The Sergeant, page 14
Nicholas Said, who always took great pride in his clothing, was undoubtedly annoyed about the bonfire, but it was a small price to pay for his entry into the war. In his new uniform, he headed to the barracks for Company I, a barnlike building with enough bunk beds for a hundred men. The soldiers came from more than a dozen states, with sixty-five farmers; five barbers; four waiters; three shoemakers, waggoneers, and riverboat workers; two sailors, butchers, carpenters, furnace tenders, servants, and laborers; and a blacksmith, cook, broom maker, miller, and plasterer. Although most were freeborn, around ten were escaped slaves, including Wallace Baker and George Roberts from Kentucky, one of four slave states that remained in the Union. (Kentucky plantation owners threatened to shoot the Fifty-Fifth’s recruiting agents for slave-stealing, but that did not stop recruiters from helping dozens of slaves escape and enlist.)
Officially, Company I was under the command of Capt. John Gordon, but he was violently ill in his parents’ home in New Hampshire, fighting a case of chronic diarrhea he had caught on his last tour of duty, so it was up to other officers to decide which recruits to appoint as sergeants and corporals. For first sergeant they chose Boston bootmaker Peter R. Laws, one of three soldiers in Company I who actually came from Massachusetts. At thirty-six, he was an eloquent writer with a keen sense of humor, who was friends with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Beneath Laws were four other sergeants, including Indiana barber Zachariah Breckinridge. Each sergeant was assigned a corporal, and for Breckinridge that was apparently Nicholas Said. “Attention was first directed to his case by the tattooing on his face, and by the entry in the company descriptive book, which gave Africa as his birthplace,” wrote one officer, probably Maj. Charles Fox, the regiment’s third in command, who described Said as “of medium height, somewhat slenderly built, with pleasing features, not of the extreme negro type, complexion perfectly black, and quiet and unassuming address.”
Major Fox, like every other commissioned officer in the regiment (meaning anyone above the rank of sergeant major), was white. Initially, Massachusetts governor John Andrew wanted to commission Black officers to lead the Black regiments, but the War Department blocked him, saying the upper ranks should be for whites only, leaving him to seek white candidates with “firm anti-slavery principles” and “faith in the capacity of colored men for military service.” He had no problem filling the top slots with such men. Colonel Norwood Hallowell, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Hartwell, and Major Fox were solid abolitionists with strong military experience. Hallowell, for instance, had been active in the Underground Railroad before the war, hiding escaped slaves in his parents’ ornate home and transporting them in their gilded carriage, and he joined the army as soon as the war broke out, fighting until his left arm was shattered by a bullet at Antietam. He had barely recuperated when he volunteered to lead the Fifty-Fifth, with his left arm hanging limply by his side.
But the War Department discouraged most skilled soldiers from becoming officers in Black regiments, fearing their talents would be wasted overseeing such unworthy troops. As a result, during the first several weeks of the Fifty-Fifth’s formation, it had only half the captains and lieutenants it needed, and because of Captain Gordon’s absence, Company I initially did not have a single white officer. To plug those holes, the regiment scoured the army’s lower ranks, reluctantly promoting corporals and privates with little or no leadership experience, and even commissioning untrained civilians. Arguably the least experienced was Lt. Robertson James, a sixteen-year-old high-school student who needed his parents’ written permission to enlist, since he was two years younger than the official minimum age. (His eighteen-year-old brother Wilkinson was a lieutenant in the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, but their older brothers stayed home: Henry James, who would become one of the century’s leading novelists, and William James, the future father of American psychology.)
Some officers joined the colored regiments out of abolitionist zeal. Henry James wrote his brother Wilkinson was “vastly attached to the negro soldier cause; believes (I think) that the world has existed for it; and is sure that enormous results to civilisation are coming out of it.” Others had more mercenary motives, drawn by the chance of getting $105 per month for a lieutenant or $115 for a captain, far higher than the $13 salary of a private or corporal. “I would drill a company of alligators for a hundred and twenty a month,” one white private wrote. “A fellow can’t save anything out of thirteen.”
