Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
rainy, . . . & the men on guard had to stay out all night in the pelting storms—then
they would be taken sick, come to the hospital, lie down on the ground, (before we
had our bunks built) and die from pure debility & exhaustion.” On 26 February, the
22d USCI moved from Yorktown twelve miles up the peninsula to Williamsburg. 66
Kilpatrick’s force, more than thirty-five hundred horsemen, was to enter Richmond
from the north, free the prisoners, and head east for the Union garrison at
Williamsburg. When Butler heard of the raid, he sent a mixed force of infantry
and cavalry forward to New Kent Court House, a small crossroads settlement of
the type that was common in Virginia counties, “to aid in case of disaster, to receive
prisoners, or to cover retreat,” as he told General Halleck on 29 February.
Duncan’s brigade began its march the next afternoon. About dark, rain began to
fall and continued, mixed with snow, through the night. “Slipping, stumbling, falling,”
Fleetwood recorded in his diary. “Nothing but mud and slush.” At midnight,
when the column halted for a few hours’ rest, “the men with nothing but a blanket
bivouacked on the cold damp ground,” Surgeon James O. Moore of the 22d USCI
wrote. They moved on at 3:30, stopping about dawn for a breakfast of coffee and
hardtack. By the time they made camp west of the courthouse that afternoon, they
had covered more than forty miles in less than twenty-four hours. 67
The march took them through country where the white residents seemed terrified
of black soldiers. As the column splashed through Williamsburg, 2d Lt. Joseph
J. Scroggs of the 5th USCI saw no one in the streets. “Afraid of the ‘nigger’ I
suppose,” he noted in his diary. “I went up to a house,” Assistant Surgeon Merrill
wrote home, “& got a good breakfast of corn bread and milk. They were glad to
be protected. The way cows, pigs & hens suffered was a caution.” Surgeon Moore
agreed with his assistant about the troops’ foraging but added that freeing “about
twenty” slaves who joined the column was more important than supplementing the
troops’ rations or punishing disloyal Virginians. 68
On the morning of 3 March, six miles west of New Kent Court House, Butler’s
force met Kilpatrick’s raiders, who had turned away from Richmond without entering
the city. About five hundred men from the city’s Confederate garrison and
some 750 cavalry and artillery from the Army of Northern Virginia had managed
to inflict 340 casualties on the Union force—nearly 10 percent of its total strength.
All that remained for Duncan’s brigade to do was to cover the horsemen’s retreat.
“Gen. Wistar has found out that these men can march well & carry anything that is
put on them,” Lieutenant Verplanck wrote, “so he keeps us following after cavalry
New Market Heights: A Tale of Two Divisions,” in Black Soldiers in Blue, ed. Smith, pp. 169–99,
esp. pp. 169–71, 194–95.
66 NA M594, roll 208, 22d USCI; C. G. G. Merrill to Dear Father, 28 Feb 1864, C. G. G. Merrill
Papers typescript, Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
67 OR, ser. 1, 33: 183, 193, 198, 615, 618 (“to aid”); Fleetwood Diary, 1 Mar 1864; J. O. Moore
to My Dearest Lizzie, 5 Mar 1864, J. O. Moore Papers, DU. Estimates of the distance marched vary
from forty-two to forty-five miles. OR, ser. 1, 33: 198; NA M594, roll 208, 4th, 5th, and 6th USCIs;
J. O. Scroggs Diary typescript, 2 Mar 1864, MHI; R. N. Verplanck to Dear Mother, 13 Mar 1864,
Verplanck Letters.
68 C. G. G. Merrill to My dear Father, 5 Mar 1864, Merrill Papers; Moore to My Dearest Lizzie,
5 Mar 1864; Scroggs Diary, 1 (quotation), 2, and 3 Mar 1864.