A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Army Life in a Black Regiment

T >> Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Army Life in a Black Regiment




The only thoroughfare by land between Beaufort and Charleston is the
"Shell Road," a beautiful avenue, which, about nine miles from Beaufort,
strikes a ferry across the Coosaw River. War abolished the ferry, and
made the river the permanent barrier between the opposing picket lines.
For ten miles, right and left, these lines extended, marked by well-worn
footpaths, following the endless windings of the stream; and they never
varied until nearly the end of the war. Upon their maintenance depended
our whole foothold on the Sea Islands; and upon that again finally
depended the whole campaign of Sherman. But for the services of the
colored troops, which finally formed the main garrison of the Department
of the South, the Great March would never have been performed.

There was thus a region ten or twelve miles square of which I had
exclusive military command. It was level, but otherwise broken and
bewildering to the last degree. No road traversed it, properly
speaking, but the Shell Road. All the rest was a wild medley of
cypress swamp, pine barren, muddy creek, and cultivated plantation,
intersected by interminable lanes and bridle-paths, through which we
must ride day and night, and which our horses soon knew better than
ourselves. The regiment was distributed at different stations, the
main force being under my immediate command, at a plantation close by
the Shell Road, two miles from the ferry, and seven miles from
Beaufort. Our first picket duty was just at the time of the first
attack on Charleston, under Dupont and Hunter; and it was generally
supposed that the Confederates would make an effort to recapture the
Sea Islands. My orders were to watch the enemy closely, keep informed
as to his position and movements, attempt no advance, and, in case any
were attempted from the other side, to delay it as long as possible,
sending instant notice to head-quarters. As to the delay, that could
be easily guaranteed. There were causeways on the Shell Road which a
single battery could hold against a large force; and the plantations
were everywhere so intersected by hedges and dikes that they seemed
expressly planned for defence. Although creeks wound in and out
everywhere, yet these were only navigable at high tide, and at all
other times were impassable marshes. There were but few posts where
the enemy were within rifle range, and their occasional attacks at
those points were soon stopped by our enforcement of a pithy order
from General Hunter, "Give them as good as they send." So that, with
every opportunity for being kept on the alert, there was small
prospect of serious danger; and all promised an easy life, with only
enough of care to make it pleasant. The picket station was therefore
always a coveted post among the regiments, combining some undeniable
importance with a kind of relaxation; and as we were there three
months on our first tour of duty, and returned there several times
afterwards, we got well acquainted with it. The whole region always
reminded me of the descriptions of La Vende'e, and I always expected
to meet Henri Larochejaquelein riding in the woods.

How can I ever describe the charm and picturesqueness of that summer
life? Our house possessed four spacious rooms and a _piazza_; around
it were grouped sheds and tents; the camp was a little way off on one
side, the negro-quarters of the plantation on the other; and all was
immersed in a dense mass of waving and murmuring locust-blossoms. The
spring days were always lovely, while the evenings were always
conveniently damp; so that we never shut the windows by day, nor
omitted our cheerful fire by night. Indoors, the main head-quarters
seemed like the camp of some party of young engineers in time of
peace, only with a little female society added, and a good many
martial associations thrown in. A large, low, dilapidated room, with
an immense fireplace, and with window-panes chiefly broken, so that
the sashes were still open even when closed,--such was our home. The
walls were scrawled with capital charcoal sketches by R. of the Fourth
New Hampshire, and with a good map of the island and its wood-paths by
C. of the First Massachusetts Cavalry. The room had the
picturesqueness which comes everywhere from the natural grouping of
articles of daily use,--swords, belts, pistols, rifles, field-glasses,
spurs, canteens, gauntlets,--while wreaths of gray moss above the
windows, and a pelican's wing three feet long over the high
mantel-piece, indicated more deliberate decoration. This, and the
whole atmosphere of the place, spoke of the refining presence of
agreeable women; and it was pleasant when they held their little court
in the evening, and pleasant all day, with the different visitors who
were always streaming in and out,--officers and soldiers on various
business; turbaned women from the plantations, coming with complaints
or questionings; fugitives from the main-land to be interrogated;
visitors riding up on horseback, their hands full of jasmine and wild
roses; and the sweet sunny air all perfumed with magnolias and the
Southern pine. From the neighboring camp there was a perpetual low
hum. Louder voices and laughter re-echoed, amid the sharp sounds of
the axe, from the pine woods; and sometimes, when the relieved pickets
were discharging their pieces, there came the hollow sound of dropping
rifle-shots, as in skirmishing,--perhaps the most unmistakable and
fascinating association that war bequeaths to the memory of the ear.

