UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
And along the quieter, scarred landscape surrounding Richmond, locals might hear muffled scraping of plow blades, fallow soil, small stones, shrapnel and shell as Virginians reclaimed the earth by turning up the battlefields.22
So much had the war’s winding down come to seem inevitable, that when Union forces first captured Jefferson Davis (dressed in drag in a camp in Georgia) the New York Herald reported that New York locals “calmly” received the news.
The Herald attributed the lack of excitement to waning interest in all things concerning the rebellion.
“The community,” the paper argued, “feel that the fighting is over and the Union restored, and therefore, care little for what may follow.”23
Increasingly the deluge of returning blue uniforms lost its novelty and romance.
By early June, The Evening Post admonished New Yorkers to rally the returning troops with cheering crowds as happened just weeks earlier.
“Let them not pass in silence now, lest the earth should shout….”24
The clothes Virginians wore (or couldn’t) on the street; the dual cacophonies of firepower and newly won freedom — the former building to a climax, receding, then giving way to the latter; the return of jaded animals into the market nexus; the trading of sabers for plowshares; the increasing huff of railroads; these and a thousand other shifting cues and markers testified to most soldiers of the end to the national nightmare.
For thousands of soldiers like Cole’s, who watched as the majority of soldiers departed for home, “peace” and the dissolving Federal Army intensified their deepest fears.
Mutiny
It was with the war’s curtains closing that Cole received orders to move his men.
While lumbering steamers and railcars carried tired soldiers to northern hearths, Cole’s brigade would soon embark for the Gulf of Mexico.
Cole would assume command of a black Cavalry Brigade in the Twenty-Fifth Corps.
Just before the dozen or so steamers arrived at the docks at Fort Monroe and Portsmouth to transport the massive combination of soldiers and horses, many of the black foot soldiers from the Twenty-Fifth Corps — without much incident — embarked into the Atlantic, heading for the Gulf of Mexico.25
Before the disintegration of General Kirby Smith’s isolated Confederate resistance, west of the Mississippi, soldiers in the all-black Twenty Fifth Corps believed they were destined to strike the final blow.26
But soon this hope faded.
Army headquarters had formed the Twenty-Fifth Corps the previous winter, months before the war ended, by drawing together black soldiers from the entire Department of Virginia and North Carolina and from the Army of the Potomac.27
Most of the troops in the Twenty-Fifth had languished in the Virginia tidewater region since the cessation of combat.
While some of them at first shared in the symbolic occupation of fallen Richmond and in the surrender of Lee at Appomattox in early April 1865, Army headquarters quickly transferred them to the outskirts of Petersburg to guard the South Side Railroad.
In Richmond as in places all over the South, white and black soldiers clashed.28
The Richmond Whig reported mounting violence between white and black occupational troops in Richmond, and that white soldiers could not bear to see black men in uniform.
“The real secret of the transfer” of the blacks troops, the paper claimed, was to avoid violence between the all white Twenty-Fourth and the all black Twenty-Fifth.29
22 See: Longacre, "The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1-4)", 974
23 Herald quoted in: David Rubel, Russell Shorto and J. Matthew Gallman, The Civil War Chronicle: The Only Day-by-Day Portrait of America's Tragic Conflict as Told by Soldiers, Journalists, Politicians, Farmers, Nurses, Slaves, and Other Eyewitnesses, 1st ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2000), 528.
24 Tarbell, "How the Union Army was Disbanded", 44; The Evening Post, June 7, 1865.
25 Richmond Whig, June 17, 1865, page 2.
26 Longacre, "The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1- 4)", 978-9
27 United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Vol. 46, p. 791 The Twenty-Fifth was formed on Dec. 3, 1864. See: Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 401-03
28 For examples of other tensions between white and black union soldiers see: Wiley, "The Life of Billy Yank, the Common Soldier of the Union", 121
29 See Richmond Whig, June 19, 1865, page 2; United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Vol. 46, Part I, pp. 139-40.
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
After departing from Appomattox, one brigade commander recorded with pride in the spring of ’65 that “the long and fatiguing march was borne with patience and fortitude creditable to old soldiers, and should forever put an end [to] any doubt as to whether colored troops can stand a campaign, however severe it may be.”30
But there were other reports of trouble brewing.31
Since the close of ’64, however, many soldiers from the newly formed Twenty-Fifth Corps had worked excessively long hours on fatigue duty, after which they climbed into “very dark, damp, and cold” huts.
With fresh vegetables in short supply, they had survived off wormy hardtack, and beef from feverish cattle — washing it down with water from foul sloughs and “the washings of old, filthy campgrounds.”
Some soldiers became despondent, and, with little firewood, lay listlessly in camp in wet clothes.
Regimental surgeons began diagnosing the troops with rheumatism, unaware these were the first signs of what would become a scourge of scurvy.32
By early summer the disease took its toll.
Some of the soldiers slipped into a sort of listless, despondent trance, many of them with their teeth nearly enclosed by bloody, purple and black gums.
Others suffered from sore bloated limbs which oozed serum — their bodies covered with foul ulcers.33
Some of the men would die from hemorrhaging after devouring freshly found rations like madmen.
In this setting, Cole’s troops along with some 30,000 black soldiers converged in and around City Point, Virginia.
With picketing and guard duty no longer a necessity, the soldiers spent their days in meaningless drills.
And as the Union began demobilizing its white troops, and prepared for the “Grand Review” where only white soldiers were invited, Union officials began preparing the Twenty-Fifth for post-war occupation of the South.34
Just as the scurvy seemed to be peaking, Union officers tightened screws.
Non-commissioned officers were required to wear their chevrons; jackets had to be worn in the baking sun; boots were to be blackened, beards trimmed, clothes brushed, brass polished, and three drills a day.
Many officers submitted their resignation papers, while common black soldiers had no recourse, but to wait out the rumors and swelter in their tents.
Some black cavalry troopers began discarding their clothes, walking in camp nearly nude.35
Meanwhile, fearful rumors of where black troops would be transferred took hold of the camps.
As acting Brigadier General, Cole was charged in June with the duty of bringing an entire brigade of black cavalry to the southern Texas border via several steamships for the purpose of guarding against invasion from Maximilian’s imperial forces in Mexico.
But Cole’s brigade had little intention of complying and fought this redeployment tooth and nail.
30 ibid., Series 1, Volume 46, Part I, p. 143
31 All official reports are suspect as they often reflect what an officer wanted superiors to think of his own leadership and execution of orders; yet it is strange how radically different these reports about the condition of black troops vary from depictions of harmony and health to aggravation and suffering. In April of 1865, Surgeon Heichhold from the 25th Corps reported that the regimental surgeons were discharging their duties faithfully and the command was then in “good sanitary condition.” Also, soldiers in his particular division endured a long campaign from Chaffin’s Farm to Richmond; in his three years experience, the surgeon claimed “I never witnessed greater powers of endurance. There is no straggling, and the men were constantly in the best of spirits.” Heichhold also suggested that the chaplains in the division were not meeting the needs of his troops See: ibid., Series 1, Vol. 46, Part 1, p. 1231
32 Whites in the Army of the James reported similar deprivations, due to weak supply lines to the front. Keeping in mind how white soldiers also suffered a great deal due to ineptitude and exigencies of war casts light on the problem of white officers stealing the food of their black subordinates. See: Longacre, "The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1-4)", 154-55 Because some reports and papers maintained that black soldiers were well provisioned, and assuming we can believe some of these reports, it underscores the ways in which black soldiers’ experiences were dictated by the vagaries and whim of officers’ personalities, bureaucratic snafus, and constant transfers of commanders.
33 S. Hemenway, "Observations on Scurvy, and its Causes among the U.S. Colored Troops of the 25th Army Corps, during the Spring and Summer of 1865," The Chicago Medical Examiner 7 (1865, October), 582-86.
34 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 412 35 ibid., 412-16
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
After departing from Appomattox, one brigade commander recorded with pride in the spring of ’65 that “the long and fatiguing march was borne with patience and fortitude creditable to old soldiers, and should forever put an end [to] any doubt as to whether colored troops can stand a campaign, however severe it may be.”30
But there were other reports of trouble brewing.31
Since the close of ’64, however, many soldiers from the newly formed Twenty-Fifth Corps had worked excessively long hours on fatigue duty, after which they climbed into “very dark, damp, and cold” huts.
With fresh vegetables in short supply, they had survived off wormy hardtack, and beef from feverish cattle — washing it down with water from foul sloughs and “the washings of old, filthy campgrounds.”
Some soldiers became despondent, and, with little firewood, lay listlessly in camp in wet clothes.
Regimental surgeons began diagnosing the troops with rheumatism, unaware these were the first signs of what would become a scourge of scurvy.32
By early summer the disease took its toll.
Some of the soldiers slipped into a sort of listless, despondent trance, many of them with their teeth nearly enclosed by bloody, purple and black gums.
Others suffered from sore bloated limbs which oozed serum — their bodies covered with foul ulcers.33
Some of the men would die from hemorrhaging after devouring freshly found rations like madmen.
In this setting, Cole’s troops along with some 30,000 black soldiers converged in and around City Point, Virginia.
With picketing and guard duty no longer a necessity, the soldiers spent their days in meaningless drills.
And as the Union began demobilizing its white troops, and prepared for the “Grand Review” where only white soldiers were invited, Union officials began preparing the Twenty-Fifth for post-war occupation of the South.34
Just as the scurvy seemed to be peaking, Union officers tightened screws.
Non-commissioned officers were required to wear their chevrons; jackets had to be worn in the baking sun; boots were to be blackened, beards trimmed, clothes brushed, brass polished, and three drills a day.
