The sergeant, p.22
The Sergeant, page 22
In February 1864, Sherman moved into South Carolina. As he pushed inland toward the state capital in Columbia, the Fifty-Fifth was assigned to pin down the Confederate forces around Charleston so they wouldn’t try to block his advance. On February 9, the Fifty-Fifth seized many of the Rebel earthworks on James Island, retaking the ground they had won and then lost the previous July. Ten days later, they moved into Christ Church Parish, northeast of Charleston, only to find that the Rebels had evacuated the area to face Sherman, withdrawing so quickly they left cannons and ammunition behind. Without any opposition, the Fifty-Fifth made its way to Mt. Pleasant, a small port on Charleston Bay, where they were warmly greeted by local slaves, suddenly freed from bondage. “The few white inhabitants left in the town were either alarmed or indignant, and generally remained in their houses; but the colored people turned out en masse,” Lieutenant Colonel Fox wrote. The biggest prize stood less than three miles across the bay from Mt. Pleasant’s waterfront: the city of Charleston, the so-called Capital of Slavery and Cradle of the Rebellion.
Although Charleston had once been one of the busiest ports on the Atlantic, four years of war had left much of the city in ruins. In December 1861, a fire had roared through the middle of the city, destroying more than six hundred buildings and leaving little behind but blackened chimneys and crumbling brick walls. The fire had been caused by an industrial accident rather than war, but the war prolonged its impact, leaving the city with little manpower or money for rebuilding. Since then, the lower part of the city had been blasted by Union bombardments, starting with the Swamp Angel and continuing with cannonades from the warships in the harbor. More recently, retreating Rebels had added to the destruction, torching warehouses to keep them from falling into enemy hands. Unfortunately, one fire touched off explosives that sent flames and shrapnel into surrounding buildings, killing more than a hundred civilians. The fires had barely been extinguished when the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts arrived on February 21, 1865.
The Fifty-Fifth was not the first Union regiment in Charleston. That honor went to the Twenty-Sixth US Colored Troops, made up of former South Carolina slaves. But it was still a thrill when the Fifty-Fifth was ferried into the city, stepping onto docks that had once handled 40 percent of the slave traffic coming into the United States. After four years of blockades and bombardments, the waterfront was in a state of eerie deterioration. “Its timbers [were] rotting, its planks decayed, its sheds tumbling in and reeling earthward,” wrote a Northern journalist. “The slips, once crowded with steam and sailing vessels, were now vacant, except [for] an old sloop with a worm-eaten gunwale, tattered sails, and rigging hanging in shreds.” After assembling into formation, the Fifty-Fifth marched forward, with Nicholas Said and the rest of the hospital crew seated in ambulance wagons toward the rear of the column.
As the wagons rumbled through the streets, there were scenes of destruction that could well have reminded Nicholas Said of the devastation he had seen as a teenager in jihad-ravaged Katsina. But here, the sound of jubilation filled the air—not coming from the defeated white citizenry, of course, but from their now-liberated slaves. “Such enthusiasms as were then and there manifested I never witnessed in my life before…,” wrote 1st Sgt. Peter Laws. “They jumped, shouted, bawled, danced, sang, swore, and prayed, apparently at the same time and in one breath.” Lieutenant Colonel Fox wrote that as the former slaves crowded to shake hands with men and officers, the white population remained within their houses, “but curiosity led even them to peep through the blinds at the ‘black Yankees.’ On through the streets of the rebel city passed the column, on through the chief seat of that slave power, tottering to its fall. Its walls rung to the chorus of manly voices singing ‘John Brown,’ ‘Babylon is Falling,’ and the ‘Battle Cry of Freedom.’… The glory and the triumph of this hour may be imagined, but can never be described. It was one of those occasions which happen but once in a lifetime, to be lived over in memory forever.”
