The Sergeant, page 20
Late in the evening of July 1, Sergeant Said and his men were ferried across the Folly River to Long Island. It was midnight before all the men of the Fifty-Fifth were across, and once they landed they traipsed in the dark through the island’s tall grasses to a secluded landing on the western shore, where they boarded pontoon boats to take them to nearby Tiger Island. At high tide, this would have been an easy crossing, since the channel between the two islands would have been deep enough to shuttle them seamlessly from shore to shore. At low tide, however, the coastal channel between the two islands was more of a swamp than a river, and the boats ran into too much muck to get to solid ground. As a result, when the men disembarked, they had to wade through mud that reached up to their knees or waists. Many needed help from their comrades to get to solid land, and all of it had to be done as quietly as possible, since they were within range of Battery Lamar’s cannons. The men were still oozing with mud when they encountered the next obstacle: a marshy channel lying between them and James Island, where Battery Lamar was located. “We were not to be discouraged, and plunging, wading and part of the time almost swimming, we got on firm ground,” wrote 1st Sgt. James Trotter.
By 4:00 A.M., the vanguard of the column reached a patch of woods and bushes on James Island, bordering an abandoned cotton plantation. A half hour later, the 103rd New York encountered a Rebel skirmish line that fired two volleys at them before vanishing into the predawn mist, inflicting no real damage but robbing them of their element of surprise. That exchange of gunfire was enough to alert the cannoneers at Fort Lamar, who soon filled the air with grapeshot and canisters full of hot chunks of iron. Seven men were killed in the first barrage, and a number of others were wounded. Firing blindly into the morning fog, Fort Lamar’s cannons forced the 103rd to pull back and take cover in trenches that the Rebel skirmishers had abandoned.
The Thirty-Third US Colored Troops, advancing on the right flank, then took fire from a different direction: Battery Wright, a crescent-shaped earthwork guarding a crossroads at the Rivers Causeway, one of the island’s main transportation routes. Unfortunately, the ex-slaves were hard-pressed to defend themselves, since the army had given them aging rifles that were so faulty they were subsequently sent to the scrap heap. Facing steady fire from the battery, some of the men had their “legs [shot] off, arm gone, foot off, and wounds of all kinds imaginable,” wrote Susie King Taylor, a sergeant’s wife who helped tend to the wounded. With both the 103rd and the Thirty-Third stalled or falling back, it seemed it would be only a matter of time before the entire column would dissolve into full-scale retreat.
As this was happening, Sergeant Said and the rest of the Fifty-Fifth were standing in the rear, anxiously waiting to enter the fray. Directly in front of them, a crude but formidable obstacle loomed out of the morning mists: Battery Wright’s outermost line of defense, consisting of a string of chopped-down oak trees that had been laid across each other to form a long wall, lined with clumps of spiky thorn bushes to repel attackers. Between that wall of timber and Battery Wright lay half a mile of open field, exposing any attackers to the battery’s guns. Despite the barriers—and the growing flow of retreating soldiers from the other two regiments—Lieutenant Colonel Fox decided it was time to move.
“Forward at the double-quick,” he shouted. Then, giving what had become a popular battle cry for Black soldiers throughout the Union Army, he yelled, “Remember Fort Pillow!”
“Remember Fort Pillow!” the men screamed back. With fixed bayonets, they charged, rushing past their retreating comrades from the other two regiments, clambering through the spiky oaken barrier and emerging onto the open land that lay beyond, where they became easy targets for the Rebels in Battery Wright. Grapeshot and canisters “hurled among us like hail, scattering death and destruction all around,” Sergeant Trotter wrote.
