Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

108
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
arrived in New York early on 6 June bearing a garbled report that the 2d Native Guard
regiment, which was actually stationed on Ship Island, had suffered six hundred casualties
at Port Hudson on 27 May. The Democratic Herald, no friend to the idea of black
soldiers, emphasized the attackers’ brutality: “It is said on every side that they fought
with the desperation of tigers. One negro was observed with a rebel soldier in his grasp,
tearing the flesh from his face with his teeth, other weapons having failed him. . . .
After firing one volley they did not deign to load again, but went in with bayonets, and
wherever they had a chance it was all up with the rebels.” In fact, the Native Guards
inflicted no casualties on the enemy. Horace Greeley’s antislavery Tribune attributed
the supposed six hundred casualties to the 3d Native Guards, which had at least been
present at Port Hudson. “Their bearing upon this occasion has forever settled in this
Department all question as to the employment of negro troops,” the Tribune correspondent
wrote. Two days later, a Tribune editorialist reverted to the earlier misidentification
of the regiment: “Nobly done, Second Regiment of Louisiana Native Guard! . . .
That heap of six hundred corpses, lying there dark and grim and silent before and
within the Rebel works, is a better Proclamation of Freedom than even President Lincoln’s.”
The project of putting black men in uniform inspired modest hopes, at best, in
most white Americans. Any evidence of black soldiers’ courage and resolve led to wild
enthusiasm among their supporters and often to gross exaggeration. Coverage of the
Native Guards at Port Hudson tended to bear out Captain DeForest’s observation that
“bayonet fighting occurs mainly in newspapers and other works of fiction.” 50
At least one black editor took a more practical view. “It is reported that the 2d
Louisiana native guard, a regiment of blacks which lost six hundred in the gloriously
bloody charge at Port Hudson, were placed in front, while veteran white
troops brought up the rear. Great God, why is this?” demanded the Christian Recorder,
the weekly organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We care not
so much for the loss of men, however bravely they may die, but we damn to everlasting
infamy, those who will thus pass by veteran troops of any color, and place a
regiment of raw recruits in the front of a terrible battle.” The editor was apparently
unaware that more than one-fourth of the Union infantry force at Port Hudson
consisted of nine-month men enlisted in the fall of 1862 and due for discharge in
a few months. Only eleven of Banks’ forty-five infantry regiments in the attack of
27 May had been in Louisiana for as long as a year. Port Hudson’s besiegers did
not constitute an army of vast experience. 51
The Louisiana summer soon set in. Colonel Irwin, the officer in charge of all
organizational returns, recalled its effects years later:
The heat, especially in the trenches, became almost insupportable, the stenches
quite so, the brooks dried up, the creek lost itself in the pestilential swamp, the
springs gave out, and the river fell, exposing to the tropical sun a wide margin of
50 The news stories appeared in the New York Herald, the New York Times, and the New York
Tribune of 6 June 1863; editorial comment from the Herald of 6 June and the Tribune of 6 and 8
June. DeForest, A Volunteer’s Adventures, p. 66. William F. Messner, Freedmen and the Ideology
of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1861–1865 (Lafayette: University of Southwest Louisiana, 1978), pp.
133–35, quotes other overwrought accounts of the Native Guards’ performance.
51 Christian Recorder, 13 June 1863; regiments listed in OR, ser. 1, 6: 706; OR, ser. 1, vol. 26, pt. 1, pp.
529–30, and Welcher, Union Army, 2: 728. Terms of service can be found in ORVF and Dyer, Compendium.