Can We Honestly Say that the USCT Story is Still “Forgotten”?

Today I saw an advertisement for an upcoming Civil War event that is taking place in Richmond that features a living history program about USCTs. While it is always gratifying to see that such programs are taking place, the blurb advertising the event mentioned that it would honor “the conflict’s 200,000 unsung heroes.”

Something about that phrase bothered me, and the question that eventually formed in my head was – is it still fair to portray the story of African American Union soldiers using terms like “unsung,” “forgotten,” and “neglected”?

I would gander that such adjectives were appropriate during the 125^th commemorations, but I’m not so sure that they are applicable in 2013. A random sampling of some reasons why I would say this would include:

1. A recent series of blog posts that dealt with the issue of historic sites interpreting the USCT story at places where USCT units did not even serve

2. USCT inclusion in popular Civil War art – something that was once reserved for showing every square foot of territory visited by Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest during the war (indeed, the great Don Troiani has a print coming out in June that shows the 6^th USCT at New Market Heights!)

3. New scholarship on previously overlooked people and battles

4. The fact that United States Colored Troops are front and center in Spielberg’s Lincoln

5. A museum and memorial in Washington DC solely dedicated to the history of US Colored Troops

6. Special events such as the USCT Grand Review in 2010 and the upcoming commemoration of General Orders No. 143 at Arlington National Cemetery on May 18th

Now, I’m in no way suggesting that we have exhausted the field – far from it. But I think we have achieved a level of general awareness of the contributions made by US Colored Troops to stop claiming that they have been relegated to the sidelines of Civil War history.

I don’t fault the event organizers for using such language – having been in the field of public history for 15 years, I certainly sympathize with the person who wrote the advertisement. You’re not going to draw a large crowd by using bland language that doesn’t “hook” the average person who could care less about history.

That being said, what do you think?

Would you still consider the saga of United States Colored Troops a “forgotten” aspect of Civil War history?

USCT Relics, Courtesy of the Old Virginia Blog

I always enjoy reading the thoughts and articles posted by Richard Williams over the Old Virginia Blog, and thought I’d pass along this most recent post about the discovery of some USCT relics.

I’m still fervently hoping to find cool stuff like this in my back yard, but…

Moral Judgments and USCTs

The Battle of Jenkins' Ferry as portrayed in Lincoln

In a recent post over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin asked a series of probing questions about the ways in which USCT history is interpreted at public sites.

Part of one question in particular piqued my interest – “have we inadvertently made the message visitors receive [about US Colored Troops] too celebratory?”

This is something I have struggled with, especially when it comes to battlefield atrocities and the refusal by some USCT units to take prisoners.

One cannot approach the topic of US Colored Troops without encountering numerous occasions in which black soldiers were ruthlessly cut down on the battlefield while in the act of surrender. Olustee, Fort Pillow, the Crater, Saltville – the list of places where Confederate troops perpetrated these war crimes goes on and on.

But there is a flip side to this coin, and the way it is presented in the grand narrative can be problematic. Just as one can find numerous examples in Civil War texts that lay out the atrocities committed by rebel soldiers, one can also find the examples of when US Colored Troops went into action shouting “Remember Fort Pillow!” and encouraging their fellow soldiers to “raise the black flag” and give no quarter to any Confederate soldier who sought any.

Take, for example, an incident made popular in the opening scenes of Spielberg’s Lincoln – the clash at Jenkins’ Ferry.

Here is how the scene plays out in Tony Kushner’s script:

There’s no discipline or strategy, nothing depersonalized: it’s mayhem and each side intensely hates the other. Both have resolved to take no prisoners.

HAROLD GREEN (V.O.)

“Some of us was in the Second Kansas Colored. We fought the rebs at Jenkins’ Ferry last April, just after they’d killed every Negro soldier they captured at Poison Springs….So at Jenkins’ Ferry, we decided warn’t taking no reb prisoners. And we didn’t leave a one of ‘em alive. The ones of us that didn’t die that day, we joined up with the 116th U.S. Colored, sir. From Camp Nelson Kentucky.”

Private Green coolly relates the story of this atrocity without batting an eye, and Lincoln gives no obvious sign of disapproval for what he would know to be a violation of the articles of war. Thus, the audience is lulled into thinking that the action of Green and his compatriots was perfectly acceptable.

