Private No More: The Civil War Letters of John Lovejoy Murray, 102nd United States Colored Infantry

The John Lovejoy Murray collection of letters contains insights into the experiences of an African American soldier and his regiment during the Civil War. John Lovejoy Murray, a private in Company E, 102nd USCT, died of disease in a Charleston hospital on April 12, 1865. Through John Murray’s letters, readers can experience the war through the eyes of a literate northern Black soldier.

His is the story of the soldiers who did not receive accolades for their heroic actions in battle, the ones who spent more time on picket and fatigue duty than on the front lines, the ones who died from disease more than they did of battle-related wounds. Murray’s letters are significant because they are ordinary in some respects yet extraordinary in others. Some of the activities and sentiments portrayed in the letters are hardly distinguishable from those described in letters written by White soldiers. In other ways, the letters represent a perspective distinctly from a Black soldier in the Union army. Although many of his experiences may have been typical, John Lovejoy Murray himself, a literate, freeborn, northern Black man, was atypical among Union Black soldiers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780820363462

Book preview

Private No More

New Perspectives on the Civil War Era

SERIES EDITORS

Judkin Browning, Appalachian State University

Susanna Lee, North Carolina State University

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Stephen Berry, University of Georgia

Jane Turner Censer, George Mason University

Paul Escott, Wake Forest University

Lorien Foote, Texas A&M University

Anne Marshall, Mississippi State University

Barton Myers, Washington & Lee University

Michael Thomas Smith, McNeese State University

Susannah Ural, University of Southern Mississippi

Heather Andrea Williams, University of Pennsylvania

Kidada Williams, Wayne State University

Private No More

The Civil War Letters of John Lovejoy Murray, 102nd United States Colored Infantry

edited by

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

© 2023 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Set in 9.75/13.5 Baskerville 10 Pro by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Murray, John Lovejoy, approximately 1830–1865, author | Hepburn, Sharon A. Roger, 1966– editor.

Title: Private no more : the Civil War letters of John Lovejoy Murray, 102nd United States Colored Infantry / edited by Sharon A. Roger Hepburn.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2023. | Series: New perspectives on the Civil War era | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022031525 | ISBN 9780820363448 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820363455 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820363462 (epub) | ISBN 9780820363561 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Murray, John Lovejoy, approximately 1830–1865—Correspondence. | United States. Army. Colored Infantry Regiment, 102nd (1863–1865)—Biography. | African American soldiers—United States—Correspondence. | Free Black people—New York (State)—Lockport—Biography. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories.

Classification: LCC E514.5 102nd .M87 2023 | DDC 973.7/3092 [B]—dc23/eng/20220712 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031525

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Editorial Note

Chapter 1. January–June 1864

Chapter 2. July–August 1864

Chapter 3. September–October 1864

Chapter 4. November–December 1864

Chapter 5. January–March 1865

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

MANY PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS WERE INVOLVED IN BRINGING this project to completion. Most important among them are the researchers at American Civil War Ancestor, whose services in digitizing archival material provided the raw material on which this collection is based. Without their work, John Lovejoy Murray’s letters would have languished unread in the archives. During various stages of research, I spent time in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and found both the staff and their collections of great assistance. I had the great fortune to work in archives and museums in Michigan, including the Archives of Michigan, the Underground Railroad Society of Cass County, and Michigan’s Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall and Museum, among others. Bruce Frail, with American Civil War Ancestor, provided invaluable assistance in these archives throughout this entire project. In March 2020, I was conducting research at the Archives of Michigan when I had to cut my trip short. After a two-year interruption, I returned to the Archives of Michigan and the State Library of Michigan in March 2022. There, I was able to view the original flags of the First Michigan Colored Infantry Regiment thanks to Matt Van Acker and Maurice Imhoff, who work tirelessly with the Save the Flags program to preserve, research, and display Michigan’s battle flags. Matt and Maurice even allowed me to hold one of the staffs from which those flags proudly waved almost one hundred and sixty years ago.