Our domestic arrangements were of the oddest description. From the
time when we began housekeeping by taking down the front-door to
complete therewith a little office for the surgeon on the _piazza_,
everything seemed upside down. I slept on a shelf in the corner of the
parlor, bequeathed me by Major F., my jovial predecessor, and, if I
waked at any time, could put my head through the broken window, arouse
my orderly, and ride off to see if I could catch a picket asleep. We
used to spell the word _picquet_, because that was understood to be
the correct thing, in that Department at least; and they used to say
at post head-quarters that as soon as the officer in command of the
outposts grew negligent, and was guilty of a _k_, he was ordered in
immediately. Then the arrangements for ablution were peculiar. We
fitted up a bathing-place in a brook, which somehow got appropriated
at once by the company laundresses; but I had my revenge, for I took
to bathing in the family washtub. After all, however, the kitchen
department had the advantage, for they used my solitary napkin to wipe
the mess-table. As for food, we found it impossible to get chickens,
save in the immature shape of eggs; fresh pork was prohibited by the
surgeon, and other fresh meat came rarely. We could, indeed, hunt for
wild turkeys, and even deer, but such hunting was found only to
increase the appetite, without corresponding supply. Still we had our
luxuries,--large, delicious drum-fish, and alligator steaks,--like a
more substantial fried halibut,--which might have afforded the theme
for Charles Lamb's dissertation on Roast Pig, and by whose aid "for
the first time in our lives we tested _crackling_" The post bakery
yielded admirable bread; and for vegetables and fruit we had very poor
sweet potatoes, and (in their season) an unlimited supply of the
largest blackberries. For beverage, we had the vapid milk of that
region, in which, if you let it stand, the water sinks instead of the
cream's rising; and the delicious sugar-cane syrup, which we had
brought from Florida, and which we drank at all hours. Old Floridians
say that no one is justified in drinking whiskey, while he can get
cane-juice; it is sweet and spirited, without cloying, foams like ale,
and there were little spots on the ceiling of the dining-room where
our lively beverage had popped out its cork. We kept it in a
whiskey-bottle; and as whiskey itself was absolutely prohibited among
us, it was amusing to see the surprise of our military visitors when
this innocent substitute was brought in. They usually liked it in the
end, but, like the old Frenchwoman over her glass of water, wished
that it were a sin to give it a relish. As the foaming beakers of
molasses and water were handed round, the guests would make with them
the courteous little gestures of polite imbiding, and would then quaff
the beverage, some with gusto, others with a slight afterlook of
dismay. But it was a delicious and cooling drink while it
lasted; and at all events was the best and the worst we had.

We used to have reveille at six, and breakfast about seven; then the
mounted couriers began to arrive from half a dozen different
directions, with written reports of what had happened during the
night,--a boat seen, a picket fired upon, a battery erecting. These
must be consolidated and forwarded to head-quarters, with the daily
report of the command,--so many sick, so many on detached service, and
all the rest. This was our morning newspaper, our Herald and Tribune;
I never got tired of it. Then the couriers must be furnished with
countersign and instructions, and sent off again. Then we scattered to
our various rides, all disguised as duty; one to inspect pickets, one
to visit a sick soldier, one to build a bridge or clear a road, and
still another to head-quarters for ammunition or commissary stores.
Galloping through green lanes, miles of triumphal arches of wild
roses,--roses pale and large and fragrant, mingled with great boughs
of the white cornel, fantastic masses, snowy surprises,--such were our
rides, ranging from eight to fifteen and even twenty miles. Back to a
late dinner with our various experiences, and perhaps specimens to
match,--a thunder-snake, eight feet long; a live opossum, with a young
clinging to the natural pouch; an armful of great white, scentless
pond-lilies. After dinner, to the tangled garden for rosebuds or early
magnolias, whose cloying fragrance will always bring back to me the
full zest of those summer days; then dress-parade and a little drill
as the day grew cool. In the evening, tea; and then the piazza or the
fireside, as the case might be,--chess, cards,--perhaps a little
music by aid of the assistant surgeon's melodeon, a few pages of Jean
Paul's "Titan," almost my only book, and carefully husbanded,--perhaps
a mail, with its infinite felicities. Such was our day.

