The needs of the newly arrived were so great that in early January 1865, Saxton wrote a plea to the “Good Men and Women of the North” asking for help on behalf of the “thousands of suffering negroes whom Gen. Sherman has just liberated by his triumphant march through Georgia.” They had arrived in the area “after long marches and severe privations, weary, famished, sick, and almost naked.” The government, he said, did not have the resources to help them, and “unless the charity of the North comes speedily to the rescue, they must die by the hundreds from exposure and disease.”37
Despite the donations that poured in as newspapers reported Saxton’s request, many of these people did die. Laura M. Towne, a Philadelphia teacher who had started the Penn School on St. Helena Island in 1862, wrote, “The poor Negroes die as fast as ever. The children are all emaciated to the last degree and have such violent coughs and dysenteries that few survive. It is frightful to see such suffering among children.” Some of these children traveled without the comfort of family members, while others lost parents and siblings along the way or shortly after arriving. Towne was temporarily caring for a young girl who had typhoid pneumonia. The child’s mother, brother, and an aunt had already died, and another aunt was dying. Towne wrote of the girl, “She is almost friendless, and too small to be very useful to any one.”38
* * *
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, although in poor health and suffering from stomach pains, went to Savannah in January 1865 to speak to Sherman about the rumors of the mistreatment of blacks by Sherman and his men.
Sherman must not have been surprised by Stanton’s visit. The general had recently received a confidential letter from Army Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck warning that certain people near Lincoln were saying that Sherman had “manifested an almost criminal dislike of the negro” and that he was “not willing to carry out the wishes of the government in regard to him.”39
After their meeting Sherman wrote that Stanton “talked to me a great deal about the negroes, the former slaves, and I told him of many interesting incidents, illustrating their simple character and faith in our arms and progress.” When Stanton asked about Davis, Sherman replied, “I assured him that General Davis was an excellent soldier, and I did not believe he had any hostility to the negro; that in our army we had no negro soldiers, and, as a rule, we preferred white soldiers, but that we employed a large force of them as servants, teamsters, and pioneers, who had rendered admirable service.” When asked specifically about the hundreds of African Americans who had died at Ebenezer Creek, Sherman sent for Davis, who, Sherman wrote, “explained the matter to [Stanton’s] entire satisfaction.”40 Davis was never punished.
Those who died at Ebenezer Creek would never see justice, but before Stanton left Savannah, he asked Sherman to arrange a meeting with local black leaders so the secretary might ask how they thought the government could most effectively help them. It would prove to be a momentous event. On the evening of February 12, Stanton and Sherman met with twenty men, mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, at Sherman’s headquarters. All but five of the men had been born enslaved.
Garrison Frazier, a sixty-seven-year-old ordained Baptist minister, was chosen to answer the questions on behalf of the group. Frazier had been enslaved until eight years earlier when he paid $1,000 in gold and silver for his freedom and that of his wife.
Frazier answered numerous questions, telling Stanton and Sherman that, above all, the former slaves wanted land. He said, “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” Asked if blacks wanted to live with whites or stay in separate communities, Frazier replied, “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over; but I do not know that I can answer for my brethren.” All but one of the other men agreed with him.41
In response to the historic meeting and at Stanton’s urging, Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 on January 16. The order set aside “the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, for the settlement of the negroes” and gave each family “a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.” Blacks were given possessory titles to the land (that is, they owned the land but could not produce titles to prove it) and would be protected “until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title.”42
Later the army would loan African Americans mules no longer fit for military work, which led to the phrase “40 acres and a mule.” In all, the Union reserved about 400,000 confiscated acres for newly freed African Americans. Property that had already been sold in the tax sales was not affected.
Sherman’s order also allowed blacks to live separately, the preference stated by the majority of the ministers. The order declared, “No white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves.”43
Saxton would be given the task of making all this happen as inspector of settlements and plantations.44
Word of Sherman’s order spread quickly; within six months forty thousand African Americans would be living on the land.45
* * *
Now that Smalls was back in Beaufort, he and the Planter were immediately put to work and were soon transporting some of Sherman’s forces from Savannah to Beaufort. Sherman was now focusing on his Carolinas Campaign with plans to meet Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. Before Sherman reached Virginia, he was determined to show no mercy to South Carolina, the state where secession had been born. “Her people were the first to fire on Fort Sumter, had been in a great hurry to precipitate the country into civil war; and therefore on them should fall the scourge of war in its worst form,” Sherman wrote.46 He would keep his word. His troops destroyed railroads, government buildings, and civilian property just as they had in Georgia.