Many officers submitted their resignation papers, while common black soldiers had no recourse, but to wait out the rumors and swelter in their tents.
Some black cavalry troopers began discarding their clothes, walking in camp nearly nude.35
Meanwhile, fearful rumors of where black troops would be transferred took hold of the camps.
As acting Brigadier General, Cole was charged in June with the duty of bringing an entire brigade of black cavalry to the southern Texas border via several steamships for the purpose of guarding against invasion from Maximilian’s imperial forces in Mexico.
But Cole’s brigade had little intention of complying and fought this redeployment tooth and nail.
30 ibid., Series 1, Volume 46, Part I, p. 143
31 All official reports are suspect as they often reflect what an officer wanted superiors to think of his own leadership and execution of orders; yet it is strange how radically different these reports about the condition of black troops vary from depictions of harmony and health to aggravation and suffering. In April of 1865, Surgeon Heichhold from the 25th Corps reported that the regimental surgeons were discharging their duties faithfully and the command was then in “good sanitary condition.” Also, soldiers in his particular division endured a long campaign from Chaffin’s Farm to Richmond; in his three years experience, the surgeon claimed “I never witnessed greater powers of endurance. There is no straggling, and the men were constantly in the best of spirits.” Heichhold also suggested that the chaplains in the division were not meeting the needs of his troops See: ibid., Series 1, Vol. 46, Part 1, p. 1231
32 Whites in the Army of the James reported similar deprivations, due to weak supply lines to the front. Keeping in mind how white soldiers also suffered a great deal due to ineptitude and exigencies of war casts light on the problem of white officers stealing the food of their black subordinates. See: Longacre, "The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1-4)", 154-55 Because some reports and papers maintained that black soldiers were well provisioned, and assuming we can believe some of these reports, it underscores the ways in which black soldiers’ experiences were dictated by the vagaries and whim of officers’ personalities, bureaucratic snafus, and constant transfers of commanders.
33 S. Hemenway, "Observations on Scurvy, and its Causes among the U.S. Colored Troops of the 25th Army Corps, during the Spring and Summer of 1865," The Chicago Medical Examiner 7 (1865, October), 582-86.
34 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 412 35 ibid., 412-16
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
As one officer put it, ever since the troopers gleaned from rumors in camp, that they would be shipped off for Texas instead of released from service, a “marked change came over them and they became sullen and disobedient.”
As a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer reported it, the officers paid “no attention” to the mutterings, which they regarded as “grumblings peculiar to the African race.”36
The brigades that preceded Cole’s departed with only minor disturbances; one paper reported only “an outbreak or two.”37
But when Cole’s officers tried to force their black regiments aboard the ships, the men resisted, increasingly become unhinged.
There may have been some premeditation, as thousands of rounds of ammunition and carbines exchanged hands from one regiment to the next sometime before the mutiny.
Some time preceding the mutiny officers had distributed new Sharpe’s breech-loading carbines and accoutrements.
Just before or during the ensuing struggle the black soldiers evidently got their hands on thousands of the withheld bullets.
Some soldiers apparently tried to break into the steamer’s hold where the chief quartermaster, or the soldiers themselves, had stowed away 250 rounds of ammunition for each departing soldier, suggesting that there were plans to commandeer the ship once it embarked.
One company alone stowed away nearly 1600 rounds.38
Of the several regiments recently put under Cole’s command — including Cole’s original regiment, and Charles Francis Adams’s — most broke out in violent protest.
Rain fell from darkened skies.
Beside one ship, with most of the men boarded from a smaller transport boat, the remaining portion drew their new carbines, capped them, and while others brandished sabers, yelled that they would not be shipped to Texas.
This spurred those already on board to draw their arms and fire into the air.
The bugler from Cole’s regiment refused to march onto the ship.
And hundreds already aboard refused to step down into the hold.
Soldiers threatened to kill their superiors as the armed men “ranged themselves about the windlass” swearing they would shoot any man who weighed anchor.
Some talked of imprisoning the officers and taking over the ship.
One private warned, “I’ll sooner have my throat cut than leave this harbor!”
From aboard a transport, William Carter, a soldier from Cole’s original regiment, defied his lieutenant’s orders to cease shooting; Carter caught sight of approaching white troops and took aim at white officers watching from mounted horses on shore.
Looking to inflame his comrades he exclaimed, “What is those damned white officers coming down here for, they can’t scare me."
"We can whip them easy enough!” Carter squeezed the trigger but missed his targets — among them a colonel and a general.
When other soldiers glimpsed the white troops approaching one of the ships, they too threatened to fire on the white detachment.
Officers on another propeller boat, with the most mutinous soldiers beside them, unmoored the small craft from the steamship, taking the black soldiers back to the wharf where the white detachment eventually crushed the rebellion.
36 Frederick W. Browne, My Service in the U.S. Colored Cavalry: A Paper Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Loyal Legion, March 4, 1908 (Cincinnati?: , 1908), 11-13. Correspondent quoted in New York Times, June 16, 1865, page 1.
37 See court martial of soldiers from other brigades: RG 153, OO1394. William Holmes, Moses Woods, 36USCT. NARA, Washington, DC.
38 Circular from Headquarters Twenty-Fifth Army Corps, Camp Lincoln, Va., May 22, 1865, in United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Vol. 46, Part III, p. 1199
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
As one officer put it, ever since the troopers gleaned from rumors in camp, that they would be shipped off for Texas instead of released from service, a “marked change came over them and they became sullen and disobedient.”
As a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer reported it, the officers paid “no attention” to the mutterings, which they regarded as “grumblings peculiar to the African race.”36
The brigades that preceded Cole’s departed with only minor disturbances; one paper reported only “an outbreak or two.”37
But when Cole’s officers tried to force their black regiments aboard the ships, the men resisted, increasingly become unhinged.
There may have been some premeditation, as thousands of rounds of ammunition and carbines exchanged hands from one regiment to the next sometime before the mutiny.
Some time preceding the mutiny officers had distributed new Sharpe’s breech-loading carbines and accoutrements.
Just before or during the ensuing struggle the black soldiers evidently got their hands on thousands of the withheld bullets.
Some soldiers apparently tried to break into the steamer’s hold where the chief quartermaster, or the soldiers themselves, had stowed away 250 rounds of ammunition for each departing soldier, suggesting that there were plans to commandeer the ship once it embarked.
One company alone stowed away nearly 1600 rounds.38
Of the several regiments recently put under Cole’s command — including Cole’s original regiment, and Charles Francis Adams’s — most broke out in violent protest.
Rain fell from darkened skies.
Beside one ship, with most of the men boarded from a smaller transport boat, the remaining portion drew their new carbines, capped them, and while others brandished sabers, yelled that they would not be shipped to Texas.
This spurred those already on board to draw their arms and fire into the air.
The bugler from Cole’s regiment refused to march onto the ship.
And hundreds already aboard refused to step down into the hold.
Soldiers threatened to kill their superiors as the armed men “ranged themselves about the windlass” swearing they would shoot any man who weighed anchor.
Some talked of imprisoning the officers and taking over the ship.
One private warned, “I’ll sooner have my throat cut than leave this harbor!”
From aboard a transport, William Carter, a soldier from Cole’s original regiment, defied his lieutenant’s orders to cease shooting; Carter caught sight of approaching white troops and took aim at white officers watching from mounted horses on shore.
Looking to inflame his comrades he exclaimed, “What is those damned white officers coming down here for, they can’t scare me."
"We can whip them easy enough!” Carter squeezed the trigger but missed his targets — among them a colonel and a general.
When other soldiers glimpsed the white troops approaching one of the ships, they too threatened to fire on the white detachment.
Officers on another propeller boat, with the most mutinous soldiers beside them, unmoored the small craft from the steamship, taking the black soldiers back to the wharf where the white detachment eventually crushed the rebellion.
36 Frederick W. Browne, My Service in the U.S. Colored Cavalry: A Paper Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Loyal Legion, March 4, 1908 (Cincinnati?: , 1908), 11-13. Correspondent quoted in New York Times, June 16, 1865, page 1.
37 See court martial of soldiers from other brigades: RG 153, OO1394. William Holmes, Moses Woods, 36USCT. NARA, Washington, DC.
38 Circular from Headquarters Twenty-Fifth Army Corps, Camp Lincoln, Va., May 22, 1865, in United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Vol. 46, Part III, p. 1199
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Aboard the ship some sixteen white officers held nearly seven hundred angry soldiers at bay after shooting a “big, pock-marked mulatto” who stood atop the pilot cabin, and while shaking his fists yelled “You damned white-livered sons of bitches, we will throw you overboard.”
On another ship a black soldier screamed, “Let us not go to Texas, let us die on the deck like men.”
Some officers claimed that the men broke into the cargo hold and guzzled down whiskey — adding to their abandoned bravado; while one paper claimed they were perfectly sober.
Amid another melee on another ship, a soldier protested, “I’ll be shot before I go to Texas, to Hell with Texas, it’s time for the colored men to talk and act too!”
Once Major Van Shelling, who led the white soldiers sent in to quell the mutiny, obtained a ceasefire, he began taking the black soldiers back to the wharf, by groups of two or three, where they were forced to lay down their arms and placed under guard behind the military fort.
Then next day when hundreds of equally mutinous men under Cole arrived at the port, they were marched through a gauntlet of white soldiers who stood armed and ready to kill.
Before they were escorted in small groups to the awaiting ships, they were forced to surrender their arms.
Readers of the New York Times were informed that “every sable face was distorted with pain as they unbuckled their accoutrements and laid down carbine and saber."
"Some ground their teeth in silent mortification, and tears rolled down the cheeks of others as they stepped in front of their fellows to lay down the honorable badges of their protection.”39
It required Cole’s officers over two days to disarm the soldiers and ship them to a god-forsaken land.
