Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

300
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
and called his new command the Army of the Potomac. Country roads outside the
city were so bad that the troops received supplies, whenever possible, by boat.
“Not less than twenty of my teams are on the road struggling to work their way
through the mud,” Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker reported from southern Maryland in
early November. “If this should be continued, I shall not have a serviceable team
in my train, nor will the depot quartermaster in Washington if he permits his teams
to be put on the road.” Hooker thought of withdrawing his troops from southern
Maryland—a tobacco-growing region full of slaveholders and Confederate sympathizers—to
a point closer to the federal supply railhead in Washington. Since
each side tried to use artillery fire to interdict the other’s shipping, control of the
shoreline was clearly necessary to secure the defenses of the capital. 3
While the garrison of Washington reorganized and gathered strength, ships of
the U.S. Navy patrolled Chesapeake Bay and the rivers emptying into it. Slaves
from the Tidewater counties of Virginia, sometimes entire families of them, took to
boats and made their way to these vessels, which put them ashore at Washington or
Fort Monroe. There, those who were able to work found employment with Army
quartermasters. Confederate authorities, of course, took a different view of the
matter. At Yorktown, one Virginia general complained in mid-August that “from
$5,000 to $8,000 worth of negroes [were] decoyed off” each week. 4
Some of the more enterprising and politically connected Union generals
sought independent commands that summer, rather than spend the rest of the
year camped near Washington, helping to train McClellan’s army. Maj. Gen.
Benjamin F. Butler, who took charge of the maritime expedition that captured
New Orleans the following spring, was one; another was Brig. Gen. Ambrose
E. Burnside, a Rhode Islander who had graduated from West Point in 1847, one
year after McClellan. Burnside proposed raising a marine division of ten New
England regiments with shallow-draft boats to secure the Potomac estuary and
Chesapeake Bay. The War Department approved the plan, but by January 1862,
when Burnside was able to gather the troops, McClellan had been appointed to
the command of all Union armies and used his new authority to order Burnside’s
force to North Carolina. The object of the expedition was to land on the coast,
to penetrate inland as far as Goldsborough, and there to cut an important rail
line that ran from the deepwater port of Wilmington, in the southeastern corner
of the state, north to Richmond, carrying supplies to the Confederate army that
threatened Washington. The line was especially useful because it was of uniform
gauge, a rarity in the South, and was thus able to move material rapidly along its
entire 170-mile length. 5
More than 160,000 people lived in the seventeen counties that lined the serrated
coastline behind the Outer Banks. The region was home to 68,519 slaves
(42.7 percent of the population) and 8,049 free blacks (5 percent). Of the black
711, 718–21 (hereafter cited as OR); New York Tribune, 30 May 1861; New York Times, 18 July 1861.
3 OR, ser. 1, 5: 372–77, 407–11, 421–24, 643 (quotation).
4 OR, ser. 1, 4: 614, 634 (quotation). Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in
the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–1922), ser.
1, 4: 508, 583, 598, 681–82, 748; 6: 80–81, 107, 113, 363 (hereafter cited as ORN).
5 OR, ser. 1, 5: 36; Robert M. Browning Jr., From Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The North
Atlantic Blockading Squadron During the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,