The fight at Jenkins’ Ferry (April 30, 1864) was retaliation for the Battle of Poison Spring (April 18, 1864) and was every bit as cold and ruthless as it appears on screen.

But one is inevitably left asking the question – if it was wrong for Confederates to show no mercy to surrendering black troops, what made it acceptable for USCTs to engage in the same activity?

Indeed, the Union soldiers who witnessed Jenkins’ Ferry wrestled with this question themselves. One white northerner wrote after the battle: “It looks hard, but the rebs cannot blame the negroes when they are guilty of the same trick.” Another simply observed, “It would not surprise me in the least if the war would ultimately be one of extermination. Its tendencies are in that direction now.” (Note: for a great treatment of Poison Springs and Jenkins’ Ferry, see Gregory J. Urwin, “’We Cannot Treat Negroes…as Prisoners of War’: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas” in The Price of Freedom: Slavery and the Civil War, Vol. 1).

Since the cause that the USCTs were fighting for is so much more compatible to 21^st Century America’s views on justice and freedom, it seems as if these incidents have flown under the radar and are taken at face value as the Confederacy’s just deserts for fighting to establish a slaveholding republic in the first place. Indeed, that very well may be the case.

But what if it isn’t?

Even George Burkhart in his work Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War writes that if the black Union soldiers and their commanding officers had ever been court martialed for killing soldiers in the act of surrender, they “would have packed many courtrooms. They killed a large but unknown number of wounded, surrendered, or captured Confederates. Though their lawyers might contend that the defendants only gave as good as they got, that argument would not have saved them” (p. 247).

As we continue into the Sesquicentennial and the topic of emancipation and black military service takes center stage, we would do well to wrestle with such vexing questions. The struggle is worthwhile.

Ed Ayers Rocks: His “Person of the Year: 1863" is the USCT!

Dr. Ed Ayers, Civil War historian extraordinaire and president of the University of Richmond, is currently speaking at the Museum of the Confederacy’s annual “Person of the Year: 1863” Symposium, where some of the most preeminent Civil War scholars in all of the land gather to nominate who they think the most influential person for a given year during the Civil War was.

Dr. Ayers has chosen the United States Colored Troops, stating that we have lost sight of how revolutionary the idea of arming former slaves was in 1863.

It should go without saying that your truly wholeheartedly concurs.

You can follow all of the action on the MOC’s Twitter page here or on Facebook here.

I look forward to hearing the entire presentation when it becomes available.

A Quick Visit to the Revisitation of Interpretive Choices

Over at Crossroads, Brooks Simpson has offered some thoughts about a critical review written by Hari Jones concerning Kate Masur’s November New York Times OP-ED on Spielberg’s Lincoln.

After viewing Lincoln for myself before Thanksgiving, I found myself agreeing with much of what Jones had to say and posted a few thoughts here.

Today’s post by Brooks lays out a clear set of arguments concerning why he thinks Jones was wrong to write what he did about Masur’s critique. He also links to my November post when observing that “my fellow bloggers…may want to consider using the other end of the hammer to yank out that nail,” implying that I might want to rethink my overall support of what Jones said.

In short, I don’t think I will.

To me, all of this boils down to arguing over preference. With no standard criterion for what the film should have been about (in other words, “A Film about Lincoln’s last days must include a, b, c, and d…”), we can only state with certainty what elements we feel should or should not have been included in the film.

Masur’s article stated that “it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them” and bemoaned the lack of other key players in the abolition movement. I found the statement about passivity absurd, considering that the movie began with USCTs fighting for their freedom.

Hari Jones took serious issue with the criticism that Frederick Douglass was not included in the film and said that Masur was quibbling with Spielberg because her choices were different than his.

What gives wiggle room to both Masur and Jones is what many people considered a main weakness of Lincoln in the first place – namely, that it bit off more than it could chew. As Brooks notes, “events during the movie move forward all the way to Lincoln’s assassination, including a reading of the Second Inaugural Address.: the passage of the [13^th] amendment is a focus, but not the only one.” While mainly a story about the struggle over the 13^th Amendment, Lincoln tries to cram a lot of other information into the finale and it is dubious as to whether or not this is effective.  

