Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, 1863–1865 261
work on the road, progress in laying track far outstripped progress in recruiting
black soldiers. While black laborers earned no more than black soldiers, many
former slaves in Tennessee and throughout the South still found civilian labor
more attractive than submission to military discipline. 4
On 13 August 1863, the secretary of war dispatched Maj. George L. Stearns
to Nashville “to assist in recruiting and organizing colored troops.” Stearns
was a New England abolitionist, a financial backer of John Brown who had
helped to organize the shipment of rifles to Kansas during the 1850s, and a
friend of Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew. When it came time to raise
the 54th and 55th Massachusetts in the spring of 1863, Stearns canvassed the
states outside New England so effectively that Secretary of War Stanton appointed
him a major and assigned him to begin black recruiting in and around
Philadelphia. By the end of the war, eleven regiments of U.S. Colored Troops
had left Philadelphia for the front, but the second of these was still only half
organized in August 1863 when Stearns received further orders from Stanton,
this time to report to Nashville. 5
Before Stearns left Philadelphia, he sent Stanton a long letter in which
he asserted “that my [recruiting] agents to be effective must be as heretofore
entirely under my control.” Stearns intended to operate in Tennessee as he had
in Pennsylvania, paying civilian agents with funds raised by a group of New
England philanthropists. Arriving in Nashville on 8 September with twenty
thousand dollars, he reported at once to General Rosecrans, who ordered him
to “take charge of the organization of colored troops in this department.” Although
Rosecrans’ order to “take charge” contradicted both the language and
the sense of Stanton’s instructions “to assist,” Stearns thus gained the full authority
that he craved. Only nine days passed before Governor Johnson complained
to the secretary of war about the new recruiter’s activities. “We need
more laborers now than can be obtained . . . to sustain the rear of General
Rosecrans’ army,” Johnson wrote. “Major Stearns proposes to organize and
place them in [a military] camp, where they, in fact, remain idle. . . . All the
negroes will quit work when they can go into camp and do nothing. We must
control them for both purposes.” Johnson’s concern about controlling the labor
of newly freed black people, based on the mistaken idea that they preferred
idleness to work, was common among federal authorities in all parts of the
South. The state’s Unionist government was just establishing itself, the governor
continued. “It is exceedingly important for this . . . to be handled in such a
4 Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp.
166–68. See, for instance, Col H. R. Mizner to A. Johnson, 3 Sep 1863, in The Papers of Andrew
Johnson, ed. Leroy P. Graf et al., 16 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967–2000),
6: 343, 353–54, 377, 417 (hereafter cited as Johnson Papers). Officers organizing black regiments
at Nashville and Gallatin reported violence directed against their recruits by white soldiers from
Kentucky and Tennessee. Capt R. D. Mussey to 1st Lt G. Mason, 14 Mar and 4 Apr 1864; to Capt G.
B. Halstead, 23 May 1864; to D. K. Carlton, 26 Jun 1864; all in Entry 1141, Dept of the Cumberland,
Org of Colored Troops, Letters Sent (LS), pt. 1, Geographical Divs and Depts, Record Group (RG)
393, Rcds of U.S. Army Continental Cmds, National Archives (NA).
5 OR, ser. 3, 3: 676–77 (quotation, p. 676), 682–83.