UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
It was no accident that Charles dedicated such an inordinate amount of space and spleen to the seemingly trivial bridge incident.
It perfectly symbolized his frustration with a war that had become a performance for the press and that smothered the talents of the up and coming.
At that moment it was “Joe Hookerism and wire pulling.”
Later it would be the politically motivated and equally murderous bungling of Ben Butler, who along with other officers Adams referred to as the “drunk-murdering-arson dynasty.”43
Locked into the relatively low rank of captain, Adams grew jealous of his superiors.
Not only did their incompetence snuff out lives and mask potential genius, their rank empowered them to almost literally write the story of the war.
This kind of frustration had been building for some time.
No less than a year into his service Adams first glimpsed the ways in which, as he saw it, the war would be told and remembered.
In a minor skirmish around Sharpsburg, Adams and his troopers galloped into the town, thinking they were backing up fellow Union troops under fire.
As he and his men rushed in along side the troopers of the Illinois cavalry, Adams excitedly drew his pistol.
But then, to his disgust, he immediately caught on to the ruse.
Far from rebels resisting tooth and nail, he found streets lined with sympathetic civilians.
Women waved handkerchiefs, “hailing us with delight as liberators,” as they helped slake thirsts by hurrying water into the soldiers’ hands.
Though Colonel Farnsworth and his men were “cracking away” with their carbines, giving “the idea of a sharp engagement in process,” the whole thing had been a “newspaper battle”—engineered to seize real estate in local papers throughout the Union under headings like “a cavalry charge” or a “sharp skirmish.”
“Lots of glory,” fumed Adams, “but n’ary a reb.”44
His father worked daily to mold opinion in Britain, while his younger brother regularly published articles about the war in prominent papers in New York, Massachusetts and London.
Yet Charles came to feel like a prop in the hands of unprincipled journalists and their military accomplices.45
Significantly, it is in the handful of letters addressed to his mother that Charles released all this spleen about the false face of war.
And it was his mother whom Charles first reprimanded for apparently buying into the romantic newspaper reports.
He complained how civilians knew so little about “non-fighting details of waste and suffering of war.”
He once dismissed the accounts of “dashing celerity” of cavalry raids under the famed General Stoneman and others, and then spun into an unusually long letter, graphically depicting the ways in which he was forced to methodically grind his horses into their graves.
The nastiness of war required it.
Later on he warned her not to believe the stories about general Pleasonton: “He is pure and simple a newspaper humbug."
"You always see his name in the papers, but to us who have served under him and seen him under fire he is notorious as a bully and a toady."
"He does nothing save with a view to a newspaper paragraph."
"At Antietam he sent his cavalry into a hell of artillery fire and himself got behind a bank and read a newspaper….”46
43 He personally blamed General Butler for the death of tens of thousands of soldiers; Other generals he mentioned were Joseph Hooker, Daniel Sickles, and Daniel Butterfield.
44 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Sharpsburg, Md., September 25, 1862, ibid., 185-87
45 If it is the case that CFA, at first, only revealed this side of war to his mother it is worth asking why this might be. It couldn’t be that she alone in CFA’s family imbibed the newspaper reports with perfect credulity; Henry seemed to believe what he read as well; and so did Adams’s father, as neither of these men had military experience. What this does suggest is that CFA seemed to be more comfortable telling his mother how reputations of great men were often a product of artifice.
46 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 1st Mass. Cav’y, Potomac Creek, May 12, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 3-8
TO BE CONTINUED ...
GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Some weeks later, Henry wrote Charles in response to the crushing news of Hooker’s defeat at Chancellorsville, charging his brother and the Union army to respond with action: “We want continual, feverish activity, and that is all."
"Worry them with cavalry raids!…Let them have no rest, no hope!”47
From Charles’s end of things, though, this kind of public lust for continual action only compounded the problem of “newspaper battles” and generals plotting deadly clashes even as they played to a national audience.
Not until late ‘63, when, evidently, Adams, Sr. queried why his son’s regiment never made the papers, did Charles grouse to his father about his invisibility in the papers.
“As for looking for this regiment in the papers — God forbid you should find it!"
"Certain regiments are always in the papers.”
Assuring his father that seasoned soldiers uniformly scoffed at the yarns in the papers, he disingenuously claimed that, “for myself I do not care ever to see my regiment’s or my own name mentioned outside of the official documents of the Army.”48
Yet, by the summer of 1864 Charles yearned to be noticed and felt he had sacrificed too much to exit the war unrewarded.
Rank would give Charles the leverage to shape and oversee battlefield heroics.
It would allow him to lay down colossal wagers — betting everything on a few moments of battlefield prowess.
Such bets made American legends from common clay.
And such bets, he believed, could help an undistinguished soldier live up to his august family name.
Adams originally drifted toward war after weighing issues of commitment to cause, desire for stimulus, hunger for status, and duty to family.
He also wanted to break loose from his father’s sway and the profession that was killing him by degrees.
Images of his own physique transformed before the mirror and capturing glory in the midst of his peers had originally pulled him into the fray.
With time however, the desire for military distinction brought his divergent reasons for joining into focus as his hunger to “command the right line of a regiment” forced Adams to shelve certain allegiances.
Though he entered the service with the modest commission of First Lieutenant (the second lowest Army commission), he would return nearly three-and-a-half years later a brevetted Brigadier General.
Though Charles later downplayed his desire for improved rank, his letters suggested otherwise.
Evidently in the first days of the war Governor Andrew and R.H. Dana promised Charles significantly more important commissions; it is not clear, then, why Charles later accepted such a lowly starting point.49
Perhaps he burned bridges by passing up the first crop of patronage.
His letters to Henry, in particular, betrayed Charles’s desire for promotion: “I shall get mine…” he once wrote, referring to how some of his comrades gained promotion through battlefield heroics.50
47 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, May 29, 1863, ibid., Volume II, 17-19
48 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Picket near Warrenton, Va., November 22, 1863, ibid., Volume II, 103-05
49 C.F. Adams, Jr. to his father, Quincy, May 27, 1861 and Boston, June 10, 1861, ibid., 6, 9-10
50 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Boston, December 10, 1861 and December 19, 1861, ibid., 80, 86
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Some weeks later, Henry wrote Charles in response to the crushing news of Hooker’s defeat at Chancellorsville, charging his brother and the Union army to respond with action: “We want continual, feverish activity, and that is all."
"Worry them with cavalry raids!…Let them have no rest, no hope!”47
From Charles’s end of things, though, this kind of public lust for continual action only compounded the problem of “newspaper battles” and generals plotting deadly clashes even as they played to a national audience.
Not until late ‘63, when, evidently, Adams, Sr. queried why his son’s regiment never made the papers, did Charles grouse to his father about his invisibility in the papers.
“As for looking for this regiment in the papers — God forbid you should find it!"
"Certain regiments are always in the papers.”
Assuring his father that seasoned soldiers uniformly scoffed at the yarns in the papers, he disingenuously claimed that, “for myself I do not care ever to see my regiment’s or my own name mentioned outside of the official documents of the Army.”48
Yet, by the summer of 1864 Charles yearned to be noticed and felt he had sacrificed too much to exit the war unrewarded.
Rank would give Charles the leverage to shape and oversee battlefield heroics.
It would allow him to lay down colossal wagers — betting everything on a few moments of battlefield prowess.
Such bets made American legends from common clay.
And such bets, he believed, could help an undistinguished soldier live up to his august family name.
Adams originally drifted toward war after weighing issues of commitment to cause, desire for stimulus, hunger for status, and duty to family.