It took two weeks for Company I to get its first white officer, and when he arrived, they probably thought it was a joke, or an insult, or both. Dennis Jones turned seventeen just four months before being commissioned as first lieutenant, and he looked even younger: wispy, freckled, no trace of facial hair, a high-school dropout whose job before the war was helping his father repair and sell church organs. Only one other soldier in the company was that young: Rhode Island waiter Perry Dorsey. Nicholas Said was about a decade older, and eight privates were more than twice Jones’s age. The fact that this teenager held a rank that they were barred from because of their complexion must have seemed like a slap in the face.
But Jones was more substantial than he looked. Unlike many New Englanders, he had seen slavery firsthand. His family had spent two years in Virginia in the 1850s, which helped sharpen his abolitionist ideals. When the war broke out, he immediately wanted to enlist, but he was only fifteen, so his parents made him wait a year before giving their permission. He joined the all-white Forty-Fourth Massachusetts in 1862 and was promoted to corporal after a harrowing woodland battle where he and his comrades came under fire from Rebel sharpshooters hidden in the treetops. When the Forty-Fourth’s tour of duty ended, its commanding officer, an ardent abolitionist, personally recommended Jones for a promotion to the Fifty-Fifth.
With Captain Gordon still sick in New Hampshire, the teenaged lieutenant took control of Company I and led it through a grueling schedule of drills, marches, and “fatigue duties,” which included such backbreaking chores as cleaning latrines, shoveling out stables, digging trenches, and chopping firewood. Fortunately, Jones was the type of officer who enjoyed working side by side with his men, and he soon became known for his “unfailing kindnesses and cheerfulness,” “pleasant and genial” manners, and “unassuming attention to all duties.” At least one soldier had problems with him, however: Sergeant Zachariah Breckinridge.
Breckinridge was a garrulous man whose loud mouth sometimes got him into trouble. For instance, when the war was over and the regiment assembled on Boston Common to be mustered out of service, Breckinridge showed up drunk and picked a fight with a sergeant that turned so vicious the sergeant clubbed his skull with the butt of his rifle.
Just four days after Lieutenant Jones took charge, Breckinridge disobeyed his direct orders, perhaps indignant about being overlorded by such a young pup. As a newly appointed officer, Jones couldn’t afford to look weak when dealing with insubordination, so he demoted Breckinridge to private and promoted Nicholas Said to replace him, a move that won quick approval from the upper ranks. “[Said’s] linguistic ability was very marked,” Colonel Hallowell later wrote, noting that he came from “the ruling class of his tribe.” Just two weeks after entering the army, Said had now ascended nearly as high as a Black soldier could get, heading a nineteen-man platoon. There is no list of which men were assigned to him, but based on circumstantial evidence, it was an eclectic group that likely included Henry Way, a thirty-year-old Pennsylvania farmer who would soon become his corporal; Ohio barber Morris Darnell, twenty-nine, with a wife and three young sons at home; and former slave Wallace Baker, a nineteen-year-old who had fled his Kentucky plantation and traveled eight hundred miles to join the army, regretfully leaving his mother behind, but promising to do his best to help her.
Of all the men under Said’s command, Baker may have been the most problematic. According to his comrades, he was so slow-witted that it was often hard for him to comprehend instructions, let alone follow them. “Among the company they call him a kind of foolish fellow, because it’s so hard for him to understand things,” said Private Frank Gardner, a teenaged servant from Ohio. As a former slave, Baker also had an unrealistic idea of what it meant to be free, and military discipline didn’t jibe with his notion of liberty. As a result, he would sometimes “jaw back” when given an order “because he thought he ought not to be ruled by another man,” said Private Henry Call, a farmhand from Indiana.
