying or running away, but of
their drooping and dying. It might not turn out so; but I mention it
for the sake of fairness, and to avoid overstating the merits of these
troops. As to the simple general fact of courage and reliability I
think no officer in our camp ever thought of there being any difference
between black and white. And certainly the opinions of these officers,
who for years risked their lives every moment on the fidelity of their
men, were worth more than those of all the world beside.
No doubt there were reasons why this particular war was an especially
favorable test of the colored soldiers. They had more to fight for than
the whites. Besides the flag and the Union, they had home and wife and
child. They fought with ropes round their necks, and when orders were
issued that the officers of colored troops should be put to death on
capture, they took a grim satisfaction. It helped their _esprit de
corps_ immensely. With us, at least, there was to be no play-soldier.
Though they had begun with a slight feeling of inferiority to the white
troops, this compliment substituted a peculiar sense of self-respect.
And even when the new colored regiments began to arrive from the North
my men still pointed out this difference,--that in case of ultimate
defeat, the Northern troops, black or white, would go home, while the
First South Carolina must fight it out or be re-enslaved. This was one
thing that made the St. John's River so attractive to them and even to
me;--it was so much nearer the everglades. I used seriously to ponder,
during the darker periods of the war, whether I might not end my days as
an outlaw,--a leader of Maroons.
Meanwhile, I used to try to make some capital for the Northern troops,
in their estimate, by pointing out that it was a disinterested thing in
these men from the free States, to come down there and fight, that the
slaves might be free. But they were apt keenly to reply, that many of
the white soldiers disavowed this object, and said that that was not
the object of the war, nor even likely to be its end. Some of them even
repeated Mr. Seward's unfortunate words to Mr. Adams, which some general
had been heard to quote. So, on the whole, I took nothing by the motion,
as was apt to be the case with those who spoke a good word for our
Government, in those vacillating and half proslavery days.
At any rate, this ungenerous discouragement had this good effect, that
it touched their pride; they would deserve justice, even if they did
not obtain it. This pride was afterwards severely tested during the
disgraceful period when the party of repudiation in Congress temporarily
deprived them of their promised pay. In my regiment the men never
mutinied, nor even threatened mutiny; they seemed to make it a matter of
honor to do then: part, even if the Government proved a defaulter;
but one third of them, including the best men in the regiment, quietly
refused to take a dollar's pay, at the reduced price. "We'se gib our
sogerin' to de Guv'ment, Gunnel," they said, "but we won't 'spise
ourselves so much for take de seben dollar." They even made a
contemptuous ballad, of which I once caught a snatch.
"Ten dollar a month!
Tree ob dat for clothin'l
Go to Washington
Fight for Linkum's darter!"
This "Lincoln's daughter" stood for the Goddess of Liberty, it would
seem. They would be true to her, but they would not take the half-pay.
This was contrary to my advice, and to that of other officers; but I
now think it was wise. Nothing less than this would have called the
attention of the American people to this outrageous fraud.*
* See Appendix.
The same slow forecast had often marked their action in other ways. One
of our ablest sergeants, Henry Mclntyre, who had earned two dollars and
a half per day as a master-carpenter in Florida, and paid one dollar and
a half to his master, told me that he had deliberately refrained from
learning to read, because that knowledge exposed the slaves to so much
more watching and suspicion. This man and a few others had built on
contract the greater part of the town of Micanopy in Florida, and was a
thriving man when his accustomed discretion failed for once, and he lost
all. He named his child William Lincoln, and it brought upon him such
suspicion that he had to make his escape.
I cannot conceive what people at the North mean by speaking of the
negroes as a bestial or brutal race. Except in some insensibility to
animal pain, I never knew of an act in my regiment which I should call
brutal. In reading Kay's "Condition of the English Peasantry" I was
constantly struck with the unlikeness of my men to those therein
described. This could not proceed from my prejudices as an abolitionist,
for they would have led me the other way, and indeed I had once written
a little essay to show the brutalizing influences of slavery. I learned
to think that we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced
by slavery among the negroes, but had overrated the demoralization. Or
rather, we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes
had checked the demoralization. Yet again, it must be admitted that this
temperament, born of sorrow and oppression, is far more marked in the
slave than in the native African.
Theorize as we may, there was certainly in our camp an average tone of
propriety which all visitors noticed, and which was not created, but
only preserved by discipline. I was always struck, not merely by the
courtesy of the men, but also by a certain sober decency of language.
