White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  There was a young curate of Worcester

  Who could have a command if he’d choose ter,

  But he said each recruit

  Must be blacker than soot,

  Or else he’d go preach where he used ter.

  But it wasn’t until early November, three months after he had entered the service, that Captain Higginson received a letter from Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, military governor of the United States Volunteers in the Department of the South. (The Department of the South officially included South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida but in practical fact meant just the Sea Islands, captured seven months after Fort Sumter fell.) Promoting Higginson to the rank of colonel, Saxton invited him to lead the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized regiment of freed slaves, its mandate issued five full months before Governor Andrew of Massachusetts received permission to recruit the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.

  Though elated, Higginson wanted to talk to Saxton in person before accepting the offer, for he was now reluctant to leave the Massachusetts Fifty-first. So he boarded the railroad to New York and then a steamer to Beaufort, South Carolina, a pretty river town about twelve miles above Hilton Head. A beachhead for Union troops after Hilton Head had been seized in the fall of 1861, Beaufort had been abandoned by its wealthy white residents, who bolted before the thick-booted blue bellies (Union men) came to carve their names on the mahogany mantels. They’d left everything: the cutlery on the table, the linens in the cupboard, the crinolines, the pianos, the livestock—and the slaves. Noisy northerners soon thronged there, mostly abolitionists and teachers intending to educate these former slaves, as well as entrepreneurs and civic minions. “The government sent agents down here, private; so too private philanthropy has sent missionaries, and while the first see that the contrabands [former slaves] earn their bread, the last teach them the alphabet,” Charles Francis Adams Jr. noted. “Between the two, I predict divers results, among which are numerous jobs for agents and missionaries, small comfort to the negroes, and heavy loss to the government.”

  But Rufus Saxton, an obdurate antislavery man, was different from all those. And he was certainly unlike his flamboyant predecessor, Major General David Hunter, a man of impeccable if aggressive abolitionist leanings who on his own initiative had declared the Sea Islands slaves free. Preempting the president’s Emancipation Proclamation, Hunter had irritated Lincoln and then everyone else by pulling former slaves, terrified, out of their cabins under the cover of darkness, tearing them from their families and bullying them into uniform. But his brash behavior had one salutary effect in the North: the issue of whether to arm black men was on the table.

  African Americans, Beaufort, South Carolina, from the collection of Rufus Saxton.

  Less choleric than Hunter, Rufus Saxton was a practical idealist. Short, compact, with deep-set eyes and curly black side whiskers—and just a year younger than Higginson—he had been a maverick abolitionist among his fellow West Point graduates and so committed to the cause that the strategic-minded Higginson at first worried that he might actually “overlook means in his zeal for ends” (as Hunter had). He did not. Directed to take possession of all plantations previously occupied by rebels and to feed, employ, and govern their inhabitants, whom the army had left without shelter, clothing, provisions, or the wherewithal to buy any, he had charge of the ten thousand or more freed slaves from the Sea Island plantations, knowing that his was an anomalous position, his function straddling that of civilian and soldier, despot and benefactor.

  Though Saxton was to report to Hunter, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had also granted him authority to recruit and train volunteers of African descent as the First South Carolina Volunteers. (According to the author James Branch Cabell, a Virginian who wrote scathingly of the enterprise, the former slaves unshackled themselves “from the dull and tedious drudgery of farm work in favor of a year or two’s military service under the more noble excitements of gunfire.”) But adamantly believing, like Higginson, that the slaves would fight for their freedom—Higginson’s theme in the Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner essays—Saxton felt it would be hypocritical not to allow them to do just that. This was a minority position among the ultras, as radical abolitionists were censoriously called.

  Higginson’s first conversation with Saxton assured him that he was not being snookered into “a mere plantation-guard or a day-school in uniform.” The First South Carolina was the real thing. For with conviction, stubbornness, and unprejudiced empathy, Saxton had won the respect of the African Americans, many of whom Hunter had discouraged, demoralized, and abused, and Higginson soon reported with satisfaction that Saxton could effortlessly silence those pious northerners who pestered him with their elaborate, often insulting inquiries about the freed blacks (whatever were they like?) with a terse reply: “Intensely human.”

