Army Life in a Black Regiment (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Karen Fisher Younger

Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves. In the fall of 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was asked to take command of the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, and he immediately understood the significance of the experiment and enthusiastically accepted the position. Drawing extensively from the diary he kept during the seventeen months he commanded the regiment, Higginson details the nature of camp life, the drills and discipline of the men, the expeditions up rivers and into the southern interior, and the invasion and occupation of Jacksonville, Florida. This literary classic is stitched together with dramatic events, factual reporting, humor, and insightful reflection on human nature. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411435087

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

FROM A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVE THOMAS WENTWORTH Higginson was on the right side of every important issue of his day, even when from a nineteenth-century perspective it was a difficult side to take. He fervently fought for the abolition of slavery and women's rights. He passionately campaigned against alcohol use and was a pioneering critic of tobacco (he was one of the first to link smoking with cancer). He was an early advocate of environmentalism, physical exercise, and anti-imperialism, and crusaded for integrated public schools. Beyond this he was a minister, soldier, and prolifically popular author. His writings span the fields of history, biography, literature, education, nature, and politics. Higginson is probably best remembered today as the individual who discovered the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. But it is Higginson's record as a radical reformer who fought for human liberty and equality that set him apart. The high point of his career as a freedom fighter came in late 1862 when he was appointed the head of the first federally authorized black regiment. His experiences as a soldier inspired his most famous and finest work in his enormous corpus of writing. Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and strikingly empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves.

Higginson was born on December 23, 1823, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to parents who were both from old, established New England families. He entered Harvard at the age of fourteen, the youngest in his class. After graduation he returned to Harvard Divinity School, seeking ordination as a Unitarian minister. In 1847 he became the minister of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and married Mary E. Channing. Increasingly controversial in his views, he was forced to resign just two years later. Higginson went on to become a prolific author and a popular speaker on the Lyceum circuit. He eventually found his way back to the pulpit in 1852 as the minister of the Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts; the church had the highest attendance in the city his first Sunday there. It is while a minister at Worcester that he shocked America by leading an attack on the Boston Court House to free Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave being held there. During this time he supported John Brown as one of the Secret Six, the group of conspirators who supported Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. But the high point of his career as a freedom fighter came in late 1862, when he entered military service as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers of African Descent. After the war, he told his story in articles in the Atlantic Monthly, which were published in 1869 as Army Life in a Black Regiment. After the Civil War other causes won his interest, including women's rights and anti-imperialism. He developed a correspondence with Emily Dickinson, eventually editing her first volume of verse titled Poems in 1890. He continued writing until his death in 1911.

Higginson entered pastoral ministry to effect change. Heavily influence by several liberal activist ministers, notable among them were his cousin, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and especially Theodore Parker, Higginson was convinced that it was as a minister that he would best be able to devote himself to what he called the sisterhood of reforms. These reforms addressed a whole host of social causes including among others temperance reform, equal treatment of women, the abolition of the death penalty, extending the franchise, elimination of child labor, reduction of worker's hours, and the establishment of public education. By his ordination Higginson had come to believe that the abolition of slavery was the most urgent cause of all. He believed that the religious establishment had compromised when it came to slavery, and sought to reform the church and the clergy. He hoped to tear down the division that existed between the clergy and the secular reformers like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in order to preach a Christlike spirit of love and moral indignation.

Higginson's unconcealed radicalism and attack on his own profession were daring and made it difficult for him to find and keep a pulpit. At Newburyport his politicization of the pulpit, especially his antislavery sermons, estranged the wealthy leaders of the church. Congregants, many merchant Whigs, were mortified when he accepted the nomination for Congress of the Free Soil party, which was formed in 1848 and opposed extending slavery into the western territories and whose motto was Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. And they could not have appreciated Higginson's Thanksgiving sermon in 1848 that berated them for voting for Zachary Taylor, the Whig presidential candidate and a man he viewed as the slave power candidate. In the end, his devotion to abolition alienated church leaders who demanded and secured Higginson's resignation.

