White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  Higginson banned looting, aware nonetheless how hard it was for the men to resist the luxuries purchased for their former masters by their own sweat. But since cotton, foodstuff, and animals were considered supplies of war, not booty, they confiscated provisions—resin, forty bushels of rice, cordage, and sheep—and loaded them onto the boats. Gun crews then stood ready. Higginson had learned that Confederates lay in wait above the river, and he indeed heard a wave of shouting sweep down from Reed’s Bluff just after he and his men had assumed they were out of danger. Bullets slammed into the side of the boat. The ship’s captain fell dead, struck in the head by a minié ball. Higginson dashed up to the gun deck from below and, dragging the captain’s body out of the line of fire, ordered his men to the hold, where the soldiers tried to shoot through the portholes while they sailed into safe waters.

  It had been a small mission, a little affair, which Higginson later admitted he inflated because it was the regiment’s first battle. But it had offered him and his men a chance to test each other: “our abstract surmises were changed into positive knowledge…. No officer in this regiment now doubts that the key to the successful prosecution of this war lies in the unlimited employment of black troops,” he reported to General Saxton. “Their superiority lies simply in the fact that they know the country, while white troops do not, and, moreover, that they have peculiarities of temperament, position, and motive which belong to them alone. Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for their homes and families, and they show the resolution and the sagacity which a personal purpose gives.”

  Recounting Higginson’s report with condescending disbelief, the Springfield Republican conceded that it might silence the enemies of the Negro “who are bent on making him incapable of anything better than labor under a lash.” Stuffier, The New York Times scolded Higginson for putting his case so strongly “and in rather exalted language, as well as in such a way as to convince the public that the negroes will fight.” He was taking on Northern prejudice as well as rebel fire.

  Two more expeditions would follow, each more unsuccessful, more demanding, more deadly than the last—except in the symbolic terms dear to Colonel Higginson.

  HIGGINSON AND HIS MEN went south to Jacksonville. Union troops had abandoned the city the year before, when Hunter had decided he could not spare the five thousand necessary to hold it, but he now decided that the First South Carolina Regiment, a brigade of less than a thousand men, should use the city as a recruiting station for black soldiers. With Jacksonville secure and more soldiers in the army, the Union might take the entire state of Florida.

  Sailing up the glassy St. John’s River in early March, Higginson’s troops rounded the point below the city in shining daylight. All was calm. The peach trees were in full bloom, and his men, listening in the silent heat, heard no shells or rifle shots from nearby Confederates, whom they had apparently surprised. Evidently the rebels would not bother to defend the town vigorously. A large number of the city’s three thousand residents had fled some time ago, and only five hundred, mostly poor, remained. So Jacksonville was again a federal post.

  Higginson’s men were joined by the Second South Carolina Colored Volunteers, a black regiment under the leadership of Colonel James Montgomery. Formerly known in Kansas as a Jayhawker for his quick-striking raids against Missouri slave owners, and the man with whom Higginson had conspired to free John Brown’s cohorts, Montgomery was tall, thin, and brutal, with slightly stooped shoulders and a hard-bitten face. As one commentator observed, “Higginson, the romantic, had raised money to send Sharps rifles to Kansas in the fifties. Montgomery, the realist, had used them.”

  At the end of March, two more infantry regiments arrived, the Sixth Connecticut and the Eighth Maine, both white. “It was the first time in the war (so far as I know),” observed Higginson, “that white and black soldiers had served together on regular duty.” He tried to mitigate friction between them by using his own troops for expeditions upstream while keeping the white troops in town on patrol: separate but equal. Yet when he stationed men outside town to reinforce the perimeter and contain rebel shelling, four black and six white companies worked side by side without demonstrable incident.

  Then came the peremptory order to evacuate the city and return to Beaufort. It was a complete and demoralizing shock. Even newspaper reports of the evacuation expressed bewilderment. “A more fatal order for the place, the interests of the people, and the Government, could not have been made,” said one. “Every body was taken by surprise, and every body was exasperated, save perhaps a few who feared the negro soldiers would achieve a reputation.”