  It was settled. “I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well,” Higginson later said, “not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.” It was also vindication—and action—at last.

  AT NIGHT THE TANGY SMELL of roasting peanuts wafted through Camp Saxton, where Higginson and his men were billeted, four miles below Beaufort on the sumptuous grounds of the defunct Smith Plantation. The place was beautiful, Higginson thought, overgrown, luxurious, and fragrant with oleander and myrtle. Long tendrils of Spanish moss dropped from the branches of the mammoth live oaks like a misty curtain; roses bloomed in December, gangling palmettos rustled in the damp breeze. Hares and wild pigeon and quail scrambled across the long avenues leading to the ruined estate, on whose grounds 250 army tents shone pearly in the moonlight. Only the pigs running wild in the camp annoyed him.

  Emerging from his tent, Higginson would stroll among his six hundred enlisted men without seeing a single white face, hearing only wild curlews, he told Mary, wailing through the night “like vexed ghosts of departed slave-lords.” There, standing in the middle of a plantation among freed slaves, hundreds of them, the eagle buttons on his new blue uniform tight and shiny, he prepared to lead their regiment and fight with them for freedom, their freedom: this was a dream come true.

  “The first man who organizes & commands a successful black regiment will perform the most important service in the history of the War,” he confided to his journal. But he would need to demonstrate to a skeptical North—and a contemptuous South—that a black regiment was as good, as brave, as disciplined, and as dogged as any white one.

  He did not lack certain comforts. At mealtime his adjutant, a young bookkeeper from Boston, spread newspapers over the table before serving plates of hominy, hot sweet potato, and oysters or fish. The pork was tasty, and so were those griddle cakes made from corn and pumpkin. His tent contained a bed, two chairs, two pails of water, and a small camp stove. He had a table for writing, on which he placed Hugo’s Les Misérables, and he carried a small book of Shakespeare’s sonnets wherever he went. Wooden planks covered the floor of the tent to prevent dampness. At Christmas he hung a wreath of oranges by the door, and when nights grew chilly, he snuggled beneath the prickly buffalo robe his mother had bought him. He wrote to Fields requesting books. He bathed in the nearby river. He cantered by horseback over roads made of oyster shells, one path passing by an enormous oak that not long before had doubled as a whipping post, the marks of the lash still visible.

  The men of the First South, as the regiment was known, were former slaves, mainly from the rice plantations of the Sea Islands. There they had toiled long hours without adequate nourishment, medical care, education, and of course remuneration; here, at Camp Saxton, they were eager, they were free, and Higginson would be damned if they weren’t correctly trained; it was the least he could do. Waiting for his regiment to fill (a minimum of 830 was needed for assignments), he relentlessly drilled his young “barbarians,” as he affectionately called the black soldiers, while Saxton rallied the troops, telling them about Higginson’s courage
during the “old dark days” and how he had tried to break Anthony Burns out of jail. You could still see the saber cut on his face.

  No black soldier in Higginson’s regiment would be treated unjustly, Saxton assured them.

  Higginson was pleased. “It needs but a few days to show the absurdity of doubting the equal military availability of these people, as compared with whites,” he wrote in his journal.

  There is quite as much average comprehension of the need of the thing, as much courage I doubt not, as much previous knowledge of the gun, & there is a readiness of ear & of imitation which for purposes of drill counterbalances any defect of mental training. They have little to sacrifice, are better fed, housed & clothed than ever before & have few vices such as lead to insubordination. At the same time I think, as I always did, that the sort of paradisiacal innocence, attributed to them by their first teachers were founded on very imperfect observation. They are not truthful, honest or chaste. Why should they be? but they are simple, docile and affectionate. The same men who have stood a fire in open field with perfect coolness, have blubbered in the most irresistibly ludicrous manner on being transferred from one company in the regiment to another.