As Company I raced across the field, Sergeant Said must have felt that finally he was living up to the destiny his father had left him, or the dream he had envisioned for himself as a boy, playing war games at the gates of Kukawa. As he surged forward through the fog, one of his fellow sergeants, William Stidum, was struck in the skull by Rebel shrapnel and instantly fell to the ground dead. The same thing happened to William Johnson, a carpenter from Ohio who had built furniture for the regiment’s school. Morris Darnell, who had testified on behalf of Wallace Baker and had served under Said at General Schimmelfennig’s headquarters, was shot through his left hand, losing a finger. Charles Crummer, a butcher from Pennsylvania, was wounded in the neck. Elsewhere on the field, nine other soldiers from the Fifty-Fifth were killed and fourteen were wounded, but still the regiment charged forward. “Could you have seen the old 55th rush in, with the shout of ‘Remember Fort Pillow!’ you would have thought that nothing human could have withstood their impetuosity,” one sergeant wrote.
Oddly, the closer the men got to Battery Wright, the less harm they faced. The battery’s cannons, which had been positioned for long-distance firing, were now shooting over their heads, and the Rebel riflemen were having a hard time finding targets in the fog. Facing an onslaught of screaming soldiers, the defenders, most of whom belonged to a Rebel cavalry unit, hopped onto their horses and beat such a hasty retreat that they left two cannons behind, including one that was loaded and ready to fire. When the first soldiers from the Fifty-Fifth climbed over the battery’s earthen parapets, they could see the former defenders fleeing in the distance, pulling along some of the lighter guns they had been using. They immediately wheeled both of the abandoned cannons around and fired at the escaping men. “You may imagine how proud we felt when we found ourselves as masters of ‘Johnny’s’ fort and with what satisfaction we looked upon our pieces of cannon, which now looked innocent enough, but which a few minutes before had dealt death to so many of our brave fellows,” a sergeant later wrote. They captured two prisoners who fell on their knees and begged for mercy, which—unlike at Fort Pillow—was somewhat reluctantly granted.
Unfortunately, the victory was short-lived. By dawn, as many as thirty heavy guns from Fort Lamar and other batteries were firing into the Union positions—not doing a lot of damage, but keeping the men pinned down in their trenches and earthworks. As the summer sun rose over the battlefield, the heat became so intense that a number of soldiers suffered sunstroke. In the Thirty-Third, one soldier left his trench, saying he’d rather be shot than baked to death. Moments later, Rebel fire blew him apart. The constant fire was so unnerving that some raw recruits in the 103rd lost their nerve and erupted into a frenzy of random shooting, accidentally killing a soldier in the Fifty-Fifth.
Around midnight, with the advance hopelessly stalled, orders came to retreat, moving as quietly as possible to avoid drawing attention from the Rebels. The men of the Fifty-Fifth managed to haul the two Rebel cannons they had captured back to Folly Island, as a souvenir of their victory, but they did not have enough time to search in the dark for their dead comrades. When they returned to the battlefield a year later, they found that the Rebels had hacked the heads off the corpses, a posthumous retribution against the Black Yankees who attacked them.
Despite the Fifty-Fifth’s short-lived elation from seizing a Rebel fort, the battle did little to end the spirit of discontent swirling through the regiment. “Twenty-eight killed and wounded, yet our noble government will still deny us just treatment,” one soldier wrote. Two weeks later, the men of the Fifty-Fifth launched their biggest protest yet, refusing to assemble for reveille on July 14 and instead gathering on the beach, calling upon Lieutenant Colonel Fox to discuss their concerns. Fox sympathized with their plight, but when he appeared on the beach, he told them that unless they immediately returned to their quarters, they would be charged with mutiny and “dealt with accordingly.” Within three minutes the beach was cleared, but when assignments were made for picket duty later that day, some men laid down their weapons and refused to go, prompting Fox to arrest a couple of ringleaders. Two days later, the protest continued in a different form, with seventy-four men from Company D signing a petition to President Lincoln, asking that they either receive equal pay or be immediately discharged from the army. “If immediate steps are not taken to relieve us,” they warned, “we will resort to more stringent measures.”
By then, partly because of a surge in public support for the Black troops after the massacre at Fort Pillow, the War Department was already moving to equalize the pay. On August 1, it decided that Black soldiers could be paid the same as whites and that the pay would be retroactive, covering all the money they were owed since enlisting, but there was one major caveat. The new pay rate applied only to soldiers who were freemen when the war began on April 19, 1861; if they were slaves on that date, which was likely true of around a tenth of the men in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts, they would still be paid $7 per month.