He also wanted to break loose from his father’s sway and the profession that was killing him by degrees.
Images of his own physique transformed before the mirror and capturing glory in the midst of his peers had originally pulled him into the fray.
With time however, the desire for military distinction brought his divergent reasons for joining into focus as his hunger to “command the right line of a regiment” forced Adams to shelve certain allegiances.
Though he entered the service with the modest commission of First Lieutenant (the second lowest Army commission), he would return nearly three-and-a-half years later a brevetted Brigadier General.
Though Charles later downplayed his desire for improved rank, his letters suggested otherwise.
Evidently in the first days of the war Governor Andrew and R.H. Dana promised Charles significantly more important commissions; it is not clear, then, why Charles later accepted such a lowly starting point.49
Perhaps he burned bridges by passing up the first crop of patronage.
His letters to Henry, in particular, betrayed Charles’s desire for promotion: “I shall get mine…” he once wrote, referring to how some of his comrades gained promotion through battlefield heroics.50
47 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, May 29, 1863, ibid., Volume II, 17-19
48 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Picket near Warrenton, Va., November 22, 1863, ibid., Volume II, 103-05
49 C.F. Adams, Jr. to his father, Quincy, May 27, 1861 and Boston, June 10, 1861, ibid., 6, 9-10
50 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Boston, December 10, 1861 and December 19, 1861, ibid., 80, 86
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
In 1862, after watching his first summer come and go with little glory, Charles groused that he had nothing to show for his sweat at Hilton Head: “thus ends my first campaign, and hasn’t it been a failure! — a failure personally and publicly…."
"Here I am just where I started."
"I have seen nothing but the distant spires of Charleston and have not been promoted.”51
Though he did achieve the rank of captain in his first regiment (First Massachusetts Cavalry), Charles ultimately skipped rungs by strapping himself to a regiment of black soldiers — something that would require ideological acrobatics for Adams — as he tried to harmonize a heart part sympathetic to his anti-slavery roots, part overcome by increasing “anti-negro” sentiment within his ranks.
The Union did not use black soldiers in earnest until the last half of the war.
Like Adams, the vast majority of officers in the colored regiments had been initiated to war alongside white soldiers who often hailed from a common region.
And like Adams, many chose to leave old comrades for higher rank.
Thus, thousands of white officers, like Adams — or Cole, Dollard, Fox -- ended their service for the nation separated from their regional comrades — with significantly elevated rank, commanding and fighting alongside ex-slaves and freedmen.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1864 that Adams admitted to his brother he was entertaining the idea of heading up a black regiment.
Some weeks earlier, for the first time, he laid eyes on colored troops around Petersburg, probably from the Army of the James.
Though they had just finished participating in another of Butler’s botched attempts to take the city, Adams assured his father that “the darkies fought ferociously.”52
But Charles’s sentiments towards African Americans had not always been so generous.
During the early stages of war, when Henry suggested that Charles was an out-and-out abolitionist, Charles mailed off three articles that he had recently written, adding that “I imagine they will not meet your and my father’s views….”53
Apparently the articles did not make his case as clearly as Charles hoped.
The next summer (1862), Major General David Hunter, a driven abolitionist, declared the emancipation of slaves in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.
He then rounded up ex-slaves in the Carolina islands, some at gunpoint, and armed them for combat against their rebel masters.
When Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, demanded a full explanation, Hunter responded with a somewhat provocative report that he was not conscripting fugitive slaves so much as helping the poor abandoned souls find their “fugitive masters.”54
Elated by the letter, Henry wrote Charles, “I congratulate your general Hunter on his negro-army letter."
"We all here sustain him….”
In the next letter to his father, though, Charles expressed deep reservations: “Our ultra-friends, including General Hunter, seem to have gone crazy and they are doing the blacks all the harm they can…."
"General Hunter is so carried away by his idea of a negro regiments as, not only to write flippant letters…but even to order their exemption from all fatigue duty.”
That same day he fired off a more barbed response to Henry.
“General Hunter is very unpopular — arbitrary and wholly taken up with his negro question."
"His one regiment is a failure, and becoming more so, and I have no faith in the experiment anyhow.”
Charles claimed he laughed at Henry’s passing suggestion that Charles take a commission over black soldiers.
51 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, At Sea, Steam Transport McClellan, August 22, 1862, ibid., 175-76.
52 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, H.Q. Army of Potomac, Before Petersburg, Va., June 19, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 128-56
53 Henry Adams to C. F. Adams, Jr., London, October 15, 1861 and C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Boston, November 5, 1861, ibid., 58, 64
54 Glatthaar, "Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers", 6-7; Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 50-53
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
In 1862, after watching his first summer come and go with little glory, Charles groused that he had nothing to show for his sweat at Hilton Head: “thus ends my first campaign, and hasn’t it been a failure! — a failure personally and publicly…."
"Here I am just where I started."
"I have seen nothing but the distant spires of Charleston and have not been promoted.”51
Though he did achieve the rank of captain in his first regiment (First Massachusetts Cavalry), Charles ultimately skipped rungs by strapping himself to a regiment of black soldiers — something that would require ideological acrobatics for Adams — as he tried to harmonize a heart part sympathetic to his anti-slavery roots, part overcome by increasing “anti-negro” sentiment within his ranks.
The Union did not use black soldiers in earnest until the last half of the war.
Like Adams, the vast majority of officers in the colored regiments had been initiated to war alongside white soldiers who often hailed from a common region.
And like Adams, many chose to leave old comrades for higher rank.
Thus, thousands of white officers, like Adams — or Cole, Dollard, Fox -- ended their service for the nation separated from their regional comrades — with significantly elevated rank, commanding and fighting alongside ex-slaves and freedmen.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1864 that Adams admitted to his brother he was entertaining the idea of heading up a black regiment.
Some weeks earlier, for the first time, he laid eyes on colored troops around Petersburg, probably from the Army of the James.
Though they had just finished participating in another of Butler’s botched attempts to take the city, Adams assured his father that “the darkies fought ferociously.”52
But Charles’s sentiments towards African Americans had not always been so generous.
During the early stages of war, when Henry suggested that Charles was an out-and-out abolitionist, Charles mailed off three articles that he had recently written, adding that “I imagine they will not meet your and my father’s views….”53
Apparently the articles did not make his case as clearly as Charles hoped.
The next summer (1862), Major General David Hunter, a driven abolitionist, declared the emancipation of slaves in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.
He then rounded up ex-slaves in the Carolina islands, some at gunpoint, and armed them for combat against their rebel masters.
When Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, demanded a full explanation, Hunter responded with a somewhat provocative report that he was not conscripting fugitive slaves so much as helping the poor abandoned souls find their “fugitive masters.”54
Elated by the letter, Henry wrote Charles, “I congratulate your general Hunter on his negro-army letter."
"We all here sustain him….”
In the next letter to his father, though, Charles expressed deep reservations: “Our ultra-friends, including General Hunter, seem to have gone crazy and they are doing the blacks all the harm they can…."
"General Hunter is so carried away by his idea of a negro regiments as, not only to write flippant letters…but even to order their exemption from all fatigue duty.”
That same day he fired off a more barbed response to Henry.
“General Hunter is very unpopular — arbitrary and wholly taken up with his negro question."
"His one regiment is a failure, and becoming more so, and I have no faith in the experiment anyhow.”
Charles claimed he laughed at Henry’s passing suggestion that Charles take a commission over black soldiers.
