The sergeant, p.15
The Sergeant, page 15
The story began in late June, when their sister regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, arrived on Folly, the Union’s first foothold in the area. They had barely disembarked when they learned the US Army had decided that no Black soldier—whether private, corporal, or sergeant—should be paid more than $7 per month, compared to the $13 it paid the lowliest white private. The army decided that since it was already paying former slaves the $7 rate for cheap labor, there was no reason to treat Black freemen any differently, even if they were serving as soldiers and not mere workers.
Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the Fifty-Fourth’s twenty-five-year-old commander, refused to believe the news, convinced it was a bureaucratic mistake: a nonsensical federal guideline that could not apply to a state militia that had promised Black soldiers would be paid the same as whites. “If this affects Massachusetts regiments, it will be a great piece of injustice,” he wrote. Shaw believed his troops could prove their worth if they were put on the front lines, instead of getting menial chores like building roads or raiding unarmed civilians for food and supplies. “My men are capable of better service…,” he insisted. “Give the black troops a chance to show what stuff they are made of.”
Shaw got his wish not long after the Fifty-Fourth’s arrival at Folly. On July 11, his heavily outnumbered soldiers managed to stave off a Confederate onslaught on nearby James Island, protecting the retreat of an all-white Union regiment that otherwise would have been decimated. Northern newspapers hailed the Fifty-Fourth as “dark-skinned heroes,” but the battle, which cost it twenty-seven dead or missing and eighteen wounded, wasn’t enough to sway the War Department’s policy on paying Black soldiers, so a week later Shaw volunteered his troops for an even riskier assignment: a frontal assault on Fort Wagner.
Fort Wagner was one of the most formidable fortresses on the Confederate coastline, manned by more than a thousand soldiers, with fourteen cannons bristling from its parapets. A ten-foot-wide moat lined its base, bordered by rows of abatis—bundles of sharpened tree branches and palmetto staves lashed together to be as daunting as barbed wire. In the plain beyond the moat were rifle pits manned by Rebel sharpshooters, ready to repel any attackers, and buried in the sand around them were dozens of primitive landmines.
On July 10, just as the Fifty-Fourth was preparing to face the Rebels on James Island, a Union brigade from Folly Island crossed Lighthouse Inlet onto Morris Island, which was then fully in Confederate hands. The attackers easily overpowered the Rebel camp near the banks of the inlet and quickly seized the surrounding dunes, before being halted by the booming guns of Fort Wagner. Early the next morning, cloaked by a thick coastal fog, the Seventh Connecticut Infantry charged across Coffin Land in a quixotic attempt to take the fort. At a great cost of life, they succeeded in seizing several rifle pits, but they came under so much fire they were forced to retreat before reaching the fort. By the end of the battle, 216 Union soldiers were killed or missing and 123 were wounded, compared to just 12 Confederate casualties.
That did not stop the Union high command from planning a similar assault a week later, using the same tactics over the same territory. Although the Fifty-Fourth had barely recovered from its fight on James Island, Shaw volunteered to spearhead the charge. He and his officers knew this could be a suicide mission, since little had been done to clear away the barriers that had impeded the Seventh Connecticut. They would be cut to shreds as they paved the way for other troops behind them, which did not displease some of the officers of the white regiments. “Put those damned niggers from Massachusetts in the advance,” Gen. Truman Seymour, in charge of the assault, reportedly said. “We may as well get rid of them one way or another.”