Even after the steamer set for ocean waters, guns were periodically discharged from the deck.40
No doubt, much of the resistance was a visceral response to being forced into the hold of a steamship bound for a distant land — somewhere in the deep South.
Some of them believed they would be forced to pick cotton to pay off the war debt.
Also, many of the leaders of the mutiny while trying to stoke the courage of others, appealed to the black soldiers’ sense of manhood.
These soldiers — sick, weak, frightened — equated slavery with the loss of manhood, and what they saw and heard all about them, had all the markings of enslavement.
But when a white artillery unit was rushed in to crush the mutiny, it was a soldier from Cole’s regiment who put the confusion and rage into perspective.
Poignantly pleading into the teeth of loaded carbines and artillery, Private John Burkley cried the following: “I will not go on board that vessel.”
“When President Lincoln was alive my wife drew rations, but now [that] President Johnson has been in office the Government don’t furnish [her] any rations and I am going to remain and work for a living.”41
It is as if officers and reporters could not see the obvious: certainly these soldiers mutinied in order to assert unrestrained manhood; and clearly they feared being re-enslaved by a government and officers they did not trust.
But for many freedmen, establishing themselves as uncontested heads of their families was one and the same with rejecting slavery and certifying themselves as true men.
39 Browne, "My Service in the U.S. Colored Cavalry: A Paper Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Loyal Legion, March 4, 1908" What “really” transpired at the ships over the two day period is impossible to know given the laconic nature of ensuing court martial testimonies where a handful of ringleaders were singled out and somewhat summarily convicted — most of them offering no final statement. For a detailed report of the mutiny, see: New York Times, June 16, 1865. The Times reported that the white officers felt indignant after the rebellion; but it also depicted the ships as unusually comfortable and roomy and, contrary to what is documented in other medical sources, that the soldiers were furnished with the “best and freshest rations for the use of the troops.” See various Courts- Martial, Record Group 153: William Carter, Robert Allen, William Respers, MM 3144; John Carr, John Burkley, Henry Washington, Jacob Payne, Edward Spencer, James Linger, Henry Wilson, George Newtwon, William Holmes, Spencer Edwards, MM 1394; Cornelius Robertson OO 1395;
James Linier, OO 1394, NARA. Washington DC. There is significant evidence that the non-commissioned black officers experienced the brunt of the anger as they were caught between executing white officers’ commands and loyalties to fellow black soldiers. The non-commissioned officers tended to be free-blacks before the war started. In one instance, private Gordon Alexander threatened to cut his sergeant’s (Richard Johnson’s) guts out when the latter commanded Alexander to load rations onto the ship.
40 Dollard, "Recollections of the Civil War and Going West to Grow Up with the Country", 149-51
41 Court Martial John Burkley, OO-1394, NARA, Washington, DC.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Aboard the ship some sixteen white officers held nearly seven hundred angry soldiers at bay after shooting a “big, pock-marked mulatto” who stood atop the pilot cabin, and while shaking his fists yelled “You damned white-livered sons of bitches, we will throw you overboard.”
On another ship a black soldier screamed, “Let us not go to Texas, let us die on the deck like men.”
Some officers claimed that the men broke into the cargo hold and guzzled down whiskey — adding to their abandoned bravado; while one paper claimed they were perfectly sober.
Amid another melee on another ship, a soldier protested, “I’ll be shot before I go to Texas, to Hell with Texas, it’s time for the colored men to talk and act too!”
Once Major Van Shelling, who led the white soldiers sent in to quell the mutiny, obtained a ceasefire, he began taking the black soldiers back to the wharf, by groups of two or three, where they were forced to lay down their arms and placed under guard behind the military fort.
Then next day when hundreds of equally mutinous men under Cole arrived at the port, they were marched through a gauntlet of white soldiers who stood armed and ready to kill.
Before they were escorted in small groups to the awaiting ships, they were forced to surrender their arms.
Readers of the New York Times were informed that “every sable face was distorted with pain as they unbuckled their accoutrements and laid down carbine and saber."
"Some ground their teeth in silent mortification, and tears rolled down the cheeks of others as they stepped in front of their fellows to lay down the honorable badges of their protection.”39
It required Cole’s officers over two days to disarm the soldiers and ship them to a god-forsaken land.
Even after the steamer set for ocean waters, guns were periodically discharged from the deck.40
No doubt, much of the resistance was a visceral response to being forced into the hold of a steamship bound for a distant land — somewhere in the deep South.
Some of them believed they would be forced to pick cotton to pay off the war debt.
Also, many of the leaders of the mutiny while trying to stoke the courage of others, appealed to the black soldiers’ sense of manhood.
These soldiers — sick, weak, frightened — equated slavery with the loss of manhood, and what they saw and heard all about them, had all the markings of enslavement.
But when a white artillery unit was rushed in to crush the mutiny, it was a soldier from Cole’s regiment who put the confusion and rage into perspective.
Poignantly pleading into the teeth of loaded carbines and artillery, Private John Burkley cried the following: “I will not go on board that vessel.”
“When President Lincoln was alive my wife drew rations, but now [that] President Johnson has been in office the Government don’t furnish [her] any rations and I am going to remain and work for a living.”41
It is as if officers and reporters could not see the obvious: certainly these soldiers mutinied in order to assert unrestrained manhood; and clearly they feared being re-enslaved by a government and officers they did not trust.
But for many freedmen, establishing themselves as uncontested heads of their families was one and the same with rejecting slavery and certifying themselves as true men.
39 Browne, "My Service in the U.S. Colored Cavalry: A Paper Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Loyal Legion, March 4, 1908" What “really” transpired at the ships over the two day period is impossible to know given the laconic nature of ensuing court martial testimonies where a handful of ringleaders were singled out and somewhat summarily convicted — most of them offering no final statement. For a detailed report of the mutiny, see: New York Times, June 16, 1865. The Times reported that the white officers felt indignant after the rebellion; but it also depicted the ships as unusually comfortable and roomy and, contrary to what is documented in other medical sources, that the soldiers were furnished with the “best and freshest rations for the use of the troops.” See various Courts- Martial, Record Group 153: William Carter, Robert Allen, William Respers, MM 3144; John Carr, John Burkley, Henry Washington, Jacob Payne, Edward Spencer, James Linger, Henry Wilson, George Newtwon, William Holmes, Spencer Edwards, MM 1394; Cornelius Robertson OO 1395;
James Linier, OO 1394, NARA. Washington DC. There is significant evidence that the non-commissioned black officers experienced the brunt of the anger as they were caught between executing white officers’ commands and loyalties to fellow black soldiers. The non-commissioned officers tended to be free-blacks before the war started. In one instance, private Gordon Alexander threatened to cut his sergeant’s (Richard Johnson’s) guts out when the latter commanded Alexander to load rations onto the ship.
40 Dollard, "Recollections of the Civil War and Going West to Grow Up with the Country", 149-51
41 Court Martial John Burkley, OO-1394, NARA, Washington, DC.
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
As The Freedman and Southern Society Project attests, the vast majority of freedmen measured the extent of their own liberty, first and last, by the degree to which they could provide for and without challenge make claims on their family.42
Many of Cole’s soldiers enlisted, not because they wanted revenge on white masters, or because they bought into Frederick Douglas’s gender calculus that military service somehow proved one’s manhood, but because they were recruited with the understanding that their labor for the government was a contractual relationship where, in exchange for taking up arms, the government would provide sustenance for their recently freed wives, mothers, and children.
Of all black soldiers, those who came from confederate plantations, like the ones who fled to Fort Monroe and New Bern, tended to associate military service with familial obligations.
Free black men who hailed from northern states, for example, had compelling reasons to remain home to exploit the demand for labor — and their motives often had less to do with slavery than frustrations with second-class citizenship.
Black soldiers from Border States like Kentucky or Maryland, on the other hand, tended to associate joining the army with personal freedom, as their family’s slave status was not altered by the Emancipation Proclamation, and there were no federally sanctioned contraband camps to which they could usher their families for safety.
In fact of all enlisted black men, Border-State soldiers risked putting their families in danger of violent retribution, even as communicating with a wife or mother proved difficult, if not impossible.43
But refugees like those who showed up in Cole’s camps — in places like Virginia or North Carolina — did not need to join the army to obtain freedom under Union law.
And there was significant opportunity for such soldiers to earn money as common laborers for the Union army.
Soldiering, then, was one of many ways that a freedman in the Piedmont could leverage his services for the protection of his fragile, uprooted family.44
Sometime before the mutiny, soldiers in one of the many regiments bound for Texas petitioned their general that though they had honorably served the US government, “our family’s are suffering at Roanoke Island, NC.”
“When we were enlisted in the service,” the petition continued, “we were prommised that our wifes and family’s should receive rations from government.”45
After Cole’s brigade arrived in Texas, soldiers from the 1st Colored Cavalry would petition military authorities that “Wee present to you our suffering at present Concerning our Famileys wich wee are now informed that Commisserys has been Closed against them as though wee were rebeling against U S.”
The soldiers continued, “never was wee any more treated Like slaves then wee are now in our Lives.”
Though the soldiers were forced into drudge labor along the Mexican border, they considered themselves slaves for other reasons.