Nevertheless, perhaps because of his own unique history as a former slave and the son of a slaveholder, Said was able to take charge of Baker and the other members of the squad and mold them into a single unit as he led them through fatigue duties, rifle drills, and daily marches, culminating in a twenty-mile cross-country trek under full gear through the forested hills that surrounded the camp. Coincidentally, his promotion occurred just as Boston newspapers began belatedly publishing the Buffalo Express article likening him to an Ethiopian baboon. It did no good for the Fifty-Fifth to have its newly minted sergeant described that way, but there was an easy fix. Major Fox was son of the literary editor of one of the state’s leading newspapers, the Boston Evening Transcript. On June 23, the day after Said’s promotion, the Transcript ran a glowing profile of his life, although it misspelled his name:
Nicholas Saib is the name of a sergeant in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers, whose curious and even romantic history is one of much interest. He is an intelligent looking negro, perfectly black, modest and gentlemanly in his bearing, and alike remarkable for his experiences and culture… Were it not for his color and position, Saib would pass anywhere for a person of no small acquisitions… He is one, but not the only one, of the ‘persons of African descent’ [in the Fifty-Fifth] whose acquisitions and behavior go far to dispel the ignorant and vulgar prejudices against the colored race.
The story, which briefly recounted Said’s adventures in Africa and Europe, likely turned him into a celebrity in the Fifty-Fifth and was so novel that it was reprinted in more than fifty newspapers as far away as England, Scotland, Ireland, and Australia—a taste of the fame that would follow him after the war was over.
As the Fifty-Fifth entered its final phase of training, Colonel Hallowell was so proud of the men that he came up with a grand plan to show them off to the public. On their way to the front lines, they would parade through downtown Boston and then sail to New York for an exultant march down Broadway. But that plan was scrapped after both cities erupted into fierce riots against the war.
In mid-July 1863, just as the Fifty-Fifth was completing its training, President Lincoln launched the nation’s first military draft, requiring every man between twenty and forty-five to enter their names into a lottery to be called into service. The idea was hugely unpopular, especially among the Irish immigrants in New York’s crowded tenements. They were already seething over the war and, in the words of one Copperhead rabble-rouser, they did not want to risk their lives “in an abolition crusade for the purpose of setting at liberty a pack of dirty niggers.” On July 13, a largely Irish mob burst into the army recruitment office and set it on fire before shifting their focus to the city’s Black residents. “Down with the abolitionists! Down with the niggers! Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” they chanted. Although it is usually referred to as a “draft riot,” it was really a racial pogrom. In their rampage, they killed between a hundred and four hundred Black people, setting fire to Black homes, businesses, and even an orphanage, where workers hastily herded more than two hundred Black children through a rear exit just moments before the building was torched.
“It seemed to be an understood thing throughout the city that the negroes should be attacked wherever found, whether they offered any provocation or not,” read the New York Times. “As soon as one of these unfortunate people were spied, whether on a cart, a railroad car or in the street, he was immediately set upon by a crowd of men and boys and, unless some man of pluck came to his rescue, or he was fortunate to escape into a building, he was inhumanly beaten and perhaps killed.”
On July 14, Boston joined the rioting, although there the protests focused specifically on the draft rather than race. An angry mob, again made up mostly of Irish immigrants, pummeled an army recruiter, besieged the police station where he sought shelter, and then turned their attention to a military arsenal that had enough weapons to turn the riot into a full-scale insurrection. After hacking down a telegraph pole, they used it as a battering ram to smash through the doors, forgetting that the soldiers inside were armed much better than they were. As they surged through the shattered entryway, the soldiers fired a cannon, killing three rioters, and then charged forward with bayonets, forcing the mob to retreat to Dock Square, where they broke into gun shops and hardware stores to get weapons. The rioting was quelled over the next two days, but tensions remained high, reaching into Camp Meigs and the Fifty-Fifth.
At 6:30 in the morning of July 18, while New York and Boston were still smoldering, an Irish-born lieutenant in the Fifty-Fifth, going by the name of John Kingston, spotted Benjamin Hayes, a nineteen-year-old private from Company I, wandering outside his barrack without proper authorization. When Kingston challenged him, Hayes said he felt sick and was heading to the hospital, but Kingston ordered him to the guardhouse instead. When Hayes continued walking toward the hospital, Kingston blocked him, and as Hayes tried to move around him, Kingston shot him with a bullet that tore through his chin and passed out the back of his head.
