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
got a first rate fellow who left Petersburg [three days ago] & who knows every road
& by path from here [to] there,” 2d Lt. Robert N. Verplanck told his mother. Other
slaves waited for Union troops to come to them. Assistant Surgeon James O. Moore
accompanied a lieutenant and twenty enlisted men of the 22d USCI on a foraging
expedition. “We halted at a house,” he wrote, “or rather I should have said that a slave
came in [and] wanted us to . . . get his Father Mother & six bros and sisters” from the
farm of former President John Tyler. “We took all the slaves & ordered them to take a
reasonable amount of clothing bedding &c whereupon they walked very deliberately
into the best room took the best bed best pillows. . . . I never saw a happier lot [of]
human beings than were those slaves when they were on their way to freedom.” 17
At least once, escaped slaves had the chance to accuse one of their former
masters of mistreatment and to punish him for it. On 10 May, a planter named
William H. Clopton, whose estate had been home to twenty-five slaves, came to
Wilson’s Wharf to take the oath of allegiance. “He gave a flattering account of his
former treatment of his slaves,” Surgeon Moore wrote. “In fact he considered himself
[more] a public benefactor than otherwise.” When some of his former slaves
who had taken refuge in the Union camp accused him of whipping them for their
reluctance to work on Confederate fortifications, Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild had
Clopton seized and tied. Sgt. George W. Hatton of the 1st USCI described the
scene for readers of the Christian Recorder, the weekly newspaper of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church:
William Harris, a soldier in our regiment . . . , who was acquainted with the gentleman,
and who used to belong to him, was called upon to undress him. . . . Mr.
Harris played his part conspicuously, bringing the blood from his loins at every
stroke, and not forgetting to remind the gentleman of the days gone by. After giving
him some fifteen or twenty well-directed strokes, the ladies, one after another,
came up and gave him a like number, to remind him that they were no longer his.
Reporting the incident to General Hinks, Wild told him, “I wish it to be distinctly
understood . . . that I shall do the same thing again under similar circumstances.”
Hinks’ response was to convene a general court-martial and prefer charges against
Wild, for he would not “countenance . . . any Conduct on the part of my command
not in accordance with the principles recognized for . . . modern warfare between
Civilized Nations.” Although the court convicted Wild, General Butler set the verdict
aside, for Hinks had failed to follow a department order directing that a majority
of U.S. Colored Troops officers sit on courts trying cases that involved black
soldiers or their officers. 18
Two weeks after Clopton’s flogging, the garrison at Wilson’s Wharf had to
hold the post against an assault. On the afternoon of 24 May, Confederates appeared
in the wood nearby, “evidently,” Wild reported, “with the design of rushing
17 R. N. Verplanck to Dear Mother, 12 May and 2 Jun (“I have got”) 1864, Verplanck Letters; J. O.
Moore to My Dearest Lizzie, 12 May 1864, J. O. Moore Papers, Duke University (DU), Durham, N.C.
18 Moore to My Dearest Lizzie, 12 May 1864. Hinks and Wild quoted in Berlin et al., Destruction
of Slavery, pp. 96–97; Hatton quoted in Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters
from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), pp. 95–96. Butler’s General Order 46, 5 Dec 1863, is in OR, ser. 3, 3: 1139–44; the