Night brought its own fascinations, more solitary and profound. The
darker they were, the more clearly it was our duty to visit the pickets.
The paths that had grown so familiar by day seemed a wholly new
labyrinth by night; and every added shade of darkness seemed to shift
and complicate them all anew, till at last man's skill grew utterly
baffled, and the clew must be left to the instinct of the horse. Riding
beneath the solemn starlight, or soft, gray mist, or densest blackness,
the frogs croaking, the strange "chuckwuts-widow" droning his ominous
note above my head, the mocking-bird dreaming in music, the great
Southern fireflies rising to the tree-tops, or hovering close to the
ground like glowworms, till the horse raised his hoofs to avoid them;
through pine woods and cypress swamps, or past sullen brooks, or white
tents, or the dimly seen huts of sleeping negroes; down to the
glimmering shore, where black statues leaned against trees or stood
alert in the pathways;--never, in all the days of my life, shall I forget
the magic of those haunted nights.

We had nocturnal boat service, too, for it was a part of our
instructions to obtain all possible information about the enemy's
position; and we accordingly, as usual in such cases, incurred a great
many risks that harmed nobody, and picked up much information which did
nobody any good. The centre of these nightly reconnoissances, for a long
time, was the wreck of the George Washington, the story of whose
disaster is perhaps worth telling.

Till about the time when we went on picket, it had been the occasional
habit of the smaller gunboats to make the circuit of Port Royal
Island,--a practice which was deemed very essential to the safety of
our position, but which the Rebels effectually stopped, a few days
after our arrival, by destroying the army gunboat George Washington
with a single shot from a light battery. I was roused soon after
daybreak by the firing, and a courier soon came dashing in with the
particulars. Forwarding these hastily to Beaufort (for we had then no
telegraph), I was soon at the scene of action, five miles away.
Approaching, I met on the picket paths man after man who had escaped
from the wreck across a half-mile of almost impassable marsh. Never
did I see such objects,--some stripped to their shirts, some fully
clothed, but all having every garment literally pasted to then- bodies
with mud. Across the river, the Rebels were retiring, having done
their work, but were still shelling, from greater and greater
distances, the wood through which I rode. Arrived at the spot nearest
the wreck (a point opposite to what we called the Brickyard Station),
I saw the burning vessel aground beyond a long stretch of marsh, out
of which the forlorn creatures were still floundering. Here and there
in the mud and reeds we could see the laboring heads, slowly
advancing, and could hear excruciating cries from wounded men in the
more distant depths. It was the strangest mixture of war and Dante and
Robinson Crusoe. Our energetic chaplain coming up, I sent him with
four men, under a flag of truce, to the place whence the worst cries
proceeded, while I went to another part of the marsh. During that
morning we got them all out, our last achievement being the rescue of
the pilot, an immense negro with a wooden leg,--an article so
particularly unavailable for mud travelling, that it would have almost
seemed better, as one of the men suggested, to cut the traces, and
leave it behind.

A naval gunboat, too, which had originally accompanied this vessel, and
should never have left it, now came back and took off the survivors,
though there had been several deaths from scalding and shell. It proved
that the wreck was not aground after all, but at anchor, having
foolishly lingered till after daybreak, and having thus given time for
the enemy to bring down then: guns. The first shot had struck the
boiler, and set the vessel on fire; after which the officer in command
had raised a white flag, and then escaped with his men to our shore; and
it was for this flight in the wrong direction that they were shelled in
the marshes by the Rebels. The case furnished in this respect some
parallel to that of the Kearsage and Alabama, and it was afterwards
cited, I believe, officially or unofficially, to show that the Rebels
had claimed the right to punish, in this case, the course of action
which they approved in Semmes. I know that they always asserted
thenceforward that the detachment on board the George Washington had
become rightful prisoners of war, and were justly fired upon when they
tried to escape.