  Though paternalistic, Higginson was more perceptive, effective, and humane than most of his peers, even the self-proclaimed enlightened ones, who still suffered from “colorphobia” (Higginson’s word): Emerson, he recalled, had squirmed when Frederick Douglass was proposed for the Town and Country Club. Few white northerners had ever interacted with blacks, free or enslaved, and very few were impatient for the chance. Fewer still were willing to put their lives on the front line for a black regiment. “He will be a marked man,” commented Whittier on hearing of Higginson’s commission; the Confederacy had vowed to hang all white officers of black troops on capture. But the abolitionist preacher Sojourner Truth, a former slave and a women’s rights crusader, declared Higginson appointed by God.

  A Boston Brahmin, Higginson was also a progressive whose sense of class was not fixed. That was true of his sense of race as well. He investigated prevailing stereotypes, even his own; this was part of his task as he defined it. He forbade blacks to be called “niggers” and registered surprise if they referred to themselves that way. He observed how hard his men worked. “How absurd is the impression about these Southern blacks, growing out of a state of slavery, that they are sluggish or inefficient in labor,” he noted.

  Smith Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862.

  “At first glance, in a black regiment,” he would reminisce, “the men usually looked to a newly arrived officer just alike, but it proved after a little experience that they varied as much in face as any soldiers. It was the same as to character.” He tried to learn as much about them as he could: the Wilson brothers told him about their grandmother, the mother of twenty-two, and how she organized a second escape from her plantation after her first one failed; Corporal Simon Crier said that he was going to Liberia after the war because he knew Johnny Reb would never be civilized in his lifetime. Another corporal, Robert Sutton, a meditative, intelligent, and loquacious man with an iron memory, spun out ingenious theories and asked questions well into the night until Higginson, exhausted, dropped off to sleep. “His comprehension of the whole problem of slavery was more thorough and far-reaching than that of any Abolitionist, so far as its social and military aspects went,” Higginson reflected. “In that direction I could teach him nothing, and he taught me much.”

  “It is the fashion with philanthropists who come down here to be impressed with the degradation & stupidity of these people,” he observed with contempt. “I often have to tell them that I have not a stupid man in the regiment. Stupid as a man may seem if you try to make him take a thing in your way, he is commonly sharp enough if you will have patience to take him in his own.” Believing that discipline endowed them with the self-respect denied them as slaves, he worked hard, he said, “to impress on them that they do not obey officers because they are white, but because they are officers.” And as an officer himself he was sensitive to his position. When a new squad of recruits arrived—lame, frightened, wrapped in rags—and he had to assign them various captains, he said he felt like a slave driver, and he hated it. But to Charlotte Forten, a young black woman from the North come to teach the freed slaves, Higginson was an ideal officer whom his soldiers liked and admired. “And he evidently feels towards them all as if they were his children,” she said, intending a compliment.

  He also tried to figure out why they had not rebelled: “it always seemed to me that, had I been a slave, my life would have been one long scheme of insurrection.” Answering his own question, he marveled at his men’s patient religious temperament—and their sense of futility: “What was the use of insurrection, where everything was against them?” Diligently he logged their remarks in his journal and devotedly collected their songs, scribbling verses in the darkness as the men sang. And when he wrote publicly of them, which he did in letters to newspapers, politicians, and The Atlantic Monthly, he praised them in terms that preserved their dignity and yet did not offend his bigoted readers; he would overcome prejudice, in other words, in increments. In a sense he would in later years use the same strategy of caution when publishing the poems of Emily Dickinson.