51 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, At Sea, Steam Transport McClellan, August 22, 1862, ibid., 175-76.
52 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, H.Q. Army of Potomac, Before Petersburg, Va., June 19, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 128-56
53 Henry Adams to C. F. Adams, Jr., London, October 15, 1861 and C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Boston, November 5, 1861, ibid., 58, 64
54 Glatthaar, "Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers", 6-7; Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 50-53
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
After Charles’s untiring “assertion of principles,” and his diatribes against slavery, he asked incredulously why he would then “become a ‘nigger driver’” in his old age.
In other words, why would he command a band of soldiers who could not fight efficiently, or for the right reasons, given that many of them, like slaves, were cowed into obedient toil?
Adams’ principles informed his belief that blacks must first be taught to work willingly, for — and for Adams, this was its worst crime — slavery leeched from southern society its vital supply of skills, motivation, ingenuity and work ethic.
Slavery stultified all parties involved because it allowed a society to take the guise of an open market without providing the cleansing agent of unfettered competition.
The same principles that led Charles to condemn slavery, then, led him to decry the excusing of black soldiers from fatigue duty.
“No! Hunter and you are all wrong,” he continued, “the Negroes should be organized and officered as soldiers; they should have arms put in their hands and be drilled simply with a view to their moral elevation and the effect of self-respect, and for the rest they should be used as fatigue duty.”55
Charles’s response reflected the general sentiment within the union ranks.
When Lincoln’s administration forced Hunter to abort his experiment, Charles reported that the news was “hailed here with great joy, for our troops have become more anti-negro than I could have imagined.”
Like many of his comrades, Adams thought that blacks should be used to help in the war, but not at the cost of pushing ex-slaves beyond their immediate abilities and inflaming the enemy in the process.
For some time he had preached that the experiment of arming blacks was doomed to fail.
It was the inattention to the “the education of these poor people” that Charles most regretted.
“But, for myself, I could not help feeling a strong regret at seeing the red-legged darkies march off.”56
Adams looked to reform the race but believed it could never happen through militarizing them.57
As the war dragged on, however, and the unsatisfied soldier began casting about for ways to make something of himself, he willingly bet his military career on the very idea that once repulsed him.
When Adams came to see how impossible it had become to fashion his own future just as he willed it, he set his gaze on the lowliest of Americans hoping to remake them, and himself in the process.
Yet, for Adams, as for most officers among the African-American regiments, race both provided and complicated the ascent.
For Charles, race would make his military climax play out like ruination.
In his final moments in uniform, he found himself flush with the accoutrements of promotion, yet surrounded by black soldiers who confounded the logic and measure of his military advancement.
55 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, July 19, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 166-74
56 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Hilton Head, S.C., August 10, 1862, ibid., 174-75
57 He would later claim his decision to enlist was “the time when I resolved to burst the bonds, and strike out into the light from the depth of the darkness.” See: Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 126
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
After Charles’s untiring “assertion of principles,” and his diatribes against slavery, he asked incredulously why he would then “become a ‘nigger driver’” in his old age.
In other words, why would he command a band of soldiers who could not fight efficiently, or for the right reasons, given that many of them, like slaves, were cowed into obedient toil?
Adams’ principles informed his belief that blacks must first be taught to work willingly, for — and for Adams, this was its worst crime — slavery leeched from southern society its vital supply of skills, motivation, ingenuity and work ethic.
Slavery stultified all parties involved because it allowed a society to take the guise of an open market without providing the cleansing agent of unfettered competition.
The same principles that led Charles to condemn slavery, then, led him to decry the excusing of black soldiers from fatigue duty.
“No! Hunter and you are all wrong,” he continued, “the Negroes should be organized and officered as soldiers; they should have arms put in their hands and be drilled simply with a view to their moral elevation and the effect of self-respect, and for the rest they should be used as fatigue duty.”55
Charles’s response reflected the general sentiment within the union ranks.
When Lincoln’s administration forced Hunter to abort his experiment, Charles reported that the news was “hailed here with great joy, for our troops have become more anti-negro than I could have imagined.”
Like many of his comrades, Adams thought that blacks should be used to help in the war, but not at the cost of pushing ex-slaves beyond their immediate abilities and inflaming the enemy in the process.
For some time he had preached that the experiment of arming blacks was doomed to fail.
It was the inattention to the “the education of these poor people” that Charles most regretted.
“But, for myself, I could not help feeling a strong regret at seeing the red-legged darkies march off.”56
Adams looked to reform the race but believed it could never happen through militarizing them.57
As the war dragged on, however, and the unsatisfied soldier began casting about for ways to make something of himself, he willingly bet his military career on the very idea that once repulsed him.
When Adams came to see how impossible it had become to fashion his own future just as he willed it, he set his gaze on the lowliest of Americans hoping to remake them, and himself in the process.
Yet, for Adams, as for most officers among the African-American regiments, race both provided and complicated the ascent.
For Charles, race would make his military climax play out like ruination.
In his final moments in uniform, he found himself flush with the accoutrements of promotion, yet surrounded by black soldiers who confounded the logic and measure of his military advancement.
55 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, July 19, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 166-74
56 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Hilton Head, S.C., August 10, 1862, ibid., 174-75
57 He would later claim his decision to enlist was “the time when I resolved to burst the bonds, and strike out into the light from the depth of the darkness.” See: Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 126
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
After the autumn of ‘63, Adams’s letters grew increasingly despondent.
With the growing list of failed attempts to take Richmond, he doubted that the confederate capital would fall.
Comparing the Union army to a man fighting for his life with one hand tied behind his back, he claimed the army could not protect Washington and take Richmond at the same time.
The war had reduced the cavalry horses into a “collection of crow’s bait.”
His superiors were wholly inept, and all too ready to commit troops to needless danger.58
In early 1864 he took a leave before reenlisting; he visited his family in England and returned to uniform in April.
But soon old vexations returned.
When bad blood boiled over between Adams and his regimental superiors, Charles used connections to extricate himself from impending clash of wills.
It is likely that Charles sought out his Harvard crony, Theodore Lyman, in order to get his (Charles’s) company detached from the First Massachusetts Cavalry.
After Charles “made one little effort, just pulled one little wire,” Lyman (who served at the time as a special assistant to General Meade) secured for Adams and his company escort duty at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.59
There Adams rubbed up against the most dignified names in the Union army during the drive through “the wilderness” and the Petersburg siege.
But still Charles held the rank of captain, and though close to the brain of Union planning, often felt like the last to know.
Adams had also begun to feel the effects of years of incessant feeding on hardtack, poorly prepared meat, and daily portions of black coffee, often by the quart.
Of greater consequence, that summer Adams encamped with his soldiers in low, wet grounds where malarial mosquitoes feasted off his blood.
All the while his company tarried along the Appomattox riverbanks where rotting animal carcasses poisoned the waters.60
Sometime during his service as an escort to Meade, Adams learned that Massachusetts, in order to fill its federal quota, had begun recruiting ex-slaves and freedmen in order to form the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry.
From one side of his mouth he muttered how he had grown tired of war; from the other he confessed his greater hope that by harnessing black soldiers he could secure “as much of a future before [him]” as he was equal to.
He had grown tired of orderly duty and, though he claimed he did not seek promotion, he thought commanding a colored regiment would “prove an interesting study.”61
In July 1864 Adams accepted the “unsought” offer to be Lieutenant Colonel in the Fifth — two full grades above his current rank.
Doing so brought him into General Butler’s controversial army, and made him fellow colonel in the Colored Cavalry with George Cole.