42 See: Berlin and Rowland, "Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era", esp. 5-7, 95-6
43 ibid., 79-80
44 In fact, as soldiers must have known, General Butler paid some laborers double what they could make in the Army when black soldiers only netted $7 per month. (Butler paid some laborers as much as $16 per month.; and some blacks could earn as much as $25 per month working for one of the military departments, thanks to an omission in the pay limits listed in the Confiscation Act.) This suggests that black soldiers did not enlist for money alone — or for care and protection of their families as laborers received many of the same protections and benefits. Under Butler enlisting did provide an instant bounty that may have been attractive to fathers looking for immediate relief. Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 53-4; Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 363-5
45 Letter on behalf of 36th USCT quoted in: Berlin and Rowland, "Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era", 125-6
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
As The Freedman and Southern Society Project attests, the vast majority of freedmen measured the extent of their own liberty, first and last, by the degree to which they could provide for and without challenge make claims on their family.42
Many of Cole’s soldiers enlisted, not because they wanted revenge on white masters, or because they bought into Frederick Douglas’s gender calculus that military service somehow proved one’s manhood, but because they were recruited with the understanding that their labor for the government was a contractual relationship where, in exchange for taking up arms, the government would provide sustenance for their recently freed wives, mothers, and children.
Of all black soldiers, those who came from confederate plantations, like the ones who fled to Fort Monroe and New Bern, tended to associate military service with familial obligations.
Free black men who hailed from northern states, for example, had compelling reasons to remain home to exploit the demand for labor — and their motives often had less to do with slavery than frustrations with second-class citizenship.
Black soldiers from Border States like Kentucky or Maryland, on the other hand, tended to associate joining the army with personal freedom, as their family’s slave status was not altered by the Emancipation Proclamation, and there were no federally sanctioned contraband camps to which they could usher their families for safety.
In fact of all enlisted black men, Border-State soldiers risked putting their families in danger of violent retribution, even as communicating with a wife or mother proved difficult, if not impossible.43
But refugees like those who showed up in Cole’s camps — in places like Virginia or North Carolina — did not need to join the army to obtain freedom under Union law.
And there was significant opportunity for such soldiers to earn money as common laborers for the Union army.
Soldiering, then, was one of many ways that a freedman in the Piedmont could leverage his services for the protection of his fragile, uprooted family.44
Sometime before the mutiny, soldiers in one of the many regiments bound for Texas petitioned their general that though they had honorably served the US government, “our family’s are suffering at Roanoke Island, NC.”
“When we were enlisted in the service,” the petition continued, “we were prommised that our wifes and family’s should receive rations from government.”45
After Cole’s brigade arrived in Texas, soldiers from the 1st Colored Cavalry would petition military authorities that “Wee present to you our suffering at present Concerning our Famileys wich wee are now informed that Commisserys has been Closed against them as though wee were rebeling against U S.”
The soldiers continued, “never was wee any more treated Like slaves then wee are now in our Lives.”
Though the soldiers were forced into drudge labor along the Mexican border, they considered themselves slaves for other reasons.
42 See: Berlin and Rowland, "Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era", esp. 5-7, 95-6
43 ibid., 79-80
44 In fact, as soldiers must have known, General Butler paid some laborers double what they could make in the Army when black soldiers only netted $7 per month. (Butler paid some laborers as much as $16 per month.; and some blacks could earn as much as $25 per month working for one of the military departments, thanks to an omission in the pay limits listed in the Confiscation Act.) This suggests that black soldiers did not enlist for money alone — or for care and protection of their families as laborers received many of the same protections and benefits. Under Butler enlisting did provide an instant bounty that may have been attractive to fathers looking for immediate relief. Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 53-4; Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 363-5
45 Letter on behalf of 36th USCT quoted in: Berlin and Rowland, "Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era", 125-6
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
“[We] well remember before the Closing of the war that men who was fighting against the U S. how thir [their] wifes were pertected and if our wifes were half pertected as they were wee would be happy men.”
These men in Cole’s brigade would feel they had been returned to slavery because they had not power to protect their wives and children from the arbitrary hand of white power.
“Wee are said to be U S. Soldiers and behold wee are U S Slaves…."
"Wee had rather pay for our next years serviss and be turned out then to stay in and no pertecttion to our wife.”
Because of the deep connection between bondage and powerless fatherhood, black soldiers began to think of their military service as an extension of slavery.
And so long as they could not shelter their families from hunger and misery, they dreamed of paying for their emancipation, and in the case of the mutiny, of revolting.46
When William Turner, a black sergeant was asked why private William Respers refused to duck into the hold during the mutiny, Turner testified that his comrade insisted he would not submit to being hauled away like a slave to Texas “without any money leaving our families destitute and I would rather die than go.”
And when a comrade was asked why William Carter resorted to shooting at white officers, the private responded, “I heard [Carter] talking about the woman he was leaving behind and he hated to go.”47
While some soldiers wrote letters, others voiced their grievances within earshot of their white officers.
It is Officer Cole’s own official report of the mutiny that is the most striking.
Only after the ringleaders were shackled in Texas, set to be tried and sentenced for years of hard labor with ball and chain, did Cole submit his summary to headquarters.
The majority of the black Cavalry, he explained, came from the near vicinity of Portsmouth and Norfolk — areas immediately surrounding the port.
(These two areas were targets of General Ord’s crackdown on Butler’s supposedly corrupt system of rations and missionary programs).
Discovering that their husbands and sons were set to embark for a dubious destination for an indefinite period, nearly one thousand family members — wives, children, and elderly — had converged on the wharf to inform the soldiers that the government was cutting off family rations, and to beg them not to go to Texas.
Some of the soldiers had not been paid for nearly ten months, meaning most of their family members were living hand to mouth.
“Consequently” Cole confessed, “[the soldiers] became excited and decidedly insubordinate.”
Cole reported that some twenty soldiers had darted away with their families, though more certainly escaped.
Cole confessed too that bringing in white troops to cow them onto the ships had only further aggravated the tensions.
But after reporting the real cause of the mutiny, Cole contended that all of it could have been avoided had two of his officers hurried the soldiers onto the boats instead of allowing them to exchange words with loved ones: “for every man left Camp,” he claimed “as cheerfully as ever before.”
(This may have been an accurate but perfectly misleading assessment of black soldiers’ morale).
The words Cole uses next are extraordinary: “I have mentioned the condition of the families,” he continued, “not as an excuse for the conduct of the men but showing the cause of the excitement and the stupidity of permitting them the inflammatory stimulus of free intercourse with the howling multitude.”48
We might ask what would cause an educated anti-slavery man, with two children at home, and who claimed to feel a deep attachment to his black soldiers — indeed there is some evidence that he risked his life to save several of them — what would compel such a man to describe a hungry family as an “inflammatory stimulus,” or pleading, nervous mothers as a “howling multitude”?
Even if Cole could not make out their words, the howling may provide clues.
It may be that the “ethos of mutuality” that Jacqueline Jones uses to understand African American work patterns during Reconstruction, is the most useful way to get at what was going on in the black military.49
On the whole, black soldiers saw enlistment not as a means to get ahead in the race of life, but as a way to provide for dependents and suture together families that had been regularly torn apart by the brutal commodification of families and selves in slavery.
The violence laden record left behind by Cole’s men forces us to question the definitive work on black soldiers, Joseph Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle which argues that, despite significant racism and violent flare-ups, white officers and black soldiers, as a collective, forged a deep alliance, “a mystical chemistry” through mutual sacrifice and bravery in combat.50
46 Anonymous black soldier from Virginia to Unidentified Washington Official, in: Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 725-6; Soldiers from the 1st Colored Cavalry shared roughly the same geographic and cultural backgrounds, skills, and sensibilities as soldiers from Cole’s own 2nd Colored Cavalry. They were recruited and prepared at the same time under the orders of General Butler.
47 Courts Martial: William Respers MM 3144; William Carter, MM 3144. NARA,
Washington, DC.
48 “Commander of a Black Cavalry Brigade to the Headquarters of the 25th Army Corps” in ibid., 723-25
49 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 443.
50 Glatthaar, "Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers", esp. 146-47. The fundamental flaw with the vast majority of writing on black Civil War soldiers is the understandable, if tiresome, attempt to restore manhood to black soldiers by emphasizing heroic battlefield exploits and sacrifice for nation. Of course, doing so measures black soldiers against gender constructions that prevailed then and now. Fine historians like Glatthaar admit to episodes of black soldiers running from battle, but then go out of their way to recount the various narratives of collective sacrifice and valor — at Fort Wagner, Milliken’s Bend, etc. What gets lost in this telling of the story is the ways in which officers reported such incidents as a way to make sense of their own promotions, doubts, racism -- and the ways in which a debate about whether or not black men would stand up in battle was at the same time a way to reestablish tenuous connections between martial instincts, courage and the essentialized white male. So obsessed with rehabilitating black manhood are these histories that essential questions about the meaning of desertion, malingering, mutiny, and various forms of resistance fall by the wayside. We might ask instead why white men spent so much time writing about what blacks did or didn’t do in the heat of battle. What was on the line when debating martial characteristics of black men? To the extent that blacks were brave, valorous soldiers, why did they risk their lives in crossfire and screeching lead? Why shouldn’t they run from death, resist military exploitation, push when pushed upon, sleep when tired, or desert when treated like animals? By holding gallant militarism as the standard by which historians implicitly measure African Americans, they reify the same connections for white manhood — once again interlocking images of citizenship, manhood, and war. Just as for white soldiers the historiographical trend has been to look closely at desertion, draft dodging, malingering, self-inflicted wounds, a similar shift needs to enrich our understanding of the black military experience.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
“[We] well remember before the Closing of the war that men who was fighting against the U S. how thir [their] wifes were pertected and if our wifes were half pertected as they were wee would be happy men.”
These men in Cole’s brigade would feel they had been returned to slavery because they had not power to protect their wives and children from the arbitrary hand of white power.
“Wee are said to be U S. Soldiers and behold wee are U S Slaves…."
"Wee had rather pay for our next years serviss and be turned out then to stay in and no pertecttion to our wife.”
