Northern politicians understood that allowing blacks to enlist in the army would change the debate over civil and political rights forever. Initially, it was too radical a move for states that recognized blacks as free but not equal. Northerners from President Lincoln down suggested that blacks were too cowardly, passive, or feminine to fight—that their presence on the battlefield would undermine army morale and would destroy any prospect of peace with the Confederacy. In Ohio, where Republicans were working to keep Unionist Democrats in their governing coalition, the issue seemed impossible. In 1862 John Mercer Langston offered to raise “a thousand and one” colored men for a regiment. In a face-to-face encounter Ohio’s Governor David Tod humiliated him. “Do you not know, Mr. Langston, that this is a white man’s government; that white men are able to defend and protect it, and that to enlist a negro soldier would be to drive every white man out of the service?” said Governor Tod. “When we want you colored men we will notify you.”6
By the end of 1862, however, after nearly two years of defeat on the battlefield and with manpower shortages looming, the notion of blacks serving in the military seemed less sinister and preposterous. When Massachusetts sought colored volunteers for its 54th Infantry Regiment in early 1863, Governor Tod asked Langston if he would lead the recruiting effort among black Ohioans. O.S.B. Wall joined him in working for the Massachusetts 54th, and together they enlisted hundreds of men. Wall’s two younger half brothers, John and Albert, joined, and at the very moment O.S.B. Wall was heading toward southeastern Ohio, they were charging Fort Wagner in South Carolina.7
Not yet forty, Wall left his wife, three small children, and shoemaking business in Oberlin and moved to Columbus, where he coordinated the transportation of the Ohio volunteers to Massachusetts. After the 54th was filled, Langston and Wall recruited troops for the Massachusetts 55th. On June 15, 1863, just after Wall received word that the 55th was full, four dozen recruits appeared at his office. Rather than sending them back to their homes, Wall found beds for them in Columbus. He walked to the statehouse and waited for an audience with Governor Tod, urging him to consider the forty-eight recruits as the first members of an Ohio regiment. Tod telegraphed the War Department, and the next day Secretary of War Stanton authorized the creation of a new regiment, the Fifth United States Colored Troops.8
While Wall masterminded the logistics of getting all the recruits to the muster, he also traveled extensively, making direct appeals to black communities across the state and recruiting three hundred men. At the end of July he rode eighty miles southeast to the university town of Athens and by early August was holding meetings along the West Virginia border. Although many in the area supported slavery and secession, had long opposed the war, and blamed blacks for the suffering that it had caused them, Wall kept riding. The threat of violence did not deter him, nor did it intimidate his volunteers. Everywhere he went, he collected commitments to fight for the Union: five men in Jefferson County, two in Harrison County, another six in Belmont County. He shared the stage at large rallies with prominent Ohioans and stood alone at quieter, less public gatherings. His message was unchanged. Joining the fight would “elevat[e] the race from degradation to equality.” It was more than a matter of simply “conferring the boon of freedom on their fellow men of the South”; for all blacks, North and South, military service would change the very meaning of freedom. “If the colored citizens of Ohio are such men as they aspire to be,” he said, “now is the time to show it.”9
Gibson: Nashville, December 1864
AT TWILIGHT RANDALL GIBSON could look down from the breastworks at the dark forms in the fields below. They were small, indistinct mounds mostly, but occasionally a hand or leg jutted into the air in agonized silhouette. Just minutes before, in the final light of day, the mounds had been recognizably human, bodies mired in cold mud, snapped, disemboweled, blood running in the hard rain. They were still clothed; Gibson’s soldiers had not had time to strip them naked, as many Confederates had done with enemy corpses the night before. It was difficult to make out their individual features, but earlier that afternoon they had been breathing and alive, young men from Indiana charging up the steep rise by the hundreds.10
As the light faded on December 16, 1864, Gibson could allow himself a moment of relief: the Army of Tennessee’s right flank had held. But his struggle was only beginning. The army’s left and center were falling in a sickening cascade. Within moments, it seemed, Union soldiers were behind his position. Confederate soldiers on all sides were dropping their rifles and sprinting “frightened and routed” for the Franklin Pike, their only path of escape.11
