The sergeant, p.23
The Sergeant, page 23
In The Negro as a Soldier, a synopsis of the survey, Sanitary Commission member Sanford B. Hunt cited the opinions of the survey’s all-white coterie of doctors to suggest that Blacks were “too animal to have moral courage” and that their skill at military drills came from “the well-known imitative faculty of the negro, together with his natural fondness for rhythmical movement.” Hunt concluded that Blacks were physically well-suited to serve as rank-and-file soldiers, but based on the variance in brain weights, he argued they didn’t have the intellectual capacity to serve as officers, a finding that was later used as a rationale for widespread racial discrimination.
Wilder, who would become one of the nation’s premier anatomists at Cornell University, spent decades attacking such ideas. Using Cornell’s collection of autopsied human brains, for instance, he disputed the idea that brain weights said anything about racial or intellectual superiority, noting that the brain of an illiterate Black janitor in the collection weighed more than the brain of a white judge. He repeatedly cited the men of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts as examples of Black intelligence, saying “no white troops could display greater devotion, virtue and valor.” And in a letter to the Sanitary Commission, he singled out Nicholas Said, a multilingual intellectual “from the very interior of Africa,” as a contrast to the then-common caricature of illiterate plantation slaves. The commission, however, never mentioned Said or any other well-educated Black soldier in its report.
22 “The Negro Pundit”
As the Civil War drew to an end, Nicholas Said faced a major decision. In September 1865, most of the soldiers in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts were slated to leave for Boston, where they would be officially mustered out of the army. From there, Said could either go back to Detroit or return to his homeland in Africa, if not as an emissary of the African Civilization Society, then of his own volition. Since the end of the war, hundreds of Black people had migrated to the US-established nation of Liberia in western Africa, hoping to escape racial prejudices. If Said joined them, he could probably find a caravan to take him the rest of the way to Borno.
Instead of sailing back to Boston, however, Nicholas Said decided to stay in South Carolina. Perhaps he wanted to settle down with the woman he married in Rikersville, although it’s possible their relationship ended not long after it began. But perhaps he stayed because, like so many other soldiers in the South, he decided his duty wasn’t done just because the fighting was over. Four years of warfare had left much of South Carolina in a shambles. Cities were in ruins, farmlands lay fallow, and tens of thousands of refugees were homeless, squatting in vacant homes, barns, sheds, or railway cars, or clustered together into refugee camps with little shelter except homemade tents or lean-tos, using blankets or loose planks of wood. Black or white, they relied largely on the Union Army to help feed and protect them.
At least two dozen soldiers from the Fifty-Fifth chose to stay in the South, most of whom joined the Union Army’s occupation force, but after Said’s experiences with Wallace Baker and the pay dispute, he had no interest in rejoining the military. By now, he had several years of experience as a teacher—both in Detroit and in the Fifty-Fifth’s school for soldiers—which was exactly what many newly freed slaves were looking for. While in bondage, they had been barred from receiving an education, and now that they were free, they deemed schooling to be nearly as important as food and shelter, since it provided hope for building a better future for themselves. In November 1865, Black delegates from throughout the state held a Colored People’s Convention in Charleston’s Zion Presbyterian Church, where the first resolution they passed was to push for the creation of public schools. “Knowledge is power,” they declared, “and an educated and intelligent people can neither be held in nor reduced to slavery.”
By July 1866, there were seventy-five “colored schools” in South Carolina, mostly funded by Northern charities like the American Missionary Association and the Freedman’s Union Commission. “Young and old, married and single, the near and far, come to the schools and display an eagerness and earnestness for instruction,” read one government report. But those schools handled only 9,000 students, out of a population of more than 130,000 school-age Black children. In addition, most of the schools were located in big towns like Charleston, Columbia, Beaufort, and Sumter, rather than the countryside where most of the Black population lived. Too small to attract funding from Northern charities, farm schools often relied on unpaid volunteers, including Union Army veterans like Nicholas Said.
Soon after leaving the army, Said was teaching freedmen in a rural plantation, probably leading informal classes in a cotton barn or storage shed. As with many farmland teachers, he was an unpaid volunteer, tending the fields by day to earn a living but devoting his spare time to teaching his fellow laborers how to read and write. With few if any textbooks, he likely taught English the same way Malem Katory had taught him Arabic twenty years before: scrawling letters onto pieces of paper—or maybe etching them into the dirt with a stick—and then having his students copy him until they completed the alphabet and started spelling simple words.
It was a humble occupation for a man who had crisscrossed Europe as a prince’s valet, but he insisted it didn’t bother him, since his new goal was to “endeavor to teach the rising generation the advantages of education.” His classes included students of all ages, and observers said that “even adult and aged blacks learn to read with marvelous rapidity under his tuition,” but his chief interest was teaching the young, and he felt he could reach dozens more children if only he could teach full-time.