  Worse, one of the regiments—a white one—set fire to the beautiful old city before leaving it. “Jacksonville is in ruins,” lamented the New York Tribune. A south wind blew the flames through mansions, houses, small cottages, churches, warehouses. Deep-rooted oaks, orange groves, tall sycamores—all were scorched and charred. Soldiers, white and black, hollered in approval. Close to tears, Higginson groped his way in the thick blue smoke to pluck one last rosebud from the sooty garden of his former headquarters.

  MEN LIKE THE BLACK ACTIVIST Lewis Hayden, who, with Higginson, had tried to batter down the Boston Court House door, and the white activist George Stearns, one of the Secret Six, were recruiting free blacks for the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. They labored night and day, as did Gerrit Smith, another member of the Secret Six, and the eloquent Frederick Douglass, who called “Men of Color, to Arms.” Douglass’s two sons, Charles and Lewis, enlisted. “In a struggle for freedom the race most directly interested in the achievement of freedom should be permitted to take a hand,” said Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) James, ill-fated brother of Henry, Alice, and William—and at seventeen himself a soldier in the Fifty-fourth. The time for a black regiment had finally come in Massachusetts.

  Governor Andrew appointed two young abolitionists to head the “Bostons,” as the Fifty-fourth was nicknamed. Robert Gould Shaw, the fair-haired son of wealthy philanthropic Yankees and formerly a captain in the Second Massachusetts Infantry, was a veteran of Cedar Mountain and a survivor of Antietam. (That Shaw was also considered handsome—“lean as / a compass-needle,” Robert Lowell later wrote—never hurt him or his propaganda value, either in life or in death, as Higginson would shrewdly observe.) Second in command was the Philadelphia Quaker Norwood Penrose Hallowell. Hallowell would eventually lead the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth, the regiment formed after recruitment efforts overflowed the ranks of the Fifty-fourth.

  The Fifty-fourth was stationed at Camp Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts, a short distance southwest of Boston, until May 18, 1863, when the men received orders to report to General Hunter in Hilton Head. On May 28, as they paraded through Boston, one thousand men strong, three thousand men and women gathered to hail the troops. It was a day quite different from the abject one in 1854 when Anthony Burns was marched to the wharves under federal guard. And though copperheads (as Southern sympathizers were called) threw stones and scuffled with the police near Battery Wharf, Governor Andrew, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass reviewed the columns of young men along with Shaw’s abolitionist parents and his recent bride, who waved from the second-floor balcony of the Sturgis house on Beacon Street. Later it was said that Shaw, riding at the front of the regiment, looked up, saw them, and kissed his sword with a flourish. It was at that moment his sister Ellen knew she would never see him again.

  Since the numbers of white enlistments had dropped, black regiments had become more acceptable to their detractors—and necessary to the Northern war effort. And though the much-hated federal draft, instituted in March of 1863, had set off murderous, racist riots the following summer, particularly in New York City—let black men fight for their own freedom, draftees viciously protested—the black regiments were earning respect. The capture of Port Hudson, Louisiana, by troops that included the First and Third Louisiana Native Guards and the
First Louisiana Engineers inspired a backhanded compliment from one Union officer: “Our negro troops are splendid,” said he. “Who would not be a Niggadier General?”

  All this meant Higginson could relax a little. “Any disaster or failure on our part would now do little harm,” he wrote to his mother, “whereas at first it might have defeated the whole thing.” Asked to make a speech before a (white) Pennsylvania regiment during the Fourth of July celebration, he said with deadpan earnestness that the First South bore this regiment no ill will, for it liked white people—as long as they behaved.