Three weeks earlier, while the Union army under William Tecumseh Sherman was marching from Atlanta to Savannah, the Army of Tennessee had headed the other way, northward into Union-occupied territory. For months, as Sherman advanced into Georgia, the rebels had been in retreat, their morale battered by the fall of Atlanta and Lincoln’s reelection. Instead of continuing to stand in Sherman’s way, General John Bell Hood believed it was time for a grand offensive. With forty thousand men, the second-strongest Confederate force aimed to take Nashville, move through Kentucky to Cincinnati, and even threaten Chicago. In the alternative, they would drive east through Tennessee, raise tens of thousands of additional volunteers, cross the Cumberland Gap, and reinforce Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. President Jefferson Davis himself had declared the offensive the beginning of a final victory for the Confederacy. Randall Gibson was pleased to be moving forward again. After so much bitter defeat in Georgia, after half his men died in a single charge, 480 in one hour, Gibson described his soldiers as “a defeated army.” Perhaps Hood’s lofty plans would reverse what seemed an inevitable decline.12
At the end of 1864 the Gibsons were all but a defeated family. Randall’s brother Hart had just been released after more than a year in captivity. He had lost everything; Union officials confiscated his plantation, Hartland. His main contribution to the war effort had been helping his general escape from the Ohio Penitentiary in November 1863. Hart’s wife had sent him boots with a hollow heel stuffed with cash, funds that allowed John Hunt Morgan to flee south and fight another nine months before being ambushed and shot dead. After a brief, undistinguished career as an artillery lieutenant, Claude Gibson, Hart and Randall’s brother, had died in 1863 of consumption, the same disease that had killed their mother. That same year their sister Sarah’s husband died after a long illness, leaving her a young widow with three children and vast estates in Union-occupied Kentucky that were worse than worthless—they were expensive, overgrown, and unproductive, and she had no means of supporting her family. McKinley Gibson, a younger brother and Randall’s aide-de-camp, was also battling consumption; before invading Tennessee, Randall ordered him back to Mississippi for his health.13
Their father, Tobias, home on the family plantations in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, was also in crisis. In late 1862 the Union army had occupied southern Louisiana and confiscated almost all his horses and mules, wagons, livestock, and corn. Tobias Gibson noticed an immediate change in his labor force. After failing to take Randall’s advice to move the best slaves to Texas for safekeeping, he found “many of the negroes led astray by designing persons, believ[ing] that the plantations & everything on them belong to them, the negroes.” “They quit work, go & come when they see fit,” Tobias and three neighbors wrote the Union commander. “Negroes in numbers from one plantation to an other at all hours night & day—They travel on the railroad—They congregate in large numbers on deserted plantations—All these things are done against the will & in defiance of the orders of their masters . . . In a word we are in a State of anarchy.”14
Although the Union army insisted that blacks stay on their plantations and work under contract, the Gibson family plantations on Bayou Black were ruined. Levees broke; the sugar crop failed; caterpillars ate the cotton; and many of Tobias’s slaves answered the repeated calls for colored soldiers. “The blacks are getting worse every
day & at the end of this year I think they will be intolerable,” the old man wrote in 1864. On a broader level, he railed against what he saw as the perversion of “American ideas of liberty” in “this Negro War.” Where once he had expressed sympathy for his slaves, now he warned his children that a Union victory would mean one thing above all else: equality with blacks. “As far as I know the white children are to grow up in ignorance or mix in the same cabin with the Negro with the same Yankee Marm for the teacher!” he wrote. “With the prevailing tendency to fanaticism at the North I would not be at all surprised if ‘miscegenation’ became the fashion as well as the Sentiment of those people.”15
