The sergeant, p.13
The Sergeant, page 13
Detroit’s white citizens were divided about Lincoln’s proclamation. Fifty-two percent had voted for Lincoln in 1860 and likely backed his War Against the Slaveholders, as Reverend Duffield called it. But that meant nearly half the white voters in Detroit had at least a little sympathy for the South. Although most of them opposed secession, few wanted to see the slaves immediately set free, let alone armed. Abolitionists called them Copperheads, after a poisonous breed of Southern snakes, but the Copperheads happily adopted the name, insisting it referred to the head of Lady Liberty engraved on copper pennies. Detroit’s Copperheads included prominent businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, but most came from the underclass: German and Irish immigrants resentful that the government seemed more concerned with freeing slaves than with their own struggles; factory and railway workers who feared that if slaves were freed, they would move north to take their jobs; and youths worried that Lincoln would draft them to fight in what some called “the Niggers’ War.” Stoking those fears was the Detroit Free Press, one of the North’s most blatantly racist newspapers.
The Free Press warned that once President Lincoln’s “sable pets” were freed, “they will swarm upon us like the locusts of Egypt, devouring the whole land.” White people would “cower in sullen gloom in [their] cold homes, surrounded by ill-clad and ill-fed wives and children, for want of work, [while] the plantation niggers must have the fat of the land…. The legislative halls, the bench, the jury box, all official positions will be open to the nigger…. As the government is now conducted entirely for their benefit, they may demand what they please.”
With the Free Press fanning the flames, racial tensions grew in the Third Ward. “We hear of frequent assaults being made upon colored people, particularly on Sunday nights, when they are going to and from their places of worship,” reported the abolitionist Detroit Advertiser and Tribune. The tensions came to a boil two months after the Emancipation Proclamation, after two young girls told police a horrific tale. On February 26, 1863, a nine-year-old white girl named Mary Brown and a slightly older mixed-race friend, Ellen Hoover, said they had been walking to the post office when they asked saloonkeeper Thomas Faulkner if they could warm their feet at his then-empty bar. Faulkner agreed and led Mary to a back room, where he locked the door and raped her as Ellen waited outside. (That, at least, was their first version of the incident. Two days later, Ellen said she witnessed the rape; the next day, she said she was raped as well; and later that week she claimed nothing happened to her and she did not see Faulkner abuse Mary.)
Faulkner, who was immediately arrested, completely denied the charges, saying that the only two times he had ever seen Mary Brown, he had shooed her away from the saloon and told her never to come again. Despite his protestations, the heinous nature of the crime gripped the city, with the Free Press portraying it as a vile racial assault. Faulkner was of mixed heritage: English, Spanish, and Native American, with perhaps a small trace of African, but perhaps not. He was deemed white enough to vote, a loyal Democrat at a time it was billing itself as the White Man’s Party, and he refused to serve Black people at his saloon. “If I thought I had one drop of colored blood in my veins, I’d let it out, if I could,” he said. For Copperheads, however, the off chance that there was one drop of blood was enough to outweigh all the rest.
“Horrible Outrage: A Negro Entraps Little Girl into His Room and Commits a Fiendish Crime upon Her Person,” a Free Press headline screamed, calling Faulkner a “black fiend” while conceding (deep down in the story) that he was “not very dark skinned, and would pass, if not scrutinized carefully, as a white man.” Mary’s friend Ellen faded into the background while the Free Press focused on the “innocent” white girl and the “depraved” Black man: “Every instinct of humanity cries out for vengeance…. The evidence of the Negro’s guilt is overwhelming and cannot be controverted. The only thing to be regretted is that there is no law sufficiently severe to punish him.”
