The Sergeant, page 18
Compared to Folly Island, however, Yellow Bluff seemed like Eden to the soldiers. Atop the bluff were stands of peach, orange, plum, and fig trees that were already blossoming. Below, tropical marshes provided lush greenery, bordering a slender beach for bathing in the St. Johns River, with a pier where the men could go angling for bass and catfish. The inland side of the camp was fringed by a thick pine forest, which offered good hunting possibilities. And somewhere beyond the forest lay cattle country, with strays that occasionally came close enough to provide the men with fresh beef.
There were some drawbacks, including daily sightings of rattlesnakes, as well as swarms of stinging gnats around sunrise and sunset. “At night we hear the alligators floundering in the swamp, and every now and then we find a scorpion or two among our things,” wrote Lt. Dennis Jones. But he added that the weather and scenery were so pleasant that “taking everything into consideration, I would rather live in Florida than in Massachusetts.”
Unlike many officers at Yellow Bluff, who bunked in the village’s abandoned buildings, Jones tented outside with his men, weathering the rainstorms that occasionally swept through the area and narrowly escaping a grassfire that destroyed his tent. Jones enjoyed Yellow Bluff so much that when he heard the regiment was organizing scouting parties to reconnoiter the area, he immediately volunteered, hoping to get some use out of his double-barreled shotgun, for hunting if not fighting. “Now I am in hopes that we shall have a little sport,” he wrote. “I think this is as good a place to use [the shotgun] as I shall find. There are a number of ducks in every pond in the vicinity.”
On March 23, Jones joined Capt. Charles Soule of Company K on a scouting trip with Corporal Richard Morrison and Private Isaac Cain from Company I. Jones “was in unusually good spirits all the morning and enjoyed the prospect of a scout exceedingly,” Soule wrote. After canoeing a mile up the St. Johns River, they walked more than two miles inland—far beyond what Lieutenant Colonel Fox had authorized—where they discovered a vacant cabin containing a Confederate canteen and a pair of pistols, with a dugout canoe lying outside. Rather than continuing inland, they decided to take the dugout to a creek about half a mile away, so they could paddle back to their own canoe. The dugout was heavier than it looked, however, and before they made it to the water a shot rang out, followed by several others.
As Jones, Morrison, and Cain struggled to get the dugout to the creek, Soule searched for the source of the shooting, until he spotted a single soldier in the distance. “To what regiment do you belong?” Soule shouted. Suddenly, a dozen soldiers rose out of the tall grasses, raising their rifles. “Come here!” one of them called. As Soule backed away, the soldiers followed quickly after him, spreading into a skirmish line.
“They’re Rebs!” he shouted to Jones. “And they’re coming upon us!”
By now, Jones and his companions had pushed the canoe to the muddy edge of the creek, but not deep enough to float. Rather than waiting for the Rebels to close in, Corporal Morrison and Private Cain jumped into the creek and started swimming, assuming their officers would follow. Indeed, they swam and then ran all the way to Yellow Bluff, where they warned their fellow soldiers of the Rebel attack. Meanwhile, Soule rushed to Jones’s side to help push the boat but slipped in the mud and fell. Just then, he heard a gunshot and saw Jones slip into the water. Soule thought he heard Jones cry “Save me!” but Dr. Burt Wilder later noted that was impossible, because Jones was already dead, instantly killed by a bullet through his heart.
As it turned out, the strangers weren’t Rebels. They were Union soldiers from Yellow Bluff, shooting at wild pigs they hoped to bring back to camp to eat. (Soule later conceded that some of them wore blue coats, but they all “acted like Rebs.”) They never fired at Soule or his companions. The shot that killed Dennis Jones came from Soule’s own pistol, which he had cocked and loaded during his reconnoitering, and which was accidentally triggered when he slipped in the mud. “You can imagine, then, how heartfelt and sincere is my grief for his death, how terrible my reflections upon the manner in which it happened,” Soule wrote to Jones’s father. “I would gladly—believe me sir, I truly mean it—I would gladly give at any moment my own life, could he be restored to you.”
