Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Along the Mississippi River, 1863–1865 191
law of General Grant. “A good many of those . . . were wives of members of our
company,” Mathews added, “[and] the boys think tis pretty hard.” 2
Union regiments marched into the undefended city of Natchez on 13 July,
completing their occupation of population centers along the Mississippi. They
captured about twenty Confederate soldiers and the next day seized a herd of
five thousand Texas cattle not far from the town. Natchez was an important
crossing point for livestock and other Confederate supplies. Its new federal
commander voiced a familiar plea for “instructions as to what policy I shall
pursue with regard to the negroes. They flock in by thousands (about 1 able
bodied man to 6 women and children). I am feeding about 500, and working
the able bodied men. . . . I cannot take care of them. What shall I do with them?
They are all anxious to go; they do not know where or what for.” This call for
advice from the commanding officer of an important town came three months
after Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas announced the policy of enlisting
black soldiers and eight months after Grant appointed Chaplain John Eaton as
general superintendent of contrabands, “to take charge of all fugitive slaves,”
late in 1862. The plea illustrates clearly the precarious nature of communications
and command that bedeviled the efforts of both sides during the war. 3
Nevertheless, most cities along the Mississippi, from St. Louis southward,
became centers for recruiting and organizing black soldiers during the summer
and fall of 1863. The first black regiment to be organized in Missouri took
shape that August and September in St. Louis. To placate the state’s slaveholders,
Union authorities named it the 3d Arkansas Volunteer Infantry (AD). Not
until December would federal recruiters in the border states feel sure enough of
white residents’ loyalty to name a black regiment, the 1st Missouri Colored, after
the state where it was raised. Similar political considerations caused a regiment
organized at Columbus, Kentucky, to be called the 2d Tennessee Heavy
Artillery (AD). 4
Farther south along the Mississippi, organizers of black troops raised a regiment
of heavy artillery and a regiment of infantry at Memphis; one regiment each
of cavalry and heavy artillery and two of infantry at Vicksburg; and one regiment
of heavy artillery and another of infantry at Natchez. All this activity took place in
Grant’s Department of the Tennessee, which included most of the state of Mississippi,
a few posts at steamboat landings in northern Louisiana, and those parts of
Kentucky and Tennessee that lay west of the Tennessee River. At the same time,
2 OR, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 1, p. 720; vol. 24, pt. 2, pp. 466 (“broken up”), 507–08. J. L. Mathews to
Dear Sister, 12 Jul 1863, J. L. Mathews Papers, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. An unofficial
Confederate source estimated the number of black captives taken in late spring at fourteen hundred.
Richard Lowe, Walker’s Texas Division C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2004), p. 106. On riverine warfare in Arkansas, see Robert B. Mackey,
The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861–1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2004), pp. 29–36.
3 OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 2, pp. 680–81 (quotation, p. 681); Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Wartime
Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 670–
71 (quotation, p. 670) (hereafter cited as WGFL: LS).
4 Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (New York: Thomas Yoseloff,
1959 [1909]), pp. 1000, 1322, 1642.