[I wish to record, as truthfully as I may, the beginnings of a momentous
experiment, which, by proving the aptitude of the freed slaves for
military drill and discipline, their ardent loyalty, their courage under
fire, and their self-control in success, contributed somewhat towards
solving the problem of the war, and towards remoulding the destinies of
two races on this continent.
During a civil war events succeed each other so rapidly that these
earlier incidents are long since overshadowed. The colored soldiery are
now numbered no longer by hundreds, but by tens of thousands. Yet there
was a period when the whole enterprise seemed the most daring of
innovations, and during those months the demeanor of this particular
regiment, the First South Carolina, was watched with microscopic
scrutiny by friends and foes. Its officers had reason to know this,
since the slightest camp-incidents sometimes came back to them,
magnified and distorted, in anxious letters of inquiry from remote parts
of the Union. It was no pleasant thing to live in this glare of
criticism; but it guarantied the honesty of any success, while fearfully
multiplying the penalties, had there been a failure. A single mutiny, a
single rout, a stampede of desertions,--and there perhaps might not have
been, within this century, another systematic effort to arm the negro.
It is possible, therefore, that some extracts from a diary kept during
that period may still have an interest; for there is nothing in human
history so momentous as the transit of a race from chattel-slavery to
armed freedom; nor can this change be photographed save by the actual
contemporaneous words of those who saw it in the process. Perhaps there
may also appear an element of dramatic interest in the record, when one
considers that here, in the delightful regions of Port Royal, the
descendants of the Puritan and the Huguenot, after two centuries, came
face to face,--and that sons of Massachusetts, reversing the boastful
threat which has become historic, here called the roll, upon
South-Carolina soil, of her slaves, now freemen in arms.]
CAMP SAXTON, near Beaufort, S. C.
_November 24, 1862._
Yesterday afternoon we were steaming over a summer sea, the deck level
as a parlor-floor, no land in sight, no sail, until at last appeared one
light-house, said to be Cape Romaine, and then a line of trees and two
distant vessels and nothing more. The sun set, a great illuminated
bubble, submerged in one vast bank of rosy suffusion; it grew dark;
after tea all were on deck, the people sang hymns; then the moon set, a
moon two days old, a curved pencil of light, reclining backwards on a
radiant couch which seemed to rise from the waves to receive it; it sank
slowly, and the last tip wavered and went down like the mast of a vessel
of the skies. Towards morning the boat stopped, and when I came on deck,
before six,--
"The watch-lights glittered on the land,
The ship-lights on the sea."
Hilton Head lay on one side, the gunboats on the other; all that was raw
and bare in the low buildings of the new settlement was softened into
picturesqueness by the early light. Stars were still overhead, gulls
wheeled and shrieked, and the broad river rippled duskily towards
Beaufort.
The shores were low and wooded, like any New-England shore; there were a
few gunboats, twenty schooners, and some steamers, among them the famous
"Planter," which Robert Small, the slave, presented to the nation. The
river-banks were soft and graceful, though low, and as we steamed up to
Beaufort on the flood-tide this morning, it seemed almost as fair as the
smooth and lovely canals which Stedman traversed to meet his negro
soldiers in Surinam. The air was cool as at home, yet the foliage seemed
green, glimpses of stiff tropical vegetation appeared along the banks,
with great clumps of shrubs whose pale seed-vessels looked like tardy
blossoms. Then we saw on a picturesque point an old plantation, with
stately magnolia avenue, decaying house, and tiny church amid the woods,
reminding me of Virginia; behind it stood a neat encampment of white
tents, "and there," said my companion, "is your future regiment of negro
soldiers."
Three miles farther brought us to the pretty town of Beaufort, with its
stately houses amid Southern foliage. Reporting to General Saxton, I had
the luck to encounter a company of my destined command, marched in to be
mustered into the United States service. They were without arms, and all
looked as thoroughly black as the most faithful philanthropist could
desire; there did not seem to be so much as a mulatto among them. Their
coloring suited me, all but the legs, which were clad in a lively
scarlet, as intolerable to my eyes as if I had been a turkey. I saw them
mustered; General Saxton talked to them a little, in his direct, manly
way; they gave close attention, though their faces looked impenetrable.
Then I conversed with some of them. The first to whom I spoke had been
wounded in a small expedition after lumber, from which a party had just
returned, and in which they had been under fire and had done very well.
I said, pointing to his lame arm,--
"Did you think that was more than you bargained for, my man?"