The Sergeant, page 16
Under Vogdes’s command, white troops were able to intersperse their fatigue chores with other assignments, such as guard duty, but Black troops were exclusively assigned to fatigue, sometimes getting only an hour or two to rest between shifts. “Every moment in camp was needed to rest the exhausted men and officers,” wrote Captain Emilio of the Fifty-Fourth. “The faces and forms of all showed plainly at what cost this labor was done. Clothes were in rags, shoes worn out, and haversacks full of holes.”
The constant labor, tropical heat, and foul water quickly took its toll. In less than five months on Folly, more than fifty soldiers in the Fifty-Fifth died from disease. During the worst of that period, an average of 14 percent of Black soldiers reported sick each day. That was better than the white average of 20 percent, but it did not stop Vogdes from suggesting that the men of the Fifty-Fifth were faking it. “I hope you do not allow men to impose upon you when they’re not really ill,” he told doctors while visiting the regiment’s hospital. Doctor Burt Green Wilder bristled at the suggestion: “It makes me somewhat indignant because he has been taking our men, 400 or 500 at a time, and many of them have been out four or five nights in succession at hard work. I am determined that none shall go who are unfit.” A white officer later told Wilder, “I do not know of any reason for the ill treatment that Vogdes served out to your regiment except the general disgust of all the old West Pointers against the use of colored troops.”
Meanwhile, work was concluding on the Marsh Battery and its eight-ton cannon, which the soldiers had bestowed with the nickname Swamp Angel. Under cover of darkness, they loaded the Swamp Angel onto a specially designed skiff and hauled it across the mud to the platform, where they spent the next three days mounting it onto a four-ton carriage and protecting it with more sandbags. By then, they had drawn the attention of Rebel gunners, who shot at them from across the swamp. “The enemy fired shell and grape into us like hotcakes, but we kept at our work like men of God,” wrote Sgt. Isaiah Welch.
On August 21, after the Swamp Angel was mounted, Gen. Quincy Adams Gillmore, commander of all Union forces in the region, warned his Confederate counterpart, Gen. Pierre Beauregard, that unless he evacuated Fort Wagner and Fort Sumter by midnight, Charleston would be bombarded. Beauregard didn’t take the warning seriously, thinking the city was safely out of range of Union guns, so at 1:30 A.M. on August 22, the Swamp Angel opened fire, first hitting a churchyard near Charleston’s city market, then the backyard of a doctor’s home, then an office building near the Charleston Hotel. The streets were soon crowded with people scrambling to get away. “One perspiring individual of portly dimensions was trotting to and fro with one boot on and the other in his hand, and this was nearly all the dress he could boast of…,” wrote British war correspondent Frank Vizetelly, who was posted in Charleston. “Another, in a semi-state of nudity with a portion of his garments on his arm, barked the shins of everyone in his way in his efforts to drag an enormous trunk.” Over the next three hours, fifteen more shots hit the city, damaging buildings and leaving craters in the streets but hitting no residents, since most of the shells fell in an industrial neighborhood that was largely vacant in the middle of the night.
The bombardment continued the next night, but again with no serious injuries, despite some close calls. (One shell ripped through a two-story home and tore a bed from beneath a sleeping child before crashing into the basement.) The unrelenting firing put a severe strain on the Swamp Angel, since each shot used twenty pounds of gunpowder, four more than standard. Six shells blew up inside the cannon, and on the thirty-sixth round, its rear end exploded, damaging it beyond repair. After soldiers spent more than 71,000 work hours preparing for the Swamp Angel, it did not survive nine hours of firing. The battery would later house two smaller cannons, but the big gun had accomplished its mission, boosting morale throughout the North with the news that a blow had been dealt to the city where the first shots of the war had been fired. Herman Melville even wrote a poem to mark the occasion:
There is a coal-black Angel
With a thick Afric lip
And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)
In a swamp where the green frogs dip
But his face is against a City
Which is over a bay by the sea,
And he breathes with a breath that is blastment
And dooms by a far degree.