So I’d say it is as equally valid to take issue with Lincoln over a dearth of fleshed-out African American characters as it is to suggest that Frederick Douglass would not be a good fit for the story that Kushner and Spielberg were trying to tell.

In order to sort through all of this, perhaps it will help the reader to read all of the abovementioned posts and reviews in the order they came out:

1. Kate Masur’s Review, November 12, 2012

2. Hari Jones Responds, November 23, 2012.

3. I link to Jones with my own additional thoughts, November 23, 2012.

4. Brooks Simpson revisits the issue, February 22, 2013.

Before giving any additional thoughts, I’m going to use this as blatant excuse to view Lincoln one more time. Thankfully, I have a friend who’s a member of the Screen Actors Guild who can loan me a DVD (bwa-ha-ha!)

And as always, I’m interested in what you think.

Who do you agree with most?

Or are we all full of it?

Profile in Courage: Henry Jarvis, 55th Massachusetts Volunteers

In May of 1861 Henry Jarvis, a recently escaped slave, sailed across the James River and claimed asylum in the Union-held citadel of Fortress Monroe. The spot where Jarvis took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where the institution of slavery first took root in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with 20 African captives. Prior to his escape, Jarvis had this to say of his master:

"My marssa, he war de meanest man on all de Easte’n sho’, and dat’s a heap to say. It’s a rough place. Dat yer Easte’n sho’m de outbeatinest part ob all de countryfur dem doin’s. Dey don’t think so much ob deir niggers as dey do ob deir dogs. D’ rather whip one dan eat any day."

One day, after his master arbitrarily shot at him, Henry escaped into the woods where he lived off the land for three weeks, trying to avoid the search parties that went looking for him. After stealing a canoe, he sailed across the bay and arrived the next morning at Fortress Monroe.

 

While most of the recently escaped slaves that were flocking to Union lines were content to celebrate their tentative freedom and adopt a "wait-and-see" attitude, Jarvis had something altogether different on his mind and he promptly sought an audience with Gen. Benjamin F. Butler – the future "Beast of New Orleans."

In Jarvis’s words, "I went to [Butler] an’ asked him to let me enlist, but he said it warn’t a black man’s war. I tol’ him it would be a black man’s war ‘fore dey got fru." After that remarkable encounter, Jarvis left the US, traveling first to Cuba and thence to Liberia, where he said he "looked about, but I ‘cluded I’d rudder come home."

After two years abroad, Jarvis entered the US at Boston harbor in May of 1863 only to discover that Lincoln had proclaimed emancipation and "it had got to be a black man’s war fo suah." Jarvis attempted to enlist in the famed 54^th Massachusetts, but found that the regiment’s ranks had been filled. However, the surplus of men who had attempted to join the 54^th was used as the nucleus of a brand-new regiment – the 55^th Massachusetts. The 55^th would fight at places such as Olustee in Florida, and on November 30, 1864, a desperate clash at Honey Hill, SC.

It was here that Jarvis was wounded three times and left on the field for dead. Jarvis later recalled that:

"Dere I war wounded free times; fust in dis arm, but I kep’ on fightin’ till a ball struck my leg an’ I fell. I war struck once more in de same leg, an’ I lay on de fiel’ all night. I should have bled to death ef all our men hadn’t been drilled in usin’ a tourniquet, an’ supplied wid bandages. I jes had time to stick my knife in de knot an’ twist it tight ‘fore I fainted."

Jarvis was deemed to be two-thirds disabled and was given a medical discharge. After returning to Hampton, "de woun’ opened agin’, an’ I had to lose my leg arter all."

After the war, Jarvis returned to the Hampton area and was settled down with his wife and two children. He also came to faith in Christ when his fighting days were over. Following this conversion experience, he was asked if he had forgiven his former master. After a momentary struggle, Jarvis shot up straight as a ramrod in his chair and said, “"es, sah! I’se forgub him; de Lord knows I’se forgub him!"

His change of heart proclaimed, Jarvis couldn’t help but add – "But I’d gib my oder leg to meet him in battle!"