Amazingly, the bullet was not immediately fatal. Hayes was taken to the regimental hospital, where doctors did their best to patch him up. Unfortunately, several soldiers in the hospital were being treated for typhoid fever, and while he lay confined to his cot nearby, he became infected with the disease, which was listed as his cause of death when he finally succumbed two months later. Although some officers in the Fifty-Fifth thought Kingston should be court-martialed for the shooting, he was allowed to quietly resign and subsequently joined an all-white regiment in Kentucky, where he served through the end of the war under the name Samuel Moore (Kingston, apparently, was an alias—probably the name of a Kentuckian he was substituting for).
The shooting had a sobering impact on the Fifty-Fifth, particularly in Hayes’s unit, Company I. Hayes was the regiment’s first gunfire casualty, felled not by a Confederate bullet but by one of their officers. They barely had time to react to the shooting before, just three days later, the regiment was ordered to the Carolinas. Gone was Colonel Hallowell’s plan to march through New York, for fear it would touch off another pogrom. Under a rain-drenched sky, the troops boarded a train that took them from Camp Meigs to Providence Station near downtown Boston. There, they were ordered to load their rifles and affix their bayonets, to guard against possible protestors during their march to the waterfront. And they were each issued five rounds of cartridges, in case they needed to reload.
As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. Despite the rain, crowds of supporters lined the streets, cheering and tossing bouquets as they marched past, in a parade led by a contingent of Boston police, an all-white drum corps, and the Fifty-Fifth’s own seventeen-piece band. From the steps of the Massachusetts State House, Gov. John Andrew told the men how proud he was. “Throughout the whole route, we did not hear of the least insult being whispered against these colored soldiers,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported. And then, with the rain still falling, they made their way to the transport ship that would take them south, on the circuitous route that would eventually take them to the front lines of the war.
13 Coffin Land and Folly
After spending a week in North Carolina, preparing for a battle that never took place, it was not until August 7, 1863, that Sgt. Nicholas Said caught his first close-up glimpse of the Civil War, from the starboard railing of the tall-masted transport ship Recruit. Two miles to the west was Morris Island, part of a patchwork of low-lying Sea Islands separating the Atlantic Ocean from the vast bay surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, where the first shots of the Civil War had been fired two years before. The southern half of Morris, known as Coffin Land, since it once served as a burial ground for diseased immigrants who died there in quarantine, consisted of a mile-long sandy plain that was fringed on the south by a cluster of sand dunes and on the north by Fort Wagner, an earthen stronghold whose walls sloped thirty feet above the sand like the beveled slab of a grave marker.
From offshore, a flotilla of Union gunships was firing on the fort, joined by mortars hidden among the Union-held dunes lining the southern edge of the plain. Cannon fire and rockets streaked from both sides of the plain, slamming into the fort and dunes or exploding in the sky above. Although the Recruit was at a safe distance, it was close enough “to feel the dreadful spirit of destruction embodied in the shells,” in the words of Burt Green Wilder, the regiment’s assistant surgeon. Despite two Yankee assaults and a month-long siege, the fort was still in Rebel hands. The newly adopted Confederate national flag flew above its battlements—the White Man’s Flag, as its designer called it, symbolizing that “as a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.”
The Recruit was supposed to unload its passengers on Folly Island, a seven-mile stretch of sand and jungle just south of Morris Island, but instead of immediately heading to port, it dropped anchor more than two miles off shore, waiting for a steam-driven towboat to guide it in. For Sergeant Said and his platoon, this must have been very frustrating, especially after nine days at sea. Folly was so close they could see the Union troops exercising on its shores, but the Recruit dared not proceed on its own. Folly was separated from Morris by a shallow coastal channel named Lighthouse Inlet, and the Recruit required a tugboat to keep it from running aground on the inlet’s shoals, where the fast-moving currents could easily rip it apart. As it stood at anchor, small supply boats arrived from the island, bringing fresh food and water as well as the story of why they had been summoned so precipitously from North Carolina.