When his commission came to hand in August, Adams — on the mend after a bout of malaria and jaundice — buoyantly proclaimed to his mother, “I shall join my colored brethren.”62
58 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Near Warrenton, Va., November 4, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 100-02; C.F. Adams to his father, Warrenton, Va., Christmas evening, 1863, ibid., Volume II, 110-11
59 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Camp of the 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., December 31, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 239-40
60 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 28-9; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 156-57
61 ibid., 163
62 C.F. Adams to his mother, H.Q. Cav’y Escort, A. of P., Before Petersburg, August 12, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 175-77
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
After the autumn of ‘63, Adams’s letters grew increasingly despondent.
With the growing list of failed attempts to take Richmond, he doubted that the confederate capital would fall.
Comparing the Union army to a man fighting for his life with one hand tied behind his back, he claimed the army could not protect Washington and take Richmond at the same time.
The war had reduced the cavalry horses into a “collection of crow’s bait.”
His superiors were wholly inept, and all too ready to commit troops to needless danger.58
In early 1864 he took a leave before reenlisting; he visited his family in England and returned to uniform in April.
But soon old vexations returned.
When bad blood boiled over between Adams and his regimental superiors, Charles used connections to extricate himself from impending clash of wills.
It is likely that Charles sought out his Harvard crony, Theodore Lyman, in order to get his (Charles’s) company detached from the First Massachusetts Cavalry.
After Charles “made one little effort, just pulled one little wire,” Lyman (who served at the time as a special assistant to General Meade) secured for Adams and his company escort duty at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.59
There Adams rubbed up against the most dignified names in the Union army during the drive through “the wilderness” and the Petersburg siege.
But still Charles held the rank of captain, and though close to the brain of Union planning, often felt like the last to know.
Adams had also begun to feel the effects of years of incessant feeding on hardtack, poorly prepared meat, and daily portions of black coffee, often by the quart.
Of greater consequence, that summer Adams encamped with his soldiers in low, wet grounds where malarial mosquitoes feasted off his blood.
All the while his company tarried along the Appomattox riverbanks where rotting animal carcasses poisoned the waters.60
Sometime during his service as an escort to Meade, Adams learned that Massachusetts, in order to fill its federal quota, had begun recruiting ex-slaves and freedmen in order to form the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry.
From one side of his mouth he muttered how he had grown tired of war; from the other he confessed his greater hope that by harnessing black soldiers he could secure “as much of a future before [him]” as he was equal to.
He had grown tired of orderly duty and, though he claimed he did not seek promotion, he thought commanding a colored regiment would “prove an interesting study.”61
In July 1864 Adams accepted the “unsought” offer to be Lieutenant Colonel in the Fifth — two full grades above his current rank.
Doing so brought him into General Butler’s controversial army, and made him fellow colonel in the Colored Cavalry with George Cole.
When his commission came to hand in August, Adams — on the mend after a bout of malaria and jaundice — buoyantly proclaimed to his mother, “I shall join my colored brethren.”62
58 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Near Warrenton, Va., November 4, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 100-02; C.F. Adams to his father, Warrenton, Va., Christmas evening, 1863, ibid., Volume II, 110-11
59 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Camp of the 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., December 31, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 239-40
60 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 28-9; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 156-57
61 ibid., 163
62 C.F. Adams to his mother, H.Q. Cav’y Escort, A. of P., Before Petersburg, August 12, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 175-77
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
What ultimately made Adams consider leading armed black men is not perfectly clear.
As he claimed, his old regiment had become “embittered and poisoned.”
It is also probable that Charles felt he could not secure a higher rank under superiors who inspected his every move.
And despite his repeated claims to the contrary, Charles cared deeply about rank and reputation.
In their cycle of missives, Charles, Henry, and their father, regularly penned scathing or adulatory summaries and assessments of war generals and their battlefield exploits.
For example, later that fall, after Sherman’s march to the sea, Henry — who could boast of a prodigious grasp on history and literature — confided “I have as much faith in Sherman as I have in any individual of ancient or modern history or mythology….”
And when Charles wrote his father about Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta, the son claimed to be on the verge of tears when he read daily reports about the general’s “boldness, the caution, the skill, the judgment, the profound military experience….”
He admitted that while Sherman’s strategies and brilliance paled compared to what had transpired at Vicksburg, Atlanta’s fall had all the attributes of poetry: “with its unheard lines of supply and unceasing opposition, it rolls along like a sonorous epic.”
Though he read some early criticisms in the papers about Sherman’s tactics, Adams reasoned, “I only look at the campaign in an artistic point of view, as a poem."
"So viewed, to my mind it is perfect.”63
Adams certainly craved this power to orchestrate war violence.
He came to see that promotion alone could pacify him so long as climbing ranks was also accompanied by danger and glory — and the power to control his own fate.
He made this clear when after finding that his black regiment would neither have horses, nor move to the front (the Fifth kept guard at Point Lookout prison), he exploited personal connections to secure private meetings with Union dignitaries like Grant, Meade, Halleck, and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.
Adams knew that the government would not supply his troopers with fresh horses so he entered “the holy of holies” to beg for worn animals.
He argued that his men could rehabilitate the horses while they continued their guard duty at Point Lookout.
As the unseasoned soldiers “built up” the horses, Adams would build up his men for combat.64
Just two summers earlier Adams dogmatically opposed using black soldiers for anything but digging and hauling; now they deserved to siphon horses from a shrinking supply; now they deserved a crack at military distinction.
63 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, London, December 9, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 230; C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Headquarters 5th Mass. Cav’y, Pt. Lookout, Maryland, September 10, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 190-93
64 See various letters in ibid., Volume II, 182-189
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
What ultimately made Adams consider leading armed black men is not perfectly clear.
As he claimed, his old regiment had become “embittered and poisoned.”
It is also probable that Charles felt he could not secure a higher rank under superiors who inspected his every move.
And despite his repeated claims to the contrary, Charles cared deeply about rank and reputation.
In their cycle of missives, Charles, Henry, and their father, regularly penned scathing or adulatory summaries and assessments of war generals and their battlefield exploits.
For example, later that fall, after Sherman’s march to the sea, Henry — who could boast of a prodigious grasp on history and literature — confided “I have as much faith in Sherman as I have in any individual of ancient or modern history or mythology….”
And when Charles wrote his father about Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta, the son claimed to be on the verge of tears when he read daily reports about the general’s “boldness, the caution, the skill, the judgment, the profound military experience….”
He admitted that while Sherman’s strategies and brilliance paled compared to what had transpired at Vicksburg, Atlanta’s fall had all the attributes of poetry: “with its unheard lines of supply and unceasing opposition, it rolls along like a sonorous epic.”
Though he read some early criticisms in the papers about Sherman’s tactics, Adams reasoned, “I only look at the campaign in an artistic point of view, as a poem."
"So viewed, to my mind it is perfect.”63
Adams certainly craved this power to orchestrate war violence.
He came to see that promotion alone could pacify him so long as climbing ranks was also accompanied by danger and glory — and the power to control his own fate.
He made this clear when after finding that his black regiment would neither have horses, nor move to the front (the Fifth kept guard at Point Lookout prison), he exploited personal connections to secure private meetings with Union dignitaries like Grant, Meade, Halleck, and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.
Adams knew that the government would not supply his troopers with fresh horses so he entered “the holy of holies” to beg for worn animals.
He argued that his men could rehabilitate the horses while they continued their guard duty at Point Lookout.
