Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, 1863–1865 281
the Union prisoners and reclaim him. In any case, black soldiers lost their shoes to
barefoot Confederates. Many would endure the winter barefoot, suffering frostbite
while working on fortifications at Corinth and other sites in Mississippi. 56
Not all of the captured soldiers lived to endure the winter’s labor. Their first
assigned task, before leaving Dalton, was to tear up two miles of railroad track.
When one soldier of the 44th refused to do the work, a Confederate shot him. Five
or more men who had just left the hospital were shot, some of them before the prisoners
set out for Villanow, a day’s march to the southwest; others, when they fell
out along the route. “From the treatment I received,” Colonel Johnson reported, “I
am sure that not a man would have been spared had I not surrendered when I did,
and several times on the march soldiers made a rush upon the guards to massacre
the colored soldiers and their officers. . . . [W]e were only saved from massacre by
our guards’ greatest efforts.” 57
Hood “could not restrain his men, and would not if he could,” as Johnson recalled
just four days after the surrender. The Confederate general did not file his
report until four months later and passed over the incident in one sentence; but
his remark to Johnson echoed some thoughts that General Forrest committed to
paper in his report of the Union surrender at Athens, Alabama, just as Hood was
threatening the Union commander at Dalton, Georgia. Forrest wanted “to prevent
the effusion of blood that I knew would follow a successful assault,” he told Lt.
Gen. Stephen D. Lee; the surrender would “spare my men and the massacre of
the garrison.” Like Hood, Forrest knew that he could not control his men in the
fury of an attack. Generals on both sides were aware of this: orders for Sherman’s
army marching through Georgia repeatedly reminded officers to exercise “proper
control of their men” and “keep them well in hand.” The disciplinary problems of
an army on the march were exacerbated by the excitement of battle and complicated
still further by racial hatred. Even Unionist Southerners had no use for black
soldiers; recruiters for the U.S. Colored Troops in Tennessee found “bitter feeling
. . . still existing . . . particularly in the Tennessee (White) Regiments.” In Gallatin,
where white Tennessee Unionists formed the garrison, “no negro dares to walk the
streets.” White soldiers there “recently burned the building . . . in which the Colored
people had their school—out of pure wantonness.” Even before the fighting
ended, white Southerners on both sides exhibited the kind of behavior that would
later manifest itself in arson, lynching, and other forms of terror as social control. 58
After the surrender at Dalton, all of the officers of the 44th USCI had asked
to go south with their men rather than north to parole and exchange, but Hood
refused. “As no guards were placed between officers and men that night,” Johnson
56 Ibid., pt. 1, pp. 719–20, 807, and pt. 2, pp. 851–55; Deposition, William McColley, 7 Nov
1899, in Pension File SC821866, William McColley, CWPAF; James L. McDonough, Nashville:
The Western Confederacy’s Final Gamble (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), p. 37.
57 OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 1, pp. 720–21, 723 (quotation, p. 721). General Thomas approved
Johnson’s decision to surrender (pp. 723–24). Company and regimental descriptive books of the
44th USCI list at least thirty-nine men who died while prisoners of war. It is hard to tell which
were captured at Dalton on 13 October and which near Nashville on 2 December and impossible to
identify the man who was shot for refusing to tear up the track. Regimental Books, 44th USCI, RG
94, NA.
58 OR, ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 1, pp. 543 (“to prevent,” “spare”), 719 (“could not”), 801–03; 44: 458
(“keep them”), 463, 489, 544, 579, 594, 641 (“proper control”). Capt R. D. Mussey to Capt G. B.