This was at the tune of the first attack on Charleston, and the noise of
this cannonading spread rapidly thither, and brought four regiments to
reinforce Beaufort in a hurry, under the impression that the town was
already taken, and that they must save what remnants they could. General
Saxton, too, had made such capital plans for defending the
post that he could not bear not to have it attacked; so, while the
Rebels brought down a force to keep us from taking the guns off the
wreck, I was also supplied with a section or two of regular artillery,
and some additional infantry, with which to keep them from it; and we
tried to "make believe very hard," and rival the Charleston expedition
on our own island. Indeed, our affair came to about as much,--nearly
nothing,--and lasted decidedly longer; for both sides nibbled away at
the guns, by night, for weeks afterward, though I believe the mud
finally got them,--at least, we did not. We tried in vain to get the use
of a steamboat or floating derrick of any kind; for it needed more
mechanical ingenuity than we possessed to transfer anything so heavy to
our small boats by night, while by day we did not go near the wreck in
anything larger than a "dug-out."

One of these nocturnal visits to the wreck I recall with peculiar
gusto, because it brought back that contest with catarrh and coughing
among my own warriors which had so ludicrously beset me in Florida. It
was always fascinating to be on those forbidden waters by night,
stealing out with muffled oars through the creeks and reeds, our eyes
always strained for other voyagers, our ears listening breathlessly to
all the marsh sounds,--blackflsh splashing, and little wakened
reed-birds that fled wailing away over the dim river, equally safe on
either side. But it always appeared to the watchful senses that we
were making noise enough to be heard at Fort Sumter; and somehow the
victims of catarrh seemed always the most eager for any enterprise
requiring peculiar caution. In this case I thought I had sifted them
before-hand; but as soon as we were afloat, one poor boy near me began
to wheeze, and I turned upon him in exasperation. He saw his danger,
and meekly said, "I won't cough, Gunnel!" and he kept his word. For
two mortal hours he sat grasping his gun, with never a chirrup. But
two unfortunates in the bow of the boat developed symptoms which I
could not suppress; so, putting in at a picket station, with some risk
I dumped them in mud knee-deep, and embarked a substitute, who after
the first five minutes absolutely coughed louder than both the others
united. Handkerchiefs, blankets, over-coats, suffocation in its direst
forms, were tried in vain, but apparently the Rebel pickets slept
through it all, and we exploded the wreck in safety. I think they were
asleep, for certainly across the level marshes there came a nasal
sound, as of the "Con-thieveracy" in its slumbers. It may have been a
bull-frog, but it sounded like a human snore.

Picket life was of course the place to feel the charm of natural beauty
on the Sea Islands. We had a world of profuse and tangled vegetation
around us, such as would have been a dream of delight to me, but for the
constant sense of responsibility and care which came between. Amid this
preoccupation, Nature seemed but a mirage, and not the close and
intimate associate I had before known. I pressed no flowers, collected
no insects or birds' eggs, made no notes on natural objects, reversing
in these respects all previous habits. Yet now, in the retrospect, there
seems to have been infused into me through every pore the voluptuous
charm of the season and the place; and the slightest corresponding sound
or odor now calls back the memory of those delicious days. Being
afterwards on picket at almost every season, I tasted the sensations of
all; and though I hardly then thought of such a result, the associations
of beauty will remain forever.

In February, for instance,--though this was during a later period of
picket service,--the woods were usually draped with that "net of
shining haze" which marks our Northern May; and the house was
embowered in wild-plum-blossoms, small, white, profuse, and tenanted
by murmuring bees. There were peach-blossoms, too, and the yellow
jasmine was opening its multitudinous buds, climbing over tall trees,
and waving from bough to bough. There were fresh young ferns and white
bloodroot in the edges of woods, matched by snowdrops in the garden,
beneath budded myrtle and _Petisporum_. In this wilderness the birds
were busy; the two main songsters being the mocking-bird and the
cardinal-grosbeak, which monopolized all the parts of our more varied
Northern orchestra save the tender and liquid notes, which in South
Carolina seemed unattempted except by some stray blue-bird. Jays were
as loud and busy as at the North in autumn; there were sparrows and
wrens; and sometimes I noticed the shy and whimsical chewink.