As the unseasoned soldiers “built up” the horses, Adams would build up his men for combat.64
Just two summers earlier Adams dogmatically opposed using black soldiers for anything but digging and hauling; now they deserved to siphon horses from a shrinking supply; now they deserved a crack at military distinction.
63 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, London, December 9, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 230; C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, Headquarters 5th Mass. Cav’y, Pt. Lookout, Maryland, September 10, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 190-93
64 See various letters in ibid., Volume II, 182-189
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Though the war clearly pushed toward its end, getting his black soldiers mounted and into the front would allow him to compose a few final stanzas in the American Iliad.
This is partly why, when a Major General from another corps offered Adams the position of Assistant Inspector General, “generally considered the highest on the Staff — in a Corps it carries with it the rank of Lieutenant Colonel,” Adams eventually declined, though he originally decided to accept the offer.
He claimed it was a position he “formerly greatly coveted” and in his letters he half-convincingly spun it as a “new and more influential life.”65
He would be closer to the brain of military activity than ever before.
But when Adams unexpectedly received a letter in February 1865 informing him that the colonel of the Fifth had resigned (possibly to salvage a broken marriage), making Adams a full colonel, the grandson of John Quincy Adams opted to stick with his regiment.
As he later described it, “I was rising surfaceward, corklike.”66
Perhaps because of this windfall, and as a way to reconcile his thoughts with his new duty, Adams temporarily cast off many of his earlier doubts about black soldiers.
When he first took command of black troops he fantasized setting up a model for reengineering the black race.
And during the final winter of the war he schemed up a “philanthropic plan for the race” where besides being a war machine, the army would become a “school of skilled labor.”
Every year fifteen to twenty thousand black citizens would be sent to army camps where they would learn from master craftsmen.67
Adams, though, quickly grew frustrated.
His plans to make his soldiers both artisans and warriors proved to be somewhat quixotic.
He could not perfectly reconcile his own camp experiences with his new mission to remake the race.
He occasionally ridiculed blacks’ skills as craftsmen, complaining one time that he could not find a “tolerable” blacksmith though he had seven hundred horses.
By winter, though, he soured considerably — succumbing to darker ideas.
Still stationed on the Maryland peninsula where his men kept guard, built houses, and dug wells, Adams complained of the “low, sandy, malarious, fever-smitten, wind-blown, God-forsaken” land where he and his men “stagnated.”
Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Shiloh — these words commanded reverence at pulpits and over broken bread.
Point Lookout, Adams realized, amounted to little more than an overcrowded stockade that drew haggard prisoners — not glory — from battles like Gettysburg.
And while he oversaw the remaking of men this was scarcely what he imagined.68
The prison pens of Point Lookout — one of the worst Union prison-of-war facilities — held young men, old soldiers, some men of refinement, and “pure white trash,” converting them all into “one cut-throat throng.”69
Instead of leading troopers into battle, his men stood atop fifteen-foot fences, guarding pitiable rebel prisoners at rifle point, occasionally picking off the “deluded” who wandered too close to the line.
His new assignment caused his mother to wince when, in one letter, Adams described the eighty to one hundred coffins that formed a pile at the main entrance, ready to facilitate the prison’s rapid turnover.
Somewhat out of indignation, he told his mother that her “sympathies were unduly excited….If the sight of a pile of coffins is going to shock a man he’d better keep out
of the Army.”
This was not the poetic violence that periodically moved him and his family.
It fell pathetically short of his plans to recast the black race, or even himself.70
In this state he confessed his mind increasingly gave way to “inborn convictions” that were admittedly “not the result of reflection.”
Slaves, he concluded, must have been relatively happy.
As slavery countered “the spirit of modern progress and civilization,” black men, who Adams came to believe possessed the spirit of the lowest order of animals, must have found relative fulfillment under the lash.
Perhaps revealing darker scenes within his camp, Adams argued that they “cannot be tortured into resistance to oppression.”
The eviscerating hand of slavery had left “the race, as a whole, not overworked, well fed and contented — greedy animals!”
65 C.F. Adams to his father, Boston, January 30, 1865, ibid., Volume II, 249-52
66 John Dwight Warner Jr, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."," DAI 58, no. 3 (1997), 388.; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 165
67 C.F. Adams to his father, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., November 2, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 212-19
68 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., November 2, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 212-19
69 Lause, "Turning the World Upside Down: A Portrait of Labor and Military Leader, Alonzo Granville Draper", 196-98
70 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., January 8, 1865, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 244-46
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Though the war clearly pushed toward its end, getting his black soldiers mounted and into the front would allow him to compose a few final stanzas in the American Iliad.
This is partly why, when a Major General from another corps offered Adams the position of Assistant Inspector General, “generally considered the highest on the Staff — in a Corps it carries with it the rank of Lieutenant Colonel,” Adams eventually declined, though he originally decided to accept the offer.
He claimed it was a position he “formerly greatly coveted” and in his letters he half-convincingly spun it as a “new and more influential life.”65
He would be closer to the brain of military activity than ever before.
But when Adams unexpectedly received a letter in February 1865 informing him that the colonel of the Fifth had resigned (possibly to salvage a broken marriage), making Adams a full colonel, the grandson of John Quincy Adams opted to stick with his regiment.
As he later described it, “I was rising surfaceward, corklike.”66
Perhaps because of this windfall, and as a way to reconcile his thoughts with his new duty, Adams temporarily cast off many of his earlier doubts about black soldiers.
When he first took command of black troops he fantasized setting up a model for reengineering the black race.
And during the final winter of the war he schemed up a “philanthropic plan for the race” where besides being a war machine, the army would become a “school of skilled labor.”
Every year fifteen to twenty thousand black citizens would be sent to army camps where they would learn from master craftsmen.67
Adams, though, quickly grew frustrated.
His plans to make his soldiers both artisans and warriors proved to be somewhat quixotic.
He could not perfectly reconcile his own camp experiences with his new mission to remake the race.
He occasionally ridiculed blacks’ skills as craftsmen, complaining one time that he could not find a “tolerable” blacksmith though he had seven hundred horses.
By winter, though, he soured considerably — succumbing to darker ideas.
Still stationed on the Maryland peninsula where his men kept guard, built houses, and dug wells, Adams complained of the “low, sandy, malarious, fever-smitten, wind-blown, God-forsaken” land where he and his men “stagnated.”
Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Shiloh — these words commanded reverence at pulpits and over broken bread.
Point Lookout, Adams realized, amounted to little more than an overcrowded stockade that drew haggard prisoners — not glory — from battles like Gettysburg.
And while he oversaw the remaking of men this was scarcely what he imagined.68
The prison pens of Point Lookout — one of the worst Union prison-of-war facilities — held young men, old soldiers, some men of refinement, and “pure white trash,” converting them all into “one cut-throat throng.”69
Instead of leading troopers into battle, his men stood atop fifteen-foot fences, guarding pitiable rebel prisoners at rifle point, occasionally picking off the “deluded” who wandered too close to the line.
His new assignment caused his mother to wince when, in one letter, Adams described the eighty to one hundred coffins that formed a pile at the main entrance, ready to facilitate the prison’s rapid turnover.
Somewhat out of indignation, he told his mother that her “sympathies were unduly excited….If the sight of a pile of coffins is going to shock a man he’d better keep out
of the Army.”
This was not the poetic violence that periodically moved him and his family.
It fell pathetically short of his plans to recast the black race, or even himself.70
In this state he confessed his mind increasingly gave way to “inborn convictions” that were admittedly “not the result of reflection.”