Even though the city had fallen, however, much of the state remained in Rebel hands. Over the next three months, the Fifty-Fifth roamed the countryside, destroying Confederate supply lines and sweeping away the remaining defenders, with a special focus on the Home Guard, a militia group that had a reputation for killing newly freed slaves. After several unsuccessful attempts to draw the Home Guard into battle, the Fifty-Fifth burned down the plantation home of one of its officers and warned that unless the killings stopped, they would destroy every mansion they came across.
As the campaign continued, the Fifty-Fifth attracted an ever-growing crowd of ex-slaves who glommed onto it for protection. By mid-April, there were two thousand refugees—twice the size of the regiment itself—in a trail of wagons nearly a mile long. “Almost every wagon was filled to overflowing with women and children…,” Fox wrote. “Women and men walked hour after hour beside the teams, toting heavy bundles on their heads, and children of fourteen did the same, or carried children younger than themselves; and yet when, at the close of the day’s march, the camping-ground was reached, and the fires lighted, all the fatigue and hurry and vexation of the day seemed to be forgotten, and all were merry and happy together.” Soon Dr. Wilder was including the refugee camp in his medical rounds, prescribing army-provided medications to the ill (“I was careful not to hurt them with too much medicine”), presumably with Nicholas Said assisting him.
At midnight on April 13, the Fifty-Fifth was encamped in the village of Rikersville, four miles north of Charleston, when a messenger rode into camp with news that Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Appomattox. “Officers and men rushed wildly out in anything but regulation dress, and cheer after cheer was heard as the news passed from company to company,” Fox later recalled. Dr. Wilder wrote that “we did not know whether to laugh or cry. The joyful news was communicated with the soldiers and through them to the colored refugees…. Surely the war must be over soon.” Under the light of a nearly full moon, the regimental band played patriotic tunes as the refugees in the adjoining camp joined the festivities. For the first time since they left Massachusetts, the men of the Fifty-Fifth could party in wild abandon with a stunning variety of women, in work clothes of gingham and calico or the more gentrified uniforms of house slaves, with their hair in cornrows or braids or pulled back by bandannas or piled into buns. With the regimental band joined by fiddlers, flutists, and drummers from the refugee camp, the dancing lasted to the wee hours of the morning. By that time, Nicholas Said was falling in love.
In his memoirs, Said never mentioned the name of any of his paramours and, except for his brief fling in Austria, never even acknowledged their existence, but it was clear to his friends that by the end of his brief stay in Rikersville, he had become entranced. “Alas for his plans of service to his countrymen in his native land!” wrote Fox. “Like many a warrior before him, he fell captive to woman.” On May 13, just a month after the victory dance, Said asked Dr. Wilder for a couple of days of leave to go to Charleston and marry the woman, and on June 7, he was granted a thirty-day furlough for a honeymoon.
It’s hard to know whether this was an actual marriage or just a wartime fling, but it was not legally binding. Before the war, marriages between slaves were sometimes tolerated by slaveholders, but they had no legal status, since an oath to stay together “as long as you both shall live” would have been an obstacle to selling spouses separately on the auction block. Even after the slaves were liberated, South Carolina had no legal structure to formalize their marriages, and it was not until 1866 that marriages involving ex-slaves began to be formally recognized. Regardless of the laws, many slaves maintained lifetime relationships with their spouses, but after two hundred years of informal marriages that could be broken up at a slaveholder’s whim, some took the ceremony more lightly. Said’s marriage seems to have lasted less than two years and may not have even survived the honeymoon. Even though he was granted a month-long marital leave, he was back at his post in less than twenty days, helping Dr. Wilder complete his last major task of the war: measuring the size and strength of his fellow soldiers.
In July 1864, the US Sanitary Commission, founded to help sick and wounded Union soldiers, sent Wilder and fifteen other military surgeons crates of equipment to conduct thorough anatomical examinations of the troops. For nine months, Wilder didn’t open the crates, since it was hard to conduct that type of research while the war was raging. Now that peace was in the air, he could finally do the work and he had a perfect setting for it. Shortly after the raucous celebration in Rikersville, the Fifty-Fifth moved to Crescent Farm, an idyllic hilltop plantation directly across the Ashley River from downtown Charleston. The plantation house was more modest than most, but it was still large enough to be used as a headquarters for the Fifty-Fifth, with room for a medical office staffed by Doctors Brown and Wilder.