Higginson eventually left the ministry in 1858 after several years as minister of the Free Church in Worcester. However, he continued to convert his creed into deed. His conviction in an anti-institutional, ethical Christianity based on humanity's intuition of the Divine, the true, and the good, however, remained a source of inspiration for his radical actions. Higginson believed that a Higher Law, the law of human freedom, must always be sought and secured, even if that meant the unfortunate use of violence. In the immediate aftermath of the failed Burns' rescue, Higginson justified his actions in his sermon, Massachusetts in Mourning, arguing that the time for words, and law and order was past. Words are nothing—we have been surfeited with words for twenty years, he proclaimed. I am thankful that this time there was action also ready for Freedom. Resistance to the authorities, he said, was in fact obedience to God.

Higginson became increasingly hostile to slavery through the 1850s. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ruled that the decision of whether a state should be slave or free was determined by the state's inhabitants at the ballot box. This ruling revoked the longstanding Missouri Compromise of 1820 that prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30' line of latitude (both Kansas and Nebraska were north of the Missouri Compromise line). The Kansas-Nebraska Act produced widespread and lethal violence as anti- and pro-slavery forces battled for control of the Kansas territory. Higginson went to Kansas as the envoy of the Kansas Aid Committee, with supplies, including rifles and ammunition, for the antislavery settlers, hoping to take part in the fighting. Later, back in Worcester, his abolition extremism continued. He supported the peaceful disunion movement as one of the principal supporters and a keynote speaker at the Worcester Disunion Convention in 1857. Peaceful disunion, a popular, but by no means universally accepted, sentiment among some radical abolitionists, was the belief that letting the South go in peace would lead inexorably to the death of slavery and the emancipation of the slaves. In 1859, Higginson boldly defended one of the most dramatic acts against slavery, when John Brown and twenty-one followers seized the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). As a member of the Secret Six, Higginson had encouraged Brown's plan to arm a group of men and start a guerilla war against slavery in the Appalachian Mountains. After the raid failed and Brown was sentenced to death for treason, Higginson was the only one of the Secret Six who did not abandon Brown. Higginson raised funds for his defense and even planned, but never executed, an armed expedition to rescue Brown.

When the Civil War started, Higginson felt uncertain about serving in the Federal army because of the government's ambivalent treatment of African Americans in the recent past as well as his wife's failing health. When hesitation subsided, his first effort at service was to request and receive authority to form the 51st Massachusetts. Then in the fall of 1862, he was asked to take command of the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers. He immediately understood the significance of the experiment and enthusiastically accepted the position. The regiment was the result of an earlier attempt by General David Hunter to form a black regiment along the South Carolina coast and the Sea Islands, a region liberated by Union forces in November 1861. Hunter's sometimes unscrupulous methods—Hunter used white troops to force some black men to volunteer for military service—and the lack of support for black troops by the Lincoln administration, crushed the project. Convinced, finally, in late 1862 that emancipation and the military recruitment of blacks was critical to Union success, Lincoln began the processes of liberating slaves and mustering black men into service. The issuance of a preliminary emancipation proclamation in September 1862 and the replacement of Hunter with General Rufus Saxton as military governor of the region brought the 1st South Carolina, composed of almost all ex-slaves, into existence.

Higginson began his command in November 1862, but the future role of black soldiers in the military was anything but certain as national policy was still being formulated. At a time when racism ruled the country, the majority of white northerners did not believe that blacks could be effective soldiers, and most white troops did not want to fight with them. Higginson understood the tremendous importance of his assignment as colonel of the regiment. He wrote in his war journal, The first man who organizes & commands a successful black regiment will perform the most important service in the history of the War.¹ He fully recognized that the performance of the 1st South Carolina would likely determine the future of black soldiers in the Union Army. Indeed, Higginson's success gave important momentum to black military service. The accomplishments of the regiment helped secure the future mobilization of almost two hundred thousand black soldiers, or between 9 and 10 percent of all Union troops who served in the war.

Army Life in a Black Regiment draws extensively from the diary that he kept during the seventeen months he commanded the regiment. A literary classic, the book is stitched together with dramatic events, factual reporting, humor, and insightful reflection on human nature. It is the record of Higginson's command—the nature of camp life, the drills and discipline of the men, the expeditions up rivers and into the southern interior, and the invasion and occupation of Jacksonville, Florida. Much of Army Life in a Black Regiment is designed to correct northern misconception of the character of southern blacks. More than this, however, Higginson's memoir portrays the war as the noble effort of former slaves to overcome their oppressor as they struggle alongside white abolitionists for racial justice. Yet the biracial alliance was about more than military might for Higginson. The black soldier with the chevrons on his sleeve represented a new day in the American political structure where equality prevailed and slaves were made citizens.