Slaves, he concluded, must have been relatively happy.
As slavery countered “the spirit of modern progress and civilization,” black men, who Adams came to believe possessed the spirit of the lowest order of animals, must have found relative fulfillment under the lash.
Perhaps revealing darker scenes within his camp, Adams argued that they “cannot be tortured into resistance to oppression.”
The eviscerating hand of slavery had left “the race, as a whole, not overworked, well fed and contented — greedy animals!”
65 C.F. Adams to his father, Boston, January 30, 1865, ibid., Volume II, 249-52
66 John Dwight Warner Jr, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."," DAI 58, no. 3 (1997), 388.; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 165
67 C.F. Adams to his father, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., November 2, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 212-19
68 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., November 2, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 212-19
69 Lause, "Turning the World Upside Down: A Portrait of Labor and Military Leader, Alonzo Granville Draper", 196-98
70 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 5th Mass. Cav’y, Point Lookout, Md., January 8, 1865, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 244-46
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
It is essential to understand, though, that when Adams cast judgment on his soldiers, he envisioned himself similar to a physician taking the pulse of sick men.
Adams believed that in time, ex-slaves could be rehabilitated, if rescued from slavery and inculcated with the work ethic that supposedly undergirded free labor ideology.
Anything that could be said about the black race had to be understood as the product of two centuries of slavery.
Slavery had made the race, but freedom, education and labor would remake it.
It was Adam’s earnestness in assessing the damage of slavery (along with the increasing American belief in rigid, stable racial categories) that made him pen letters with crosswise conclusions.
Adams conceded that blacks made fierce soldiers when they marched in hordes; but they lacked the individuality to excel as cavalrymen.
Left alone, he argued, the black soldier folded.
“A sick nigger, for instance, at once gives up and lies down to die, the personification of humanity reduced to a wet rag."
"He cannot fight for life like a white man."
"In this regiment if you degrade a negro who has once tried to do well, you had better shoot him at once, for he gives up and never attempts to redeem himself.”
Yet Adams constantly hedged his condemnation of black soldiers, often fumbling or contradicting himself within the same letter.
In one paragraph blacks lacked a sense for craftsmanship, in another, he praised them for engineering well-water pumps and evincing “no little ingenuity and skilled labor.”
In one passage black soldiers evinced the supine nature of animals or logs.
Lines later, “you cannot realize the industry, versatility and ingenuity called forth…every blacksmith, every carpenter, every shoemaker, every tailor and every clerk is constantly busy, and those who can do nothing else dig and carry until they can do something better.”
In one letter blacks personified wet rags, in another, he praised them, claiming that as soldiers they “were inferior to none, if indeed not the best in the world.”71
Adams believed blacks, crushed by slavery, operated outside the channels of progress, industry and merit.
For this alone he despised them.
Yet he alone secured them horses and pushed to send them into the teeth of combat.
He at least partially believed that they could be molded and taught to follow the script written by their new colonel.
Because remaking black men had become enmeshed with the making of himself, he wrote schizophrenically, swinging widely from cursings to praise.
Their behavior in battle would reflect light on the merit of their leader — and offer him the distinction he prized.
But when Adams sensed he himself had drifted from the orbit of progress and merit and that his contribution to the epic’s ending would be reduced to footnotes (or ridicule), his scornful humanitarianism devolved into naked malice.
Richmond at Last!
In the first days of April, with confederate defeat imminent, Adams for the first time received orders to move his regiment to the front.
His men suddenly needed to slough off the stasis of camp life and form a limber fighting line.
Chaotic scenes ensued as the regiment cut loose surplus baggage, drew new arms, and trudged toward the front (just outside Richmond) knee-deep in mud.
It must have seemed providential when Adams found himself positioned on the cusp of the falling confederate capital.
The day before, on April 2, rebel lines finally stretched to breaking points, forcing General Lee to pull troops out of Petersburg and Richmond.
That day a message from Lee reached Jefferson Davis while the latter sat in Sunday worship, warning him that it was “absolutely necessary” to immediately flee the falling capital.
The prior evening, many from the Virginia Legislature had fled Richmond via the James River and Kanahwa Canal.
Knowing he would need to follow their lead, Davis gathered his cabinet, some half-million dollars in gold and furtively fled to Danville by rail.
Just as confederate directives ordered, fleeing armies set flame to warehouses all along the river in the southeastern corner of the city; from across the James River one could see the cotton and tobacco warehouses pulsing with fire.
By nightfall, Confederate deserters and criminals who sprung themselves from jail crowded the streets where winds sent scraps of burning paper and red embers swirling overhead; mingled with smoke, one could smell the vast quantities of liquor poured into the streets (because of a last minute order by the city council to avoid mayhem).
71 To see Adams’s often contradictory assessments see various letters in: ibid., Volume II, 190-91, 194-95, 199, 205, 153, 215-16, 218, 233
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
It is essential to understand, though, that when Adams cast judgment on his soldiers, he envisioned himself similar to a physician taking the pulse of sick men.
Adams believed that in time, ex-slaves could be rehabilitated, if rescued from slavery and inculcated with the work ethic that supposedly undergirded free labor ideology.
Anything that could be said about the black race had to be understood as the product of two centuries of slavery.
Slavery had made the race, but freedom, education and labor would remake it.
It was Adam’s earnestness in assessing the damage of slavery (along with the increasing American belief in rigid, stable racial categories) that made him pen letters with crosswise conclusions.
Adams conceded that blacks made fierce soldiers when they marched in hordes; but they lacked the individuality to excel as cavalrymen.
Left alone, he argued, the black soldier folded.
“A sick nigger, for instance, at once gives up and lies down to die, the personification of humanity reduced to a wet rag."
"He cannot fight for life like a white man."
"In this regiment if you degrade a negro who has once tried to do well, you had better shoot him at once, for he gives up and never attempts to redeem himself.”
Yet Adams constantly hedged his condemnation of black soldiers, often fumbling or contradicting himself within the same letter.
In one paragraph blacks lacked a sense for craftsmanship, in another, he praised them for engineering well-water pumps and evincing “no little ingenuity and skilled labor.”
In one passage black soldiers evinced the supine nature of animals or logs.
Lines later, “you cannot realize the industry, versatility and ingenuity called forth…every blacksmith, every carpenter, every shoemaker, every tailor and every clerk is constantly busy, and those who can do nothing else dig and carry until they can do something better.”
In one letter blacks personified wet rags, in another, he praised them, claiming that as soldiers they “were inferior to none, if indeed not the best in the world.”71
Adams believed blacks, crushed by slavery, operated outside the channels of progress, industry and merit.
For this alone he despised them.
Yet he alone secured them horses and pushed to send them into the teeth of combat.
He at least partially believed that they could be molded and taught to follow the script written by their new colonel.
Because remaking black men had become enmeshed with the making of himself, he wrote schizophrenically, swinging widely from cursings to praise.
Their behavior in battle would reflect light on the merit of their leader — and offer him the distinction he prized.
But when Adams sensed he himself had drifted from the orbit of progress and merit and that his contribution to the epic’s ending would be reduced to footnotes (or ridicule), his scornful humanitarianism devolved into naked malice.
Richmond at Last!
In the first days of April, with confederate defeat imminent, Adams for the first time received orders to move his regiment to the front.
His men suddenly needed to slough off the stasis of camp life and form a limber fighting line.
Chaotic scenes ensued as the regiment cut loose surplus baggage, drew new arms, and trudged toward the front (just outside Richmond) knee-deep in mud.