  In the spring of 1863, after the Fifty-fourth arrived in South Carolina, Colonel Montgomery ordered Shaw and his men to sail to the mouth of the Altamaha River and shell plantations along the way, regardless of who might still be living there, and once they arrived in the undefended town of Darien, Georgia, he insisted that Shaw’s men load all portable goods onto their boats and burn the place to the ground. Montgomery wanted to make southerners feel “that this was a real war,” as he said, “and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.” He put a match to the last buildings himself. “It was as abominable a job as I ever had a share in,” said Shaw.

  To Higginson, Montgomery’s scorched-earth policy undermined the reputation of the black troops, undoing all the good he had done, and pleased to learn that Colonel Shaw, after Darien, was as disillusioned with Montgomery as he, Higginson reminded Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, that “the colored troops as such are not responsible for the brigand habits of Montgomery. This indiscriminate burning & pillaging is savage warfare in itself—demoralizes the soldiers—& must produce reaction against arming the negroes.”

  After Shaw formally protested Montgomery’s tactics, the Fifty-fourth was removed from Montgomery’s command, and General Hunter, who supported Montgomery, was temporarily relieved of his position. Furious, Hunter regarded this as public censure, but President Lincoln, who liked Hunter, suavely assured him otherwise.

  Montgomery persisted. Hating slavery but caring little for the slave, as Higginson said, Montgomery had asked a black man in his regiment whom he presumed a deserter if he had anything to say in his own defense. The soldier answered “Nothing,” and Montgomery, with nonchalance, replied, “Then you die at half past nine.” “I accordingly shot and buried him at that hour,” he told Brigadier General George Crockett Strong. When Strong reported the incident to General Benjamin Butler, he concluded, “We need cool things of that kind in this climate.”

  More than thirty years later, Higginson was still seething. “Montgomery had two soldiers shot for deserting after their payment had been cut down—without court martial,” he recalled. “If he had done it to white soldiers, he would have been court martialled himself.”

  If Montgomery was a hooligan, the army was filled with them, pro-and antislavery men alike. “Do not think this rapid organization of colored regiments is to be an unmixed good to the negroes,” Higginson confided to Charles Norton in the early summer of 1863. “There will be much & terrible tyranny under military forms, for it is no easy thing to make their officers deal justly by them.”

  Take the example of Francis Jackson Merriam, grandson of the famous Boston abolitionist Francis Jackson and formerly one of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raiders, who fled before he was arrested. A hotheaded abolitionist with no regard for the rights of others, he bent the ear of General Hunter, “as fanatics sometimes did,” Higginson noted with disgust. Merriam requisitioned several of Higginson’s non-commissioned officers, including Corporal Sutton, for a small scouting party along the coast of Georgia. Sutton and the men knew the local terrain well, which Merriam did not; no matter. He ordered them to row to rebel-held territory on St. Simon’s Island. They did, against their better judgment, and they were almost killed. But the next night, when Merriam barked his orders, they recoiled. Not to be countermanded by black men, Merriam and another officer promptly shot two of them “without mercy,” Higginson acidly noted, “lest they should interfere with the elevation of the race!”

  Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, First South Carolina Volunteers, 38 years old, 1862.

  So much for antislavery men. “The worst acts of tyranny I have known in colored regiments proceeded from those who came there as abolitionists,” Higginson declared.

  Merriam wasn’t finished. He blamed Sutton for the incident—Sutton had refused to seize the guns of the miscreants—and insisted Sutton be court-martialed. Sutton was later cleared of all charges, and Merriam was promoted to captain in the Third South Carolina Colored Volunteers.

  HUNTER’S REPLACEMENT WAS Brigadier General Quincy Adams Gillmore, the army engineer whose bombardment of the Georgia coast had caused the surrender of Fort Pulaski. At first he struck Higginson as fair and approachable; later Higginson would say “he is not a man of the sentiments, & if a large ‘Parrolt’ [cannon] exploded & swept away every member of his staff, he would only take out his pencil & make a note of the angle of fracture.”