Looking dapper with his thin goatee and jaunty mustache, Colonel Shaw did his best to inspire the troops. “I want you to prove yourselves men,” he told them on July 18. “The eyes of thousands will look upon this night’s work.” And then, as evening fell, he and his men surged forward. “Wagner became a round of fire, from which poured a stream of shot and shell…,” wrote Captain Luis Emilio, who helped lead the charge. “As officers sprang to the fore with waving swords barely seen in the darkness, the men closed the gaps, and with set jaws, panting breath and bowed heads charged on.” The Fifty-Fourth did far better than the previous attackers. The vanguard managed to climb to the top of the fort’s walls, where they engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the defenders. Under heavy fire, however, they were driven back, with 106 killed or presumed dead (with Shaw among the deceased) and 164 wounded or captured, totaling more than a quarter of the regiment. “Men fell all around me,” wrote Sgt. Lewis Douglass, son of Frederick Douglass. “A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet; our men would close up again, but it was no use. We had to retreat.” And that is why the Fifty-Fifth had been called in so abruptly from North Carolina, to bolster the next attack on the fort.
The news left the men on the Recruit in a somber mood. Many had acquaintances or relatives in the Fifty-Fourth, and now they were within sight of the battlefield where so many had lost their lives and within earshot of the cannons that had killed them. Soon they would be under fire from those same guns. Although few were churchgoers, they gathered on deck the next evening to sing somber hymns. “Each breeze that swells the ocean brings tidings from afar; of nations in commotion, prepared for Zion’s war.” “Death with its arrows may soon lay us low; safe in our Savior, we fear not the blow.”
And there was one more bit of news for the men on the Recruit: Even though the Fifty-Fourth’s attack on Fort Wagner had won praise from the Union high command, it did not change the War Department’s policy on paying Black soldiers. On August 5, a Union Army paymaster showed up at the Fifty-Fourth’s camp, offering the men $7 per month, far less than many had made in civilian life. Rather than take the money, implicitly agreeing they were worth less than their white counterparts, they decided to take no pay at all until the army recognized them as equals. It was the beginning of a dispute that would ensnare both the Fifty-Fourth and the Fifty-Fifth over the next year, eventually bringing both regiments to the brink of mutiny.
As word of the $7 pay rippled through the Recruit, it only confirmed rumors that had been circulating since before the Fifty-Fifth left Boston. For Sergeant Said, who had been drawn to the United States because of its democratic ideals, this was only his latest disappointment. To many of the soldiers, it must have seemed that the true folly of Folly Island was the idea that they could earn equal treatment simply by performing better than their white peers. Instead, it would take protest, struggle and sacrifice—and not all of them would live to see the results.
For three days, the Recruit lay at anchor offshore, bobbing in the waves as it waited for a towboat from Folly. At all hours, the sound of Fort Wagner’s guns echoed through the decks, with bombardments that lit up the night sky like fireworks. It was not until August 10 that the steam-driven towboat Escort finally guided the Recruit through Lighthouse Inlet. Even with the Escort’s help, the Recruit scraped against the bottom several times before getting to the recently constructed wharf on Folly’s inland shore. By the time it docked, the men were so eager to step foot on solid ground that many tripped over themselves running down the gangplank, and even when they landed face-first against the boards, they made no complaint, but hurriedly brushed themselves off and ran to shore.
14 Land Crabs and the Swamp Angel
Folly Island was one of the largest Union camps along the Southern coast. Two earthen ridges ran through the island, and between those ridges was a long, thickly wooded gulch, known as a “folly” to the Elizabethan settlers who put its name on the map. Plagued by insects, bereft of clean water, and with few resources other than its impassable tangle of palmettos, ferns, pines, oaks, and underbrush, it had been largely uninhabited for the past two centuries. When the Civil War began, its only resident was a beachcomber who salvaged items that washed ashore from shipwrecks and sold them to collectors from Charleston, nine miles away.
War changed Folly. In April 1863, the Union Army seized the island as a staging ground to attack the Confederate forces protecting Charleston. Within weeks, more than 10,000 Union troops were based there, pitching tents along the beaches and astride the dunes, digging trenches, drilling wells, chopping trees, and building wharves, warehouses, and fortifications. After taking over the beachcomber’s abandoned two-story home to use as their headquarters, they marched along the shore and swam and fished in the surrounding waters, watching out for sharks on the Atlantic side and alligators in the swampy Folly River to the west.