If a man had to report to me any disagreeable fact, for instance, he
was sure to do it with gravity and decorum, and not blurt it out in an
offensive way. And it certainly was a significant fact that the ladies
of our camp, when we were so fortunate as to have such guests, the young
wives, especially, of the adjutant and quartermaster, used to go among
the tents when the men were off duty, in order to hear their big pupils
read and spell, without the slightest fear of annoyance. I do not mean
direct annoyance or insult, for no man who valued his life would have
ventured that in presence of the others, but I mean the annoyance of
accidentally seeing or hearing improprieties not intended for them. They
both declared that they would not have moved about with anything like
the same freedom in any white camp they had ever entered, and it
always roused their indignation to hear the negro race called brutal or
depraved.
This came partly from natural good manners, partly from the habit of
deference, partly from ignorance of the refined and ingenious evil which
is learned in large towns; but a large part came from their strongly
religious temperament. Their comparative freedom from swearing,
for instance,--an abstinence which I fear military life did not
strengthen,--was partly a matter of principle. Once I heard one of them
say to another, in a transport of indignation, "Ha-a-a, boy, s'pose I no
be a Christian, I cuss you sol"--which was certainly drawing pretty hard
upon the bridle. "Cuss," however, was a generic term for all manner
of evil speaking; they would say, "He cuss me fool," or "He cuss
me coward," as if the essence of propriety were in harsh and angry
speech,--which I take to be good ethics. But certainly, if Uncle Toby
could have recruited his army in Flanders from our ranks, their swearing
would have ceased to be historic.
It used to seem to me that never, since Cromwell's time, had there been
soldiers in whom the religious element held such a place. "A religious
army," "a gospel army," were their frequent phrases. In their
prayer-meetings there was always a mingling, often quaint enough, of
the warlike and the pious. "If each one of us was a praying man," said
Corporal Thomas Long in a sermon, "it appears to me that we could fight
as well with prayers as with bullets,--for the Lord has said that if you
have faith even as a grain of mustard-seed cut into four parts, you
can say to the sycamore-tree, Arise, and it will come up." And though
Corporal Long may have got a little perplexed in his botany, his faith
proved itself by works, for he volunteered and went many miles on a
solitary scouting expedition into the enemy's country in Florida, and
got back safe, after I had given him up for lost.
The extremes of religious enthusiasm I did not venture to encourage, for
I could not do it honestly; neither did I discourage them, but simply
treated them with respect, and let them have their way, so long as they
did not interfere with discipline. In general they promoted it. The
mischievous little drummer-boys, whose scrapes and quarrels were the
torment of my existence, might be seen kneeling together in their tents
to say their prayers at night, and I could hope that their slumbers were
blessed by some spirit of peace, such as certainly did not rule over
their waking. The most reckless and daring fellows in the regiment were
perfect fatalists in theur confidence that God would watch over them,
and that if they died, it would be because theur time had come. This
almost excessive faith, and the love of freedom and of their families,
all co-operated with their pride as soldiers to make them do their duty.
I could not have spared any of these incentives. Those of our officers
who were personally the least influenced by such considerations, still
saw the need of encouraging them among the men.
I am bound to say that this strongly devotional turn was not always
accompanied by the practical virtues; but neither was it strikingly
divorced from them. A few men, I remember, who belonged to the ancient
order of hypocrites, but not many. Old Jim Cushman was our favorite
representative scamp. He used to vex his righteous soul over the
admission of the unregenerate to prayer-meetings, and went off once
shaking his head and muttering, "Too much goat shout wid de sheep." But
he who objected to this profane admixture used to get our mess-funds far
more hopelessly mixed with his own, when he went out to buy chickens.
And I remember that, on being asked by our Major, in that semi-Ethiopian
dialect into which we sometimes slid, "How much wife you got, Jim?" the
veteran replied, with a sort of penitence for lost opportunities, "On'y
but four, Sah!"
Another man of somewhat similar quality went among us by the name of
Henry Ward Beecher, from a remarkable resemblance in face and figure to
that sturdy divine. I always felt a sort of admiration for this worthy,
because of the thoroughness with which he outwitted me, and the sublime
impudence in which he culminated. He got a series of passes from me,
every week or two, to go and see his wife on a neighboring plantation,
and finally, when this resource seemed exhausted, he came boldly for one
more pass, that he might go and be married.