Killed just three weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Jones was Company I’s second gunshot death, following Benjamin Hayes’s shooting in Readville. Captain Soule was torn apart, and his despair ripped through Company I as he sought a scapegoat for his guilt. Within three days of Jones’s death, Corporal Morrison was stripped of his rank and court-martialed for cowardice and “raising a false alarm,” by spreading the word that Rebels were attacking. The men of Company I, already depressed by the loss of their teenaged lieutenant, were now angered over seeing a colleague being scapegoated in the affair. Unwilling to contradict a fellow officer, the court-martial found Morrison guilty and sentenced him to twenty days of hard labor, which it immediately tried to rescind, but was blocked by the upper command. Morrison was restored to his rank in October but died just six weeks later, after being mortally wounded in a battle where he gave lasting proof that he was no coward.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Jones’s death left a vacuum in the leadership of Company I, paving the way for an event that would totally disrupt the regiment—and Nicholas Said’s career in the army. By the time it was over, one more soldier in Company I would be shot to death—and again, not by the Rebels.
17 “The Greatest Discontent Prevails”
By April 1864, Sergeant Said’s men—like the rest of the Fifty-Fifth—were in a foul mood. When they had first begun their pay protest, their white officers had told them not to worry, since this was just some bureaucratic mistake that would be cleared up in a month or two. But they had now gone eight months without pay, and it was taking a huge toll on their loved ones at home, who otherwise would have been receiving a portion of their earnings.
Every mailboat that chugged up the St. Johns River brought letters detailing the hardships at home, as their families struggled to keep from being sent to the poorhouse. Company I had a number of married men with children, including Morris Darnell, with three young sons at home, and Thomas Sorrell, whose wife had become pregnant with their second child just before he joined the army. In an age when it was hard for women to make an independent living outside the home, the soldiers’ wives depended on whatever money their husbands could send home, especially if they were raising young children. At the beginning of the protest, charities donated food and clothing to their families, making up for the absent breadwinners. But as the months dragged on, the donations dwindled, and their families were suffering.
One soldier broke into tears when his wife wrote that she had been laid low by sickness for several months and begged him to send any money he could, even if it was only fifty cents (the equivalent of $10 today). Another soldier learned that his previously loving wife had “been driven by want and the cries of her children for bread” into the arms of another man. As one of that soldier’s comrades remarked, “these are very pleasant reflections for soldiers to have while enduring a thousand other privations.” And it didn’t help when the paymaster showed up in Florida, distributing full pay to the white officers while offering nothing acceptable to the men. “Money is very much needed, but I do not believe there are twenty who will take less than what we enlisted for,” a soldier wrote to the Boston Evening Transcript—quite possibly Sergeant Said, given his special relationship to that newspaper. “It is truly shameful to treat men who expose their lives and forsake their homes in this way.”
The mood worsened in mid-April, when the Fifty-Fifth was ordered to leave its tropical surroundings in Florida and return to Folly Island. Folly was in the midst of a torrential rainstorm when Said and the first four hundred troops arrived, skittering down the slippery gangplank of the transport ship Neptune as they shielded themselves from the rain. More than a hundred men struggled to unload the ship and then pitch their tents in the downpour, while the rest were immediately assigned to picket duty, slogging through the mud and gloom to take up unsheltered guard posts in the unlikely event that the Rebels would pick such a soggy time to attack. After bedding that night, soaked to the bone, they soon faced a schedule of picket and fatigue duty as grueling as it had been before their sojourn in Florida.
“How we all did hate to come back to Folly Island,” one soldier wrote. “The beautiful orange groves [of Florida], with the great luscious fruit, mockingbirds warbling sweetly from every tree in the day time, and even continuing their harmonious confusion of songs far into the night, the delightful healthy climate and pure water rather spoiled us, and we are not in a way to appreciate this barren, sandy isle.”