That provision sparked one more wave of discontent throughout the Black regiments. Beyond the unfairness of the provision, the freeborn soldiers thought it was an insult that the army would force them to swear they hadn’t been slaves, while the ex-slaves worried it could be a trick to get them to admit that they had been slaves so they could be returned to their owners after the war. (Most of them came from slaveholding Union states—Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri—where slavery was still legal despite the Emancipation Proclamation, which only covered the Confederate states.)I The top officers of the Fifty-Fifth and some other Black regiments figured out a way around that, by asking soldiers if they considered themselves to be freemen under the laws of God when the war began, whether or not they were slaves under the laws of men. If they took such an oath, they would be listed as freemen on the regimental rosters and get full pay. But even then some ex-slaves balked, fearing they could later be charged with lying under oath.
The men who were most leery of taking the oath were in Company I, with most of the dissenters apparently located within Nicholas Said’s platoon. Wallace Baker’s death was still fresh in their memory—a former slave who had received zero compensation for his service in the army and who would posthumously only be entitled to the $7 rate, which his friend George Roberts—another ex-slave—had promised to take to his mother after the war was over. “In that company, the same spirit that had urged on Baker and led him to the act that caused his death still existed and exerted its influence…,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Fox. “I reasoned with some, scolded others, and threatened to reduce one of our smartest sergeants [likely referring to Said], who would do neither one nor the other.” Despite Fox’s best efforts, fifteen men in the Fifty-Fifth, mostly in Company I, still refused to take the oath, even though Massachusetts offered to equalize the pay between ex-slaves and freemen.
On August 31, the regiment was mustered to register for the payroll, preparing for the paymaster’s arrival the following month. For Nicholas Said, it was a time of reflection. Since he had enlisted in the army, little had turned out the way he had expected. The two battles he had taken part in consisted of seizing small patches of Rebel territory that were ceded back to them hours later. Other than that, his main functions included such things as digging trenches, filling sandbags, and hauling cannons. Since he had enlisted, the army had treated him like a second-class citizen, unfit for equal pay or a higher leadership role, and even though the pay issue had now been resolved, the other had not. The War Department still banned Blacks from becoming commissioned officers. Colonel Hartwell tried bucking that policy, promoting three sergeants to become lieutenants—James Trotter, John Shorter, and William Dupree—but the War Department refused to ratify those commissions, and even some white officers in the Fifty-Fifth disagreed with having Blacks share their ranks.
In the meantime, Said was now taking orders from one of the least-qualified officers in the regiment: Lieutenant Robertson James, now aged eighteen. James had replaced Lieutenant Ellsworth, who was transferred away from Company I after the Baker affair, and then Captain Gordon was discharged, felled by another bout of chronic diarrhea, leaving the company temporarily headed by James: “a well-meaning little officer, but too young and inexperienced for such a position,” according to Fox. To Nicholas Said, whose battle-tested colleagues had been denied lieutenancies solely because of their complexion, being led by such a novice must have been hard to take. But of course, the toughest blows were the imprisonment of Henry Way and execution of Wallace Baker. It’s hard to fathom what he felt when witnessing one of his men being shot to death by his own comrades. That could explain why he had such a hard time trying to “reason with” or “scold” the pay protestors, despite Fox’s urging.
Yet there were accomplishments Said could be proud of. On the battlefield, he had not only aided in the defeat of Fort Wagner, but faced the Rebels twice in combat. As a teacher, he had helped prepare his men for life outside the army, giving illiterate soldiers the education they would need for an existence beyond manual labor. And as an activist, he had supported his men’s efforts to prove they should be treated the same as white men. Now that they had won that battle, he apparently no longer felt the need to lead them. On the same day Said registered to earn his long-denied pay, and a week after Fox half-heartedly threatened to demote him, he voluntarily resigned, demoting himself to private. Rather than remain in Company I under the command of Lieutenant James, he asked to work as an aide to Colonel Hartwell’s adjutant, George McKay, where he could help handle the paperwork involved in running the regiment. He apparently felt he could no longer bear arms in an army that had used its arms to kill one of his men.
