Category: Black Soldiers

Old Men and Boys Defend Marianna

The raid upon the peaceful town of Marianna, Florida in late September 1864 was led by Brig-Gen. Alexander Asboth, a refugee from the failed 1848 Hungarian socialist revolution. Earlier in the Civil War he fought under Fremont in Missouri and Arkansas along with other European revolutionaries, following nomination as brigadier by Abraham Lincoln. In 1863 he commanded the district of West Florida and led raids to suppress armed resistance. During his attack on Marianna, Asboth was severely wounded by two bullets, one shattering his left arm and another lodged under his right cheek.

Old Men and Boys Defend Marianna

“September 18-October 4: General Asboth leaves Barrancas at the head of 700 picked mounted troops- black and white – and several artillery pieces. They cross Pensacola Bay and move the fifty miles to East Pass. Here the raiders take on supplies from their steamer Lizzie Davis and then march rapidly northeast into Washington and Walton counties.

At daybreak on September 23, a surprise attack is made on the town of Eucheanna plundering homes, gathering horses and mules, and taking fifteen citizens as prisoners. The raiding column then moves toward Jackson County while news of their approach quickly reaches the town of Marianna, the county seat. Defense reparations are hastily made there with the few depleted companies of irregular Confederate troops in and about the town. Also, old men and boys are armed with available weapons such as shotguns and squirrel rifles. The defenders erect a barricade where the road forks within the town, and there some 300 men and boys await the enemy’s arrival.

The raiders come up rapidly and sweep aside the barricade with artillery and follow this with a determined charge by the 2nd Maine Cavalry. The defending force is dispersed with some withdrawing to the Chipola River bridge, and many taking refuge in the nearby Episcopal Church and continue firing from its windows. The enemy then sets fire to the church, and its defenders are shot down as they run into the graveyard, falling amid its headstones. Some of the boys are burned to death inside the church. The enemy advance is finally checked at the Chipola Bridge.

In this raid the enemy lost a total of 39 killed and wounded, and before leaving town they plundered stores and homes, taking with them 81 prisoners, 200 horses, 600 Negroes and 400 cattle.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis. Columbia University, 1913, pp. 311-312)

The Great American Misfortune

The Northern States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. The North’s industrial production exploded and made agriculture prosper, while the flood of European immigration more than replaced the men in blue lost by Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. The South was in shambles and soon the North would send its carpetbaggers and Union League organizers to loot anything of value that remained.

The Great American Misfortune

“On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union army landed in Texas. At Galveston he proclaimed, in the name of President Johnson, that the authority of the United States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were free. With him, thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French in Mexico; the others congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the State. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior and most camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the State with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by.

Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as “right.” They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texans were stubborn and prideful people. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy too.

The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The State was placed under military rule and army tribunals replaced the civil courts . . . Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. More galling than the actual atrocities [by Union soldiers], however, was the fact that most Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.

Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.

Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville.

This had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full and lasting effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texas soul.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, 1968, pp. 394-395)

 

Seddon’s View of Black Southern Troops

By 1856 the new Republican party had acquired control of most northern State governments, while being denounced as the chief “disunionists” of the country for reintroducing slavery agitation as a party tactic.

Its party platform in 1860 was very clear on the territories, favoring subsidies for immigrant homesteaders, and a transcontinental railroad crossing Indian lands in the way of rail lines carrying Northern goods westward. Once Southern members departed Congress in early 1861, Republicans created a Federal corporation, the Union Pacific, which extinguished Indian titles and any defense of their land when driven off by military force.  The Indian tribes were to be progressively eliminated as obstacles to settlement and industrial expansion, and before the Civil War ended this policy was in full force.

As the South’s colored population fell into their hands as plantations were overrun, they were designated “contrabands” and utilized as hard labor battalions. As US Colored Troops, they were used as prison guards or cannon fodder in futile assaults and rightly assumed they would suffer the same fate as the Indians under northern rule.

Seddon’s View of Black Confederate Troops

“Hon. James A. Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, in his report, supplemented Mr. Davis’s message with some still stronger recommendations of his own. The slaves, he said, had an even stronger interest in the victory of the Confederacy than did the white people. The latter risked their political independence, but the former their very existence as a race.