As a Union-controlled area, Beaufort escaped the destruction inflicted on other parts of the state. The already overburdened town would, however, briefly play host to Sherman and many of his men. The first of his troops arrived by boat on January 3, and the rowdy, weather-beaten soldiers made their way from the wharf to their camps four miles outside town. One Beaufort resident who saw them wrote,
Strange, rough looking, unshaven and badly dressed: they seemed like a gang of coal heavers when compared with the trim and snug fellows here, who have nothing to do but guard-duty with white gloves. These western marauders came trooping through the streets, roaring out songs and jokes, making sharp comments on all the tidy civilians, and over-flowing with merriment and good-nature.47
More troops reached Beaufort in the following weeks and waited for their next orders. Many of these men, all of whom were white, were fighting to preserve the Union rather than to end slavery and found the unusual situation in the town surprising. Beaufort was crowded with thousands of former slaves, while black soldiers and black property owners, including Smalls, mingled with white military men and white missionaries who touted racial equality. It was unlike anything most, if not all, of Sherman’s soldiers had ever seen.
The majority of Sherman’s troops were civil to their temporary neighbors, but some tried to take what little the people in Beaufort had. Others were angered by the preferential treatment they believed African Americans were receiving. A Northern missionary wrote, “Sherman and his men are impatient of the darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted, and spoiled, as they have been here. They hustled them out of the way, and the blacks were afraid of them.”48 In an effort to protect the freedmen from the soldiers, Brig. Gen. Saxton forbade all troops but those assigned to headquarters and acting as provost guards to enter the town.49
Although Sherman’s troops were in Beaufort for several weeks, the general’s stay was especially brief. He arrived by steamer in Beaufort on January 23 to start his campaign
, spent the evening at Saxton’s home, and started out the following day to conquer the seat of the rebellion.50
CHAPTER 10
Triumph and Tragedy
As William Tecumseh Sherman and his men moved north, the Confederates had no idea which city would be his next target. He was headed to Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, but the Confederates were betting Sherman would attack Charleston. Residents along the coast were so sure that Sherman was coming their way that they had burned their cotton and hidden their livestock in swamps.
By the time Union troops arrived in Columbia on February 17, 1865, Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard had already issued orders for his men to leave Charleston. The beleaguered city, which had endured eighteen months of bombardment and had once thought itself invincible, was now being abandoned.
Most residents had already fled Charleston, and the only people who remained were soldiers, poor laborers, and the enslaved—and the last had been ordered to watch over the homes of the masters who had left them behind.
With orders to evacuate, Confederate soldiers burned massive stores of cotton and rice; exploded a thirty-eight-ton Blakely gun on the Battery, the seawall at the tip of the peninsula; and set the new bridge across the Ashley River on fire. They destroyed anything that could benefit Union soldiers, including three Confederate ironclads. The Confederates also evacuated the forts in Charleston Harbor, including Fort Sumter, where the war had begun.
On the morning of February 18, 1865, the Union heard the news it had waited for years to receive: the Confederates had abandoned Charleston, the heart of the Confederacy. The Union commander at nearby Morris Island, Lt. Col. Augustus G. Bennett of the 21st U.S. Colored Troops, immediately sent word for some of his men to meet him in the abandoned city, while he sent others to take possession of the forts in the harbor. Bennett then headed toward the city with just a small band of soldiers.
When Bennett and twenty-two men landed at Mills’ Wharf in Charleston, a cheering crowd of African Americans welcomed them and shook the soldiers’ hands as tears of joy and relief streamed down their faces. They, too, had been waiting years for that day; their freedom had finally arrived.
Although the Union occupation was relatively peaceful, a horrific tragedy had already marred the day. Two hours before Bennett arrived, the city’s Northeastern Railroad depot, where commissary supplies and ammunition had been stored, exploded. While hungry civilians had been trying to salvage food from the depot, a group of young boys playfully tossed handfuls of gunpowder into cotton that was burning nearby. The trail of gunpowder they created eventually connected the fire to the ammunition, resulting in a massive blast. At least 150 people, mostly women and children, were killed, and two hundred more were wounded.1
* * *
Although Smalls would not lead Union forces into Charleston as he once had dreamed, he must have found it especially poignant that the first Union soldiers to arrive in the city after Bennett landed were African Americans of the 21st USCT. Many of these men had once been forced to work on the very streets they were now liberating. As the men marched up Meeting Street, the newly freed people rushed to welcome them.
For much of the country the relatively peaceful surrender of Charleston was an anticlimactic ending to the siege of a rebel city that was so reviled by the North.
The Union had expected a major clash but was nevertheless overjoyed by the news. Stanton, the secretary of war, ordered a national salute to be fired at noon on February 22 “at every fort, arsenal and army headquarters of the United States, in honor of the restoration of the flag of the Union upon Fort Sumter.”2
The Confederacy was in shock. It had taken great pride in its ability to hold the city through so many years of war and reeled at its loss. Many Confederates were especially angry that the North seemed to relish the news that black soldiers had been the first to arrive.