On September 30, the men of the Fifty-Fifth lined up, company by company, as the federal paymaster reached into his large iron moneybox to dole out all their pay. “It came at last, after being kept out of it for nearly a year and a half, so you can imagine how we all felt,” wrote Sgt. John Shorter. “We felt overjoyed, and at the same time thankful to God for the successful termination of our suit.” The men sent $65,000 to their wives, mothers, and children at home, using the rest to spend on long-delayed purchases of personal supplies at the sutlers’ shops, pay off any debts they had accrued over the past year, or buy sandwiches, pies, and other treats from the small stands that former slaves had established near the camp. Nicholas Said, who likely received around $200 in back pay, asked Lieutenant Colonel Fox to send $120 (the equivalent of nearly $2,000) to his father, Thomas Fox, to invest it on his behalf—an example of how close he and Fox had gotten. He was the only man in the regiment who made such a request.
Ten days later, the soldiers staged a regiment-wide gala to commemorate their historic payday. First Sgt. Peter Laws headed the committee that planned the event, which he dubbed as a celebration of “the triumph of freedom and equality over despotism and prejudice,” and even though Nicholas Said was no longer a sergeant, he took part as one of the committee’s secretaries. At 3:00 P.M. on October 10, the men marched out of their tents and gathered in front of a small rise of land that served as a makeshift dais, with seats for the white officers of the regiment, the twenty-one sergeants on the planning committee, plus Nicholas Said, the only private on the committee, listed in the program as “Ex-Sergt. N. Said.” Considering that there were nearly thirty sergeants who weren’t on the dais, his presence shows how active he had been in the pay dispute.
Over the next several hours, there were speeches from the sergeants, music from the regimental band, and singing by the entire assembly. When it was all over, the members of the committee had an elegant dinner, followed by more speeches, songs, toasts, and cheers. “Gentlemen sang that night that who were never known to sing before,” wrote Sergeant Shorter. The next day, Said returned to his desk job with Adjutant McKay, and he likely spent the next month processing paperwork and teaching at the regimental school. On the last day of October, however, he took a new job, helping run the regimental hospital, just in time for the biggest battle that the Fifty-Fifth would fight during the war—a battle that would stretch the capabilities of its medical team, including Nicholas Said.
I. The reason the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the Confederacy was that President Lincoln had no Constitutional authority to free slaves in states that remained in the Union. The proclamation was based on a loophole that gave him special powers during times of rebellion.
20 Baptized in Blood
The regimental hospital on Folly Island was built on a flattened mound of sand and sod, lined with a row of trees offering shade from the tropical sun and a wall of yucca providing relief from the glaring sand. There were several large hospital tents, as well as a pharmacy, laundry, morgue, and kitchen. “At a distance, it looks like a small fort,” boasted Dr. Burt Green Wilder, who had overseen its construction.
Officially, the hospital was run by Dr. William Symington Brown, a middle-aged Scotsman who was destined to become one of the nation’s premier gynecologists. But the day-to-day operations were largely overseen by Wilder, a wild-haired twenty-three-year-old whose views would have a profound impact on Nicholas Said.
When the war began, Wilder was finishing his studies in zoology at Harvard, where he published scholarly papers on pig snouts and the hands of chimpanzees. After joining the army, he spent his first year as a medical intern in Washington, DC, treating the wounded from Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. When he was offered the possibility of moving to the front lines with the Fifty-Fifth, he knew it would be risky. “The position is certainly not perfectly safe, and we cannot count upon coming out unhurt or even alive,” he wrote. But he was attracted to the notion of working with an all-Black regiment: “an idea in grandeur and importance second only to that of Emancipation itself—the idea that the oppressed should, could and would fight for their own lives and liberty.”