"From Emancipation to the March on Washington" Panel Discussion

"From Emancipation to the March on Washington" is a Black History Month panel discussion set for 7 p.m., Monday, Feb. 18 in Sealy Auditorium in the Workforce & Technology Building on Germanna Community College's Fredericksburg Area Campus in Spotsylvania. The event, which is open to the public, free, will feature the Rev. Lawrence A. Davies, former mayor of Fredericksburg, and Germanna history faculty members Stuart Smith, Ed Watson and James Price.

Give 'em hell, 54th!

Members of the 54th Mass & 23rd USCT marched in the Inauguration Parade this past Monday.

A Few More Thoughts on George W. D. Kirkland

Greetings everyone, and a belated happy new year to you!

We are just getting started with the 150^th anniversary of what is arguably the most pivotal year – both in terms of events and attitudes – of the American Civil War. 1863 was a watershed in many regards and the events that will take place around the country this year will reflect the drastic shift towards emancipation.

Of interest for readers of this blog is the  May anniversary of the establishment of the Bureau of Colored Troops.  I am happy to report that I am working with the rest of the staff at Arlington House to plan an event on Saturday May 18^th to commemorate the publishing of General Orders, No. 143. It will be the only NPS commemoration of this important event that I am aware of.

More to follow soon…

In other news, one unexpected surprise for me this year has been the amount of interest generated by my post about Elizabeth Keckly’s son, George W.D. Kirkland who enlisted as a white soldier and was killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. I have received many email and comments from folks wanting to know more about young Kirkland’s motives for enlisting in a white unit in Missouri when he was a mulatto student at Oberlin College in Ohio at the outbreak of the war, so I offer a few more thoughts for your consideration.

One obvious reason for enlisting in Missouri is the fact that Kirkland lived there in the 1850’s. Also, we must understand the men that Kirkland would have been enlisting with in 1861 – Missouri Germans, many of whom were veterans of the failed 1848 "Peasant Revolution”. To these recent immigrants, the aristocratic slaveholders (who went out their way to persecute the German elements of Missouri society) were just another incarnation of the oppressive ruling class that they had failed to defeat in the Fatherland. In fact, many of these German-Americans had flocked to join the Wide Awakes to show their support of Lincoln’s candidacy in 1860.

It would seem, then, that rather than joining a white unit out of some sort of shame felt about his mixed racial heritage, George Kirkland was enlisting to fight alongside like-minded, sympathetic individuals who were fighting specifically to strike a blow against slavery.   

Lastly, thanks to a researcher who replied to my initial post, I have learned that Dr. Jennifer Fleischner, author of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave, wrote a work of historical fiction about Kirkland in 2006 entitled Nobody’s Boy. Unfortunately, the novel takes place in 1850’s St. Louis and only mentions his military service in passing at the conclusion of the book. From what I can tell, it sheds little light on the subject at hand.

As always, I welcome your thoughts on this fascinating topic, and will continue to post new information if and when it comes to light.

Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie Reviews Three Books on USCTs & Emancipation

Dr. Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie of Howard University has posted a helpful review essay on William Dobak’s Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867, Barbara Gannon’s The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic, and Harold Holzer’s Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory.

Kerr-Ritchie concludes:

There is little doubt that these three books will contribute to ongoing and vigorous debates on how freedom came during and after the American Civil War. Those who think that emancipation was a gift from above will draw sustenance from Holzer’s historicity. Those who link freedom with white and black bayonets will be inspired by Dobak’s meticulous tome. Those who seek moments of racial equality in America’s long tradition of racial exclusion and inequality will appreciate the GAR’s history. But reviewing these three randomly selected books together raises a vexing issue. Black troops fought to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. Black veterans promoted an interracial agenda--with all its limitations--far into the postbellum decades. In other words, they were at the very heart of implementing freedom. The message that emancipation was brought by Lincoln, Congress, the generals, abolitionists, etc., however, serves not only to deny the agency of blacks in their own liberation, but to deny them a very place at freedom’s table, which was taken by representatives--Christian missionaries, northern business interests, federal employees, etc.--who ended up defining what that freedom would become. The United States continues to frequently foster this misguided understanding of freedom economically and militarily around the globe today.

The full review can be found here.