Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, 1863–1865 273
Part of the country in east-central Tennessee through which Capt. James H. Meteer and
the 14th U.S. Colored Infantry marched in the early spring of 1864, seeking recruits
USCI alone on its march, sending only two or three shots into the regiment’s
camps throughout the entire expedition. 34
Captain Meteer thrived on the rigors of mountain campaigning, but his first
sight of slavery in practice shocked him. “Among the 120 recruits we brought
back,” he wrote,
There are not 20 genuine Africans and as many as 10 of them could have enlisted
in a white regt without . . . being discovered. At Pikeville a wealthy man who glories
in the title of Colonel Bridgeman came and offered his darky [for enlistment]
and claimed his 300 dollars [bounty due to a slaveholder who allowed a slave to
enlist]. Before the termination of his interview . . . a black woman came and declared
that the ‘boy’ was her son and Col Bridgeman was his father—that he had
slept with her about two years, and after the birth of the boy she was exchanged
for a more enticing bed-fellow. Want had driven [Bridgeman] to come and offer
the fruit of his illegitimate dalliance with his chattel for sale. . . . [T]here is no
crime . . . too hellish for an upholder of African slavery to do.
Traffic in human beings shocked the young man who had only recently called his black
soldiers Unwashed Americans, but who declared after a few weeks in the field with
them that he was ready “to fight 30 years for their freedom if necessary.” “We expect
34 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 2, p. 268; J. H. Meteer to Dear Prof, 26 Jan 1864 (“14th ‘Unwashed’”), and to
Dear Sir, 18 Apr 1864 (“We fully”), both in Mills Papers; Sean M. O’Brien, Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla
Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), pp. 64–67.