One of the most interesting elements in Higginson's memoir is his religious observations of the black recruits. At a time when many Union soldiers dismissed African-American religion as nonsense, Higginson took black religion seriously. Higginson's own ecumenical religious beliefs—he considered religion an activity shared by all humans regardless of creed—encouraged him to respect black expressions of Christianity and find parallels between their ideas and his own. Higginson was one of the first white northerners to listen to their songs, prayers, and religious ceremonies and document what he heard and saw. Of special note are the thirty-six slave spirituals he transcribed. His groundbreaking work sparked a new interest in slave spirituals and black American folk culture. Biographer Howard N. Meyer has suggested that Higginson had the immediate distinction of having opened the door to the wider interest in spirituals and later the credit—not always assigned to him—of having been the pioneer recorder of what many have called our greatest single artistic creation.²

Time and again, Higginson reveals a true empathy for the black men and women he encounters, and shows genuine admiration for his soldiers' accomplishments. His description of the January 1, 1863, ceremony when the Emancipation Proclamation is read for the first time, and the former slaves break out in spontaneous singing of My Country, 'Tis of Thee, is one of the most poignant and memorable passages in the memoir. Higginson writes, The quavering voices sang on, verse after verse; others of the colored people joined in. . . . I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap, it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. . . . Just think of it! The first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people. He is at once high-minded and idealistic, but also a spectator. Higginson, though a champion to their cause, repeatedly characterizes African Americans as fascinating outsiders, observing them as an anthropologist or an explorer would a newly discovered people. The memoir is full of racial generalities and observations that often cast Higginson as an interloper amazed at the display of black men and women responding to the drama of liberation.

Far more advanced than most of his contemporaries regarding racial matters, Higginson's views were, nevertheless, limited, and are an important reminder to readers today of the deep and enduring currents of American racism. Higginson's observations waver between paternalistic racial stereotyping over the mysterious race of grownup children, and antiracist commentary that never doubted their capacity to make good soldiers and eagerly recount the everyday heroism and accomplishments of the black Americans around him. On the one hand, he repeatedly compares his soldiers to children, arguing that the experience of soldiering elevated mere boys to men. On the other, in one of several similar passages, he asserts that their capacity for honor and fidelity gives Higginson entire faith in them as soldiers.

The contradictions in Higginson's thought help explain his postwar failure to maintain interest in black rights. After two years of service, Higginson left the army suffering both a battle wound and lingering illness. After the war Higginson denounced Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction plan, insisted on the enforcement of equal rights, backed the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and was fully committed to social and educational desegregation. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, however, Higginson looked to new causes and new interests while writing all the while. Like so many white Americans, Higginson proved remiss in helping black Americans obtain the fullest measure of freedom. After the tide of freedom swept across the country in 1865, the rush to reconciliation and the drive for reunion of North and South trumped issues of race and racism in American life. By the mid-1870s, most northerners were no longer willing to support Reconstruction. With the government awash in corruption and the economy gravely ill—the Panic of 1873 sent the economy into a slump for several years—many white Americans began to question the necessity for the military and political support of black Americans in the South. Rather than help black Americans obtain the fullest measure of freedom the majority of white northerners succumbed to the unrelenting claims that freedmen were incapable of self-government and began to doubt the wisdom of universal male suffrage. The result is that the nation—its white leaders and civilians—turned a blind eye to the disenfranchisement of most black southerners through legal and illegal means, violence and lynching, affirmed segregation, and Jim Crow Laws in the South.