It must have seemed providential when Adams found himself positioned on the cusp of the falling confederate capital.
The day before, on April 2, rebel lines finally stretched to breaking points, forcing General Lee to pull troops out of Petersburg and Richmond.
That day a message from Lee reached Jefferson Davis while the latter sat in Sunday worship, warning him that it was “absolutely necessary” to immediately flee the falling capital.
The prior evening, many from the Virginia Legislature had fled Richmond via the James River and Kanahwa Canal.
Knowing he would need to follow their lead, Davis gathered his cabinet, some half-million dollars in gold and furtively fled to Danville by rail.
Just as confederate directives ordered, fleeing armies set flame to warehouses all along the river in the southeastern corner of the city; from across the James River one could see the cotton and tobacco warehouses pulsing with fire.
By nightfall, Confederate deserters and criminals who sprung themselves from jail crowded the streets where winds sent scraps of burning paper and red embers swirling overhead; mingled with smoke, one could smell the vast quantities of liquor poured into the streets (because of a last minute order by the city council to avoid mayhem).
71 To see Adams’s often contradictory assessments see various letters in: ibid., Volume II, 190-91, 194-95, 199, 205, 153, 215-16, 218, 233
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
In the early morning hours of April 3, rebels blew up their own ironclads anchored downriver, sending them to the riverbed where loads of artillery were dumped days earlier.
Meanwhile on the north side of the city an exploding powder magazine sent off a jolt; these concussions pounded the city just around the time the first rays of daylight gave shape to the black plume hanging over Richmond, through which the sun shone like an “immense ball of blood.”
Fleeing confederate troops set fire to the bridge over the James.
Before the eyes of approaching soldiers the symbolic center of confederate order and rule — the center of its government, armies and production of munitions — plummeted into mayhem.
Adams, one of these soldiers, was now poised to make a grab at glory. 72
In the early morning of the third, with his guts in a knot, Adams began leading some of the first troops into Richmond.
He feared his men were not up to the task.
Cramped parade grounds at Point Lookout had forced the Fifth to unnaturally compress its regimental drills.
Though it drilled with hurdles and practiced “running at heads” (slicing off simulated heads of hay), the regiment’s sabers arrived only three months previously.
Neither did the entire regiment have horses.
Most troubling, the Fifth’s troopers continued to have guard duty at the prison every other day.
His “cavalrymen” had spent equal time off the horse.
When Adams did push to tighten up the regiment through intense drilling, his troops and fellow officers soon resisted, complaining of his condescending “catechizing.”73
Along with his greenhorn regiment Adams inherited command over an ad hoc body of detachments, a “miscellaneous brigade” that lacked staff and organization.
Chaotically forging forward in early daylight, he led more than a thousand mounted men, galloping four abreast, toward the prized city.
They swept past the final deserted trenches, forts and earthworks — many of them built with the sweat of slaves.
Meals still simmered over fires.
At a frenetic pace the soldiers crossed the river and cut into the city.
They trotted through Richmond’s streets toward the town square, thronged by huge crowds of blacks “frantic with joy” as they shouted hallelujahs, planting kisses on the horses and legs of the mounted soldiers.74
In the background, Richmond’s business sector and more than a dozen city blocks burned into the sky as tens of thousands of shells exploded inside the burning arsenals.
The Petersburg and Danville rail depots, various foundries, flour and paper mills, all the banks, some of the hotels, many shops, and most of the government offices around Capitol Square burned to charred rubble.
Risking the flames, some barely escaping, citizens hauled sofas, beds, carpets, baby toys, and European mirrors to the Capitol Square greens.
Amid this chaos one confederate woman caught her first glimpse of an invading Union soldier.
It was almost certainly one of Adams’s black troopers — atop his horse, yelling with swelled lungs, “Richmond at Last!”75
Within hours, bells pealed and markets shut down throughout the North.
Baltimore’s mayor ordered every bell in the city to ring.
In Philadelphia fire companies raced the streets, clanging siren bells, waving banners, steam throttles screaming.
In Washington, a massive crowd flocked to the War Department, brandishing captured rebel flags and cheering as Secretary Stanton announced the latest intelligence coming down the line.
(When they really liked the news they hollered until he agreed to read it again.)
Foreign ministers from all over Europe began telegraphing congratulations into the State Department.
72 David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 802-14.; Dallas D. Irvine, "The Fall of Richmond: Evacuation and Occupation," Journal of American Military Institute 2, no. 3 (1939), 66-79.; G. Weitzel and Louis H. Manarin, Richmond Occupied: Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, Va., April 3, 1865 (Richmond: Richmond Civil War Centennial Committee, 1965), 3, 31.
73 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 380-89, 411
74 Much of this information is drawn from, ibid., 403-408; Weitzel and Manarin, "Richmond Occupied: Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, Va., April 3, 1865", 52
75 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 406-08
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
In the early morning hours of April 3, rebels blew up their own ironclads anchored downriver, sending them to the riverbed where loads of artillery were dumped days earlier.
Meanwhile on the north side of the city an exploding powder magazine sent off a jolt; these concussions pounded the city just around the time the first rays of daylight gave shape to the black plume hanging over Richmond, through which the sun shone like an “immense ball of blood.”
Fleeing confederate troops set fire to the bridge over the James.
Before the eyes of approaching soldiers the symbolic center of confederate order and rule — the center of its government, armies and production of munitions — plummeted into mayhem.
Adams, one of these soldiers, was now poised to make a grab at glory. 72
In the early morning of the third, with his guts in a knot, Adams began leading some of the first troops into Richmond.
He feared his men were not up to the task.
Cramped parade grounds at Point Lookout had forced the Fifth to unnaturally compress its regimental drills.
Though it drilled with hurdles and practiced “running at heads” (slicing off simulated heads of hay), the regiment’s sabers arrived only three months previously.
Neither did the entire regiment have horses.
Most troubling, the Fifth’s troopers continued to have guard duty at the prison every other day.
His “cavalrymen” had spent equal time off the horse.
When Adams did push to tighten up the regiment through intense drilling, his troops and fellow officers soon resisted, complaining of his condescending “catechizing.”73
Along with his greenhorn regiment Adams inherited command over an ad hoc body of detachments, a “miscellaneous brigade” that lacked staff and organization.
Chaotically forging forward in early daylight, he led more than a thousand mounted men, galloping four abreast, toward the prized city.
They swept past the final deserted trenches, forts and earthworks — many of them built with the sweat of slaves.
Meals still simmered over fires.
At a frenetic pace the soldiers crossed the river and cut into the city.
They trotted through Richmond’s streets toward the town square, thronged by huge crowds of blacks “frantic with joy” as they shouted hallelujahs, planting kisses on the horses and legs of the mounted soldiers.74
In the background, Richmond’s business sector and more than a dozen city blocks burned into the sky as tens of thousands of shells exploded inside the burning arsenals.
The Petersburg and Danville rail depots, various foundries, flour and paper mills, all the banks, some of the hotels, many shops, and most of the government offices around Capitol Square burned to charred rubble.
Risking the flames, some barely escaping, citizens hauled sofas, beds, carpets, baby toys, and European mirrors to the Capitol Square greens.
Amid this chaos one confederate woman caught her first glimpse of an invading Union soldier.
It was almost certainly one of Adams’s black troopers — atop his horse, yelling with swelled lungs, “Richmond at Last!”75
Within hours, bells pealed and markets shut down throughout the North.
Baltimore’s mayor ordered every bell in the city to ring.