Unfortunately, rank-and-file soldiers like Sergeant Said got no time to celebrate their accomplishment. Instead, they were hard at work on their next target: Fort Wagner. After two unsuccessful charges across the mile-long plain of Coffin Land, the army settled on a different tactic: digging trenches that would take the next attackers nearly all the way to Wagner’s walls, limiting their exposure to Rebel cannons and rifles.
As with the Swamp Angel, the trenches required weeks of around-the-clock labor. During the day, soldiers filled sandbags and made gabions (wickerwork cylinders filled with rocks) and fascines (bundles of tightly bound tree branches or brushwood). At night, teams of diggers crept onto the sand, carving trenches seven feet deep and ten feet wide and bolstering their walls with the sandbags, gabions, and fascines. Despite the darkness, they drew heavy fire from the cannons of Fort Wagner and other Rebel positions on Charleston Bay. Unable to identify specific targets in the dark, the gunners fired canisters of shrapnel that exploded above the diggers, in hopes they would be cut to shreds with a rain of falling metal. When the canisters burst, the men scrambled for cover “like so many land-crabs in distress,” wrote Lt. Robertson James.
As they dug through the sands of Coffin Land, the soldiers sometimes uncovered the coffins that gave the area its name, besides uncovering corpses of soldiers that had fallen in recent battles and been buried by the shifting sands. Each night brought casualties from the Rebel fire, but miraculously none of the men in the Fifty-Fifth were killed or seriously wounded, even as shells exploded mere feet away. “It is very wonderful that none of us were hurt and only shows that it takes an amazing lot of iron to kill a man, for full twenty or thirty shells were thrown at us without doing any damage,” Lieutenant Bowditch wrote after one outing with his men. Nevertheless, laboring in the trenches was just as harrowing as going into battle, and maybe more so, since they couldn’t fire back at their attackers. “When men are exposed to a galling fire of artillery and sharpshooters, with no means of returning it and without a complaint, and when that duty is forced upon them both day and night, for weeks without intermission, they may justly lay claim to some credit,” one soldier wrote.
As the diggers pushed forward, other soldiers were dragging carts laden with cannons across the sand to position them close enough to the fort to rip into its earthen walls. Normally, horses and mules would have been used to pull the carts, but the army feared that would be so noisy it would attract Rebel fire, so instead hundreds of Black soldiers were assigned to the job. It was an arduous task. The carts often stuck in the sand and sometimes collapsed under the cannons’ weight, leaving the soldiers to manually put them aright. The heaviest gun, a thirteen-ton behemoth as big as the Swamp Angel, broke three carts. Nevertheless, by early September, the guns were all in place, delivering a blistering fire against the fort. Behind the guns stood towers topped with calcium lights—mirrored lamps that shone brighter than the sun—which let the cannoneers keep a firm focus on their targets even during the darkest night. The lights were so bright they blinded Fort Wagner’s gunners and sharpshooters from trying to return fire and kept Rebel work crews from repairing the damage done to the fort, since the lights made them easy prey for marksmen, but the lights were angled high enough to keep the trench diggers shrouded in darkness, hidden from the enemy.
In the wee morning hours of September 7, 1863, streams of Union soldiers crowded into the trenches to attack Fort Wagner. This time, the assault was to be handled by all-white troops, with the Fifty-Fifth and other Black regiments standing by as reserves. But just before the attack was to begin, scouts discovered the Rebels had already abandoned the fort, escaping through the rear and leaving Morris Island in rowboats. Less than two months after Colonel Shaw’s suicide charge, Fort Wagner had fallen, and the men in the trenches let out a long hearty cheer. In the words of one soldier of the Fifty-Fifth, their “patient and faithful labor” had finally paid off, after weeks of being “subjected to hard labor under a heavy crossfire of solid shot and shell.”
After Wagner fell, the military engineers in charge of the trenches and the Swamp Battery were asked to evaluate which soldiers worked better: Black or white. One engineer estimated the Black soldiers he worked with were 25 percent more productive than the white soldiers. “They do not have so many complaints and excuses, but stick to their work patiently, doggedly, obediently, and accomplish a great deal,” wrote another. Another wrote that Black troops “are easily handled, true and obedient; there is less viciousness among them; they are more patient; they have greater constancy.” Unanimously, they concluded that “the black will do the greater amount of work than the white soldier, because he labors more consistently.”