Many others helped shape the final product. My sincere gratitude goes to Susanna Lee, Judkin Browning, and Mick Gusinde-Duffy, at the University of Georgia Press, for their help and advice through every stage of the publication process. Their patience as I worked through revisions while juggling academic and personal duties was much appreciated. Their careful editing, and that of Zubin Meer, made this book a more polished narrative. If any mistakes remain, they are entirely my own. I would also like to acknowledge those readers who reviewed different versions of the manuscript and offered their suggestions, challenging or gently prodding me to broaden my focus and approach. This book is more firmly grounded thanks to their insights. Among those readers to whom I owe a great debt are three groups of students in my American Civil War and African American History classes at Radford University, in Radford, Virginia. These students provided thoughtful suggestions from their perspective as young scholars. The annotations accompanying the correspondence in this book were shaped by their questions and comments. My hope is that this book will be a tool for learning and teaching, and if I have been successful in that endeavor, it is my students who made it possible.

I am grateful to Radford University for supporting my work, both financially and in terms of time off. My personal appreciation goes out to Kate Hawkins, former dean of the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences at Radford University, for providing generous research grants to digitize pension records from the archives. Without this funding, I could not have acquired all the pension files for the 102nd United States Colored Infantry Regiment and may never have seen Private Murray’s file and letters. Both Kate and Matthew Smith, current dean of the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, supported this project with course-release time for me to pursue my research and writing. The final stages of this manuscript were completed during a semester of Faculty Professional Development Leave, granted by Radford University. Without this time, my duties as department chair in particular would have prolonged the completion of this manuscript by several years.

I dedicate this book to my family: my parents, Armand and Meg Roger—see Dad, I do work; my sons, Ryan and Casey, who have had to share me with John Lovejoy Murray for years—maybe they will actually read this book; and my sister Marcia, who was always there to drag me on a hike up a mountain when I needed to relieve stress and never pushed me over the edge. She even picked me up a few times and never once stopped to take a picture first. She certainly did laugh though.

Private No More

Introduction

I came Down here to fight . . . we have Pledge our self to Stick By one other till the last

PRIVATE JOHN LOVEJOY MURRAY, COMPANY E, 102ND UNITED STATES Colored Regiment, expressed the above sentiment in a letter he wrote to his mother from Baldwin, Florida, in August 1864.¹ During a skirmish with Confederate pickets earlier that day, a rebel minié ball split the wood in Murray’s gun and cut the pack over his shoulder, dropping his tent to the ground.² Murray never returned home to reunite with his family and friends. He was one of almost forty thousand African American Union soldiers who perished during the American Civil War. An enemy bullet did not strike him down. Nor did he languish in a prisoner of war camp. Private Murray died in a hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, the victim of a ravaging fever, on April 12, 1865, three days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and three days before President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

During his service in the Union army, Murray wrote home often to his mother and other family members and friends in Lockport, New York. Never having married, John Murray left no widow or children. After his death, John’s mother, Sarah Wells, applied for a federal pension based on her late son’s military service. This pension file, retained at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., contains fifty-six letters penned by Murray to his family and friends. Also in the file are four letters written from Sarah to her son late in the war. Sarah gave all these letters to T. D. Yeager, a special examiner for the U.S. Pension Bureau, as evidence in support of her claim.³

Union veterans of the Civil War were beneficiaries of financial assistance from the federal government, most important of which was military pensions. Pension records reveal a mixed record for African American veterans. The federal government recognized their status as veterans and rewarded their service with access to military pensions for themselves and their dependents: widows, minor children, and fathers and mothers. There was nothing in the application process that required applicants to be White. The process of submitting and approving pension claims, however, was not color-blind. Various obstacles hampered African American efforts to obtain the pensions due them. Race and class discriminations embedded in a system built primarily for elite and middle-class White families intensified the difficulties Black veterans encountered. Black veterans and their dependents often had difficulty establishing their ages, the dates and legality of their marriages or proof of death of prior spouses, their legal parentage, and the birth dates of themselves and their children. White veterans and their dependents also confronted such impediments, but they were not as prevalent as they were among the Black community, nor were they as difficult to resolve. These challenges did not necessarily prevent African Americans from receiving pensions, but they certainly made the process more complicated and lengthier. Regardless of whether such delays or outright rejections were due explicitly to racial discrimination, they nonetheless posed a hardship to African American veterans and their families.⁴

