Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
of Pascagoula, Mississippi, some thirty miles west of Mobile Bay, would upset
Confederate plans. He left Ship Island early on the morning of 9 April 1863 with
one hundred eighty men of his regiment and reached Pascagoula about 9:00 a.m.
Soon after Daniels’ force went ashore, Confederate troops arrived and eventually
managed to drive the Union pickets back from the outskirts of town before
retiring themselves to the surrounding woods. Later in the morning, the enemy
returned to the attack but was driven back again. When Daniels learned that Confederate
reinforcements were on the way, he reembarked his force and returned
to Ship Island. Union losses in four hours of intermittent fighting amounted to
two killed and eight wounded by the enemy and six killed and two wounded
by a shell from the U.S. Navy gunboat Jackson nearly a mile offshore. Daniels
estimated more than twenty Confederates killed “and a large number wounded.”
The expedition took three Confederate prisoners but accomplished little else,
although it may have contributed to civilian anxiety in nearby seaports. In May,
a committee of Mobile residents complained to the governor of Alabama about
the small size of the city’s garrison and the possibility of coastal raids. 36
Colonel Daniels’ report mentioned by name Major Dumas; Capt. Joseph
Villeverde; 1st Lt. Joseph Jones; 1st Lt. Theodule Martin; and the regimental
quartermaster, 1st Lt. Charles S. Sauvenet. They were “constantly in the thickest
of the fight,” he wrote, and “their unflinching bravery and admirable handling
of their commands contributed to the success of the attack.” Four of these
officers would be gone from the regiment in the next sixteen months, although it
is not certain that General Banks’ desire to remove black officers was manifest
in each instance. Dumas and Jones would resign that July, almost certainly the
result of official pressure; Martin and Villeverde would receive discharges in
August 1864, one ostensibly for medical reasons, the other perhaps because of
muddled property accounts. Only Sauvenet would manage to hold on until the
end of the war. 37
At the same time that Banks was purging black officers from existing regiments
in the Department of the Gulf, the Lincoln administration had settled on a
policy of recruiting black enlisted men in all parts of the occupied South. While the
War Department sent no less a figure than Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to organize
black troops in General Grant’s command, which included parts of Arkansas,
northeastern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, it sent a Know-Nothing
politician turned Republican, Brig. Gen. Daniel Ullmann, to the Department of the
Gulf. Ullmann’s rank reflected his assignment to recruit a brigade of five all-black
36 OR, ser. 1, vol. 52, pt. 1, p. 61, and pt. 2, p. 471; Col N. W. Daniels to Brig Gen T. W. Sherman,
11 Apr 1863, Entry 1860, Defenses of New Orleans, LR, pt. 2, Polyonymous Successions of Cmds,
RG 393, NA. Daniels apparently filed two reports, on 10 and 11 April. The earlier, shorter report
appears in OR, ser. 1, vol. 52, pt. 1, p. 61, and in his diary, published as C. P. Weaver, ed., Thank God
My Regiment an African One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1998), pp. 79–87. The diary contains hints of the racial composition
of Ship Island refugees on pp. 58, 62, 68, 71–73, 75–77. The report of 11 April was published in
William W. Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Boston:
Lee and Shepard, 1867), pp. 94–96. Daniels listed several different casualty figures in his reports
and diary; the numbers given here are those that seem most consistent.
37 Daniels to Sherman, 11 Apr 1863; ORVF, 8: 248; Hollandsworth, Louisiana Native Guards,
pp. 72–76.