In 1866, Said’s work came to the attention of Gen. Robert K. Scott, assistant commissioner of the South Carolina branch of the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was trying to coordinate the education of former slaves. “There are a number of competent colored men here who would willingly devote their time to the education of the young, providing that their support could be insured…,” Scott wrote to Reuben Tomlinson, the bureau’s superintendent of education in South Carolina. “Among the number of such persons is a native African who is a thoroughly educated man and a distinguished linguist, who converses fluently in ten languages and who is equally conversant in the Greek Testament and the Koran.” Scott wrote that if the government could provide Said with army rations, just as it was doing with impoverished war refugees, “he could and would earnestly devote his whole time to the education of some eighty children in his vicinity,” instead of laboring in the fields to make ends meet.
When Scott’s letter was made public, Southerners mocked the notion that such a knowledgeable African existed. “It is a pity that such a genius should waste his fragrance in the desert air of an old cotton field…,” read a tongue-in-cheek article in Columbia’s Daily Phoenix. “If this ‘native African’ had a single grain of common sense, he could lease himself to [freak show impresario P. T.] Barnum for an annual sum.”
Reuben Tomlinson had a different reaction. “Here is an appeal which must reach every heart,” he wrote. But even though the Freedmen’s Bureau could spend money on school buildings and furnishings, to stimulate the economy by making work for carpenters and builders, Congress barred it from paying for teachers, schoolbooks, or supplies. For teachers’ pay, the best the bureau could do was seek funds from Northern charities, which often preferred to hire white teachers from the North rather than Black teachers in the South, and there’s no evidence that Said ever received any aid. Instead, his first support came from a man who most white Southerners would describe as a “carpetbagger”: Dr. Thomas Sim.
Sim had been a Chicago surgeon before joining the Union army, where one of his most noteworthy actions was amputating the right leg of Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles during the battle of Gettysburg. When Sickles was named military commander of South Carolina in 1865, Sim came along as his personal physician, and he soon took control of Marshfield Plantation, consisting of 625 acres of farmland, woods, and swamps, about nine miles west of Charleston. Before the war Marshfield was owned by Charleston merchant John O’Hear, who held nearly forty slaves there, but O’Hear died during the war, and his cash-strapped widow sold the property to Sim, who hired Nicholas Said as a full-time teacher for the workers’ children.
With Sim’s backing, Said was not only able to devote most of his time to teaching, but in his spare hours he continued his own linguistic education. A few miles northeast of Marshfield was Clear Springs, a thousand-acre plantation owned by Marx Cohen, a leader of Charleston’s Jewish community. Cohen looked like a biblical prophet, with a snowy beard, curling sidelocks, and a halo of ivory hair. Before the war, he had owned more than forty slaves, and his oldest son had died fighting for the Confederacy, yet he had no qualms about befriending an African-born, Muslim-raised Union veteran like Nicholas Said. When Cohen heard of Said’s interest in languages, he apparently gave him a Hebrew dictionary, grammar book, and Torah. Within months, Said was reading Jewish scriptures and could tell at a glance whether a text was in Hebrew or Aramaic, even though they were written with the same alphabet.
Perhaps with Cohen’s help, Said soon developed “numerous white friends who have shown me a good deal of favor,” including Charleston surgeons Thomas Ogier and John Chazal; Gen. James Simons, who had commanded the Confederate troops on Morris Island when the war had begun; and members of the wealthy De Saussure and Kanapaux families, several of whom had clashed with the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts during the war. Capt. Charles Kanapaux had commanded a battery of cannons that had fired on the Fifty-Fifth as it dug trenches toward Fort Wagner, his son John had captained a similar battery at Honey Hill, and General Wilmot De Saussure had overseen much of Charleston’s defense against Union attacks.
To these former Rebels, all of whom had been slaveholders before the war, Nicholas Said must have been a curiosity: a native of “darkest Africa” who was as intellectually refined as any of them and who had glorious stories to tell of his travels through four continents. Despite their differing skin tones, Said had more in common with them than they would care to admit. Like them, he had grown up in wealth and luxury, with slaves at his beck and call and with an education that few of his countrymen could afford. As a “gentleman’s gentleman,” he had spent his formative years in European palaces that made their plantation mansions seem paltry in comparison, and his skill at speaking French added to his luster. Except for General Simons and Marx Cohen, they were all descended from French immigrants who, like most aristocrats of the time, viewed French as the language of true civilization and culture.
Despite their friendship with Said, these people could be strident racists. On the eve of the war, for instance, Wilmot De Saussure’s brother Henry had a mixed-race freeman tossed into jail for failing to doff his hat as he approached, an act of racial impudence punishable by up to ten days in prison. Nancy Bostick De Saussure, married to one of Wilmot’s cousins, later wrote a book extolling the virtues of the prewar South and its practice of slavery. “It is an insult to a good dog to compare [Africans] to animals,” she wrote, adding that American slaves benefited from their bondage, since it enabled them to be “Christianized and humanized by the people of the South.”
On the other hand, perhaps because of their French roots, they had more nuanced views on race than many of their Southern neighbors. Like the French colonists in places like Haiti and New Orleans, they could accept the notion that individual Black people could be tolerated by polite society. As a member of the state assembly on the eve of the war, Wilmot De Saussure had fought against a bill written by more conservative legislators, which would have banned Black freemen from working as carpenters, mechanics, or other skilled professionals. In response, he filed a petition from 120 white businessmen who argued the freemen did not deserve such restrictions, since they were “good citizens, [with] patterns of industry, sobriety, and irreproachable conduct” (besides working at cheaper rates than their white competitors). The petition didn’t work. The bill passed the assembly by 66–46. But the action suggests that De Saussure felt that even if Blacks on the whole were “inferior,” some could be treated as “good citizens,” which he apparently felt applied to Nicholas Said.