Faulkner’s trial began March 5, just a week after his arrest. Hundreds of spectators jammed into the city hall courtroom, spilling into the building’s marble hallways and filling the Campus Martius Plaza outside. They were just three blocks from the Select Colored School, where Nicholas Said was teaching his students how to conjugate French verbs. Mary Brown was among the first to testify. Despite discrepancies in her story, she drew nothing but sympathy from the crowd. (“It could not, of course, be expected that a mere child… would be as precise in all her statements as a person of maturity,” the Free Press explained.) The crowd intimidated witnesses from speaking on Faulkner’s behalf. When Ellen Hoover’s mother testified that she doubted her daughter’s story, the spectators booed. When the defense team presented evidence that the rape could not have happened how Mary described it, the spectators became so angry bailiffs had to restrain them. And when Faulkner and his lawyers led the jury on a field trip to his saloon, to demonstrate flaws in Mary’s account, a jeering mob surrounded them, calling for Faulkner’s death. One spectator broke through police lines to smash a huge stone against Faulkner’s head, driving him to the ground unconscious.
As the trial began its second day, the mob became increasingly violent. Any Black people who ventured near city hall “were subjected to kicks, cuffs, and blows, and were liable to be butchered on the streets,” according to the Free Press. “Even women and children were not exempt, several of them being abused in a most shameful and outrageous manner.” As Nicholas Said led his students through their lessons at the Select Colored School, chants of “Kill the nigger” filled the air near city hall and echoed down the surrounding streets.
When the trial ended at 2:00 P.M., it took the jury only five minutes to find Faulkner guilty, and it took the judge not much more time to sentence him to life in prison. But the mob wanted blood. Fearing a lynching, authorities dispatched seventy-five soldiers from the Detroit Provost Guard to escort Faulkner to the jailhouse, three blocks away. As they left city hall, a mob surged forward, pelting them with stones and clubs. The soldiers tried prodding them back with bayonets, but that did little good, so they fired blanks into the air as warning shots. When the crowd kept advancing, the soldiers fired live ammunition over their heads, but one bullet struck an onlooker in the chest, killing him instantly.
A wild pandemonium now swept through the mob. Backing away from the Provost Guards, the mob surged down Beaubien Street into the Third Ward, screaming “Kill the niggers! Kill all the damned niggers!” A few carried knives and pistols, while others grabbed whatever weapons they could find: stones, bricks, tree branches, fence staves. “I could see… innocent men, women and children, all without respect to age or sex, being pounded in the most brutal manner…,” said Thomas Buckner, a Black man who owned a boarding house on Beaubien. “It seemed as if Satan was loose, and his children were free to do whatever he might direct without fear of the city authority.”
Richard Evans, aged seventy-nine, was at home with his wife when rioters broke down their door. As Evans tried to keep them out, one rioter shot him in the face, ripping the skin off one of his cheeks, leaving a bloody stretch of bone. “Are you satisfied now?” Evans moaned as the rioters ransacked his house, taking whatever money and goods they could carry.
Benjamin Singleton, a nearly blind garbage collector, was in his parlor when the mob set fire to his house, blocking the front door to keep him inside. Fortunately, some friendly white neighbors broke through his back fence to guide him to safety. Angered by his escape, the rioters decided to take revenge on his horse, which was tethered outside. They were about to slit its throat when one of Singleton’s white neighbors saved its life by falsely declaring it was his.
Ephraim Clark, an eighty-year-old ex-slave who had accompanied US troops during the War of 1812, was knocked to the ground and beaten as he tried to keep the mob from burning down the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he served as sexton. He was saved by Irish-born Constable Dennis Sullivan, who dragged him to the steps of the church and then stood over him, pistol in hand, threatening to kill any rioter who tried to torch the building.
At a Black-owned barrel factory two blocks from the Select Colored School, the workers quickly barricaded the doors to keep the rioters out, so the mob set fire to the building and severely beat anyone who tried to flee. Joshua Boyd, “a very industrious, peaceable person” who was saving money to buy freedom for relatives enslaved in Virginia, was on fire when he escaped the burning building and was then kicked and beaten so severely by the mob that he was in a coma when Constable Sullivan dragged him to safety. He never regained consciousness. His face had been beaten into jelly, his eyes were missing, his nose was broken, and his leg was burned half an inch deep.