But the engineers’ findings did nothing to change the army’s policy on paying Black soldiers, nor did it sway General Vogdes from mistreating them. Now that Wagner had fallen, the daily workload eased sharply for white troops, but not so much for Black soldiers, who were expected to perform not only their own fatigue duties but also chores that white men had previously handled. Vogdes let white officers use Black soldiers as their personal servants and cooks, and when new white regiments arrived, he assigned Black troops to clear their campgrounds of underbrush and rocks, dig wells and latrines, and even pitch their tents, as the newcomers stood idly by and watched. Acting under the bizarre belief that it was unhealthy for Black people (but not white people) to be idle in the predawn air of early autumn, Vogdes also required that all-Black troops must be under arms from 4:00 A.M. until sunrise, including frequent drills on the beach. “They drill us till we cannot rest,” one soldier wrote. “Sometimes several [soldiers] got sick and had to leave the ranks, and some fainted and fell.” Major Fox wrote that Vogdes “is and always has been entirely opposed to colored troops, and we have not a shadow of a chance of being treated fairly.”
Finally, the commanders of the Black regiments went above Vogdes, convincing his superior, Gen. Quincy Adams Gillmore, to ban requiring Black soldiers to perform menial services on behalf of white men. Soon, most nighttime fatigue duty came to an end and most soldiers were exempted from predawn drilling, which now did not start until 5:30 A.M. Rations also improved, with new supplies of soft bread, vegetables, sweet potatoes, and watermelons.
Unfortunately, during the summer and fall of 1863, it’s impossible to know much about the specific actions of Nicholas Said and his platoon, since the Fifty-Fifth’s records were sketchy during that period. But it’s safe to assume that he, like the other soldiers in the regiment, was involved in most if not all of the major tasks surrounding the Marsh Battery, the trenches, and the cannon emplacements in Coffin Land. The first known mention of his presence on Folly came from Maj. Charles Fox, who wrote his wife that they had a private meeting on September 26, 1863. It was rare for Fox—soon to be promoted to lieutenant colonel, the regiment’s second-in-command—to have one-on-one meetings with sergeants, but Fox had developed an affinity for Said ever since his father’s newspaper had run its profile of “Nicholas Saib,” and he had come to value the sergeant’s “faithful and brave” service. Fox was particularly intrigued by Said’s life in Africa and travels through Europe, encouraging him to put his stories into writing, so that by the end of the war, Said gave Fox a sheaf of handwritten pages that would serve as the first version of his memoirs. Although there’s no record of what they discussed in their meeting that September in 1863, the likeliest topic was what the men of Company I thought of Capt. John Gordon, who had finally joined the regiment just four days before, after three months of absence, and who had grand plans for the most-educated men in the unit, including Sergeant Said.
15 “Led by Love of Country”
Capt. John Gordon rejoined Company I on September 22, 1863, grateful that Lieutenant Jones and sergeants like Nicholas Said had been such capable leaders during his absence. “The men are under good discipline and I have very little trouble indeed with them,” he wrote. At twenty, Gordon was three years older than Jones, but he barely looked it, with a soft, boyish face that only underscored that he was younger than half the men under his command. With his hat angled rakishly across his forehead and his sword dangling loosely by his side, he probably hoped to looked like a swashbuckling cavalier, but he more closely resembled a foppish young dandy out for a night on the town.
Gordon soon had Company I working on a variety of fatigue-duty projects: building a new armory and wharf for Folly Island, planting bushes in front of their tents to keep sand from blowing in, and installing stoves to provide warmth as the weather got colder. For a classical touch, he erected an arch above the tents with the motto: “Ducit Amor Patriae,” or “Led by Love of Country.” (His love of Latin was acquired at New Hampshire’s exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was classmates with Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s oldest son.)