Meanwhile, the other six companies of the Fifty-Fifth were steaming up from Florida on the transport ship Sentinel. By their third night, cramped below decks in a stormy sea, the soldiers were loudly complaining about army life. After taps sounded, Lt. Jacob Bean unsuccessfully tried to silence them, and then picked out a man he thought was “talking loud and hollering and using some profane language” and ordered him to the main deck for punishment.
Unfortunately, in the shadowy darkness of the lower decks, Bean picked the wrong man. Sampson Goliah, a former Kentucky slave named after two biblical strongmen, wasn’t the profanity-spouting noisemaker, who sat on a nearby bunk. After briefly protesting, Goliah decided to follow Bean’s orders, but as he reached for his coat, Bean impatiently grabbed him by his collar.
“Take your hands off me,” Goliah growled. “I won’t let any man collar me.”
“Keep still,” ordered Capt. William Nutt, who had just arrived on the scene.
“I will not keep still, not for you or any other goddamned white man,” Goliah replied. “You Massachusetts men have been humbugging us long enough.”
Aided by two guards, Nutt and Bean dragged Goliah topside and tied him to a mast. For two hours he remained bound in the dark and the rain, until a dozen or so comrades went to the deck to free him. As his comrades scuffled with the guards, Goliah was cut loose and darted back below, where he hid for half an hour before he was recaptured and clapped into irons.
When the Sentinel reached Folly Island the next day, Goliah and four of his liberators were arrested for mutiny, and their sergeant and corporal were stripped of their ranks. But that was only the beginning of the season of discontent in the Fifty-Fifth, as frustration with the pay dispute gave way to resentment of their white officers. And in Company I, Nicholas Said and his fellow soldiers had the added burden of adjusting to life under a tough new lieutenant: Thomas Ellsworth, who had been picked to replace the late Dennis Jones.
As a corporal in the all-white Second Massachusetts, Ellsworth had seen action in Antietam and Gettysburg, but he lacked Jones’s easy rapport with the men. In his first ten days as lieutenant, he accused five soldiers of insubordination, throwing them into the guardhouse for a day or two for the most minor of infractions. Recently demoted ex-corporal Richard Morrison, for instance, was cited for refusing to clean a rifle that Ellsworth erroneously thought was his. When Morrison protested that it wasn’t his rifle, Ellsworth didn’t believe him and eventually had him court-martialed for disobedience and sentenced to three months of hard labor. But the soldier who would suffer the worst under Ellsworth was former slave Wallace Baker.
As mentioned above, Baker was illiterate and had problems understanding military instructions. “I have never thought him very rational,” said his friend Morris Darnell, adding that he had a “kind of strange” way of talking and was “always awkward” in military drills. Baker’s years in slavery had also made him skeptical of anyone in authority, especially white people, making him likely to balk at any command he thought was unreasonable. Somehow, Sergeant Said, Lieutenant Jones, and Captain Gordon had worked their way around those hurdles over the past ten months. Before Ellsworth arrived, Baker’s only known infraction was that he and two friends were once caught outside their tents after taps. “Baker has a way of carrying on sometimes, but he’s never raised any kind of fuss in the company,” teenaged servant Frank Gardner said.
To a stickler like Ellsworth, however, Baker’s personality quirks were extremely annoying. The day after Ellsworth took charge, he put Baker under arrest for two days for some unspecified rule-breaking. The next week, Baker was assigned to two days of “pioneer duty”: fatigue work on construction projects that was so grueling it was often doled out as a punishment.
Ironically, even though Ellsworth was strict in enforcing rules, he was breaking a major regulation himself. He had virtually taken charge of Company I, now that Captain Gordon was once again bedridden from a tropical disease, but technically he was still a corporal, outranked by the sergeants under his command, since the paperwork involved with his transfer and promotion had not yet been fully processed. In fact, technically he was still assigned to the Second Massachusetts instead of the Fifty-Fifth. By being on duty before the paperwork was approved, he was violating the Fifty-Fifth’s own rules, and the men of Company I knew it. “An idea was prevalent that obedience to one so situated could not be enforced,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Fox. All of which helps explain the events that led Company I to its greatest crisis, an event that arguably shaped Nicholas Said’s actions through the rest of the war.