Despite the pleasant tropical surroundings, life on Folly had major drawbacks. The sulfurous drinking water, dredged from beneath the sand, had to be mixed with molasses to be drinkable, and even then it was teeming with microbes that caused dysentery and chronic diarrhea, either of which could be deadlier than a Rebel bullet. Mosquitoes carried malaria into the camp; rats haunted the food supplies; and tiny sand fleas, which bit so viciously that later generations nicknamed them “flying teeth,” swarmed through the camp at sundown and sunset. Coastal breezes, which provided relief from the midsummer sun and helped chase the bugs away, also kicked up sandstorms so fierce that the soldiers referred to them as “Carolina blizzards,” blowing sand into their eyes, mouths, food, and belongings. To top it all, the island was flanked to the north and west by Rebels. There were too many Yankees on Folly for the Rebels to try an all-out assault, but they lay hidden in the surrounding woods and marshes, shooting at sentries and capturing soldiers who strayed too far from Union lines.
“Folly Island! Yes, many a time our commander cursed the folly [that brought him there],” read an 1888 novel partly set in the Union camp. Long gone were the days that “folly” could refer to a pocket of dense foliage. Instead, dictionaries now defined it solely as “a foolish act,” “want of good sense,” and “derangement of mind.” To the Union soldiers stationed there, the name seemed all too appropriate.
It was early in the afternoon of August 10, 1863, when the transport ship Recruit began disgorging the soldiers of the Fifty-Fifth onto Folly, but it took until sunset for all the men to disembark and unload, and it was nearly dark when they pitched their tents around a grove of evergreens and palmettos near Lighthouse Inlet, directly opposite Coffin Land. Despite swarms of insects and wind-borne clouds of sand, it was one of the pleasantest sites on the island. “At high tide, the ocean rolls across the beach within a hundred feet of our tents, and every breeze from the sea serves to send a cooling breath through our camp,” wrote Major Fox. Although the men were still abuzz about the Fifty-Fourth’s suicide charge and the treacherous way the army had cut their pay, they were ready for action. “[We] are desirous of making a bold dash upon the enemy,” wrote Sgt. Isaiah Welch. “I pray God the time will come soon when we, as soldiers of our God, and of our race and country, may face the enemy with boldness.”
Early the next morning, Lt. Dennis Jones, who still headed Company I due to Captain Gordon’s continuing illness, assigned the men to various work details—chopping timber, digging trenches, filling sandbags, unloading munitions, hauling cannons—precisely the kind of backbreaking fatigue work the Fifty-Fourth’s commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, had feared lay in store for Black troops. Ironically, Shaw’s defeat at Fort Wagner was one reason all the Union troops on Folly and Morris islands—Black and white—were now being assigned to fatigue duties. Shaw’s loss showed that a direct charge against the fort would likely fail, so the army shifted its focus to two laborious construction projects: building trenches across Coffin Land and taking the war directly to the streets of Charleston.
Downtown Charleston lay six miles west of the Union lines on Morris Island, but it was protected by its surrounding bay as well as a no-man’s land of impassable swamps ringed by an array of Rebel forts. Since a frontal assault against those defenses was impossible, the only way to attack the city was through bombardment, but no cannon could shoot that far. The best option was a twelve-foot long, eight-ton Parrott gun with a five-mile range, but that would still be a mile short of the city. To do any damage, the cannon would have to be fired from the middle of a swamp that fringed the northwestern edge of Coffin Land, but there was no solid land to support such a weapon. Instead there was a fifteen-foot-deep mass of syrupy mud so liquid that any heavy weight would quickly sink beneath its surface.
To overcome that obstacle, Sergeant Said and his fellow soldiers were put on a round-the-clock schedule of hard labor: chopping down pine and oak trees from Folly’s inner jungle, sawing the logs into planks and posts, hauling the wood and other supplies to Morris Island, and stuffing thousands of burlap bags with sand. In the latter job, each soldier was expected to fill thirty bags with eighty-five pounds of sand apiece, totaling more than a ton of sand per two-hour shift. Making matters worse, “the weather was excessively hot, and flies and sand-fleas tormenting,” wrote Capt. Luis Emilio of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. “Only sea-bathing and cooler nights made living endurable.”