If the eternal enemies of the South should triumph, they would extinguish the negroes in a few years, as they had already extinguished the Indians. He recommended that the States which had absolute and exclusive control of the matter, should legislate at once with a view to the contingency of negro enlistments.

On the 15th [of March 1865] the subject of enlistments came up in the Virginia legislature . . . and on the 27th instructed its Senators to vote for the [negro] enlistment measure in the Confederate Congress. [About this time] a letter of General Lee’s was published looking to approval, considering it “not only expedient but necessary.” If the Confederates did not make use of the slaves, the Federals would.

The vote in the Senate on the final passage of the bill, March 7, 1865, the President was authorized to ask for and accept from slave owners the services of as many able-bodied slaves as he thinks expedient; to the same to organized by the commander-in-chief under instructions from the War Department, and to receive the same rations and compensation as other troops.

Mr. Lincoln did not think much of the impressment and enlisting of slaves. He said, in a speech made at Washington on the 17th of March, that the negro could not stay at home and make bread and fight at the same time, and he did not care much for which duty was allotted to him by the Confederate government. “We must now see the bottom of the rebels; resources.”

(Confederate Negro Enlistments. Edward Spencer. Annals of the War, Written by the Leading Participants, North and South. 1879, pp. 547-552)

Fort Pillow’s So-Called “Massacre”

The State of Tennessee established Fort Pillow in 1861 on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River to prevent the passage of northern warships. The Confederate States government later fortified it, but in early 1864 abandoned it to northern troops.

Fort Pillow’s So-Called “Massacre”

“Two ridges gave Confederate sharpshooters complete command of the fort’s interior, and General Forrest decided to send up a formal demand for surrender. The enemy commanding officer was notified that he was surrounded, and that, “if the demand was acceded to, the gallantry of the defenses already made would entitle all its garrison to be treated as prisoners of war.

An answer, after considerable delay, was brought up from the fort, written in pencil on a soiled scrap of paper, without an envelope. It read: “Your demand does not produce the desired effect.” General Forrest read it and hastily exclaimed: “This will not do, send it back and say to Major Booth that I must have an answer in plain English – yes or no.”

Shortly the messenger returned with “no.” Forrest immediately planned to make the assault. The bugle sounded the “charge,” and the Confederates, with a rush, cleared the parapet and swept with their fire every face of the work. General Forrest’s men drove the enemy toward the river, leaving their flags flying, but they turned and fired as they ran.

Now thoroughly panic-stricken, many of the enemy threw themselves into the river and were drowned; others, with arms in their hands, endeavored to make good their escape in different directions but were met by flanking parties of the Confederates and either killed or captured. Fortunately, the firing instantly ceased after General Forrest rode into the fort and cut down the garrison flag.

On the Confederate side, 14 officers and men were killed and 86 wounded. Under a flag of truce, an enemy steamer came to the landing place as Forrest allowed parties to come ashore to look after their dead and wounded, to bury the former and remove the latter to the transport. Of the enemy wounded, there were 61: 34 whites and 27 colored men, according to the reports of the Federal surgeon at the Mound City, Illinois hospital.

There were taken as prisoners of war, 7 officers and 219 enlisted men – 56 of whom were colored and 163 white men without wounds, which, with those wounded, make an aggregate of those who survived, exclusive of those who may have escaped, some 300 souls, or fully 55 percent of the entire garrison. Those who survived unhurt constituted forty percent.

This was the so-called massacre of Fort Pillow.”

(Jefferson Davis: A Memoir by His Wife, Volume II. Varina Davis. Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America. 1990 (originally published 1890), pp. 484-485)

Pondering “Juneteenth” in Texas

In mid-June 1865 a northern general and his brigade landed at Galveston to officially proclaim the war at an end; Texas was now under the rule of his government in Washington. He also reminded the colored people in Texas of their ability to work for whom and where they wished. Both white and colored people in Texas were already aware of Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation edict, and that any Texas slave desiring emancipation from their condition could have, before and during the war, simply crossed the Mexican border to freedom.

Pondering “Juneteenth” in Texas

“In the 1850s there existed fears of slave revolt, with one uprising in Colorado county in 1856, perhaps motivated by John Brown’s influence and example. It was reported that a number of Negroes had acquired and secreted arms for the revolt, with a goal of killing white persons and fighting their way to Mexico “and legal freedom.” The plot was discovered, a number of Negroes killed and about 200 severely punished, with a claim that it was instigated by area Mexcians.