On May 1, Ellsworth oversaw what should have been a routine inspection of the troops. Captain Gordon, Sergeant Said, and five other soldiers in Company I were sick that day (perhaps if Gordon or Said had been well, the crisis could have been averted), but all the rest lined up in their full uniforms, standing at attention, holding rifles by their sides. Except for Wallace Baker. After spending the previous two days on pioneer duty, carrying a shovel or ax instead of his gun and dressing lightly because the work was so sweaty, he was unprepared for a formal inspection. When he emerged from his tent, he was sloppily dressed, clasping his rifle to his chest while he struggled to pull on his equipment belt, with his cartridge box dangling from a strap around his shoulder instead of being on his right hip where it belonged.
“Baker, bring your gun to your shoulder,” Ellsworth ordered.
“I can’t do that, sir. I haven’t got my equipment on yet.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t had the time to do it.”
“You’ve had all afternoon to get ready, Baker,” Ellsworth said.
“I’m not going to hurry.”
Ellsworth couldn’t believe his ears. “What’s that you say, Baker?”
“I said, ‘I’m not going to hurry.’ ”
“Keep your mouth shut and come to attention, as I’ve ordered you before.”
Baker muttered something under his breath.
“Do you intend to obey me?”
“Yes, sir. I’m just not going to hurry.”
“All right, Baker. I am now ordering you to shoulder your rifle, go back to your tent, pack up your knapsack, and report to me after parade. Is that understood?”
Baker understood precisely what Ellsworth meant. The reason Ellsworth wanted him to fill his knapsack is that he intended to punish him by making him stand at attention for two hours under the hot South Carolina sun while wearing fifteen pounds of equipment and holding his rifle squarely to his side. So when he went to his tent, he left his knapsack where it was and threw his rifle, equipment belt, and cartridge box onto his cot. Stripped down to his shirt and pants, he returned to Company I.
Baker’s fellow soldiers laughed when they saw him, but Ellsworth was furious. “Return to your tent and do as I instructed you!” he demanded.
“I won’t go. You’ll want me to stand at attention and I won’t do it. I’ll be damned if I’ll do it.”
“Return to your tent immediately!”
“Lieutenant, I won’t stand at attention for you or any other goddamned white officer.”
Angry beyond words, Ellsworth grabbed Baker’s collar and tried to physically pull him back to the tent. As the collar tightened, Baker swatted at Ellsworth’s hands and hit him twice in the face. Ellsworth tried to draw his sword, but Baker grabbed at it, and as they tussled over it, they punched each other. Seizing Baker’s collar in his left hand, Ellsworth started hitting him with the right, but Baker did the same, locking both men into a boxing match.
In desperation, Ellsworth called out to the sergeants of Company I, but nobody moved. The only noncommissioned officer to speak out was Nicholas Said’s corporal, Henry Way, who blamed the fight on Ellsworth. “If you or any other officer strikes me, I shall strike you back and do my best to defend myself,” he shouted.
Finally, Ellsworth yelled for Captain Gordon, who emerged from his sickbed and, after briefly watching from the sidelines, strode forward to grab Baker’s shoulder.
“Stop this instantly,” he said.
“Hands off!” replied Baker, who was still latched onto Ellsworth’s collar.
“Let go of him,” Gordon ordered.
“Not until he lets go.”
Once both men relaxed their holds, Gordon had Ellsworth take Baker to the guardhouse where he was “bucked and gagged,” meaning that after a gag was wrapped across his mouth, he was forced to sit on the ground with his knees against his chest and his arms wrapped around them, and was then tied so tightly he could not move, with a pole fixed below his knees and over his elbows to keep him in place. It was a torturous punishment that could last from three to twelve hours and was often enhanced by dousing the prisoner with cold water. By the time it was over, prisoners were often so racked with pain they could not walk and had to be carried back to their cells. That was just the beginning of Baker’s ordeal.