But the nights were full of hard labor as well. At night, the soldiers created a wooden walkway that extended a mile into the swamp, working under cover of darkness, since they were within range of Confederate cannons. And that was tricky, since in the dark it was hard to distinguish between the walkway and the surrounding marsh, especially during high tide, when water washed over the walkway. “You can imagine what an easy thing it was to walk on a single plank in a dark night, said plank being slimy and slippery and three or four inches underwater,” wrote Lt. Charles Bowditch.
At the end of the walkway, hidden by tall reeds, teams of soldiers built a fifty-foot-square wooden frame, lined by tall wooden posts driven through the mud into the sandy floor below. Normally, the army would have used a mechanical pile driver to hammer the posts down, but that would have attracted too much attention from Rebel gunners, so instead the men used their own weight, attaching a long wooden lever to each post and then using teams of fifteen men on each side to alternately push and pull on the lever as if it were a seesaw. More than 120 posts were driven into the floor of the swamp that way.
Once the enclosure was complete, the men hauled more than 13,000 sandbags a mile and a half to a stream at the edge of the swamp, where they were loaded onto rowboats that took them to the construction site. There, the bags were sunk between the posts to provide a firm foundation so a wooden platform could be placed on top, sturdy enough to hold an eight-ton cannon, protected by a wall of other sandbags. During the two weeks it took to build this so-called Marsh Battery, it swallowed up 812 tons of sandbags.
This could not have been how Sergeant Said envisioned his role as a soldier: shoveling, bagging, chopping, hauling, without firing a single shot at the enemy. The chores were so relentless that the engineers in charge of the project recommended that soldiers spend just eight hours on such tasks, followed by twenty-four hours off, but the men of the Fifty-Fifth worked as much as twenty-four out of forty-eight hours. In Company I, at least, their mood was buoyed by Lieutenant Jones, who labored wholeheartedly by their side. Major Fox later wrote that Jones’s diary “shows how constant and severe a service he [not to mention his men] was subjected to, in the trenches and on picket and guard; but not a word appears reflecting the slightest degree of discontent or discouragement, but a spirit of cheerfulness, and of willing devotion to his duty.” Unlike Jones, however, the soldiers were dogged by the knowledge that the army viewed them as inferiors, unfit to be commissioned officers and worth little more than half the pay of the lowliest white private. “Our debasement is most complete,” wrote a soldier using the pen name Bay State, most likely Said’s immediate superior, first sergeant Peter Laws. “No chances for promotion, no money for our families, and we [are] little better than an armed band of laborers with rusty muskets and bright spades.”
Initially, the Black soldiers were taunted by the white troops. “If I had my will of the goddamn nigger troops, I would drown every one,” said one lieutenant in an all-white regiment. But as soldiers of both races worked beside each other, laboring on the same tasks, working toward the same goal, many of those frictions withered away. “When we first landed on this island, we were liable to be insulted by any of the white soldiers,” wrote Sgt. Richard W. White of the Fifty-Fifth. “But thank God, that is about played out, and they have come to see that they are bound to treat us as men and soldiers, fighting for the same common cause.”
Unfortunately, higher-ranking officers didn’t necessarily see things that way, including General Israel Vogdes, the burly commander of all Union forces on Folly and Morris. Vogdes, described by Lt. Charles Bowditch as “a queer sort of man, very ready with his oaths and very strict in discipline,” viewed the Black troops as something less than soldiers. During a prisoner exchange after the battle at Fort Wagner, for example, he won the release of all 105 white captives but did not say a word about the 14 Black men being held. “No reference having been made in the agreement to the negro prisoners…, none of them were included in the exchange,” Confederate general Roswell S. Ripley wrote. Five would die in prison, with the rest remaining in captivity until the final weeks of the war.