Because of the deep connection between bondage and powerless fatherhood, black soldiers began to think of their military service as an extension of slavery.
And so long as they could not shelter their families from hunger and misery, they dreamed of paying for their emancipation, and in the case of the mutiny, of revolting.46
When William Turner, a black sergeant was asked why private William Respers refused to duck into the hold during the mutiny, Turner testified that his comrade insisted he would not submit to being hauled away like a slave to Texas “without any money leaving our families destitute and I would rather die than go.”
And when a comrade was asked why William Carter resorted to shooting at white officers, the private responded, “I heard [Carter] talking about the woman he was leaving behind and he hated to go.”47
While some soldiers wrote letters, others voiced their grievances within earshot of their white officers.
It is Officer Cole’s own official report of the mutiny that is the most striking.
Only after the ringleaders were shackled in Texas, set to be tried and sentenced for years of hard labor with ball and chain, did Cole submit his summary to headquarters.
The majority of the black Cavalry, he explained, came from the near vicinity of Portsmouth and Norfolk — areas immediately surrounding the port.
(These two areas were targets of General Ord’s crackdown on Butler’s supposedly corrupt system of rations and missionary programs).
Discovering that their husbands and sons were set to embark for a dubious destination for an indefinite period, nearly one thousand family members — wives, children, and elderly — had converged on the wharf to inform the soldiers that the government was cutting off family rations, and to beg them not to go to Texas.
Some of the soldiers had not been paid for nearly ten months, meaning most of their family members were living hand to mouth.
“Consequently” Cole confessed, “[the soldiers] became excited and decidedly insubordinate.”
Cole reported that some twenty soldiers had darted away with their families, though more certainly escaped.
Cole confessed too that bringing in white troops to cow them onto the ships had only further aggravated the tensions.
But after reporting the real cause of the mutiny, Cole contended that all of it could have been avoided had two of his officers hurried the soldiers onto the boats instead of allowing them to exchange words with loved ones: “for every man left Camp,” he claimed “as cheerfully as ever before.”
(This may have been an accurate but perfectly misleading assessment of black soldiers’ morale).
The words Cole uses next are extraordinary: “I have mentioned the condition of the families,” he continued, “not as an excuse for the conduct of the men but showing the cause of the excitement and the stupidity of permitting them the inflammatory stimulus of free intercourse with the howling multitude.”48
We might ask what would cause an educated anti-slavery man, with two children at home, and who claimed to feel a deep attachment to his black soldiers — indeed there is some evidence that he risked his life to save several of them — what would compel such a man to describe a hungry family as an “inflammatory stimulus,” or pleading, nervous mothers as a “howling multitude”?
Even if Cole could not make out their words, the howling may provide clues.
It may be that the “ethos of mutuality” that Jacqueline Jones uses to understand African American work patterns during Reconstruction, is the most useful way to get at what was going on in the black military.49
On the whole, black soldiers saw enlistment not as a means to get ahead in the race of life, but as a way to provide for dependents and suture together families that had been regularly torn apart by the brutal commodification of families and selves in slavery.
The violence laden record left behind by Cole’s men forces us to question the definitive work on black soldiers, Joseph Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle which argues that, despite significant racism and violent flare-ups, white officers and black soldiers, as a collective, forged a deep alliance, “a mystical chemistry” through mutual sacrifice and bravery in combat.50
46 Anonymous black soldier from Virginia to Unidentified Washington Official, in: Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 725-6; Soldiers from the 1st Colored Cavalry shared roughly the same geographic and cultural backgrounds, skills, and sensibilities as soldiers from Cole’s own 2nd Colored Cavalry. They were recruited and prepared at the same time under the orders of General Butler.
47 Courts Martial: William Respers MM 3144; William Carter, MM 3144. NARA,
Washington, DC.
48 “Commander of a Black Cavalry Brigade to the Headquarters of the 25th Army Corps” in ibid., 723-25
49 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 443.
50 Glatthaar, "Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers", esp. 146-47. The fundamental flaw with the vast majority of writing on black Civil War soldiers is the understandable, if tiresome, attempt to restore manhood to black soldiers by emphasizing heroic battlefield exploits and sacrifice for nation. Of course, doing so measures black soldiers against gender constructions that prevailed then and now. Fine historians like Glatthaar admit to episodes of black soldiers running from battle, but then go out of their way to recount the various narratives of collective sacrifice and valor — at Fort Wagner, Milliken’s Bend, etc. What gets lost in this telling of the story is the ways in which officers reported such incidents as a way to make sense of their own promotions, doubts, racism -- and the ways in which a debate about whether or not black men would stand up in battle was at the same time a way to reestablish tenuous connections between martial instincts, courage and the essentialized white male. So obsessed with rehabilitating black manhood are these histories that essential questions about the meaning of desertion, malingering, mutiny, and various forms of resistance fall by the wayside. We might ask instead why white men spent so much time writing about what blacks did or didn’t do in the heat of battle. What was on the line when debating martial characteristics of black men? To the extent that blacks were brave, valorous soldiers, why did they risk their lives in crossfire and screeching lead? Why shouldn’t they run from death, resist military exploitation, push when pushed upon, sleep when tired, or desert when treated like animals? By holding gallant militarism as the standard by which historians implicitly measure African Americans, they reify the same connections for white manhood — once again interlocking images of citizenship, manhood, and war. Just as for white soldiers the historiographical trend has been to look closely at desertion, draft dodging, malingering, self-inflicted wounds, a similar shift needs to enrich our understanding of the black military experience.
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Glatthaar’s important work claims that there was a significant anti-slavery sentiment shared by the bulk of white officers.
And he is certainly right.
But no matter how many of these white men had wept as they read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s indictment of slavery — a book that depicted slavery as first and foremost a disruption of familial bonds — no matter what their responses to the evils of slavery before the war from a thousand-mile distance, many such white officers found both the poignancy and remove of literature, anti-slavery discourse, and sentimental letters to home about their commitment to blacks, to be more stirring than the heartbreaking realities that transpired under their noses.
One of Cole’s most callous officers, Robert Dollard — who claimed to have freely shed tears over Uncle Tom’s Cabin — played a central role in the mutiny.
He ferried the men back and forth to the wharf, and actually called in the white troops.51
It may have been that these white officers, so deep in the rut of making themselves and fashioning their own narratives about rank, promotion and manliness — fundamentally could not grasp a form of manhood anchored in mutuality instead of vertical mobility.
They may have felt sorrow for the broken domestic lives of slaves as they read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but, it appears, they were incapable of such compassion when standing only feet away from the real thing.
Ultimately, the demands and distinctive “manly” claims of the black troops did not square with the story Cole and his officers were trying to tell about themselves.
One scholar has described anti-slavery groups who built movements around “imagined” realities of suffering as sentimental communities.
Cole’s story suggests that imagined connections with the oppressed, and catharsis through literature and political tracts, often collapsed when so-called reformers rubbed flesh to flesh with authentic black selves.
It may be that the most earnest and sympathetic of northern imaginations, in the end, preferred romantic literary relationships with blacks over the vexing and rich complexities of real contact.52
In the turbulent spaces shared by Cole’s white and black soldiers, the relationship between them was anything but an alliance, forged in battle.
Racism has always been created through storytelling, and as one scholar reminds us, in regards to race, “nineteenth-century whites were probably the most creative storytellers of all.”53
But as all of this suggests, stories that many white soldiers insisted on telling about themselves — ones fundamentally grounded in self-making and their own obsessions with moving vertically while masking their own dependence — had an equally profound effect on race relations.
The kaleidoscope of motives and reactions surrounding the mutiny can be partially explained by a longer history of not only relations within Cole’s regiment, but by of deeply ingrained assumptions held by many of Cole’s fellow officers.
Nineteenth-century self-made men were busy telling particular stories about their own families — stories informed by the Revolution’s aim of divorcing status from family: Who, it was asked, remembers the name of Virgil’s father or son?
Lincoln and his party depicted the Civil War as a struggle for the ability to transcend one’s origins.
The argument for ending slavery borrowed heavily from this ideal so precious to northerners.54
The measurement of manhood increasingly required that each son distinguish, if not distance himself from his father.
Status, through merit, had to be reestablished with each generation: Making something of oneself meant doing so without lineage, without roots.
The self-made man’s wife was supposed to support and augment her husband’s rise above his roots.
In short, the ideal self-made man of Lincoln’s generation used his wife’s hearth to magnify the distance he had traveled from his mother’s.55
No wonder, then, that a self-made soldier like Cole could look into the faces of frantic mothers and children — begging for food, money, protection — and see in this little more than “inflammatory stimulus.”
51 “Commander of a Black Cavalry Brigade to the Headquarters of the 25th Army Corps” in Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 723-25; Court Martial of Cornelius Robertson, OO 1395, NARA, Washington, DC.
52 Franny Nudelman, John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 19-22.
53 Mia Bay, "Remembering Racism: Rereading the Black Image in the White Mind," Reviews in American History 27, no. 4 (1999), 646-656.
54 Sandage, "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America", 218
55 Kenneth Winkle argues that the self-made man was a linguistic device to help ease the transition from a family-centered economy to one explicitly for the individual. In particular, in an era of increasing geographic mobility and the opening up of new careers, the ideal helped young men cope with the fact that many of them would leave their fathers and mothers for economic reasons. Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man", 1-16; Appleby, "New Cultural Heroes in the Early National Period", 163-88
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Glatthaar’s important work claims that there was a significant anti-slavery sentiment shared by the bulk of white officers.
And he is certainly right.