A month after his arrival, Gordon picked Sergeant Said for his riskiest assignment yet, sending him across the Folly River to lead a squad on picket duty on neighboring Long Island, which the Union had captured the month before. At the time, Long Island was the most dangerous position in the islands, sandwiched between the Union strongholds on Folly and Morris and the Confederate forces on James Island, lying just beyond. A misshapen stretch of muddy flatland, it provided little cover for the troops stationed there, who were often within range of Rebel sharpshooters. “No fires or lights in tents were allowed after dark, as we were at all times in sight of the enemy on James Island, only being hidden by a medium growth of trees and brush,” wrote a soldier whose posting on Long Island ended a week before Said’s began. “Being surrounded by swamps and stagnant water on all sides, mosquitoes and gnats were well-nigh unbearable.”
By the time Said returned to Folly in early November, he—like the other men of the Fifty-Fifth—had been serving the army for nearly four months without pay. Under military regulations they were supposed to be paid every two months, but during the Civil War, delays in pay were common on both sides, and for the Fifty-Fifth there was the added question of how to deal with the army’s plan to pay them each just $7 a month, compared to $13 for a white private or corporal, $17 for a sergeant, and $21 for a sergeant major.
The dispute was not a matter of simply wanting more money. “We did not enlist for the pay,” one soldier wrote. “Any man would be foolish to risk his life for between $18 and $21 per month.” Instead, it was a matter of principle. If they took the $7, they would be tacitly accepting the idea that they weren’t worth as much as white soldiers.
The Fifty-Fifth’s sister regiment, the Fifty-Fourth, had already voted to reject the pay, earning a stiff rebuke from the head of their brigade, Col. James Montgomery, who warned that they could be court-martialed and executed. Montgomery, a thick-bearded zealot with a mane of swept-back hair, hated slavery with a religious passion but looked down on his soldiers as ignorant “niggers”—a word that he used frequently when addressing them. “You want to be placed on the same footing as white soldiers… [but] you are a race of slaves. A few years ago, your fathers worshipped snakes and crocodiles in Africa,” he said in an hour-long harangue. Fortunately, their commander, Edward Hallowell, brother of the commander of the Fifty-Fifth, supported their protest, as did most of his officers, but Montgomery was correct on one point. Under military law, the protest was a mutiny, which could be punishable by death.
On November 26, thoughts of protest and mutiny were temporarily interrupted by Thanksgiving—the first time it was celebrated as a national annual holiday, created by President Lincoln to give thanks that the country was surviving the war. For the soldiers on Folly and Morris, it meant a day-long break from fatigue work, which they spent playing games, competing in sack and wheelbarrow races, listening to fiddle music, dancing the jig, and enjoying a sweet dessert with their army rations. But even as they celebrated, they knew that the federal paymaster had just arrived in camp, preparing to distribute their allotment. In the Fifty-Fourth, which had already rejected one round of pay, one game they played that Thanksgiving was to erect a twenty-foot-tall greased pole in the middle of the camp, topped with a pair of pants with $13 in its pocket, which went to the first soldier able to shimmy all the way up, poking fun at how hard it was to get equal pay. In the Fifty-Fifth, which had not yet faced the $7 offer, Sergeant Said and his fellow soldiers knew they would soon have to declare whether they would accept the pay or risk being seen as mutineers.
The next day, Paymaster Roland Usher—a forty-year-old clothing merchant with burgeoning sideburns and a well-waxed mustache—set up a table at the Fifty-Fifth with chairs for himself, his clerk, and Col. Alfred Hartwell, who had just been promoted to lead the regiment after Norwood Hallowell retired for poor health. (Said’s friend Major Fox was promoted to lieutenant colonel at the same time.) Atop the table was a list of all the men in each company, along with a thick iron chest with enough cash to give each soldier four months’ worth of $7 pay. Under normal circumstances, the men would assemble, company by company, in front of the paymaster to receive their money, but on this day the men refused.
“To accept our pay in this way would degrade us and mark us as inferior soldiers, and would be a complete annihilation of our manhood,” one soldier later wrote.
“Our children would blush with shame to think their fathers would acknowledge their inferiority by taking inferior pay to that of other soldiers, and the whole civilized world would look on us as being a parcel of fools, not fit to enjoy our freedom,” wrote another.