Post-Reconstruction Higginson rallied for women's rights, campaigned for reform of the civil service and eliminating corruption in public life, opposed the Spanish-American War of 1898, and defended the socialist movement in the United States. It is not that Higginson forgot his commitment to racial justice. Higginson occasionally spoke out against racial inequality and injustice that followed in the wake of the end of Reconstruction. He denounced the upsurge in lynching across the South at the turn of the century, reaffirmed the importance of black suffrage as absolutely necessary, and condemned The Clansman, the novel that inspired the film The Birth of a Nation. Yet he declined active participation in any organized opposition. Ironically the once radical Higginson threw his support behind the conservative policy of black accommodation espoused by Booker T. Washington, a leading black figure in late nineteenth-century America. Higginson believed that black Americans would gain full civil, political, and constitutional rights more quickly through self-development, industry, and education than by the radical political programs of black activists like black scholar W. E. B. DuBois. Ever optimistic, Washington encouraged black Americans to avoid politics and defiant demands for civil rights. He was convinced that as black Americans made economic progress and became productive, white Americans would concede them their rights. DuBois, however, favored an aggressive attack on discrimination, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow. He was convinced that the advancement of black Americans was the responsibility of the black elite, those he called the Talented Tenth, meaning the upper 10 percent of black Americans. These blacks should accept nothing less than full political, educational, and professional equality. DuBois would eventually help form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Higginson's conservative solution to interracial justice reflected the ambiguity of race in his own mind. It also was the result of Higginson's optimistic religious belief in the ultimate good of all humans and their innate desire to chose right over wrong. Given time, he believed, southern whites would embrace equality. Equally important, Higginson deeply distrusted centralized federal power, blaming the failure of Reconstruction almost solely on the federal government. This mistrust helps explain Higginson's anti-imperialist and socialist tendencies later in life. Sadly the aging abolitionist warrior underestimated the insidiousness of racism in American life. Yet among the lessons of Army Life in a Black Regiment for all Americans is the realization that the spirit that propelled interracial cooperation and broke the chains of slavery freeing four million slaves, continues to move Americans of all ethnicities forward to fight new battles for true freedom. Or as twentieth-century civil rights activist James Baldwin once put it: "History . . . does not refer merely to the past . . . history is literally present in all that we do."³

Karen Fisher Younger is managing director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University and managing editor of the journal Civil War History. She is co-editor of Lincoln's Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTORY

THESE PAGES RECORD SOME OF THE ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST SOUTH Carolina Volunteers—the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the United States during the late Civil War. It was, indeed, the first colored regiment of any kind so mustered, except a portion of the troops raised by Major-General Butler at New Orleans. These scarcely belonged to the same class, however, being recruited from the free colored population of that city, a comparatively self-reliant and educated race. The darkest of them, said General Butler, were about the complexion of the late Mr. Webster.

The First South Carolina, on the other hand, contained scarcely a freeman, had not one mulatto in ten, and a far smaller proportion who could read or write when enlisted. The only contemporary regiment of a similar character was the First Kansas Colored, which began recruiting a little earlier, though it was not mustered in—the usual basis of military seniority—till later. These were the only colored regiments recruited during the year 1862. The Second South Carolina and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts followed early in 1863.

This is the way in which I came to the command of this regiment. One day in November 1862 I was sitting at dinner with my lieutenants, John Goodell and Luther Bigelow, in the barracks of the Fifty-First Massachusetts, Colonel Sprague, when the following letter was put into my hands:

Beaufort, S. C., November 5, 1862

My dear Sir,

I am organizing the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, with every prospect of success. Your name has been spoken of, in connection with the command of this regiment, by some friends in whose judgment I have confidence. I take great pleasure in offering you the position of Colonel in it, and hope that you may be induced to accept. I shall not fill the place until I hear from you, or sufficient time shall have passed for me to receive your reply. Should you accept, I enclose a pass for Port Royal, of which I trust you will feel disposed to avail yourself at once.

I am, with sincere regard, yours truly,

R. Saxton,

Brig.-Genl., Mil. Gov.

Had an invitation reached me to take command of a regiment of Kalmuck Tartars, it could hardly have been more unexpected. I had always looked for the arming of the blacks, and had always felt a wish to be associated with them; had read the scanty accounts of General Hunter's abortive regiment, and had heard rumors of General Saxton's renewed efforts. But the prevalent tone of public sentiment was still opposed to any such attempts; the government kept very shy of the experiment, and it did not seem possible that the time had come when it could be fairly tried.