From this early spring-time onward, there seemed no great difference in
atmospheric sensations, and only a succession of bloom. After two months
one's notions of the season grew bewildered, just as very early rising
bewilders the day. In the army one is perhaps roused after a bivouac,
marches before daybreak, halts, fights, somebody is killed, a long day's
life has been lived, and after all it is not seven o'clock, and
breakfast is not ready. So when we had lived in summer so long as hardly
to remember winter, it suddenly occurred to us that it was not yet June.
One escapes at the South that mixture of hunger and avarice which is
felt in the Northern summer, counting each hour's joy with the sad
consciousness that an hour is gone. The compensating loss is in missing
those soft, sweet, liquid sensations of the Northern spring, that burst
of life and joy, those days of heaven that even April brings; and this
absence of childhood in the year creates a feeling of hardness in the
season, like that I have suggested in the melody of the Southern birds.
It seemed to me also that the woods had not those pure, clean, _innocent_
odors which so abound in the New England forest in early spring; but
there was something luscious, voluptuous, almost oppressively fragrant
about the magnolias, as if they belonged not to Hebe, but to Magdalen.

Such immense and lustrous butterflies I had never seen but in dreams;
and not even dreams had prepared me for sand-flies. Almost too small to
be seen, they inflicted a bite which appeared larger than themselves,--a
positive wound, more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving more
annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the
dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my
head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while tears rolled profusely down my
face, from mere muscular irritation. Had I stirred a finger, the whole
battalion would have been slapping its cheeks. Such enemies were,
however, a valuable aid to discipline, on the whole, as they
abounded in the guard-house, and made that institution an object of
unusual abhorrence among the men.

The presence of ladies and the homelike air of everything, made the
picket station a very popular resort while we were there. It was the one
agreeable ride from Beaufort, and we often had a dozen people
unexpectedly to dinner. On such occasions there was sometimes mounting
in hot haste, and an eager search among the outlying plantations for
additional chickens and eggs, or through the company kitchens for some
of those villanous tin cans which everywhere marked the progress of our
army. In those cans, so far as my observation went, all fruits relapsed
into a common acidulation, and all meats into a similarity of
tastelessness; while the "condensed milk" was best described by the men,
who often unconsciously stumbled on a better joke than they knew, and
always spoke of it as _condemned_ milk.

We had our own excursions too,--to the Barnwell plantations, with their
beautiful avenues and great live-oaks, the perfection of Southern
beauty,--to Hall's Island, debatable ground, close under the enemy's
fire, where half-wild cattle were to be shot, under military
precautions, like Scottish moss-trooping,--or to the ferry, where it was
fascinating to the female mind to scan the Rebel pickets through a
field-glass. Our horses liked the by-ways far better than the level
hardness of the Shell Road, especially those we had brought from
Florida, which enjoyed the wilderness as if they had belonged to
Marion's men. They delighted to feel the long sedge brush their flanks,
or to gallop down the narrow wood-paths, leaping the fallen trees, and
scaring the bright little lizards which shot across our track like live
rays broken from the sunbeams. We had an abundance of horses, mostly
captured and left in our hands by some convenient delay of the post
quartermaster. We had also two side-saddles, which, not being munitions
of war, could not properly (as we explained) be transferred like other
captured articles to the general stock; otherwise the P. Q. M. (a
married man) would have showed no unnecessary delay in their case. For
miscellaneous accommodation was there not an ambulance,--that most
inestimable of army conveniences, equally ready to carry the merry to a
feast or the wounded from a fray. "Ambulance" was one of those words,
rather numerous, which Ethiopian lips were not framed by Nature to
articulate. Only the highest stages of colored culture could compass it;
on the tongue of the many it was transformed mystically as "amulet," or
ambitiously as "epaulet," or in culinary fashion as "omelet." But it was
our experience that an ambulance under any name jolted equally hard.

Besides these divertisements, we had more laborious vocations,--a good
deal of fatigue, and genuine though small alarms. The men went on duty
every third day at furthest, and the officers nearly as often,--most of
the tours of duty lasting twenty-four hours, though the stream was
considered to watch itself tolerably well by daylight. This kind of
responsibility suited the men; and we had already found, as the whole
army afterwards acknowledged, that the constitutional watchfulness and
distrustfulness of the colored race made them admirable sentinels. Soon
after we went on picket, the commanding general sent an aid, with a
cavalry escort, to visit all the stations, without my knowledge. They
spent the whole night, and the officer reported that he could not get
within thirty yards of any post without a challenge. This was a pleasant
assurance for me; since our position seemed so secure, compared with
Jacksonville, that I had feared some relaxation of vigilance, while yet
the safety of all depended on our thorough discharge of duty.

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