We used to quote _him_ a good deal, also, as a sample of a certain
Shakespearian boldness of personification in which the men sometimes
indulged. Once, I remember, his captain had given him a fowling-piece
to clean. Henry Ward had left it in the captain's tent, and the latter,
finding it, had transferred the job to some one else.
Then came a confession, in this precise form, with many dignified
gesticulations:--
"Cappen! I took dat gun, and I put bun in Cappen tent. Den I look,
and de gun not dar! Den Conscience say, Cappen mus' hab gib dat gun to
somebody else for clean. Den I say, Conscience, you reason correck."
Compare Lancelot Gobbo's soliloquy in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona"!
Still, I maintain that, as a whole, the men were remarkably free from
inconvenient vices. There was no more lying and stealing than in average
white regiments. The surgeon was not much troubled by shamming sickness,
and there were not a great many complaints of theft. There was less
quarrelling than among white soldiers, and scarcely ever an instance of
drunkenness. Perhaps the influence of their officers had something to do
with this; for not a ration of whiskey was ever issued to the men, nor
did I ever touch it, while in the army, nor approve a requisition for
any of the officers, without which it could not easily be obtained. In
this respect our surgeons fortunately agreed with me, and we never
had reason to regret it. I believe the use of ardent spirits to be
as useless and injurious in the army as on board ship, and among the
colored troops, especially, who had never been accustomed to it, I think
that it did only harm.
The point of greatest laxity in their moral habits--the want of a high
standard of chastity--was not one which affected their camp life to any
great extent, and it therefore came less under my observation. But I
found to my relief that, whatever their deficiency in this respect, it
was modified by the general quality of their temperament, and indicated
rather a softening and relaxation than a hardening and brutalizing of
their moral natures. Any insult or violence in this direction was a
thing unknown. I never heard of an instance. It was not uncommon for
men to have two or three wives in different plantations,--the second,
or remoter, partner being called a "'broad wife,"--i.e. wife abroad.
But the whole tendency was toward marriage, and this state of things was
only regarded as a bequest from "mas'r time."
I knew a great deal about their marriages, for they often consulted me,
and took my counsel as lovers are wont to do,--that is, when it pleased
their fancy. Sometimes they would consult their captains first, and then
come to me in despairing appeal. "Cap'n Scroby [Trowbridge] he acvise
me not for marry dis lady, 'cause she hab seben chil'en. What for use?
Cap'n Scroby can't lub for me. I mus' lub for myself, and I lub he." I
remember that on this occasion "he" stood by, a most unattractive woman,
jet black, with an old pink muslin dress, torn white cotton gloves, and
a very flowery bonnet, that must have descended through generations of
tawdry mistresses.
I felt myself compelled to reaffirm the decision of the inferior court.
The result was as usual. They were married the next day, and I believe
that she proved an excellent wife, though she had seven children, whose
father was also in the regiment. If she did not, I know many others
who did, and certainly I have never seen more faithful or more happy
marriages than among that people.
The question was often asked, whether the Southern slaves or the
Northern free blacks made the best soldiers. It was a compliment to both
classes that each officer usually preferred those whom he had personally
commanded. I preferred those who had been slaves, for their greater
docility and affectionateness, for the powerful stimulus which their new
freedom gave, and for the fact that they were fighting, in a manner,
for their own homes and firesides. Every one of these considerations
afforded a special aid to discipline, and cemented a peculiar tie of
sympathy between them and their officers. They seemed like clansmen,
and had a more confiding and filial relation to us than seemed to me to
exist in the Northern colored regiments.
So far as the mere habits of slavery went, they were a poor preparation
for military duty. Inexperienced officers often assumed that, because
these men had been slaves before enlistment, they would bear to be
treated as such afterwards. Experience proved the contrary. The more
strongly we marked the difference between the slave and the soldier, the
better for the regiment. One half of military duty lies in obedience,
the other half in self-respect. A soldier without self-respect is
worthless. Consequently there were no regiments in which it was so
important to observe the courtesies and proprieties of military life
as in these. I had to caution the officers to be more than usually
particular in returning the salutations of the men; to be very careful
in their dealings with those on picket or guard-duty; and on no account
to omit the titles of the non-commissioned officers. So, in dealing
out punishments, we had carefully to avoid all that was brutal and
arbitrary, all that savored of the overseer. Any such dealing found them
as obstinate and contemptuous as was Topsy when Miss Ophelia undertook
to chastise her. A system of light punishments, rigidly administered
according to the prescribed military forms, had more weight with them
than any amount of angry severity. To make them feel as remote as
possible from the plantation, this was essential. By adhering to this,
and constantly appealing to their pride as soldiers and their sense of
duty, we were able to maintain a high standard of discipline,--so, at
least, the inspecting officers said,--and to get rid, almost entirely,
of the more degrading class of punishments,--standing on barrels, tying
up by the thumbs, and the ball and chain.