Some runaway slaves were reported who faced a bleak country to live off of, as well as hostile Indians who may also enslave them. The record shows that most runaways returned home after a harrowing life in the wilds of Texas.

[But] there is ample evidence that owners had a genuine interest in the material welfare and contentment of their black workers. This was especially true of plantations south of the Guadalupe or Colorado Rivers where the border with Mexico was not far off. It was true that plantation slaves more often led better lives, materially, than the poor whites of Texas. The diet of slaves, referred to as “hands” on the plantation, was equal to that of the average white farmer. They were given their own plots to garden for their own supply of greens. The most important consideration was the valuable medical care provided to the hands, and they fared far better than the average white people on the frontier. As was common in the pre-Civil War South, no planter could afford a sick slave, and he could afford doctors.

One horror of the war waged upon the South, including Texas, was the disappearance of medical supplies, especially anesthetics, due to the northerner blockade. This caused Southern hospitals, both military and civilian to become tragic and hideous places late in the war.

But one remarkable aspect of the war years in Texas was the behavior of the Negro slaves. Thousands of able-bodied men were left in charge of women, old men and boys on the river bottoms. A region that had long been haunted by the specter of slave revolt – it was only months since the hysteria of John Brown in 1859 – did not record a single incident. As the chief justice of Texas stated: “It was a subject of general remark that the Negroes were most docile and manageable during the war than at any other period, and for this they deserve the lasting gratitude of their owners in the army.”

The fact that slaves labored mightily and peaceably through the war has never adequately been explained. But certainly, more humane treatment helped, and many slaves seemed to have been genuinely caught up in a feeling for the plantation, land and society in which they had no stake. There were dozens of instances where a white mistress directed the efforts of dozens of slaves, in isolate places. No white woman or child was ever molested, and even more remarkably, fewer slaves tried to run away than in previous years.

But in the immediate postwar, thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where they were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no solider or officer was ever brought to trial for this act. Men who were known Southern veterans, which included 90 percent of the population, were frequently publicly humiliated.

In Texas, this outside rule was not to last a few months, but for nine long years.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books. pp. 316-319; 357-358; 395)

 

Conquest, Not Union

On April 12, 1864, Fort Pillow, located north of Memphis on the Mississippi River, was surrounded by some 1,500 troops under Gen’s. Nathan Bedford Forrest and James Chalmers. After sending an ultimatum to surrender or suffer “no quarter” and the enemy rejecting capitulation, Forrest’s men attacked and caused most of the enemy’s 600 soldiers to flee into the river. As northern colored troops were half of the fort’s garrison, they suffered great loss along with their white counterparts, and the usual cries of “massacre” were heard from northern reporters anxious to sell newspapers to a gullible public. The Radical Republicans were also quick to establish a congressional committee to investigate Fort Pillow for political purposes.

This pattern was repeated late in the war as the northern public was fed atrocity stories of Georgia’s Andersonville prison stockade. Missing from the stories were the pleas of President Davis and other Southern leaders for prisoner exchanges, including safe passage for medical supplies and food to sustain the inmates. These were all refused by Grant, with Lincoln’s approval.

Conquest, Not Union

“What exactly did the [Committee on the Conduct of the War] uncover and how objective was its investigation? Critics have assumed that the committee deliberately exaggerated Southern atrocities to smear Forrest’s reputation, inflame public sentiments, and serve its own narrow partisan agenda.

The committee’s most thorough historian, T. Harry Williams, for instance, argues that Benjamin Wade used this investigation, as well as previous atrocity reports, as a means to create a consensus for an even more radical reconstruction. By deliberately exaggerating Rebel brutalities, he would cause the public to support a reconstruction policy that would treat the South as a conquered territory.

There is little doubt that the issue of reconstruction was on the minds of committee members and other Republicans during the Fort Pillow investigation. George Julian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, was already busy sponsoring legislation to confiscate the large holdings of Rebel planters and redistribute them to veterans of the Union armies, both white and black.

In remarks to the House of Representatives shortly after Fort Pillow, Julian castigated the Confederates as “devils” and argued that the [alleged] massacre provided additional reasons to support the program of confiscating [Southern property].