Although Sarah Wells encountered challenges in her quest for a pension, race does not appear to have been at issue, at least not in any overt way. Rather, the Pension Bureau initiated an investigation after another woman submitted a conflicting application.⁵ There were two John Murrays enrolled in the 102nd USCT. John Lovejoy Murray, Company E, was the son of Sarah Wells. John Murray, Company K, who deserted less than two months after his enlistment, was the son of Catharine Murray who lived in Detroit. When Catharine learned that a John L. Murray died in Charleston during the war, she became convinced that her son was dead and that she deserved a mother’s pension. Catharine’s filing for a pension triggered the special examination into the validity of Sarah’s request. Sarah furnished wartime letters in her possession to the special examiner in her case to prove that John was her son and that her claim for a mother’s pension was legitimate. After his investigation, Special Examiner Yeager concluded beyond a doubt that Sarah Wells was the mother of the soldier and the correspondence between the claimant and soldier confirm that fact. Sarah subsequently received a pension of eight dollars per month.⁶

Despite Yeager’s promise to Sarah that the letters should be returned to her as soon as possible, they never were.⁷ At the expense of John Murray’s family and friends, who parted with these precious pages from their loved one, readers today are able to experience the war through the eyes of a literate northern free Black solider. The documents submitted to the Pension Office are not just a few scattered epistles. This collection composes a significant intact body of communication. Its sheer quantity is in itself remarkable. The Murray collection is the largest known to exist from the 102nd USCT.⁸ The letters printed within this volume represent the entirety of extant correspondence received by Murray’s family and friends. How many letters, painstakingly scribed by John, were lost or destroyed in transit is unknown.⁹

Special Agent Yeager, September 9, 1873.

Civil War Pension File, NARA; photo by American Civil War Ancestor.

Mail was a treasured link between Civil War camps and battlefields and home. Writing and receiving letters helped morale. It maintained the connection between soldiers and civilians: husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and mothers. By 1860, the federal postal service was the nation’s largest bureaucracy and during the war was an effective communication system. It was this relatively reliable and cheap postal system that encouraged a regular exchange of letters between soldiers and their family and friends; between the battlefront and the home front. Although precise numbers are not, and never will be, available, letters carried to and from the armies numbered in the tens of millions over the course of four years.¹⁰ Millions of personal stories were thus recorded and preserved for posterity. Letters such as those featured in this work are a means of recovering the human dimensions of war, providing valuable insights into what it was like to serve during America’s most deadly conflict. Along with diaries and journals, letters from soldiers like Murray afford readers today the closest contact possible with actual Civil War soldiers, allowing us to eavesdrop on their innermost thoughts and feelings.

Wartime created difficulties for postal delivery. Correspondents had to wait for weeks, even months, to receive mail. While it was relatively easy for the army post to find soldiers when they remained encamped for several weeks or more, armies were often in motion. This continual shifting of location made delivering the mail a challenge. Friends and family at home had to rely on information from a soldier’s last letter regarding his whereabouts, but there was no guarantee that the soldier was still stationed at that camp and with his regiment. Murray closed most of his correspondence with instructions as to where exactly to send letters to him. In several letters in December 1864 and January 1865, he specifically mentioned that the mail was disrupted because of fighting in the area. In others he informed his family that his regiment was temporarily moving, but he encouraged them to continue writing, assuring them that the letters would find him. Other inevitable wartime disturbances interrupted postal services. It is clear from both John’s letters home and those written to him that the intended recipients did not receive all their correspondence. However, it seems that most letters were received.

John Lovejoy Murray was born free in Edinburgh, Saratoga County, New York, located north of Albany.¹¹ Without a birth certificate, family Bible record, or other documentation, the exact year of his birth is unknown. When he enlisted at the end of 1863, he gave his age as thirty-four. State and federal census enumerations show his age as nineteen in 1850, twenty-five in 1855, and thirty in 1860. While none of these records constitutes definitive proof, taken together they indicate a birth date of between 1829 and 1831. There is no indication that either of his parents were ever enslaved persons, though they could have been. In 1799, New York passed an act for the gradual abolition of slavery. A subsequent law passed in 1817 set July 4, 1827, as the date of final emancipation within the state. Sarah was born in Niagara County, New York. The birthplace of John’s birth father, Alonzo Murray, is unknown. Alonzo died near Rochester, New York, around 1840, while John was still a child. John’s widowed mother married Asher Wells on February 15, 1841, in Lockport. John did not take his stepfather’s name, but he consistently referred to him in his letters as father, suggesting a close relationship between the two. No evidence suggests that John had any siblings.¹²