But no matter how many of these white men had wept as they read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s indictment of slavery — a book that depicted slavery as first and foremost a disruption of familial bonds — no matter what their responses to the evils of slavery before the war from a thousand-mile distance, many such white officers found both the poignancy and remove of literature, anti-slavery discourse, and sentimental letters to home about their commitment to blacks, to be more stirring than the heartbreaking realities that transpired under their noses.
One of Cole’s most callous officers, Robert Dollard — who claimed to have freely shed tears over Uncle Tom’s Cabin — played a central role in the mutiny.
He ferried the men back and forth to the wharf, and actually called in the white troops.51
It may have been that these white officers, so deep in the rut of making themselves and fashioning their own narratives about rank, promotion and manliness — fundamentally could not grasp a form of manhood anchored in mutuality instead of vertical mobility.
They may have felt sorrow for the broken domestic lives of slaves as they read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but, it appears, they were incapable of such compassion when standing only feet away from the real thing.
Ultimately, the demands and distinctive “manly” claims of the black troops did not square with the story Cole and his officers were trying to tell about themselves.
One scholar has described anti-slavery groups who built movements around “imagined” realities of suffering as sentimental communities.
Cole’s story suggests that imagined connections with the oppressed, and catharsis through literature and political tracts, often collapsed when so-called reformers rubbed flesh to flesh with authentic black selves.
It may be that the most earnest and sympathetic of northern imaginations, in the end, preferred romantic literary relationships with blacks over the vexing and rich complexities of real contact.52
In the turbulent spaces shared by Cole’s white and black soldiers, the relationship between them was anything but an alliance, forged in battle.
Racism has always been created through storytelling, and as one scholar reminds us, in regards to race, “nineteenth-century whites were probably the most creative storytellers of all.”53
But as all of this suggests, stories that many white soldiers insisted on telling about themselves — ones fundamentally grounded in self-making and their own obsessions with moving vertically while masking their own dependence — had an equally profound effect on race relations.
The kaleidoscope of motives and reactions surrounding the mutiny can be partially explained by a longer history of not only relations within Cole’s regiment, but by of deeply ingrained assumptions held by many of Cole’s fellow officers.
Nineteenth-century self-made men were busy telling particular stories about their own families — stories informed by the Revolution’s aim of divorcing status from family: Who, it was asked, remembers the name of Virgil’s father or son?
Lincoln and his party depicted the Civil War as a struggle for the ability to transcend one’s origins.
The argument for ending slavery borrowed heavily from this ideal so precious to northerners.54
The measurement of manhood increasingly required that each son distinguish, if not distance himself from his father.
Status, through merit, had to be reestablished with each generation: Making something of oneself meant doing so without lineage, without roots.
The self-made man’s wife was supposed to support and augment her husband’s rise above his roots.
In short, the ideal self-made man of Lincoln’s generation used his wife’s hearth to magnify the distance he had traveled from his mother’s.55
No wonder, then, that a self-made soldier like Cole could look into the faces of frantic mothers and children — begging for food, money, protection — and see in this little more than “inflammatory stimulus.”
51 “Commander of a Black Cavalry Brigade to the Headquarters of the 25th Army Corps” in Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, "The Black Military Experience", 723-25; Court Martial of Cornelius Robertson, OO 1395, NARA, Washington, DC.
52 Franny Nudelman, John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 19-22.
53 Mia Bay, "Remembering Racism: Rereading the Black Image in the White Mind," Reviews in American History 27, no. 4 (1999), 646-656.
54 Sandage, "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America", 218
55 Kenneth Winkle argues that the self-made man was a linguistic device to help ease the transition from a family-centered economy to one explicitly for the individual. In particular, in an era of increasing geographic mobility and the opening up of new careers, the ideal helped young men cope with the fact that many of them would leave their fathers and mothers for economic reasons. Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man", 1-16; Appleby, "New Cultural Heroes in the Early National Period", 163-88
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Hearth-made Men
Charles Francis Adams, who used the war to set himself apart from his own father and mother, later condemned his black soldiers by emphasizing what he viewed as a lack of “individuality and self-reliance.”56
For the rest of his life, Robert Dollard would take pride that he was one of Massachusetts’ “Minute-Men.”
He clipped stories from newsletters about them, attended reunions, and visited memorials for this group of soldiers who dropped everything to rush to war.
Merchants, mechanics, business men — all darted immediately to the cause.
Many of these “Minute Men” did not “have time to see their wives or children before hastening away,” Dollard proudly wrote in his memoirs.57
This sort of pride in “able-bodied,” independent manhood, and the belief that one’s deep love for hearth must cede to male duty, helps shed light on how otherwise decent men during the war forced black fathers or young boys into the Union army despite their victims’ appeal for the wellbeing of their families.58
The primacy of the “able-bodied,” independent self — which the war did little to contest — helps us fathom the shocking disregard for black women and children that we have already seen: Ditching frantic children and wives on their path to freedom; Dumping a mother and several children from a cart.
Many soldiers seemed to have a deep repulsion toward the most dependent of freed slaves.
In a time in American history when the bonds between children and parents were becoming more affective and indulgent, a blue-blooded soldier in New Orleans wrote home to Boston, “As I was going along this afternoon a little black baby that could just walk got under my feet and it look[ed] so much like a big worm that I wanted to step on it and crush it, the nasty, greasy little vermin was the best that could be said of it."59
Paradoxically, the emergence of the ambitious “man of force” correlated with antebellum northerners’ increasing emphasis on affection, complementarity and intimacy within families.
Consciously downplaying the family’s economic role, antebellum middle-class men and women increasingly associated the hearth with love and security within a brutal, male world beyond the doors.
But the removal of families from the economy of agrarian households was not so much a withdrawal from the marketplace as it was a new strategy for allowing families to grab for larger portions in a changing economy.60
In Cole’s own central New York, mid-century families increasingly had fewer children (through birth control and abortions), discontinued family & son businesses where boys once automatically followed their fathers, sent boys to boarding schools, and preached abstinence to sons in hopes of catapulting them into the “new middle class” of merchants, lawyers, doctors and professional men.
Whereas Cole’s great-grandparents had emphasized breaking the will of children, Cole’s generation emphasized using maternal love to nurture a son’s will to master himself.
Mothers, sisters, and fathers took in boarders, or worked second jobs at factories to ensure the advance of promising sons.61
56 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 166
57 Dollard, "Recollections of the Civil War and Going West to Grow Up with the Country", 16; Robert Dollard, "Family Papers, 1861-1918", 1861-1918).
58 Of course, many such soldiers also hoped to get a portion of the bounty by forcing slaves to enlist in the Union army. But the concept of “self-making” with all of its underpinning ideals, like individualism, self-reliance, independence, vertical orientation over horizontal, etc., helped provide the ideological foundation for such actions. For a few examples of white soldiers knowingly forcing fathers, or young sons, into service in South Carolina, see: Rufus Saxton to Edwin Stanton, December 30, 1864, in United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 3, Volume 4, pp.1028-29
59 I do not mean to argue that the sharp racism one finds all over northerners’ letters and in war memoirs is merely an extension of free labor ideology or of long held beliefs about dependency and labor. As David Roediger has argued white folks hated, despised, brutalized, longed for, mimicked, and romanticized black men, sometimes all in one night — participating in minstrelsy shows and following it up with mob beatings. But if one begins looking, it is shocking how much the obsession of making able-bodied black men accept their role in the Free Market is brought up in letters and official communications. Accompanying this obsession is the not unusual commentary on the vexing question of what to do with black mothers, children and the aged. The “blue-blood,” C.F. Abbott quoted in Wiley, "The Life of Billy Yank, the Common Soldier of the Union", 109. Also see, David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Rev. ed. (London; New York: Verso, 1999), 200.
60 Ryan, "Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865", 153, 177; Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, Or how Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005), 432.; Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (London ; New York: Verso, 1988), see especially the ways in which women surrendered public power, and sacrificed self-interest for the “crisis of family succession.”
61 Ryan, "Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865", 145-85
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Hearth-made Men
Charles Francis Adams, who used the war to set himself apart from his own father and mother, later condemned his black soldiers by emphasizing what he viewed as a lack of “individuality and self-reliance.”56
For the rest of his life, Robert Dollard would take pride that he was one of Massachusetts’ “Minute-Men.”
He clipped stories from newsletters about them, attended reunions, and visited memorials for this group of soldiers who dropped everything to rush to war.
Merchants, mechanics, business men — all darted immediately to the cause.
Many of these “Minute Men” did not “have time to see their wives or children before hastening away,” Dollard proudly wrote in his memoirs.57
This sort of pride in “able-bodied,” independent manhood, and the belief that one’s deep love for hearth must cede to male duty, helps shed light on how otherwise decent men during the war forced black fathers or young boys into the Union army despite their victims’ appeal for the wellbeing of their families.58
The primacy of the “able-bodied,” independent self — which the war did little to contest — helps us fathom the shocking disregard for black women and children that we have already seen: Ditching frantic children and wives on their path to freedom; Dumping a mother and several children from a cart.
Many soldiers seemed to have a deep repulsion toward the most dependent of freed slaves.
In a time in American history when the bonds between children and parents were becoming more affective and indulgent, a blue-blooded soldier in New Orleans wrote home to Boston, “As I was going along this afternoon a little black baby that could just walk got under my feet and it look[ed] so much like a big worm that I wanted to step on it and crush it, the nasty, greasy little vermin was the best that could be said of it."59
Paradoxically, the emergence of the ambitious “man of force” correlated with antebellum northerners’ increasing emphasis on affection, complementarity and intimacy within families.
Consciously downplaying the family’s economic role, antebellum middle-class men and women increasingly associated the hearth with love and security within a brutal, male world beyond the doors.