Said seemed unaware of these nuances. As his friends allowed their respect for him as an individual to trump their prejudices against his race, he assumed they were not as racist as they might otherwise have seemed. And that, in turn, helped shape his own views of the South, which were much more conservative than many of his peers. He later told an interviewer that “the kindest people with whom he had ever met and domiciled [with] are the Southern whites.”
In 1867, as South Carolina approached its first real postwar election, Said’s ability to get along with both white and Black people was probably a factor in General Sickles’s decision to name him as one of the nation’s first Black registrars of voters. As military governor, Sickles had to appoint registrars in each precinct in the state, tasked with registering freed slaves as well as white people who swore allegiance to the United States, although any former military officers or government officials from the defeated Confederacy were temporarily banned from voting. To register voters in St. Andrews Parish, Sickles picked his old friend Dr. Sim, Union army veteran Lewis Dodge, and Nicholas Said.
Working from sunup to sundown, the three men registered 555 voters in just four days, including 540 former slaves and 15 white people. One reason the white vote was so tiny is that some St. Andrews plantation owners voted from their townhomes in nearby Charleston, while others were banned from voting because of their roles in the Confederacy, and others boycotted the election, unwilling to take part in a process where Black people would have the upper hand. In South Carolina, after all, Black people outnumbered white people by 400,000 to 290,000—the only state outside Mississippi where they held the majority. Statewide, more than 80,000 Black people registered to vote, compared to 47,000 white people. The impact would be seen in November, when the state voted overwhelmingly to draft a new constitution, replacing one that had just been written by the state’s all-white legislature, laden with anti-Black laws.
Despite the historic nature of the election, however, it was Said’s work as a teacher, not a registrar, that catapulted him into the spotlight. In mid-1867, the New York Times sent William Swinton, one of the top journalists of the era, on a three-month assignment to gauge how the South was faring under Union occupation. After interviewing Robert E. Lee and other Rebel leaders, he went to Charleston to write a profile of General Sickles, who was slated to be his last interview in the South. But before returning to New York, he wanted to make sure he had not missed any important stories, so during a horseback ride with an army officer, he asked if there was anyone else he should talk to in the city.
“You must see Said,” the officer replied.
“And who is Said?”
“A learned negro who lives on one of the Sea Islands… a marvel of linguistic accomplishment… He can speak or write, ’tis said, a dozen or a score of languages, and knows their literature and is deep in the philosophies.”
After learning that Said was teaching at Marshfield, Swinton arranged to meet him. The contrast could not have been greater: Swinton, a tall gregarious Scot with thick red whiskers and dressed in the finest New York fashion, and Said, a short, slender African, probably dressed in homespun plantation work clothes, looking like a common laborer. To Swinton, Said seemed remarkably unassuming, despite having a “savage aspect” from the tattoos carved into his face. “His gait is shambling; his look shy and sad,” he wrote. “He is not in the least communicative or disposed to exploit himself, but must be drawn out by sympathy and some confidence.”
Said couldn’t be blamed for being nervous. In previous encounters with the press, he had been described as an “odoriferous lackey” who looked like a baboon. Nevertheless, he spent several hours telling Swinton about his childhood in Africa and his subsequent travels. He said little about his service in the war, which may have been too painful to talk about, but waxed poetic about Emmanuel Swedenborg as well as his own methods for teaching former slaves.
Swinton, who was fluent in several European languages, was particularly impressed by Said’s linguistic skills. “He has certainly made himself a remarkable philologist. Remarkable it would be in even the most cultured of Caucasians, but still more so in one who bears on his black visage the symbols of his savage race [i.e., his tattoos]. For he knows, in addition to English and his native tongue, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, German, French and Italian—some more perfectly than others but, in most cases, so that he can read and write them with ease and accuracy. Nor is it merely a parrot-like faculty of imitation, for he has a deep penetration of their genius and affinities, and in some instances a fair, in others a profound acquaintance with their literature.”
Swinton was quite taken by Said. His article, which ran in the New York Times under the headline “The Negro Pundit” on August 13, 1867, was longer than many of his profiles of politicians and generals, and he apologized to his readers that it didn’t run even longer. Like his future friend Mark Twain, Swinton was a skilled storyteller, so over the next several months, the article was partly or fully reprinted in at least thirty publications throughout the United States, in such major cities as Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
When the editors of the liberal magazine The Nation read the story, they suggested that Said was so talented he might make a good candidate for vice president someday, or at least a cabinet secretary or maybe an ambassador to Russia. “It would be touching to witness an examination for the post at St. Petersburg between Said and a competitor like Minister Clay,” The Nation opined, referring to the diplomat Thomas Hart Clay, whose slaveholding father Henry Clay had helped pioneer Missouri’s entrance into the Union as a slave state.