Starting at 7:00 each morning, Brown conducted a sick call of the soldiers tenting on Crescent Farm, while Wilder rode out for sick call at two outlying outposts, with Nicholas Said taking notes by his side. Once sick call was over, Wilder and Said devoted the rest of their day to the Sanitary Commission project. In the plantation house’s unvarnished basement, they set up an examination room, covering the earthen floor with slats meant for window shutters and hanging drapes to give the men privacy, since they were asked to strip naked to be measured properly.
Besides being Wilder’s aide on the project, Said was also his first subject. Using a seven-foot-tall contraption called the andrometer, or “man-measurer,” Wilder measured Said’s height, chest, shoulders, waist, and hips, as well as more obscure areas, such as the length between his nipples. Wilder used a dynamometer to see how much weight Said could lift, a spirometer to quantify how much air flowed through his lungs, and a pyramidical “facial angle” to measure the positioning of his nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, chin, and cheekbones. Then there were tests for color blindness, tooth decay, and nearsightedness, among other things.
The Sanitary Commission provided two sets of questionnaires for the survey: one for white soldiers, the other for Black soldiers. Although most questions were identical, there were a few major differences. White soldiers were asked for their ethnic background (“English, Irish, French, etc.”), while Black soldiers were categorized as “full-Black, half-Black, quarter-Black, or eighth-Black,” often based solely on the guesstimate of the white examiners. While white soldiers were asked for their educational background (“limited common school, good common school, high school, or professional”), it was left to the examiners to decide whether the “culture or intelligence” of a Black soldier seemed “very low, low, average, or quick” compared to an average white private.
Unlike many of his peers in the medical corps, Wilder firmly believed that intelligence was not determined by race. He felt some sergeants in the Fifty-Fifth were “superior in all respects to many white officers that I have seen” and was particularly impressed with Nicholas Said, who he felt was “very philosophical in his mind and interested in unusual things, religious problems, etc.” Indeed, as the two men worked on the Sanitary Commission project, they stumbled into a conversation on religion that vastly altered Said’s outlook on the world.
The conversation started randomly, when one of them mentioned the story of Adam and Eve. To Said, the idea of a talking serpent in the Garden of Eden seemed bizarre, while to Wilder, the entire story was no more than an allegory, since he firmly believed in Charles Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution. In fact, not long after the war ended, Wilder struck up a correspondence with Darwin, who mentioned one of his research projects in The Descent of Man and helped publicize a separate project in England’s Nature magazine.
The discussion of the creation story gave way to a wide-ranging conversation about religion. Wilder viewed traditional Christianity with the same disdain that Said held toward fundamentalist Islam. “Why… did we, the peaceable, religious youths of the ’60s, enter the army as a matter of course?” he asked. “Largely because we were religious. Because at church and in our homes we had listened to the Old Testament narratives of wars as if inseparable from human history… I hope to live to see the Bible expurgated of such [warlike passages] and other unedifying matter…. We have no right to assume that over human battles [God] exercises more control than over a dog fight.”
In lieu of the Bible, Wilder pointed Said to the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic of the 1700s. After an impressive career as a scientist, Swedenborg began having strange dreams about ghouls, dragons, and invisible vermin. Soon he was traveling between heaven and hell, talking with angels and demons, meeting aliens from other planets, and encountering the ghosts of King David, Muhammad, and Saint Paul. Convinced these visions were real, he gave up his scientific work to write books intertwining biblical commentary with his hallucinations. Swedenborg’s followers later claimed his visions were mere allegories, like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost, but he insisted they were real: “As true as you see me before your eyes, so true is everything that I have written.”