  On New Year’s, 1863, Saxton planned a great celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was to take effect that day. In a grove of live oaks near the camp, black and white congregated together among the wide trees, people arriving on foot, in carriages, on horse-or muleback: cavalry officers, black women wearing brightly colored head scarves, teachers, superintendents, and the band of the Eighth Maine. Higginson, standing on a wooden platform with the other designated speakers, introduced William Henry Brisbane, a South Carolinian planter who had earlier freed his slaves, and Brisbane read from the Proclamation: “On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The crowd roared, men tossed their hats into the air, women hugged one another. “This spontaneous outburst of love and loyalty to a country that has heretofore so terribly wronged these blacks,” noted the regiment’s physician, Seth Rogers, “was the birth of a new hope.”

  The Reverend Mansfield French presented Higginson with a silk regimental flag mounted on an ebony and silver staff and embroidered with the motto “The Year of Jubilee has come!” Unbidden, an elderly man and two women, former slaves, burst into song, belting out “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Higginson stood silent, eyes damp. “It made all other words cheap,” he wrote that evening; “it seemed the choked voice of a race, at last unloosed.”

  After the ceremony the men and the officers, black and white, well-wishers and uncertain onlookers, clustered around huge square tables for a feast of ten oxen roasted whole over huge pits and, when crisp, cut with axes. Not as good as at home, recollected a young black woman, but Higginson, who loved it all—the food, the speeches, the salty-sweet taste of freedom under the trailing moss—refused to dine with other white officers and the dignitaries, preferring instead to sit with his own men. He had come south as a believer, and now all around him was something to believe in.

  But clad in the bright red trousers he loathed—he could not wait to get his troops into standard army issue—when they marched into Beaufort, muskets bright, boots blackened, they were heckled from the side of the road, and there were fistfights along with the catcalls and slurs. Yet Higginson had heard praise from formerly disdainful white officers, who admitted that no other regiment in the Department outshone his.

  Later that month came his first battle. General Hunter, back in Hilton Head as commander of the Department of the South, wanted to enlist fifty thousand more blacks; that was his directive, not the winning of territory or the blocking of lines, so Higginson was ordered to scout the area for recruits a
mong the abandoned forts and plantations. For bait, Higginson carried the regimental flag and copies of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  Aboard a small gunboat, the Ben de Ford, and flanked by two other vessels, Higginson and his men headed south to a Union post in Fernandina, Florida. From there they would ascend the narrow St. Mary’s River. But when he and a detachment of his men scrambled ashore at midnight near Township Landing, the air thick with the sticky scent of pine, they walked into the maw of a rebel cavalry unit. “A man fell at my elbow,” Higginson later wrote. “I felt it no more than if a tree had fallen,—I was so busy watching my own men and the enemy, and planning what to do next.” Corporal Sutton was wounded, and Higginson himself had a close call when a Confederate officer took direct aim at him—but was shot by three of Higginson’s men before he could pull the trigger.

  The breathlessness of the fight, the courage of his soldiers, the smell of victory: the small skirmish became, to him, a significant event. “Nobody knows anything about these men who has not seen them in battle,” Higginson informed General Saxton. “I find that I myself knew nothing. There is a fiery energy about them beyond anything of which I have ever read.”

  He and his men continued their reconnoiter up the St. Mary’s to a landing near Alberti’s Mill in Georgia, the plantation where Corporal Robert Sutton had been a slave. Finding only Mrs. Alberti on the premises, Higginson introduced himself and then presented Corporal Sutton, saying he believed the two of them had already been acquainted. The woman’s smile froze. “Ah,” she replied, measuring her words. “We called him Bob.”

  Soldier and slave: “You may make a soldier out of a slave, very readily,” Higginson commented, “but you can no more make a slave out of a soldier than you can replace a bird in the egg.” Sutton walked Higginson over to the slave prison, a small outbuilding equipped with a huge rusty chain for tying down its victims. The stocks came in two sizes, one with smaller holes for women and children. Higginson conveyed three sets of these stocks, as well as shackles, chains, and keys, back to his supply ship, “good illustrations,” he informed General Saxton, “of the infernal barbarism against which we contend.”