While his family was suffering, Randall Gibson thrived in the war. As colonel of his Louisiana regiment, he had become not only a technically competent officer but a gallant and beloved warrior, someone his men would name their children after. From the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh to Hell’s Half Acre at Murfreesboro, to Perryville and Chickamauga, his regiment came to be regarded as some of the Confederacy’s most disciplined and fearless fighters. Gibson developed a taste for “a magnificent battle. The country entirely open. The contending hosts plainly to be seen. The fire of batteries + infantry—the wounded + slain—the charge + retreat—the triumphant Confederate yell—the confusion in the enemy’s ranks—the flying Regiments—the riderless horses.” Under murderous fire he charged ahead, planted flags in the enemy breastworks, rallied and regrouped, and inspired his men to fight again and again. In early 1864, as he was falling back to defend Atlanta, Gibson was promoted to brigadier general.16
For years Randall Gibson had complained about incompetent generals. He had fought under Braxton Bragg, his onetime neighbor in Louisiana sugar country, a spiteful, vainglorious fool. During the defense of Atlanta, Joseph Johnston seemed to know only retreat and defeat. For the Nashville campaign, however, John Bell Hood would command the Army of Tennessee. Gibson had thrilled at the prospect of mounting Hood’s offensive strategy. When the army decamped from Florence, Alabama, on November 20, 1864, and headed north for Nashville, Gibson had had no doubt that great victories awaited. As his brother McKinley wrote, the soldiers were veterans, well fed and outfitted for winter, amply supplied with “coffee, whiskey and ordnance and ammunition.” By contrast, it was an article of faith that Sherman’s March to the Sea would be the ruin of the Union army. “We now look forward to his defeat as certain and his surrender as probable. He is harassed night and day,” wrote McKinley Gibson. “The fruits of four long years of terrible war will be lost to the Yankees, and the flags of the Confederates will again wave in triumph over the strongholds of’62. How much we have to be thankful for!”17
Marching north for nine days through Columbia to Spring Hill, Tennessee, the Confederate army positioned itself to shatter the Union forces below Nashville. On the night of November 29, General Hood ordered an attack, but the order was never communicated. While the army and its officers slept, thousands of Union troops accomplished a silent evacuation that they could only describe as miraculous. The next day, as if to atone for his army’s inertia, Hood ordered a frontal assault on a fortified Union position at Franklin, fifteen miles south of Nashville. After five hours of fighting, the Union forces retreated, but Hood’s army could not claim victory. Nearly seven thousand Confederate soldiers were dead or wounded, including fifteen generals and fifty-four regimental commanders. Held in reserve at Franklin, Gibson’s brigade marched toward Nashville at nearly full strength, but the rest of the Army of Tennessee was in no position to take the city. Arriving on December 1, they formed a series of trenches and fortifications in a three-mile arc in the hills just south of town and waited for the Union army to attack. After two frozen weeks of isolated skirmishes, the Union army advanced with overwhelming force on December 15. After a day of fighting, the Confederate forces retreated two miles and dug in for another pounding.18
Rebel soldiers cut down the trees on Peach Orchard Hill and hauled them about forty feet below the Confederate fortifications, to slow the inevitable enemy attack and keep the charging soldiers under fire for as long as possible. All morning on December 16, Union cannons popped and crackled, and shells pushed through the air. By early afternoon, a Union brigade had begun its advance. They marched across open fields and up the hill, but their strong lines grew ragged and pocked as Confederate cannons took out entire clusters of troops. From the hilltop Gibson’s men fired their rifles and in ten minutes killed eighty-three men and wounded hundreds. After the first wave broke and ran, a second began. The Union soldiers marched over the bodies of their comrades, only to be slaughtered themselves. Finally a third wave tried climbing the hill. The closest they got was seventy-five yards. Gibson estimated that that afternoon his men killed two hundred outright and wounded between seven and nine hundred more.19
