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
Belle Plain, one of the river landings that served the Army of the Potomac’s movement
toward Richmond in May 1864. Wagons carried wounded from the fighting to waiting
vessels and bore supplies back to the advancing troops.
been wrong; not every slight that the Colored Troops suffered was the result of
racial prejudice. Union troops across the South burned their verminous winter
quarters when the time came to leave them, although some pessimists in the
often-defeated Army of the Potomac cautioned against the practice. “Leave
things as they are,” one veteran recalled hearing them say that spring. “We may
want them before snow flies.” 8
The men of the 4th Division barely had time to improve their campsites,
for the Army of the Potomac moved south on 4 May. The position of the IX
Corps was awkward, for Burnside was senior to the army commander, Meade,
yet led a smaller force. Grant solved the problem by assigning Burnside’s corps
to guard the roads in the wake of Meade’s advance, from Manassas “as far
south as we want to hold it.” Within the corps, the 4th Division would guard
wagon trains. The forty-three hundred wagons and eight hundred thirty-five
ambulances that belonged to the Army of the Potomac required more than
twenty-seven thousand horses and mules to draw them. If they had formed in
single file, Grant estimated, the line that resulted would have been more than
8 J. H. Rickard [no salutation], 29 Apr 1864, J. H. Rickard Papers, American Antiquarian
Society (AAS), Worcester, Mass.; Frank Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army
of the Potomac (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1886), p. 41 (“Leave things”); Charles W. Wills,
Army Life of an Illinois Soldier . . . Letters and Diaries of the Late Charles W. Wills (Washington,
D.C.: Globe Printing, 1906), p. 231; W. Springer Menge and J. August Shimrak, eds., The Civil War
Notebook of Daniel Chisholm: A Chronicle of Daily Life in the Union Army, 1864–1865 (New
York: Orion Books, 1989), p. 12.