But the removal of families from the economy of agrarian households was not so much a withdrawal from the marketplace as it was a new strategy for allowing families to grab for larger portions in a changing economy.60
In Cole’s own central New York, mid-century families increasingly had fewer children (through birth control and abortions), discontinued family & son businesses where boys once automatically followed their fathers, sent boys to boarding schools, and preached abstinence to sons in hopes of catapulting them into the “new middle class” of merchants, lawyers, doctors and professional men.
Whereas Cole’s great-grandparents had emphasized breaking the will of children, Cole’s generation emphasized using maternal love to nurture a son’s will to master himself.
Mothers, sisters, and fathers took in boarders, or worked second jobs at factories to ensure the advance of promising sons.61
56 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 166
57 Dollard, "Recollections of the Civil War and Going West to Grow Up with the Country", 16; Robert Dollard, "Family Papers, 1861-1918", 1861-1918).
58 Of course, many such soldiers also hoped to get a portion of the bounty by forcing slaves to enlist in the Union army. But the concept of “self-making” with all of its underpinning ideals, like individualism, self-reliance, independence, vertical orientation over horizontal, etc., helped provide the ideological foundation for such actions. For a few examples of white soldiers knowingly forcing fathers, or young sons, into service in South Carolina, see: Rufus Saxton to Edwin Stanton, December 30, 1864, in United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 3, Volume 4, pp.1028-29
59 I do not mean to argue that the sharp racism one finds all over northerners’ letters and in war memoirs is merely an extension of free labor ideology or of long held beliefs about dependency and labor. As David Roediger has argued white folks hated, despised, brutalized, longed for, mimicked, and romanticized black men, sometimes all in one night — participating in minstrelsy shows and following it up with mob beatings. But if one begins looking, it is shocking how much the obsession of making able-bodied black men accept their role in the Free Market is brought up in letters and official communications. Accompanying this obsession is the not unusual commentary on the vexing question of what to do with black mothers, children and the aged. The “blue-blood,” C.F. Abbott quoted in Wiley, "The Life of Billy Yank, the Common Soldier of the Union", 109. Also see, David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Rev. ed. (London; New York: Verso, 1999), 200.
60 Ryan, "Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865", 153, 177; Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, Or how Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005), 432.; Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (London ; New York: Verso, 1988), see especially the ways in which women surrendered public power, and sacrificed self-interest for the “crisis of family succession.”
61 Ryan, "Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865", 145-85
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Braided into the psychological fulfillment and real love that women and men often found in such families, ran a strategy for creating successful men through the work of household dependents.
The “private” family was heavily engaged in creating public men of gravity.
The relationship of wife and husband vis-à-vis the antebellum marketplace could be transferred to war.
In this way, perhaps as much as nursing and home front fund raising, women informed the logic and pace of war.
Even as they seemed to be turning inward to domestic or “private” concerns, letters to the front had a way of turning fathers and sons outward again.
In her warm and plaintive letters to her husband, for example, Sarah Butler continuously knitted together intimacy and power brokering.
General Butler was not simply playing the indulgent husband when he confided to an associate, “I have never done anything of any import without taking counsel of my wife….”62
Sarah might smooth feathers and enflame her husbands’ ambitions at the same time by telling him, as she did after his failed attempt on Richmond, that she had bought a velvet hat for anticipated victory but was forced to send it back to Massachusetts.
Woven into her rich, literary musings and reveries Sarah made sure to emphasize the tender connection between her private letters and her husband’s grand ambitions.
“When you are triumphant, I am foolish enough to think that you forget me."
"Sometimes I know you love me."
"Do not forget me in triumph or danger."
"I shall prove better worth remembering than any other ever can be, to you.”
In other words of all his connections, she was “worth” the most to him.
In May of ’64, when Grant began weakening Butler’s strength by draining off troops in the very hour that Butler planned to attack Petersburg, Sarah argued “with anger and disgust” that Grant’s orders were connected to a larger political conspiracy to keep Butler at bay in the upcoming presidential election.
She had talked it over with sympathetic officers and newspapermen, concluding that Grant and Lincoln had decided “it would not be safe politically to leave a force in your hands by which you could capture Petersburg or attack Richmond….”
She and others had believed for some time that Butler would be “so closely shorn of command that no possibility of distinction would be left you.”
“How gloomy you must feel,” she continued, sounding a bit like Job’s comforter, “stripped of command on the hour of movement and in belief of success….”63
In June, with his army once again pared down she prodded him further.
“You will have to think very fast now."
"I cannot believe you will be allowed a great chance unless it comes by accident.”
Now Butler not only had to tame secessionists; he had to keep watch for compatriots with daggers.
“I would rather fight the rebels, an open foe, than encounter the home enemy, who strike, assassin-like, under cover, and at the moment success awaits you.”
Then, grooming him to outdo other “men of force” and fellow patriots, she continued: "Never yield an inch, or droop an hour, disheartened."
"It is the great game of life you are playing."
"And it goes faster than a weaver’s shuttle."
"Your brain spins swifter than other men, and you must weave while you spin."
"If the foe in front or rear show a single opening, be ready to spring into it, all armed."64
62 Butler quoted in Taylor Merrill, "General Benjamin F. Butler in the Presidential Campaign of 1864", 552
63 Sarah Butler to General Butler, May 27, 1864, July 20, 1864 and May 29, 1864 in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 4, March 1864-August 1864", 276-77, 285, 521-22
64 What is extraordinary about Sarah Butler’s letters is the ways in which she seamlessly shifts — often within the same paragraph — between these sorts of ambitious proddings and quotidian matters about where she is staying, her night’s rest, the weather, their daughter’s newest adventures, etc. Sarah Butler to General Butler, June 14, 1864 in ibid., 362-63. I am not suggesting that Sarah Butler’s letter writing was a calculated interplay between domestic matters and grandiose visions of her husband getting ahead. I do not believe that she consciously set out to embolden her husband by linking ambitious visions to domestic security. But this is what her letters, in effect, produced. I do want to suggest that many middle-class antebellum women did not see these as unrelated categories — that the so-called “private” sphere was a place where plans were made for public advancement — where husbands were reminded that they, not just their wives, were the “spinners” and “weavers.” This relationship between hearth and public ambitions has come to seem so natural that we barely notice even in ourselves today. In public and written acknowledgments it has become part of professional etiquette to thank intimate relations for helping win a Super Bowl or an election, or write an award-winning book in history. While naming partners or intimate others can be an act of gratitude and humility, it is also a way to openly redirect intimate relations into the service of professional achievement. “I couldn’t have written this book without her,” is a kind gesture but rarely true unless the author’s loved one typed the pages and dug through archives. The point here is that in meritocratic societies intimate relations often obtain value only to the extent and measure that they enhance one’s station, or place in public life. Thus, when General Butler wrote that he had achieved nothing great without first consulting his wife, he was at once showing (or feigning) humility while at the same time divulging a fundamental truth about intimacy and power.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Braided into the psychological fulfillment and real love that women and men often found in such families, ran a strategy for creating successful men through the work of household dependents.
The “private” family was heavily engaged in creating public men of gravity.
The relationship of wife and husband vis-à-vis the antebellum marketplace could be transferred to war.
In this way, perhaps as much as nursing and home front fund raising, women informed the logic and pace of war.
Even as they seemed to be turning inward to domestic or “private” concerns, letters to the front had a way of turning fathers and sons outward again.
In her warm and plaintive letters to her husband, for example, Sarah Butler continuously knitted together intimacy and power brokering.
General Butler was not simply playing the indulgent husband when he confided to an associate, “I have never done anything of any import without taking counsel of my wife….”62
Sarah might smooth feathers and enflame her husbands’ ambitions at the same time by telling him, as she did after his failed attempt on Richmond, that she had bought a velvet hat for anticipated victory but was forced to send it back to Massachusetts.
Woven into her rich, literary musings and reveries Sarah made sure to emphasize the tender connection between her private letters and her husband’s grand ambitions.
“When you are triumphant, I am foolish enough to think that you forget me."
"Sometimes I know you love me."
"Do not forget me in triumph or danger."
"I shall prove better worth remembering than any other ever can be, to you.”
In other words of all his connections, she was “worth” the most to him.
In May of ’64, when Grant began weakening Butler’s strength by draining off troops in the very hour that Butler planned to attack Petersburg, Sarah argued “with anger and disgust” that Grant’s orders were connected to a larger political conspiracy to keep Butler at bay in the upcoming presidential election.
She had talked it over with sympathetic officers and newspapermen, concluding that Grant and Lincoln had decided “it would not be safe politically to leave a force in your hands by which you could capture Petersburg or attack Richmond….”
She and others had believed for some time that Butler would be “so closely shorn of command that no possibility of distinction would be left you.”
“How gloomy you must feel,” she continued, sounding a bit like Job’s comforter, “stripped of command on the hour of movement and in belief of success….”63
In June, with his army once again pared down she prodded him further.
“You will have to think very fast now."
"I cannot believe you will be allowed a great chance unless it comes by accident.”
Now Butler not only had to tame secessionists; he had to keep watch for compatriots with daggers.
“I would rather fight the rebels, an open foe, than encounter the home enemy, who strike, assassin-like, under cover, and at the moment success awaits you.”
Then, grooming him to outdo other “men of force” and fellow patriots, she continued: "Never yield an inch, or droop an hour, disheartened."
"It is the great game of life you are playing."
"And it goes faster than a weaver’s shuttle."
"Your brain spins swifter than other men, and you must weave while you spin."