In Philadelphia fire companies raced the streets, clanging siren bells, waving banners, steam throttles screaming.
In Washington, a massive crowd flocked to the War Department, brandishing captured rebel flags and cheering as Secretary Stanton announced the latest intelligence coming down the line.
(When they really liked the news they hollered until he agreed to read it again.)
Foreign ministers from all over Europe began telegraphing congratulations into the State Department.
72 David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 802-14.; Dallas D. Irvine, "The Fall of Richmond: Evacuation and Occupation," Journal of American Military Institute 2, no. 3 (1939), 66-79.; G. Weitzel and Louis H. Manarin, Richmond Occupied: Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, Va., April 3, 1865 (Richmond: Richmond Civil War Centennial Committee, 1965), 3, 31.
73 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 380-89, 411
74 Much of this information is drawn from, ibid., 403-408; Weitzel and Manarin, "Richmond Occupied: Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, Va., April 3, 1865", 52
75 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 406-08
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Throughout the Union, public revelry and emotional displays crested into the night and small hours of the next day.76
On the morning of April 3, Adams marched into Richmond and onto a national stage where the final act had been anxiously anticipated.77
To his father he gloried “to have led my regiment into Richmond at the moment of its capture is the one event which I should most have desired as the culmination of my life in the Army.”
In the eleventh hour, Adams felt he had finally “rounded” and “completely filled out” his war record.
He would no longer have to suffer the occasional jokes about the thinning talents of John Adams’ posterity.
Both Charles Jr. and his father had for too long endured the occasional comments about “sharp decline” and the accompanying “sneering laughs.”78
His father proclaimed it a “singular circumstance that you, in the fourth generation of our family, under the Union and the constitution, should have been the first to put [his] foot in the capital of the Ancient Dominion, and that, too, at the head of a corps” which symbolized the demise of slavepower and its policies.
For a heady moment Charles and his generation became redeemers, the revolutionary generation mere forerunners: “It is literally the third and fourth generation which is paying the bitter penalty for what must now be admitted were the shortcomings of the original founders of the Union,” bragged Charles.79
Though general mayhem persisted and buildings burned as poor whites and slaves “pillaged freely,” the Fifth helped restore order for the next three days, arresting rebel soldiers and fanning out to picket Richmond’s roads.
“All through the occupation” bragged Adams, “the behavior of our Army has been wonderful."
"I have not seen or heard of any riot, blood-shed or violence.”
Soon after though, Adams learned that though he was “in just the right place and at just the right time,” he had yoked himself to the wrong people.
Being black, or associated with it, invited sudden reversals in fortune.
Windfalls often led to a swift kick to the teeth.
Two weeks after the Richmond “culmination,” Adams received notice of his arrest for “allowing [his] command to straggle and maraud.”
Adams indignantly obeyed orders and departed for headquarters where he found himself “utterly forgotten,” waiting two weeks for trial at Fort Monroe as the war came to an end.
He hurried off letters of protest.
He received no replies.
He growled to his kin that he was “in fact, buried alive.”80
After Adams obtained release in late May he immediately returned to Richmond.
Upon arrival he discovered that his accusers “had all gone off at half-cock on a parcel of verbal complaints of citizens against my regiment, and now they only had blind wrath to show, and lots of it, but neither facts nor evidence.”
He demanded facts from his soldiers; they insisted the accusations were groundless.
Adding salt to his wounds, Adams learned that the day before his release the Fifth had been thoroughly investigated “with a view to smashing it and me generally.”
76 The Evening Post, April 3, 1865..
77 It has been debated ever since whether black soldiers actually were the first Union soldiers to set foot in Richmond; there are compelling reasons to believe both sides of the story. Some accounts claim that blacks (perhaps Adams’s men) were about to enter the city first when at the last moment they were forced to yield to a white regiment. See: Weitzel and Manarin, "Richmond Occupied: Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, Va., April 3, 1865", 10; Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 298-300; Irvine, "The Fall of Richmond: Evacuation and Occupation", 76-77
78 “Sharp decline” quoted from Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in Daniel J. Boorstin and Ruth Frankel Boorstin, Hidden History, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 44.
79 Various letters in Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 259-67
80 C.F. Adams, Jr., to John Quincy Adams, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, May 2, 1865, ibid., Volume II, 267-69
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Throughout the Union, public revelry and emotional displays crested into the night and small hours of the next day.76
On the morning of April 3, Adams marched into Richmond and onto a national stage where the final act had been anxiously anticipated.77
To his father he gloried “to have led my regiment into Richmond at the moment of its capture is the one event which I should most have desired as the culmination of my life in the Army.”
In the eleventh hour, Adams felt he had finally “rounded” and “completely filled out” his war record.
He would no longer have to suffer the occasional jokes about the thinning talents of John Adams’ posterity.
Both Charles Jr. and his father had for too long endured the occasional comments about “sharp decline” and the accompanying “sneering laughs.”78
His father proclaimed it a “singular circumstance that you, in the fourth generation of our family, under the Union and the constitution, should have been the first to put [his] foot in the capital of the Ancient Dominion, and that, too, at the head of a corps” which symbolized the demise of slavepower and its policies.
For a heady moment Charles and his generation became redeemers, the revolutionary generation mere forerunners: “It is literally the third and fourth generation which is paying the bitter penalty for what must now be admitted were the shortcomings of the original founders of the Union,” bragged Charles.79
Though general mayhem persisted and buildings burned as poor whites and slaves “pillaged freely,” the Fifth helped restore order for the next three days, arresting rebel soldiers and fanning out to picket Richmond’s roads.
“All through the occupation” bragged Adams, “the behavior of our Army has been wonderful."
"I have not seen or heard of any riot, blood-shed or violence.”
Soon after though, Adams learned that though he was “in just the right place and at just the right time,” he had yoked himself to the wrong people.
Being black, or associated with it, invited sudden reversals in fortune.
Windfalls often led to a swift kick to the teeth.
Two weeks after the Richmond “culmination,” Adams received notice of his arrest for “allowing [his] command to straggle and maraud.”
Adams indignantly obeyed orders and departed for headquarters where he found himself “utterly forgotten,” waiting two weeks for trial at Fort Monroe as the war came to an end.
He hurried off letters of protest.
He received no replies.
He growled to his kin that he was “in fact, buried alive.”80
After Adams obtained release in late May he immediately returned to Richmond.
Upon arrival he discovered that his accusers “had all gone off at half-cock on a parcel of verbal complaints of citizens against my regiment, and now they only had blind wrath to show, and lots of it, but neither facts nor evidence.”
He demanded facts from his soldiers; they insisted the accusations were groundless.
Adding salt to his wounds, Adams learned that the day before his release the Fifth had been thoroughly investigated “with a view to smashing it and me generally.”
76 The Evening Post, April 3, 1865..
77 It has been debated ever since whether black soldiers actually were the first Union soldiers to set foot in Richmond; there are compelling reasons to believe both sides of the story. Some accounts claim that blacks (perhaps Adams’s men) were about to enter the city first when at the last moment they were forced to yield to a white regiment. See: Weitzel and Manarin, "Richmond Occupied: Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, Va., April 3, 1865", 10; Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 298-300; Irvine, "The Fall of Richmond: Evacuation and Occupation", 76-77
78 “Sharp decline” quoted from Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in Daniel J. Boorstin and Ruth Frankel Boorstin, Hidden History, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 44.
79 Various letters in Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 259-67
80 C.F. Adams, Jr., to John Quincy Adams, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, May 2, 1865, ibid., Volume II, 267-69
TO BE CONTINUED ...