For myself, I was at the head of a fine company of my own raising, and in a regiment to which I was already much attached. It did not seem desirable to exchange a certainty for an uncertainty; for who knew but General Saxton might yet be thwarted in his efforts by the pro-slavery influence that had still so much weight at headquarters? It would be intolerable to go out to South Carolina, and find myself, after all, at the head of a mere plantation-guard or a day-school in uniform.

I therefore obtained from the War Department, through Governor Andrew, permission to go and report to General Saxton, without at once resigning my captaincy. Fortunately it took but a few days in South Carolina to make it clear that all was right, and the return steamer took back a resignation of a Massachusetts commission. Thenceforth my lot was cast altogether with the black troops, except when regiments or detachments of white soldiers were also under my command, during the two years following.

These details would not be worth mentioning except as they show this fact: that I did not seek the command of colored troops, but it sought me. And this fact again is only important to my story for this reason, that under these circumstances I naturally viewed the new recruits rather as subjects for discipline than for philanthropy. I had been expecting a war for six years, ever since the Kansas troubles, and my mind had dwelt on military matters more or less during all that time. The best Massachusetts regiments already exhibited a high standard of drill and discipline, and unless these men could be brought tolerably near that standard, the fact of their extreme blackness would afford me, even as a philanthropist, no satisfaction. Fortunately, I felt perfect confidence that they could be so trained—having happily known, by experience, the qualities of their race, and knowing also that they had home and household and freedom to fight for, besides that abstraction of the Union. Trouble might perhaps be expected from white officials, though this turned out far less than might have been feared; but there was no trouble to come from the men, I thought, and none ever came. On the other hand, it was a vast experiment of indirect philanthropy, and one on which the result of the war and the destiny of the Negro race might rest; and this was enough to tax all one's powers. I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well, not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.

In view of all this, it was clear that good discipline must come first; after that, of course, the men must be helped and elevated in all ways as much as possible.

Of discipline there was great need—that is, of order and regular instruction. Some of the men had already been under fire, but they were very ignorant of drill and camp duty. The officers, being appointed from a dozen different states, and more than as many regiments—infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers—had all that diversity of methods which so confused our army in those early days. The first need, therefore, was of an unbroken interval of training. During this period, which fortunately lasted nearly two months, I rarely left the camp, and got occasional leisure moments for a fragmentary journal, to send home, recording the many odd or novel aspects of the new experience. Camp life was a wonderfully strange sensation to almost all volunteer officers, and mine lay among eight hundred men suddenly transformed from slaves into soldiers, and representing a race affectionate, enthusiastic, grotesque, and dramatic beyond all others. Being such, they naturally gave material for description. There is nothing like a diary for freshness—at least so I think—and I shall keep to the diary through the days of camp life, and throw the later experience into another form. Indeed, that matter takes care of itself; diaries and letter-writing stop when field-service begins.

I am under pretty heavy bonds to tell the truth, and only the truth; for those who look back to the newspaper correspondence of that period will see that this particular regiment lived for months in a glare of publicity, such as tests any regiment severely, and certainly prevents all subsequent romancing in its historian. As the scene of the only effort on the Atlantic coast to arm the Negro, our camp attracted a continuous stream of visitors, military and civil. A battalion of black soldiers, a spectacle since so common, seemed then the most daring of innovations, and the whole demeanor of this particular regiment was watched with microscopic scrutiny by friends and foes. I felt sometimes as if we were a plant trying to take root, but constantly pulled up to see if we were growing. The slightest camp incidents sometimes came back to us, magnified and distorted, in letters of anxious inquiry from remote parts of the Union. It was no pleasant thing to live under such constant surveillance; but it guaranteed the honesty of any success, while fearfully multiplying the penalties had there been a failure. A single mutiny—such as has happened in the infancy of a hundred regiments—a single miniature Bull Run, a stampede of desertions, and it would have been all over with us; the party of distrust would have gotten the upper hand, and there might not have been, during the whole contest, another effort to arm the Negro.

I may now proceed, without farther preparation, to the diary.

CHAPTER TWO

CAMP DIARY

CAMP SAXTON, near Beaufort, S. C.,

November 24,