Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Kansas, 1863–1865 231
not employ[e]d as officers[’] servents,” Lieutenant Miller wrote home, “so they
hide from us like chickens from a hawk we search their houses at all hours of
the day and night sometimes at midnight sometimes they tell us they wont go
but we general[l]y manage to make them last night I had to cock my revolver
on one before he would move he toddled in a hurry when he heard it snap.” Despite
the brutal means recruiters sometimes employed, Lieutenant Miller was
optimistic about his regiment’s future. “We are drilling every day the negroes
learn fast and will fight well,” he predicted. 5
Jackson Brown was one recruit who joined Miller’s regiment. “I got free in
1863,” when a Union force occupied Pine Bluff on the lower Arkansas River, Brown
recalled after the war. He continued to work for his former owner for wages and
used the money to buy a pair of mules, intending to go into the hauling business, but
a federal quartermaster took the animals. “There was a review that day,” a military
spectacle that provided a welcome break in the boredom of small-town life:
Everybody went out to see it, white and black, and when the whole crowd was
together, the cavalry made a half moon about us, and the infantry closed up the
opening, then they . . . left a guard . . . and the rest of them went through town and
gathered up all the horses and mules they could find in the lots and stables . . . , they
kept us there two hours, till they had all the stock.
The next time Brown saw his mules, they were pulling a government wagon.
With them went his hope of becoming an independent teamster, and he joined a
company of the 2d Arkansas (AD) that was recruiting in Pine Bluff. Union quartermasters’
requisitioning of livestock cost some black Southerners their jobs and drove
more than one of them to enlist. 6
Men of the 2d Arkansas (AD), like those of some other black regiments in the
Mississippi Valley, came under fire before they mustered in. Confederate generals
had kept an eye on Helena since a Union force occupied the town in July 1862, and
forebodings of a possible federal move against the state capital at Little Rock had
spread as far as the government in Richmond. By June 1863, Lt. Gen. Theophilus
H. Holmes, commanding the Confederate Department of Arkansas, thought that the
time had come to recapture Helena, both to forestall Union operations against the
interior of the state and to divert federal troops from the siege of Vicksburg. The assault
fell on 4 July—by coincidence, the day Vicksburg surrendered. 7
At daybreak, more than seventy-six hundred Confederates attacked a line of
trenches and gun emplacements around Helena occupied by forty-one hundred
Union troops. Rumors of enemy movements had been reaching General Prentiss for
ten days, and a dispatch from Memphis on 2 July advised him that an attack might
be imminent. He ordered the Helena garrison to stand to arms well before dawn. “On
5 Miller to Dear Mother, 12 Jun 1863.
6 Deposition, Jackson Brown, Dec 1874, in Case File 10,146, Jackson Brown, Entry 732,
Settled Case Files for Claims Approved by the Southern Claims Commission, RG 217, Rcds of the
Accounting Ofcrs of the Dept of the Treasury, NA. For a similar case, see Deposition, Luke Turner,
Nov 1871, in Case File 7,010, Luke Turner, Entry 732, RG 217, NA.
7 OR, ser. 1, 13: 891–92, 914–15; vol. 22, pt. 1, pp. 408–09.