In all ways we had to educate their self-respect. For instance, at first
they disliked to obey their own non-commissioned officers. "I don't want
him to play de white man ober me," was a sincere objection. They had
been so impressed with a sense of inferiority that the distinction
extended to the very principles of honor. "I ain't got colored-man
principles," said Corporal London Simmons, indignantly defending himself
from some charge before me. "I'se got white-gemman principles. I'se do
my best. If Cap'n tell me to take a man, s'pose de man be as big as
a house, I'll clam hold on him till I die, inception [excepting] I'm
sick."
But it was plain that this feeling was a bequest of slavery, which
military life would wear off. We impressed it upon them that they did
not obey their officers because they were white, but because they were
their officers, just as the Captain must obey me, and I the General;
that we were all subject to military law, and protected by it in
turn. Then we taught them to take pride in having good material for
noncommissioned officers among themselves, and in obeying them. On
my arrival there was one white first sergeant, and it was a question
whether to appoint others. This I prevented, but left that one, hoping
the men themselves would at last petition for his removal, which
at length they did. He was at once detailed on other duty. The
picturesqueness of the regiment suffered, for he was very tall and fair,
and I liked to see him step forward in the centre when the line of first
sergeants came together at dress-parade. But it was a help to discipline
to eliminate the Saxon, for it recognized a principle.
Afterwards I had excellent battalion-drills without a single white
officer, by way of experiment; putting each company under a sergeant,
and going through the most difficult movements, such as division-columns
and oblique-squares. And as to actual discipline, it is doing no
injustice to the line-officers of the regiment to say that none of
them received from the men more implicit obedience than Color-Sergeant
Rivers. I should have tried to obtain commissions for him and several
others before I left the regiment, had their literary education been
sufficient; and such an attempt was finally made by Lieutenant-Colonel
Trowbridge, my successor in immediate command, but it proved
unsuccessful. It always seemed to me an insult to those brave men to
have novices put over their heads, on the ground of color alone; and the
men felt it the more keenly as they remained longer in service. There
were more than seven hundred enlisted men in the regiment, when mustered
out after more than three years' service. The ranks had been kept full
by enlistment, but there were only fourteen line-officers instead of the
full thirty. The men who should have filled those vacancies were doing
duty as sergeants in the ranks.
In what respect were the colored troops a source of disappointment? To
me in one respect only,--that of health. Their health improved, indeed,
as they grew more familiar with military life; but I think that neither
their physical nor moral temperament gave them that toughness, that
obstinate purpose of living, which sustains the more materialistic
Anglo-Saxon. They had not, to be sure, the same predominant diseases,
suffering in the pulmonary, not in the digestive organs; but they
suffered a good deal. They felt malaria less, but they were more
easily choked by dust and made ill by dampness. On the other hand,
they submitted more readily to sanitary measures than whites, and,
with efficient officers, were more easily kept clean. They were injured
throughout the army by an undue share of fatigue duty, which is not only
exhausting but demoralizing to a soldier; by the un-suitableness of the
rations, which gave them salt meat instead of rice and hominy; and
by the lack of good medical attendance. Their childlike constitutions
peculiarly needed prompt and efficient surgical care; but almost all the
colored troops were enlisted late in the war, when it was hard to get
good surgeons for any regiments, and especially for these. In this
respect I had nothing to complain of, since there were no surgeons in
the army for whom I would have exchanged my own.
And this late arrival on the scene affected not only the medical
supervision of the colored troops, but their opportunity for a career.
It is not my province to write their history, nor to vindicate them,
nor to follow them upon those larger fields compared with which the
adventures of my regiment appear but a partisan warfare. Yet this, at
least, may be said. The operations on the South Atlantic coast, which
long seemed a merely subordinate and incidental part of the great
contest, proved to be one of the final pivots on which it turned. All
now admit that the fate of the Confederacy was decided by Sherman's
march to the sea. Port Royal was the objective point to which he
marched, and he found the Department of the South, when he reached it,
held almost exclusively by colored troops. Next to the merit of those
who made the march was that of those who held open the door. That
service will always remain among the laurels of the black regiments.