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
broke, as Lieutenant Brown claimed they did. Colonel Leib’s report gave the 13th
Louisiana’s casualties for the day as five wounded and those of the 1st Mississippi
as twenty-six but listed none for the 23d Iowa. The 23d, he wrote, “left the field
soon after the enemy got possession of the levee . . . and was seen no more.”
Indeed, the regiment gave way so quickly that the Confederate General McCulloch
remarked that the Confederate assault “was resisted by the negro portion of the
enemy’s force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion
ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.” 70
Lieutenant Brown told a different story, writing that the 23d Iowa “only fetched
40 men off the field 2/3 of us were killed and wounded.” Cornwell agreed years
later, calling the casualties “very severe . . . amount[ing] almost to annihilation.”
Pvt. Silas Shearer of the 23d Iowa, whose tally of the dead in his own company
matched the official count, wrote that “about one half of those present were killed
and wounded.” The Official Army Register of the Volunteer Force shows that the
23d Iowa lost 57 officers and men killed, wounded, and missing at Milliken’s Bend
and a total of 107 in the Vicksburg Campaign during May. Statistical tables in the
Official Records, though, show the regiment’s losses in May as 136. The Official
Records’ statistics were published in 1889; those in the Register of the Volunteer
Force were hastily compiled and printed in eight volumes between 1865 and 1868.
Applying the discrepancy between the two figures for the 23d Iowa’s casualties
for May 1863 (136, the larger figure, is 127 percent of 107, the smaller) to the 57
casualties the regiment supposedly incurred at Milliken’s Bend yields a total of
about 72 killed, wounded, and missing. This is much closer to the two-thirds casualty
rate Lieutenant Brown mentioned for the eight companies of the 23d that were
present at the fight. The entire regiment, Brown told his parents, had been “reduced
in the last month from 650 fighting men down to 180.” 71
Colonel Leib’s report lists similar casualties for the new black regiments at
Milliken’s Bend: in his own regiment, the 9th Louisiana (AD), 195 casualties out
of about 285 men present; in the 1st Mississippi (AD) 26 out of about 153; and in
the 11th Louisiana (AD) 395 casualties out of about 685, including one officer and
242 privates missing. “I can only account for the very large number reported missing
. . . by presuming that they were permitted to stray off after the action,” Leib
commented. It is not strange that the men of the 11th Louisiana were “permitted
to stray,” for their commanding officer, Col. Edwin W. Chamberlain, rowed out to
the Choctaw at the first sign of the Confederate attack. He watched the fight from
70 OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 2, p. 467 (“was resisted”); Annual Return of Alterations and Casualties
for 1863, 51st USCI, Entry 57, RG 94, NA. Leib’s report quoted in Wearmouth, Cornwell Chronicles,
pp. 217, 219 (“left the field”); Sears, Paper, p. 9. On p. 11, Sears denied the existence of the 13th
Louisiana, but he was wrong: the recruits and a few officers were present but untrained and barely
organized. Leib gave the regiment’s strength as 108, of which three were officers. I have not been
able to learn whether any of the remaining 105 were white veteran soldiers assigned to the 13th as
company first sergeants.
71 OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 584, and pt. 2, p. 130; Brown to Dear Parents, 12 Jun 1863 (“only
fetched,” “reduced”); David Cornwell, “The Battle of Milliken’s Bend,” National Tribune, 13 Feb
1908, p. 7 (“very severe”); 23d Iowa, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA; Harold D. Brinkman, ed.,
Dear Companion: The Civil War Letters of Silas I. Shearer (Ames, Iowa: Sigler Printing, 1996), p.
50; ORVF, 7: 282.