* * *
It was a celebratory time in the North as people sensed the war would soon end, but many knew that the country would face a monumental challenge in reuniting when the fighting was finally over. Lincoln certainly knew and was already trying to prepare the nation. On March 4, 1865, he gave his second inaugural address at the Capitol to forty thousand onlookers. Rather than giving a victory speech or admonishing the South for its role in starting the war, Lincoln encouraged reconciliation. In the short time he spoke, just six or seven minutes, he named the institution of slavery as the cause of the war and described slavery as a national debt created by the “bondsmen’s 250 years of unrequited toil.”3
Lincoln said these words knowing that slavery soon would be officially abolished. The House had finally passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, nine months after the Senate, and the amendment was now before the states for ratification.
In Lincoln’s closing remarks on that cold winter day, he called for the country to reunite “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”4
* * *
Smalls’ chance to return to Charleston for the first time since his escape came just a few weeks after the Union occupied the city. On March 10 Smalls served as the captain aboard the Planter as he took Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, several other Union officers, and an agent from the Freedmen’s Relief Association from Beaufort to inspect Charleston.
When the Planter neared Sumter, Smalls smiled with satisfaction as he saw the American flag once again flying over the fort.5 There is little doubt that his thoughts went back to those early morning hours when he had piloted that same vessel past the fort’s imposing guns while bracing for the sound of cannon fire.
Minutes later the Planter approached the city, and Smalls saw firsthand the heavy toll the war had taken on Charleston. Homes and businesses hit repeatedly by the Union bombardment lay in ruins in every direction, while grass grew over the decaying palmetto logs of the wharves.6 It hardly resembled the place he had left.
But with the destruction had come other changes. No longer were African American men, women, and children being sent to the auction block where families were torn apart. They were no longer sent to the Work House for cruel punishments, and they were no longer required to wear the metal slave badges peculiar to the city.
To further help the newly freed population, the Union had already started distributing food and clothes. It had also appointed a superintendent of public jurisdiction, James Redpath. By March 4 Redpath, a journalist and radical abolitionist who had been born in Scotland, had reopened the school buildings. Both black and white children attended, but the classes remained segregated.
Many of the old ways were gone, but Smalls soon learned that Charlestonians, black and white alike, remembered him.
Shortly after he moored the Planter at one of the wharves, Saxton and the other officials left to make their inspection. Some African Americans near the wharf heard that Smalls and the Planter were there, and they rushed to greet the man whose escape had given them hope that one day they, too, would be free.
The crowd was so taken with Smalls that the people were still with him when Saxton and his group returned to the Planter that afternoon.
Also standing with Smalls were two white men with whom Smalls had been speaking. When Saxton approached, Smalls introduced them. One had built the Planter, and the other had made the original engine and boilers. With his usual charm Smalls joked and said, “I put the polish on.” When the friendly conversation was over, the white men walked away to speak with a man Smalls recognized immediately: John Ferguson, the former owner of the Planter.
Smalls pointed Ferguson out to Saxton, but neither Ferguson nor Smalls made an effort to speak to each other. The tension between them was hardly surprising. When Smalls had seized the Planter in 1862, most of the blame had fallen on Ferguson as the steamer’s owner rather than on the white officers who had left the vessel in the care of the enslaved crew. Smalls’ escape had also cost Ferguson the hefty leasing fees he had charged the Confederacy for using the Planter. Their brief, icy run-in would not be the last time Fergu
son appeared in Smalls’ life.
Smalls and Saxton soon boarded the boat, leaving the crowd of African American men and women still gathered around the vessel. As they prepared to depart, Smalls’ admirers “raised at first a few feeble cheers,” but when Saxton asked for three more for Smalls, “every arm was swung, and every voice was raised till the [heavens] rang.”7
* * *
Smalls and the Planter once again returned to the Charleston wharves on the morning of April 14, 1865. This time they had come for a celebration.
The excitement in the city was palpable that spring morning as Charleston had learned the day before that Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in the rural town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9. After four years of conflict, more than 620,000 dead and more than one million wounded, the war was essentially over.8
Sherman, who had marched into North Carolina after he left South Carolina, would accept the surrender of Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and all troops in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas on April 26, 1865, at Bennett Place, North Carolina.9 Other Confederate armies also would soon lay down their arms.
But none of that was what Smalls had returned to Charleston to celebrate. Exactly four years earlier to the day, Union major Robert Anderson and his men had lowered the American flag at Fort Sumter in defeat and evacuated. Now Anderson was returning, at Lincoln’s request, to raise the same flag over the fort once more. The Planter and nine other steamers would be taking soldiers and civilians from Charleston to Fort Sumter to watch the historic event.
Naval vessels near the wharves began that Good Friday by firing a twenty-one-gun salute while flags flew from public and private buildings throughout the city. The former Confederate fortifications in the harbor all flew American flags, with the exception of Fort Sumter, whose bare flagpole stretched high above the ramparts as if expectantly waiting.
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 18