Within a year or two of Alonzo Murray’s death, John’s mother, probably for financial reasons, sent her son to live with another family. According to family friend Lucinda Crain, John came to live with her stepbrother, Albert Adams, when John was about twelve and remained there until he was twenty-three. He then lived with his mother and stepfather for the next several years. From 1856 to 1859, John resided with Chester F. Shelley, sheriff of Niagara County, for whom he worked. Shelley was part of the Crain family, married to Lucinda’s sister, Clarissa. The full extent of the relationship between Murray and the Crain family is ambiguous. At various times before his enlistment, he worked for different members of the extended Crain family. Lucinda and John, and perhaps other members of the Crain family, exchanged letters during Murray’s military service. Lucinda was instrumental in proving that Sarah was indeed the mother of John Lovejoy Murray, providing several supporting affidavits on her behalf. What makes the relationship between the Crain family and John Murray less common at the time is that the Crains were White.¹³

The 1860 census records John Murray’s occupation as a waiter at the Eagle Hotel of Lockport owned by Lyman Spaulding. For at least one season and perhaps more until his enlistment in the Union army, John Murray farmed for shares on Albert Adams’s farm. Affidavits in the pension file attest that his share amounted to $200 one year. While off at war, he encouraged his mother to have his crop of wheat harvested, telling her that there was eleven acre in the field if the wheat is good it will be Just as goad as A Hundred Dollars in your Pocket.¹⁴ John was literate by the time he enlisted. Perhaps his literate mother or a member of the Crain family, likely Lucinda or Adam, taught him. He closed many of his letters with excuse bad spelling, indicative of an awareness of proper conventions that might suggest a level of formal schooling, though no evidence indicates that John attended school at any age.

In the fall of 1863, John Murray traveled more than two hundred miles from Lockport to Detroit. Information in the pension records suggests that Murray headed to Michigan seeking employment. His mother believed he left New York intending to find work in the lumber business, not to enlist.¹⁵ It was not inconceivable, of course, that John kept his true intentions from his mother to spare her from worry. If his primary objective was to enlist, he need not have gone to Detroit. He could have enlisted in one of several other Black regiments already in existence or in the process of organizing, among them the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Colored Infantry Regiments, the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Colored Infantry Regiment, and the Twenty-Sixth United States Colored Infantry raised in Murray’s home state of New York. At least one associate of his, Elias DeGroff (DeGraw), enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Colored Infantry the same month Murray enlisted in the First Michigan Colored Infantry. Presumably, other Black men from the Lockport area with whom Murray was acquainted joined different regiments.¹⁶ There is no indication of any personal ties to the state of Michigan behind his enlistment.

Murray was one of almost three hundred men who volunteered for the First Michigan Colored Infantry in December 1863. The mobilization of free Black communities in the North depended on patriotic appeals and organization aided by governors and others. Most frequent among the reasons noted by Black soldiers for fighting in the Union army were emancipation, saving the Union, and fighting for equality, the last in terms of the right to vote, the opportunity to own land, equal treatment before the law, or full citizenship. There are no clear indications in Murray’s letters pointing to any fervent ideological or patriotic impetus for his enlistment. Intensified recruiting efforts in and around Detroit likely helped entice Murray. Perhaps recruiters awakened his patriotism and sense of duty. Perhaps the lure of a soldier’s income proved more promising than a laborer’s job in Detroit. Contextual evidence throughout his letters suggest that Murray enlisted to receive a substantial bounty. Again, there was no clear indication of why he joined the First Michigan Colored specifically. Other enlistment opportunities with bounties were available. Recruiting agents from Rhode Island were in Detroit during the fall of 1863, and they may have offered a higher bounty. Whatever his motivation may have been, Murray enlisted as a private in the First Michigan Colored Infantry Regiment on December 1, 1863, pledging to serve the U.S. Army for three years. He was subsequently assigned to Company E.¹⁷

Henry Barnes, a British-born abolitionist, was the force behind the organization of the First Michigan Colored Infantry. Barnes cofounded the Detroit Tribune newspaper in 1851, and when the Tribune merged with the Detroit Advertiser, he became editor of that Republican-affiliated newspaper. In the spring of 1863, Barnes began a campaign to raise a Michigan Black regiment. He first appealed to Governor Austin Blair for approval and assistance, and