Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

80
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
629 wounded, and 28 missing on the Union side. Confederate casualties were
8 killed and 42 wounded. 59
The Coast Division retired to Boyd’s Neck, where it had come ashore.
During the following weeks, several forays inland took its troops close to the
railroad but inflicted no damage on the line. Meanwhile, Sherman’s army continued
to move from Atlanta toward the sea at the rate of about nine miles a
day. On 4 December, General Foster received a report that the western army
was in sight of Savannah. On 12 December, one of Sherman’s scouts reached
Beaufort and established communication with the Department of the South.
Nine days later, Sherman’s troops entered Savannah as the city’s Confederate
garrison abandoned it and dispersed toward Augusta and Charleston. The war
had entered its final phase. 60
It was a phase in which the Colored Troops of the Department of the South
played only a minor part. The day before Savannah fell to Sherman’s troops,
Col. Charles T. Trowbridge led three hundred men of the 33d USCI on a reconnaissance
from the Coast Division’s base to a point two miles beyond the
Union picket line toward the Pocotaligo Road. There they met a Confederate
force of about equal size. “Formed line of battle and charged across the open
field into the woods and routed the enemy,” Trowbridge reported. “My observations
yesterday,” he added, “have convinced me that the only way to reach
the railroad with a force from our present position is by the way of the Pocotaligo
road, as the country on our left is full of swamps, which are impassable
for anything except light troops.” These were the same swamps, made worse
by “the late heavy rains” that Sherman’s XVII Corps encountered three weeks
later when it moved by sea from Savannah to Beaufort and marched inland to
cut the railroad. 61
The XVII Corps numbered about twelve thousand soldiers. They impressed
the Department of the South’s seventy-five hundred officers and men by their
appearance and their reputation. “Sherman’s men appear gay and happy,” Capt.
Wilbur Nelson of the 102d USCI recorded in his diary. “They are a rough set of
men, but good fighters.” The new arrivals had marched across Tennessee, Mississippi,
and Georgia during the past three years and now felt that they were in
the home stretch. Pvt. Alonzo Reed of Captain Nelson’s regiment agreed that
the westerners “look[ed] very Rough.” Captain Emilio of the 54th Massachusetts
called them “a seasoned, hardy set of men. . . . Altogether they impressed
us with their individual hardiness, powers of endurance, and earnestness of
purpose, and as an army, powerful, full of resources and with staying powers
unsurpassed.” By 8 February 1865, the XVII Corps had “heavy details” of
men at work destroying eight miles of track on the Charleston and Savannah
Railroad, a goal that had eluded the Department of the South for months. The
materiel and manpower available to one of the Union’s principal armies and the
high morale of its troops that came from their having continually beaten their
59 Ibid., pp. 416, 424 (“was executed”), 425, 433, 665 (“a drawn”).
60 Ibid., pp. 12, 420–21, 708; vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 1003.
61 OR, ser. 1, 44: 451 (“Formed line”); vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 375 (“late heavy rains”).