  Gillmore wanted Charleston and intended to take it by degrees: destroy the smaller forts around Fort Sumter safeguarding the city, then seize Sumter, then the city itself.

  The first of these steps involved Higginson and his regiment. Gillmore’s plan was to cut off supplies to Charleston and its surrounding forts, weakening them, and so Higginson’s regiment was to destroy the Jacksonboro railroad bridge on the Edisto River.

  On July 9 he and three hundred men set sail aboard the John Adams and two smaller boats, the Enoch Dean and a gunboat, the Governor Milton, the latter two dispatched to navigate the shallow waters beyond Wiltown Bluff. The first stage went well. The vessels pulled into Wiltown in a thick fog around four the next morning and surprised the Confederates, who hastily retreated. As the sun rose, Higginson, on board ship, watched in amazement as two hundred slaves, men, women, and children dressed in bright tatters rushed toward the marshy bank of the river, their worldly possessions wrapped in bundles and balanced on their heads. Refugees: they were the reason he had come south.

  Heavy artillery fire drove the Dean and the Milton downstream, and by the time they tried to move again, they had lost the tide and the Milton had been crippled, its engines burst, the engineer killed. Though the Dean managed to continue downstream once the tide changed, in the incessant shelling two men were fatally hit, another soldier’s head shot off, and Higginson himself felt a sudden hard whack at his side. He staggered back, and though he saw neither blood nor a ripped uniform, the pain was terrible, and he fell.

  When the shooting finally stopped, the Dean slid back into Wiltown Bluff and reconnoitered with the John Adams. The Milton had been scuttled—needlessly, thought Higginson.

  The railway bridge had not been touched. The mission had failed.

  FORTUNATELY HIGGINSON’S WOUND was superficial, and the colonel recovered quickly in the Beaufort hospital, almost proud of the purple bruise, large as two hands, that stretched along his side above the hip.

  But his regiment was poorly treated, and he was angry. Decimated by pleurisy and pneumonia, black troops did not receive sufficient medical attention, and Dr. Rogers and Higginson were left to prevent scurvy without vegetables, make bread without yeast, amputate limbs without knives. The troops still suffered from the scorn of many officers, both regular and volunteer, and were begrudgingly equipped with weapons. Higginson’s and Montgomery’s regiments were told, at one point, that their firearms would be replaced with pikes.

  In spite of this, and whatever the success or failure of their various expeditions, his soldiers had worked hard, behaved well, fought fearlessly. Yet they had not been paid since February. Moreover, they would not receive the promised wage of thirteen dollars; their salary had been cut to ten dollars a month. Higginson barraged the New York Tribune, The New York Times, the head of the Senate Finance Committee, the War Department, and Charles Sumner with letters: “We presume too much on the supposed ignorance of those men,” he fumed. “I have never ye
t found a man in my regiment so stupid as not to know when he was cheated.”

  He was also furious when, later, he learned that retroactive pay would be given only to “free colored regiments”—a tacit reference to outfits like the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth—not those made up of fugitive slaves who had been “earlier in the field,” namely, his First South Carolina. The Fifty-fourth received much more publicity, causing many people to assume it was the country’s very first black regiment—they still do—and in later years Higginson would painstakingly explain that five such regiments had already existed by the year 1862.

  In actual fact, Higginson’s was the first.

  But the youthful, rich, and war-scarred Shaw got far more attention than Higginson. This was all the more galling since Higginson would not have minded an appointment to the Fifty-fourth. Shortly after its formation he had written Governor Andrew (in a letter subsequently published in The Liberator) bragging about the high rate of enlistment of African Americans in the First South Carolina (350 men in seven weeks). It was a great triumph, he said; so if there was difficulty raising the required number of black soldiers in the Northeast—which initially there was—he was the man for the job. The governor wasn’t interested. Shaw’s parents had donated generously to the regiment, and Hallowell, second in command, came from a similarly distinguished philanthropic family. By comparison, Higginson was inexperienced, poor, and much too radical.