At the Select Colored School, Nicholas Said and his fellow teachers had not yet finished their afternoon sessions when the riot began, but as soon as they realized the danger they were in, they apparently declared the school day over and ushered their students onto the street, where they had to run to escape the mob. It was the only sensible choice. At a garment shop a couple of doors down from the school, tailor Lewis Pierce tried to stand up against the mob, but he was brutally clubbed as the rioters set fire to his store, and the flames spread so rapidly that the Select Colored School was soon ablaze as well. Over the next four hours, at least three dozen buildings burned to the ground, with rioters attacking firefighters who tried to quench the blazes.
It would later turn out that Thomas Faulkner was innocent. Doubts about his accusers began growing just two months after the trial, when they were arrested for theft and spent their time in jail bawdily taunting the police. The Free Press, which had extolled them as innocent flowers in the Faulkner case, now labeled them “hardened and depraved creatures.” Over the next decade, Mary Brown would be repeatedly jailed on such charges as theft and pickpocketing (in a church, no less). Then, in 1869, she and Ellen Hoover confessed they had lied about being raped, making up the story to avoid being punished for not doing their chores. Faulkner was released from jail, but his business was gone and he was bankrupt, although local businessmen helped him regain his footing. The Free Press never apologized for stirring up sentiment against him, but once it was clear that he was innocent, it did stop referring to him as a Black man.
In the wake of the riot, the Third Ward spent several days under martial law, patrolled by the state militia as well as a police force bolstered by officers pulled in from nearby towns. Unfortunately, some peacekeepers were little better than the rioters. Several devoted their time to harassing Black people who walked on the sidewalk instead of shifting to the gutter when white people walked past. One was arrested for entering a Black couple’s home, “insulting” the woman of the house (often used as a Victorian codeword for making unwanted sexual advances), and attacking her husband when he tried to defend her. Another was arrested for “insulting” Black women on the street. And in one neighborhood, soldiers joined with white civilians to form a vigilante group that “seemed posed to create a disturbance” before the police arrived and ordered them to disband.
In the Third Ward, it was a time for rebuilding. Reverend Duffield’s son George Jr., who had achieved nationwide fame for his hymn, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” took the lead in raising money for the Select Colored School. “He deemed it an honor to represent the school, [which] had suffered by the late riot in Detroit,” said one news story. “He spoke with much feeling and emotion of the violence done at the time.”
With the school in ruins, Nicholas Said’s work as a teacher was likely limited to tutoring sessions in his students’ homes, but it was around then that recruiters arrived in Detroit, hoping to enlist men into the North’s first all-Black regiment. By that time, the army was already enlisting freed slaves in the South, but the only Northern state willing to recruit Black soldiers was Massachusetts. Yet Massachusetts only had around two thousand Black males of military age, and not all of them could join the army because of height and health restrictions, making it hard to fill a thousand-man regiment. To bolster the ranks, Massachusetts sent recruiters to Black communities throughout the Union, offering them their first chance to get into the fight.
When the recruiters came to Detroit, the Second Baptist Church held a late night “war meeting” to decide how to respond. John Richards was leery, especially since the army said no Black soldier could be promoted higher than sergeant major. “Why would I leave the home of my wife and five children to fight for $13 a month [a private’s salary], unless old Abe removes the obstacle from us becoming officers?” he asked. The pay was less than most menial jobs in civilian life, but it wasn’t the money that bothered him. It was the lack of respect. “Hold on a little longer,” he advised. “The Rebels are whipping the federal soldiers as hard as they can. It will be but a short time before it will be necessary for the federals to call upon us for help. Then the president will have to make us equals, and we can fight with the consciousness that it is for our own freedom that we’re struggling.”
But business leader George de Baptiste, whose son John had already gone to Massachusetts to enlist, strongly promoted the recruiting efforts. “Anyone who doesn’t join the Massachusetts brigade is worse than a Copperhead,” he said.
That spring, more than two hundred Black men left Michigan to enlist in Massachusetts, although only seventy-seven managed to pass the army’s height and health requirements. By mid-May, Massachusetts had filled all the spaces in its first all-Black unit, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, but there was so much interest that it launched a second one: the Fifty-Fifth.
