As Douglass traveled to Boston to see his sons and the historic Fifty-fourth off to battle at the close of May, the North needed to find hope in something. As the other Army of the Potomac leaders had before him, Massachusetts's own "Fighting" Joe Hooker had missed his great chance. Against all classical military advice, the aggressive Robert E. Lee had brilliantly split his army in the Virginia wilderness and had sent Stonewall Jackson to surprise resting Union regiments. With federals running as if a force from hell had descended upon them, the Battle of Chancellorsville in early May had been a rout, another Union disaster. The only consolation, and it would prove to be a huge one, was that Jackson had been accidentally killed by his own men. Yet, this did not change the fact that the battle crushed confidence at home again. How is it possible to win a war when your army is thoroughly beaten over and over? How many more defeats like this could the North endure?
People around Boston desperately needed something to signal things were changing, that there was hope for their cause. The debut of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, the unveiling of the free black man as soldier, certainly signified something new. For Douglass, this was deliverance.
The Boston and Providence railroad ran a train along the great plain of Camp Meigs in Readville, where Massachusetts men trained to become part of the Union army. In the windy and muddy month of March 1863, white officers waited for the trains. At last the results of Stearns's agents produced a flood of recruits, who were promptly outfitted with their wool blue uniforms with the brass buttons that read U.S. and billeted in vast drafty and chilly wooden barracks. By March 25, four hundred men were in camp, and in eight weeks, the regiment reached full numbers at a thousand.
Steams, in his offices in Buffalo, notified Governor Andrew that they were two hundred men above the limit. Could they go beyond Stanton's orders and create another regiment? Andrew dared and said yes, and the Fifty-fifth was born.
By mid-May, all had been trained to march and turn, wheel and salute. Moreover, they all now held Enfield rifles. The nature of the Civil War was about to change irrevocably. All they needed now were the regimental colors, and on May 18, Frederick Douglass joined a flood of dignitaries to watch as four Massachusetts flags were presented to Col. Robert Gould Shaw, a young man from a proud abolitionist family. Shaw, a white Beacon Hill Brahmin only twenty-five-years old, initially thought himself unworthy to lead such a significant regiment. He also feared the loneliness and social stigma that would come from leading black troops. Eventually his ideals outweighed these considerations, and he commanded with a maturity far beyond his years. At the presentation of the colors, Shaw said, "May we have an opportunity to show that you have not made a mistake in intrusting the honor of the State to a colored regiment—the first State that has ever sent one to the war."30
Andrew then handed him his orders from Stanton. They were pulling out immediately, to report to General David Hunter's Hilton Head headquarters on the Sea Islands off South Carolina. The army was stationing them south of Charleston, near Fort Sumter where the war had begun. No one on that proud day could envision what one month would do to the ranks of the men before them. It is not recorded if Douglass spoke that day. He would also be there when, ten days later, the Fifty-fourth marched through Boston to the waterfront to sail to their fate.
Lewis was a sergeant major, a noncommissioned officer. Charles was an orderly, but stayed behind ill at Readville. The regiment formed their line at six thirty A.M. and boarded a train at Readville bound for Boston. No previous regiment had elicited such awed reaction. Beacon Street was jammed with excited onlookers, one newspaper putting the number at twenty thousand. The regiment neatly marched along the Boston Common while women waved handkerchiefs from the windows of the fine red-brick mansions, with flags and shouts of encouragement filling the air. As they paused in front of the State House, Governor Andrew proudly sent up a hurrah. They entered the Boston Common by way of the Charles Street gate and drilled for the cheering crowd. Around noon, the regiment marched toward State Street in the direction of the wharves, while throngs sang "John Brown's Body." They passed over the exact spot where Crispus Attucks fell in the Boston Massacre. At the last moment reality intruded on this remarkable day, when ruffians at the tail end of the parade finally disrupted an otherwise ideal march. Lewis was among those who were spit at and beaten. Some white men tried to grab their weapons, but these guns were now firmly in black hands.31
Police held back well-wishers and family as the men boarded the steamer De Molay, headed for Port Royal, South Carolina. By four o'clock, the sun started to set over the Boston Harbor on a clear, cool spring day and the steamer left its dock. As it sailed away from the great crowd at the wharves, one family member was not ready to say goodbye. Douglass was allowed to board the ship. Besides his eldest son, the regiment also contained over a hundred young men who had put their trust in him. He did not know all of them well but knew some of their stories and the small towns they had left behind for this mission. He went throughout the boat, bidding farewell to these young men he felt connected to, offering words of encouragement and strength.32
In a larger sense, the whole regiment was the product of Douglass's dreams, and they were his children. He had cried out for black troops from the outset of war. The faces of this sharply outfitted and well-drilled fighting force embodied Douglass's vision. Throughout the day, Douglass could hardly believe how grand they looked. It was understandable that he wanted a more intimate goodbye. The sight of land was fading when it was finally time for Douglass to board a tugboat and head slowly back to shore.33
Lewis Douglass stared at the long treacherous stretch of South Carolina beach. A fresh breeze blew through the ranks of six hundred men of the Fifty-fourth crouched down in the wet sand. Fog gathered over the sea as the sun set. Thunder mixed with the sound of the preceding artillery barrage. Having marched almost continuously for two days and having gone without food since morning, the men wished the wait over, the orders to charge now.