Just to Gibson’s right, the Union soldiers came within feet of the Confederate line. The rebels had held their fire, waiting until the enemy was close enough to massacre—a deadly reception reserved for black troops. For two weeks these new Yankee soldiers had been skirmishing with the Confederate pickets, and whenever the rebels saw that their foes were black, they had timed their fire to be lethal. The Twelfth and Thirteenth U.S. Colored Troops were composed of former slaves who had never been under fire before. As they marched up in tight formation, Peach Orchard Hill was eerily silent. When they were close enough to talk to, the Confederate line rose and blasted them. A Confederate officer commented that the Negro soldiers “gallantly dashed” forward “but . . . came only to die.” Still, the Union troops kept coming. When their color-bearer was killed, a comrade picked up the regimental flag. When he fell, another man took it. Five times the flag went down, and five times another soldier tried to carry the standard up to the Confederate breastworks. Throughout the bloodbath the Confederates displayed “coolness unexampled.” Only when the enemy finally retreated, leaving hundreds of corpses behind and a flag that had been presented to them “by the colored ladies of Murfreesboro,” did the rebel soldiers begin screaming for more blood. The sight of black soldiers had inspired “the intensest indignation,” wrote one soldier from Arkansas, “express[ing] itself in a way peculiarly ominous and yet quite natural for the ‘masters.’” The men wanted to charge down the hill and kill them all. “With great difficulty,” their commanding officer wrote, “I prevented my line from pursuing.”20
During the two-day Battle of Nashville, nearly a third of the Union dead and wounded fell on Peach Orchard Hill. But while the Confederates’ right flank was busy fighting off the assaults, Union infantry and cavalry smashed the rest of their line. Thousands of rebels surrendered, while thousands more dropped their guns, abandoned cannons and wagons, and ran south. Finding themselves the rear guard of a shattered army column, just steps ahead of the enemy, Gibson and his men retreated from one skirmish after another, a cold, wet, filthy chaos of killing and being killed. A few miles south, on the banks of the Harpeth River, they were charged by five thousand men and surrounded by Union cavalry but shot their way clear. Three weeks later the rebel army reached Mississippi, staggering and starving and blood-soaked, barefoot, ragged, and freezing, about half its original strength.21
After one of the worst Confederate defeats in the war, Randall Gibson and his brigade headed south to Mobile, Alabama, as winter turned to spring, to help defend the city from a massive Union attack. Gibson took command of Spanish Fort, east of the city across Mobile Bay. As Union forces twenty thousand strong closed in, Gibson ordered his three thousand soldiers and several hundred black conscripts to dig trenches as quickly as they could—with few spades, picks, and axes at hand, they used any tool they could find. For two weeks they endured constant bombardment. Every day the Union lines neared. By nightfall on April 8, the enemy was beginning to breach Gibson’s defenses, and Gibson’s scouts reported the situation as hopeless. Without knowing it, the invading army had advanced behind their lines; in the morning they would realize their position and attack. Before they could,
Gibson and his men escaped in the dead of night through tall grass and marsh, taking off their shoes and walking slowly so no one would hear them. Although Spanish Fort fell undefended, Gibson could describe the escape as one final victory.22
On April 9 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. After holding out for another month, the Confederacy’s western forces surrendered. General Gibson stood before his men and told them to regret nothing about their “unselfish patriotism” and devotion to what he called the Confederacy’s “eventful revolution.” As he issued paroles for his men, releasing them to their families, Gibson flatly denied that they had been defeated. Although he urged them to be “law-abiding, peaceable, and industrious” citizens, he did not tell them to forget the previous four years. “Your banners . . . were never lowered save over the bier of a comrade,” he said. “You have not surrendered, and will never surrender your self-respect and love of country.” Perhaps there were ways to keep fighting, without guns.23
Wall: Charleston, 1865-66
THE SCABBARD FOR O.S.B. Wall’s sword bore the words “God Speed the Right,” and there were days when they spoke the truth. In late March 1865, before he headed to South Carolina, the people of Oberlin gathered to see him off. A professor from the college addressed the crowd, remembering the day six years earlier when the U.S. government had indicted Wall for his role in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Now the same government was making him a captain in its army, the first regularly commissioned colored captain in the nation’s history. The professor presented Wall with the sword—the town’s antislavery faithful had raised eighty dollars for the magnificent weapon. Dressed in his officer’s uniform, Wall said that he felt humbled by the joy they took in entrusting him with an awesome responsibility. As he looked out at the adoring crowd, black and white, it seemed as if his cause had already triumphed.24
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