"If the foe in front or rear show a single opening, be ready to spring into it, all armed."64
62 Butler quoted in Taylor Merrill, "General Benjamin F. Butler in the Presidential Campaign of 1864", 552
63 Sarah Butler to General Butler, May 27, 1864, July 20, 1864 and May 29, 1864 in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 4, March 1864-August 1864", 276-77, 285, 521-22
64 What is extraordinary about Sarah Butler’s letters is the ways in which she seamlessly shifts — often within the same paragraph — between these sorts of ambitious proddings and quotidian matters about where she is staying, her night’s rest, the weather, their daughter’s newest adventures, etc. Sarah Butler to General Butler, June 14, 1864 in ibid., 362-63. I am not suggesting that Sarah Butler’s letter writing was a calculated interplay between domestic matters and grandiose visions of her husband getting ahead. I do not believe that she consciously set out to embolden her husband by linking ambitious visions to domestic security. But this is what her letters, in effect, produced. I do want to suggest that many middle-class antebellum women did not see these as unrelated categories — that the so-called “private” sphere was a place where plans were made for public advancement — where husbands were reminded that they, not just their wives, were the “spinners” and “weavers.” This relationship between hearth and public ambitions has come to seem so natural that we barely notice even in ourselves today. In public and written acknowledgments it has become part of professional etiquette to thank intimate relations for helping win a Super Bowl or an election, or write an award-winning book in history. While naming partners or intimate others can be an act of gratitude and humility, it is also a way to openly redirect intimate relations into the service of professional achievement. “I couldn’t have written this book without her,” is a kind gesture but rarely true unless the author’s loved one typed the pages and dug through archives. The point here is that in meritocratic societies intimate relations often obtain value only to the extent and measure that they enhance one’s station, or place in public life. Thus, when General Butler wrote that he had achieved nothing great without first consulting his wife, he was at once showing (or feigning) humility while at the same time divulging a fundamental truth about intimacy and power.
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 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Butler, Dollard, Adams, Fox, Cole and especially the tens of thousands of black soldiers who served under these officers, fought a war with multiple fronts: Rebels before them, men on the make beside and behind.
Sarah Butler demonstrated a particular way in which the war had no front or rear — and how it was an extension of antebellum male politics.
All the spinning, weaving, pipe-laying, wirepulling, and tickling in antebellum America came to roost in a war that was, in part, fought to purge the Republic of such sins, but was — in the end — waged to protect a nation of busy “weavers.”
In a Lincolnesque way, Sarah Butler seemed to be suggesting that “the great game of life” justified the battles and deadly maneuvers, and that in peace and war one always had enemies to the rear.
Not one letter between George and Mary Barto Cole survives.
And there are only two extant wartime letters in Mary’s hand.
One — a hurried message really — she added to the bottom margin of a letter to Cornelius Cole which George had just composed.
As she did several times during the war, Mary had recently relocated to be closer to her husband who was now a colonel in the Colored Cavalry.
With her two daughters she secured “a miserable hotel” room about seven miles from George’s camp.
For a short moment, the Cole family spent an evening together.
George began the letter explaining how he had stopped in Portsmouth, Virginia to visit his “folks” after a recent raid where he captured two rebel captains.
Cole also recounted how he revisited the site just outside of Suffolk where several of his black soldiers had recently been cornered into an abandoned house and offered no
quarter.
In an area where confederate women waved handkerchiefs, calling out “kill the negroes,” rebel soldiers torched the structure.
When one of the soldiers leaped from a window “a dozen bayonets pierced his body; another, and another followed, and shared the same fate,” one soldier boasted to a newspaper.
A few of Cole’s men braved it to death and remained in the fire, “burnt to cinders.”
The rebel soldiers had refused to bury the bodies.65
Cole assured Cornelius that his men were “crazy” with anticipation of getting back at the rebels, and encouraged him to keep watch for news of their retaliation.
After passing on some rumors about Butler, taking a jab at West Pointers, and fretting over Grant’s inclination to “dig up fossils” for promotion, he admitted “I am of course exceedingly busy all the time & can see my folks but seldom though I hope to be soon brought in camp….”
George ended the letter asking to be kept posted on “political prospects.”
65 Bruce Suderow, ""we did Not Take any Prisoners": The Suffolk Slaughter," Civil War Times Illustrated 23, no. 3 (1984), 36-39.; Weymouth T. Jordan Jr and Gerald W. Thomas, "Massacre at Plymouth: April 20, 1864," North Carolina Historical Review 72, no. 2 (1995), 152-53.; Brian Steel Wills, The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 213-19.; Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 279. For the official reports by Butler, Cole and others where they emphasized the bravery of the black troops who were greatly outnumbered — and inflated losses to the enemy, see: various reports in, United States War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Volume 33, pages 237-39. Cole was also reported to have killed the commanding officer on his horse. One southern paper reported that many of the soldiers who were killed were from Suffolk, dying “a few hundred” yards from their ex-masters’ homes. See: March 15, 1864, Western Democrat. Emmerton, "A Record of the Twenty-Third Regiment Mass. Vol. Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865", 162. Black troops suffered various atrocities in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Virginia. Many of these atrocities involved black troops who in the process of surrendering were murdered by rebel soldiers. These murders at times were generated by high command, or popular sentiment among the rebel troops (sometimes in disobedience of officers’ orders to take black soldiers as prisoners). Not surprisingly, there were more than a few accounts of black reprisals, often with black soldiers yelling out slogans of revenge. For an example of one northern, African-American correspondent admitting to a reprisal by blacks in the Army of the James, see: “A Very Important Letter from Chaplain Turner,” July 9, 1864, The Christian Recorder. For a poignant account of white on black atrocities and ensuring revenge, see: Gregory J. W. Urwin, "'we Cannot Treat Negroes . . . as Prisoners of War': Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas," Civil War History 42, no. 3 (1996), 193-210. The single best work that examines the various atrocities is: Gregory J. W. Urwin, ed., Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War (Carbondale Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 265.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Butler, Dollard, Adams, Fox, Cole and especially the tens of thousands of black soldiers who served under these officers, fought a war with multiple fronts: Rebels before them, men on the make beside and behind.
Sarah Butler demonstrated a particular way in which the war had no front or rear — and how it was an extension of antebellum male politics.
All the spinning, weaving, pipe-laying, wirepulling, and tickling in antebellum America came to roost in a war that was, in part, fought to purge the Republic of such sins, but was — in the end — waged to protect a nation of busy “weavers.”
In a Lincolnesque way, Sarah Butler seemed to be suggesting that “the great game of life” justified the battles and deadly maneuvers, and that in peace and war one always had enemies to the rear.
Not one letter between George and Mary Barto Cole survives.
And there are only two extant wartime letters in Mary’s hand.
One — a hurried message really — she added to the bottom margin of a letter to Cornelius Cole which George had just composed.
As she did several times during the war, Mary had recently relocated to be closer to her husband who was now a colonel in the Colored Cavalry.
With her two daughters she secured “a miserable hotel” room about seven miles from George’s camp.
For a short moment, the Cole family spent an evening together.
George began the letter explaining how he had stopped in Portsmouth, Virginia to visit his “folks” after a recent raid where he captured two rebel captains.
Cole also recounted how he revisited the site just outside of Suffolk where several of his black soldiers had recently been cornered into an abandoned house and offered no
quarter.
In an area where confederate women waved handkerchiefs, calling out “kill the negroes,” rebel soldiers torched the structure.
When one of the soldiers leaped from a window “a dozen bayonets pierced his body; another, and another followed, and shared the same fate,” one soldier boasted to a newspaper.
A few of Cole’s men braved it to death and remained in the fire, “burnt to cinders.”
The rebel soldiers had refused to bury the bodies.65
Cole assured Cornelius that his men were “crazy” with anticipation of getting back at the rebels, and encouraged him to keep watch for news of their retaliation.
After passing on some rumors about Butler, taking a jab at West Pointers, and fretting over Grant’s inclination to “dig up fossils” for promotion, he admitted “I am of course exceedingly busy all the time & can see my folks but seldom though I hope to be soon brought in camp….”
George ended the letter asking to be kept posted on “political prospects.”
65 Bruce Suderow, ""we did Not Take any Prisoners": The Suffolk Slaughter," Civil War Times Illustrated 23, no. 3 (1984), 36-39.; Weymouth T. Jordan Jr and Gerald W. Thomas, "Massacre at Plymouth: April 20, 1864," North Carolina Historical Review 72, no. 2 (1995), 152-53.; Brian Steel Wills, The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 213-19.; Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 279. For the official reports by Butler, Cole and others where they emphasized the bravery of the black troops who were greatly outnumbered — and inflated losses to the enemy, see: various reports in, United States War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Volume 33, pages 237-39. Cole was also reported to have killed the commanding officer on his horse. One southern paper reported that many of the soldiers who were killed were from Suffolk, dying “a few hundred” yards from their ex-masters’ homes. See: March 15, 1864, Western Democrat. Emmerton, "A Record of the Twenty-Third Regiment Mass. Vol. Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865", 162. Black troops suffered various atrocities in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Virginia. Many of these atrocities involved black troops who in the process of surrendering were murdered by rebel soldiers. These murders at times were generated by high command, or popular sentiment among the rebel troops (sometimes in disobedience of officers’ orders to take black soldiers as prisoners). Not surprisingly, there were more than a few accounts of black reprisals, often with black soldiers yelling out slogans of revenge. For an example of one northern, African-American correspondent admitting to a reprisal by blacks in the Army of the James, see: “A Very Important Letter from Chaplain Turner,” July 9, 1864, The Christian Recorder. For a poignant account of white on black atrocities and ensuring revenge, see: Gregory J. W. Urwin, "'we Cannot Treat Negroes . . . as Prisoners of War': Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas," Civil War History 42, no. 3 (1996), 193-210. The single best work that examines the various atrocities is: Gregory J. W. Urwin, ed., Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War (Carbondale Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 265.
TO BE CONTINUED ...