The evening battle of the 54th Massachusetts regiment,
depicted in Storming Tort Wagner by Kurz & Allison, 1890
At the end of the narrow sea path facing them was the confederate stronghold of Fort Wagner. Made of quartz sand and palmetto logs and stretching for the width of the island at that point, it was generously equipped with cannon and bristled with determined defenders. Ingeniously designed, Fort Wagner was a death trap, as Shaw and his men well knew, but the way to Charleston was through it—there was no way around. The dashing young man's face looked pale as he called out, "Now I want you to prove yourselves. The eyes of thousands will look on what you do tonight."
As they rose to start their long advance, the fort seemed to explode with fire. Lewis kept pace with those around him. Every few seconds he saw a shell clear a deadly space of about twenty feet in the ranks. He did his best to close the gaps around him. Trying to ignore the screams of downed comrades, at times he pressed through waist-deep water. After running the equivalent of ten football fields among flying lead, they reached the base of Fort Wagner and knelt in a long ditch. The time had come for Colonel Shaw to offer what officers must. His men followed as he ran on a pathway leading to the fort, yelling "Forward, Fifty-fourth!"34He scrambled up the bloodied sloping sand wall to the parapet, and then, his shadow set off by blazing gunfire, he rose up with his sword out. His regiment followed behind him with bayonets ready, but his bullet-ridden body fell.35
Lewis Douglass
With grape, canister, shell, and mines exploding around him, Lewis pushed forward toward the fiery rampart. Men fell all about him, with the returning fire savagely effective. A bullet grazed his leg, completely obliterating his sword sheath. The regiment gained the crest of the fortress through their hand-to-hand combat. However, they were outnumbered and trapped. Confederates were pushing back their progress. Lewis felt the battle was in the balance. He desperately looked behind him for reinforcements that he did not see. The fort's occupiers deliberately m
oved forward until Lewis had no choice but to join the retreat. He dodged shells and other missiles on the agonizingly long run back to safety. Badly wounded men who did not make it all the way back would drown during the night, as the tide continued to rise. It dawned on Douglass's son that he had no idea how he could have survived what had just happened.36
Lewis quickly understood the larger importance of what they had achieved. The Fifty-fourth may have failed to take Fort Wagner, but they validated the courage of black soldiers for all who saw the attack. Two days after the battle he wrote to Amelia, telling her that not a man flinched and their reputation would be of a fighting regiment. He also bid her farewell in the event of his death. He thought it highly unlikely that he could survive another such slaughter. He told her that "if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war."37
His parents were on his mind. Describing the regiment that his father helped to create as "cut to pieces," Lewis estimated that they had suffered three hundred casualties, including all but eight of the officers. He wrote to his parents, "If I die tonight I will not die a coward."38Douglass would later celebrate the importance of Fort Wagner, saying, "In that terrible battle, under the wing of night, more cavils in respect of the quality of negro manhood were set at rest than could have been during a century of ordinary life . . .,"39 This was undoubtedly true, and vitally important to his people and the eventual course of the war, but he kept his raw and immediate emotions under his usual steely control. Nothing survives that indicates how he actually received the news of the effective destruction of the regiment only a month into service, or of his son's almost miraculous survival. We do know how Steams learned of his men's fate, however, and his reaction reveals the strain close to terror that these men were under as they worked twelve-hour days to send boys into the maw of battle.
Steams was in Washington on July 19 arguing (with "great disgust") against Secretary Stanton about equal pay for the black regiments and the need for black officers. A friend asked Steams as he entered the Willard Hotel if he had heard the news—the death of Shaw and half the officers, the shredding of the regiment. Hearing the words that they had been "cut to pieces," the businessman collapsed into a chair in anguished silence, clasping the newspaper report. His son Frank remembered never seeing his father so upset. Steams immediately wrote Andrew, "My heart bleeds for our gallant officers and soldiers of the 54th. All did their duty nobly."40
The recruiting moved forward as the War Department closely watched the battles of Milliken's Bend, Mississippi, and Fort Wagner in which black troops fought. There was no willingness to pay the men equally or to commission black officers, but a basic policy was about to change, and so Steams was sent for. To his amazement, Stanton was pleased at his and Andrew's audacious recruiting and wished to make official the work of the Black Commission by making Steams an assistant adjutant-general with the effective rank of major. Accepting, he resolved to move his headquarters from Buffalo to Philadelphia.