Even before the war, there were many in the North who viewed the South as backward and in need of radical reordering along the outline of Northern free labor institutions. The war accelerated such beliefs. “The war is quickly drawing to an end,” the Continental Monthly predicted in the summer of 1862, “but a greater and nobler task lies before the soldiers and free men of America – the extending of civilization into the South.”

In formulating its Fort Pillow findings, the committee reflected Northern opinion as much as it sought to shape it.”

(“These Devils Are Not Fit to Live on God’s Earth”: War Crimes and the Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1864-1865”. Bruce Tap. Civil War History – A Journal of the Middle Period, John Hubbell, ed. Kent State University Press, June 1996, Vol. XLII, No. 2, pp. 121-122)

The Cornerstone of the Republican Party

By mid-1862, the advance of the northern invasion had accumulated thousands of “contrabands” left homeless from overrun and destroyed plantations. Lincoln and his cabinet were already in talks with the Danes, Dutch and Swedes to take the contrabands to their Caribbean colonies. By the end of that year and with northern enlistments at a virtual standstill without exorbitant financial incentives, Lincoln was advised to use contrabands against the South as soldiers. His Quartermaster-General Meigs, under the interesting impression that all Southern soldiers owned plantations, believed ‘colored labor allows the rebel to leave his plantation to fight, build fortifications, cook and aid him on picket by rare skill with the rifle.”  Secretary of War Stanton wrote in a rather Marxist vein that “By striking down this system of compulsory labor, which enables the leaders of the rebellion to control the resources of the people, the rebellion would die of itself.”

The Cornerstone of the Republican Party

When northern Negroes asked Free-Soilers what they thought should be done for them or what course they should follow, the recommendation was always the same: separatism, and usually colonization in some other country as well, though the Free-Soil politicians were careful to point out that they meant voluntary separatism or colonization and not forced measures.

When the newly formed Republican party created a truly northern political organization, there was pressure from those who wanted it to take an anti-slavery stance stronger than mere free-soil, and from those who feared it would do just that.

Many Republicans clung to the idea of colonization and for some, at least, it was basic to their policy. Colonization “is the key of the whole question,” commented one. “The exclusion of slavery from the territories is only an incidental part of a general policy of which colonization is the corner stone.”

The Republicans might hope to appeal to non-slaveholders in the South as well as to northern voters if they presented the question properly as a “question of the white man against the Ethiopian.” Though the anticipated support from Southern unionists did not materialize, the narrow issue of slavery exclusion remained the sole antislavery plank in the Republican political program. The combination of anti-slave power and anti-Negro sentiment was a powerful attraction in both the Free Soil and Republican programs.”

(Slavery and the Slave Power – A Crucial Distinction. Larry Gara. Civil War History – A Journal of the Middle Period, March 1969, Volume 15, No. 1. pp. 16-17)

Saving “Uncle George” MacDonald

Saving “Uncle George” MacDonald

“The Osceola (Missouri) Democrat raised money to send “Uncle” George McDonald of St. Clair County, a colored Confederate veteran, to the Confederate Reunion at Columbia last month. In 1861 “Uncle” George went off with the men of St. Clair County and fought in several engagements.

At Wilson’s Creek a Minie ball plowed through his hip and buckshot struck him in the face. George lay groaning upon the ground when he was found by Owen Snuffer, a lieutenant of his company. Snuffer stooped down, examined the black man’s wounds and stanched the flow blood from them. “For God’s sake,” cried the suffering negro, “give me a drink of water.”

Snuffer’s canteen was empty but midway between the firing lines was a well. To reach it the lieutenant was to become the target of sharpshooters, and it meant almost certain death. But with bullets falling all around him like hailstones he pushed forward until the well was reached. And then he discovered that the bucket had been taken away and the windlass removed. The water was far down and the depth unknown.

The well was old-fashioned – stone-walled. Owen pulled off his long cavalry boots and taking one in his teeth he let himself down slowly, hand over hand until the water was reached and the boot filled. He then climbed up, straddling the well and clutching with hands and feet the rocky walls. Reaching the surface again he picked up the other boot and safely made his way back to his lines and brought water to “Uncle George.”

Returning from the war, “Uncle George” settled near Monegaw Springs and has reared an intelligent, honest and industrious family. One of his children educated himself, graduated the Smith University in Sedalia, and is now the pastor of a church in Kansas. Another child is a waiter at the Commercial Hotel in Osceola, an establishment known for high integrity.”