By then, only three and a half years had passed since Nicholas Said had first stepped foot in the United States. During that time, he had faced discrimination in New York, witnessed the prejudices of a former US president, survived a bloody pogrom in Detroit, and been relegated to work as a scullion because the military did not care for his complexion. It would be easy to understand if he had been wary about once again trying to enlist in the army of such a nation. But he knew that no matter how much the Union was shackled by its own prejudices, the Confederacy was even worse, committed to the idea of expanding slavery to the western half of the country to ensure white supremacy.
In early June, he went to the Great Western Railways depot on the Detroit waterfront to start his eight-hundred-mile journey to Boston. It had been more than a decade since he had boarded his first train, riding from Alexandria to Cairo during his pilgrimage to Mecca. Now he was on a different kind of pilgrimage, to the front lines in the war against slavery.
12 Boot Camp
Nicholas Said likely sat alone for the first leg of his journey, as the farms, villages, and forests of southern Michigan rolled past the windows of his train car. His first major stop came at Toledo, Ohio, where he transferred onto an eastbound train carrying at least ten recruits bound for Boston, including Zack Breckenridge, a sharp-tongued barber from Indiana, and Benjamin Butler, a teenaged farmhand who viewed the war in religious terms and was given to saying things like “God moves in a mysterious way.” More than a dozen other recruits boarded the train as it skirted the southern shores of Lake Erie, so by the time they left Ohio they had filled up more than half their train car.
When the train pulled into the depot at Buffalo, New York, the recruits all had to disembark to be examined by a surgeon the army had hired to make sure they were fit for military service, which meant running a gauntlet of glares from local citizens. Like Detroit, nearly half of Buffalo leaned toward the Copperheads, who were not happy about putting weapons into the hands of Black troops. “These colored volunteers are arriving at our depot daily…,” wrote a Copperhead-leaning writer. “Upon arrival here, these ebony ‘levies’ undergo a strict examination at the hands of a surgeon, and all who do not come up to the strict military standard are rejected as worthless. Whether the surgeon is black or white we are unable to state, as we cannot—owing to obvious reasons—get near enough to find out—one of our senses revolting.”
Nevertheless, newspapers knew a good story when they saw it, so when the Buffalo Express discovered that the latest batch of recruits included a native African, it ran with the story: “He is a native of one of the interior provinces of Ethiopia, and has a physiognomy, to speak in the most complimentary terms, closely resembling that of the baboon. He managed to make his way from the centre of Africa to the coast without losing his liberty, and shipping on a vessel, went to Europe, where he resided some years, and then came to this country. He speaks five European languages fluently, and possesses far more than ordinary ability.”
Besides being riddled with errors, the story pandered to the racial prejudices of the day by comparing Said to a baboon. He would later be called “tall, dark and handsome,” “intelligent looking,” “as straight as an arrow,” with “classical” features. Unfortunately, such stories often had long lives, with other newspapers reprinting them weeks or months later, which is how the tale of the Ethiopian baboon eventually trailed Said to Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, Said and his fellow recruits continued on to Camp Meigs in Readsville, nine miles west of Boston. Located on a broad plain along the Neponset River, Camp Meigs was the biggest army training center in Massachusetts, fit for five thousand troops and a thousand war horses. There were forty barracks in the center of camp, but the Fifty-Fifth was assigned to ten barracks on the secluded western fringe, separated from the main cluster by three marshy ponds and the tracks of the Boston & Providence Railroad.
After being issued uniforms, Said and the other new recruits were led to a pond, where they were ordered to strip naked and bathe, hopefully without creating too much of a show for any trains passing by, since passengers sometimes complained. As the recruits bathed, their civilian clothes were tossed onto a bonfire, symbolically spelling an end to their previous lives, although the civvies of white troops were typically stored in barrels until the end of the war. “The transformation was quite wonderful,” wrote the commanding officer, Colonel Norwood Hallowell, who ordered the burning. “The recruit was much pleased with the uniform. He straightened up, grew inches taller, lifted, not shuffled, his feet, [and] began at once to try, and to try hard, to take the position of a soldier.”