The strain on Stearns's most effective agent was evident, however, especially to his old English friends. Rosine Draz saw the emotional strain this was taking on Douglass. After she sent Douglass money that she had raised for his causes, he tersely replied that she could have raised more, and that he ought to send the whole sum back until she could do better. She was shaken by his response and wrote back reminding him how much work had gone into these efforts and the joy she had felt sending the sum to him. To receive scorn instead of praise grieved her terribly. Douglass's uncharacteristically cross response reflected not only the anxiety he was experiencing for Lewis's trials but simple exhaustion. Mary Carpenter complimented his courage "not to shrink from any sacrifice that you may be called on to make or to hold back anything." She reminded him that his friends empathized and wanted to support him during the "trial of letting your sons join the army."41
How could Douglass stop when black troops were proving what he had long predicted? Nothing could help shift attitudes on slavery's ability to survive the war than what was being sacrificed on the field. The Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had unprecedented visibility as the first northern black regiment, but they were only one part of a larger movement of black soldiers proving their merit as spring became summer in 1863. Regiments largely composed of Louisiana natives fought fiercely at Milliken's Bend above Vicksburg and at Port Hudson on the Mississippi. At the latter, Captain Andre Cailloux, a wealthy, Paris-educated, free black man, shouted his orders in French, English, and Creole. With an arm almost totally shot off, he pressed on for up to six separate charges. Eventually it became clear that these charges were suicidal, but not before rebel guns had fatally struck Cailloux. Black soldiers found themselves holding the Union line under rebel assaults at Milliken's Bend. They protected it as the battle descended into vicious hand-to-hand matches. Both of these contests earned increasing praise from the generals sending reports back to Washington. However, nothing captured the country's attention like the Fifty-fourth's assault on Fort Wagner.42
Yet, Douglass was increasingly troubled. Slavery and equality were different matters, and what was disturbing Douglass was the continuing and obstinate discrimination against black troops. When Steams asked him to come to Philadelphia to speak at the National Hall on July 6 to address the increasing resistance of black men to this evident discrimination, Douglass went. Douglass had no trouble attracting a crowd—around five thousand black and white people packed the space to hear him. Greeted by thunderous applause, Douglass was more solemn than usual. On the question of whether black men should enlist despite this inequality, Douglass contended that fighting bravely would be the best way to gain equality. The speech came in a week that was probably the most crucial in the entire history of the war, as news filtered in about the defeat of Lee's invasion at Gettysburg, the capture of Vicksburg by Grant that put the Mississippi River under total Union control, and the outbreak of riots in New York City in resistance to the army draft.43
For three days and nights, dangerous mobs controlled the city and took out their anger on the black population. In one of the most impassioned passages from Douglass's Life and Times, he wrote:
It spared neither age nor sex; it hanged negroes simply because they were negroes; it murdered women in their homes, and burnt their homes over their heads; it dashed out the brains of young children against the lamp-posts; it burned the colored orphan asylum . . . and forced colored men, women and children to seek concealment in cellars or garrets or wheresoever else it could be found, until this high carnival of crime and reign of terror should pass away."44
In a career of close calls, this was one of Douglass's narrowest, as he was passing through New York when the riots broke out and, as he noted, his fame as the Union's most prominent recruiter would have made him a double target of rage.
In his Philadelphia talk, even as these momentous events were swirling around them, Douglass once again tried to motivate the potential black recruits in the face of blatant inequality. As they faced death, why could they not receive equal pay? "I shall not oppose this view. There is something deep down in the soul of every man present which assents to the justice of the claim thus made, and honors the manhood and self-respect which insists on it . . . I am content with nothing for the black man short of equal and exact justice." But there was one thing that needed to be considered—the ghastly existence of slavery itself. If the South won, or stalemated, or exhausted the North, it lived on, and nothing excused that. "Do not flatter yourselves, my friends, that you are more important to the government than the government is to you. You stand but as the plank to the ship. The rebellion can be put down without your help. Slavery can be abolished by white men, but liberty so won for the black man, while it may leave him an object of pity, can never make him an object of respect."45
All this, before the July 18 assault on Fort Wagner.
As the recruiting continued, the ranks of the Union army swelled with the infusion of tho
usands of blacks. Many white soldiers at first, and not surprisingly, resented fighting alongside black men. A dispute broke out in a New Jersey regiment stationed in the Sea Islands of South Carolina over going into battle with black men. When a captain contended that they were an inferior race, a comrade countered, "What do you say of Frederick Douglass, who has raised himself from slavery to a high position?" The captain had no response to that, but was still not convinced.46
Charles Douglass had learned that wearing the uniform only increased racism toward him when, as he was boarding a train to leave a Fourth of July celebration in Boston to return to camp with the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth, a group of Irishmen overheard him making disparaging comments about former Union commander George McClellan. One stepped in front of him with his fists up and swore, "McClellan's a good General, you black nigger. I don't care if you have a uniform on." With his father's audacity, Charles ran right at the considerably larger man and fought him until a police officer pulled them apart. Charles was livid, believing he could have whipped a dozen more men. With a loaded pistol on him, Charles wrote his father that he would use it the next time a white man laid a hand on him.47
This racism would have saddened Douglass, not surprised him. Before he had started recruiting, he had written words that presaged those of W. E. B. Du Bois before World War I: "We shall be fighting a double battle, against slavery at the South and against prejudice and proscription at the North . . ."48 Although he believed that no one who saw fifty thousand well-drilled soldiers could possibly retain their old notions of black inferiority, with so much blood already spilled, what increasingly made him share the anger of those young men he was lecturing was the formal and calculating way that the government was discriminating against black troops. This inequality took different forms.
Douglass and Lincoln Page 18