(Confederate Veteran, Volume XI, November 1903, pg. 494)

A Second Boston Massacre

New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, firmly believed that conscription was unconstitutional as the federal government was to depend upon the States to furnish needed troops. He charged Lincoln’s draft with bringing disgrace upon the American name and shamed his administration. Seymour further declared that neither the President nor the Congress had a right ‘to force men to take part in the ungodly conflict which is distracting the land.’ Seymour also charged – and proved – that Lincoln levied higher draft quotas upon New York’s Democratic voting districts as part of a ‘manifest design to reduce the Democratic majority of voters.’ In short, the draft was designed, it appeared to Seymour, ‘to take Democrats into the army and exempt Republicans.’

New York City’s bloody draft riot which began July 11, 1863, ended the lives of some 120 residents as blue-coated soldiers hurried from Gettysburg opened fire on them with muskets and cannon. At least five black men were hung as demonstrators denounced Lincoln’s emancipation war. Strong anti-draft riots occurred across the State to include Buffalo, and throughout the north.

In Boston, though the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiment was available, Gov. John Andrew feared that the sight of colored soldiers might excite his white citizenry. This colored regiment contained nearly 400 men enticed mostly from Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania to count toward Massachusetts troop quota and leave white residents at home. Only 22 soldiers were Massachusetts residents; 3 were Canadians. The black soldiers were hurried away and replaced with white men.

The governor’s fears were realized on July 14, 1863, when nearly a thousand angry residents – many of them women and children – gathered in front of the city’s Cooper Street Armory. After they hurled paving bricks at the wooden doors, a nervous officer inside ordered a field cannon loaded with grapeshot wheeled to the door and opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 14 and maiming many more.

This senseless slaughter of civilians recalled the massacre just over 93 years earlier, when British soldiers fired into a crowd of three hundred jeering and rock-throwing Boston residents. Eight were killed and five wounded. The post-riot investigation featured future US president John Adams representing the British soldiers.

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf. 1948, pg. 305)

 

 

Dissent in the Northern Ranks

Northern military officers soon found that any Democrat political leanings were an obstacle to promotion from Republican politicians. One officer wrote his brother that “several sources advised that if I change my political views and make a few Republican stump speeches to my troops it would be greatly to my advantage.” Democrat officers claimed that promotions and dismissals were more often based upon partisan politics and Lincoln’s desire to win elections. Historian Michael Holt noted that Lincoln did appoint prominent Democrats to high rank, but only for the purpose of luring Democrat votes to union parties in northern States.

Dissent in the Northern Ranks

“While Republican soldiers had no difficulty [obtaining or] writing to their hometown newspapers, Democratic soldiers often found themselves in hot water. In August 1864, Pvt. Newton B. Spencer of the 179th New York Infantry wrote a letter to his local newspaper of which he had previously been editor, the Penn Yan Democrat, claiming that the “Abolition mania for employing “n****r” soldiers has culminated in the worst disaster of the whole campaign and discouraged and nearly demoralized the whole army.”

Spencer believed that it “was to glorify the sooty abolition idol, that upon a Division of raw and worthless black poltroons, was devolved the most important part of the whole conflict – in the hope that they would crown our temporary success with decisive victory and bear off the hard-won laurels of the white fighting men.”

Spencer was charged with conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline, contempt and disrespect for his commanding officer, violation of the Fifty-seventh Article of War (giving intelligence to the enemy), and “giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” which was essentially a charge of treason. Spencer admitted writing the letter but pleaded not guilty to each of the charges.

In like manner, Sgt. William B. Gillespie of the Twenty-eighth New York Infantry was convicted by courts-martial for publishing a newspaper article in January 1863 in which he stated that Lincoln’s emancipation edict “will be the cause of a large number of our best officers resigning and of a large number of desertions,” to which he added that the freed people should all be “shipped to Washington . . . for a heart welcome and cordial embrace.” Gillespie was sentenced to be reduced to the ranks and then drummed out of the service.

Capt. Thomas Barrett of the Nineteenth Illinois Volunteers was summarily and dishonorably dismissed for publishing a letter in the Chicago Times on May 25, 1863, critical of Lincoln’s policy of enlisting black soldiers.”

(Emancipation, the Union Army and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln. Jonathan W. White. LSU Press, 2014, pp. 55-57)