Although Swedenborg was widely viewed as insane, some saw him as a visionary who provided a path to achieving heaven on earth. What the angels told him was that divine love was the life force of the universe, pulsating through it in the same way sunlight radiates through the atmosphere, and existing in all things: birds, beasts, trees, flowers, and especially human beings. “Love is the life of Man…,” he wrote, “not only the common life of his whole body, and the common life of all his thoughts, but also the life of all their particulars.” Evil thrived only when people lost their connection with love.
In a world wracked by disease and poverty, serfdom and slavery, war and bloodshed, Swedenborg provided a glimpse of a more ideal life. A cult spread around his words, finding favor among the transcendentalists of Wilder’s hometown of Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson undoubtedly spoke for most transcendentalists when he mocked Swedenborg’s visions as an “elixir of moonbeams” but praised his ruminations on the meaning of life. “He delivers golden sayings which express with singular beauty the ethical laws,” Emerson wrote.
Like Emerson, Wilder had little use for Swedenborg’s hallucinations, but he found so much power in his underlying thoughts that he carried a crate of his books to South Carolina, and as he labored in his basement clinic, he shared them with Said. For Said, who grew up in a region where even rocks and streams were believed to be infused with spirits, Swedenborg’s notion of a universe saturated with divine love found a special resonance, especially after the ugliness of racism and war. Disheartened by seeing so many comrades killed and wounded in battle, he saw Swedenborg as an answer to his pain.
“As soon as I read a page or so, I found that all what Swedenborg spoke about was so plain and true that I wondered that the world should take interest in falsehood and reject the truth…,” he later wrote. “Let any man apply to life what he says and he will be convinced.” After devouring Wilder’s collection of books, Said decided he wanted to read everything Swedenborg ever wrote, so Wilder placed an order with Boston’s New Jerusalem Church, the national center of the Swedenborgian sect.
Said later told a journalist that Swedenborg “responded to all that was most intimate in his spiritual being” and “made a complete transformation in his inner nature,” enabling him to see the spiritual world more clearly than the natural world. “He found the affirmation of Swedenborg’s doctrines not in any mere external authority, but in his inner consciousness, in his own profoundest experiences…,” the journalist wrote. “He had formerly been fond of reading miscellaneous literature, including French novelists, but he now thinks he will never more be interested in anything but Swedenborg’s books.”
As Wilder and Said discussed the finer points of Swedenborg’s theology, they dutifully took down the measurements of hundreds of soldiers from the Fifty-Fifth on behalf of the Sanitary Commission. Neither of them suspected that the commission’s survey, recording data on more than 22,000 soldiers nationwide, would later be used to bolster the practice of “scientific racism” in the United States.
The survey was intended to determine whether there were physical differences between soldiers born in different states, or native-born versus foreign-born, or freeborn Black men versus ex-slaves, or white, Black, and mixed-race soldiers. Most of the data was too obtuse to be useful. Was it truly significant that 30 percent of white soldiers from Indiana had light hair, versus 18 percent from Vermont? Or that the skulls of New England soldiers were slightly bigger than the skulls of Southerners? Or that the autopsied brains of dead American soldiers weighed more than those of French or English soldiers, which should not have been surprising, since American soldiers averaged several inches taller and several pounds heavier than their European counterparts?
On the other hand, by carefully cherry-picking the data, it was possible to build claims that one type of soldier was better than another, which is how researchers later used the data showing differences between white and Black subjects. The fact that the average mixed-race soldier had a slightly lower lung capacity than the average Black or white soldier was cited as proof that “race-mixing” could damage the human species, even though the study was laden with evidence contradicting that idea. And the fact that the average Black soldier had a slightly lower brain weight than the average white soldier, similar to the English and French soldiers mentioned above, suggested to researchers that Black people were intellectually inferior, although it was rooted in the fact they were an average of two inches shorter than white people. (In general, the smaller the person is, the smaller their brain and other organs are, which has zero impact on their intellect.)
