Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Mustering In—Federal Policy on Emancipation and Recruitment 17
in Philadelphia itself. The school’s brochure boasted that ninety of its first
ninety-four graduates passed the examining board, but according to the list of
names, only seventy-three received appointments. Of the 205 names listed as
still attending at the end of March 1864, fewer than half appear in the volume
of the Official Register of the Volunteer Force that includes the Colored Troops.
It would appear, therefore, that the graduates’ rate of success was less than the
school’s brochure intimated. Most graduates’ appointments were in one of the
regiments formed at Camp William Penn or in one of the Kentucky regiments
that began to form rapidly in 1864 as federal armies penetrated so far south that
there was little need any longer for the Lincoln administration to placate the
slaveholders of that state. Nearly all these regiments served in Virginia and the
Carolinas. The school’s influence, therefore, was mainly regional. 36
In other parts of the country, appointment as an officer of Colored Troops
came before—often, long before—a candidate’s appearance before an examining
board. While inspecting the 74th USCI in the fall of 1864, an officer in New
Orleans commented on the regiment’s adjutant, 1st Lt. Dexter F. Booth: “If he
was examined by the Board, he certainly was not by the Surgeon.” Booth’s ill
health was one of the factors that resulted in his dismissal. In the winter of 1865,
an inspector warned the commanding officer of the 116th USCI, one of the new
Kentucky regiments, that his company officers “must be compelled to see that
the men are kept clean and made as comfortable as possible.” An inspector in
the Department of the South noted that the 104th and 128th USCIs, “which were
enlisted near the close of the war, . . . became utterly worthless, owing to the inefficiency
of most of the commissioned officers.” In another instance, the 125th
USCI, which was raised in Kentucky in the winter and spring of 1865, received
orders early in 1866 to march to New Mexico for at least a year’s stay. An examination
of the regiment’s officers resulted in four resignations and discharges,
including that of the colonel. Running out of suitable officers, of course, was not
a problem peculiar to the Civil War or to American armies. 37
Proponents of the Colored Troops hoped that the selection process would
assure a better type of officer than prevailed in the other volunteer regiments of
the Union Army. Some observers believed that these hopes had been realized.
Col. Randolph B. Marcy, a West Point graduate of 1832 and the Army’s inspector
general, thought that officers of the Colored Troops he saw in the lower
36 Free Military School, pp. 9, 28–31, 33–43. Pennsylvania regiments’ cities of origin are in
Dyer, Compendium, pp. 214–28. Officers’ names can be found in ORVF, vol. 8. Of the 204 names of
Free Military School graduates, only 101 appear in ORVF, 8: 343–411, even making allowance for
typographical errors and variant spellings like “Brown” and “Browne.”
37 Lt Col W. H. Thurston to Maj G. B. Drake, 29 Oct 1864 (“If he was”), 74th USCI, Entry 57C, RG
94, NA; Maj C. W. Foster to Maj Gen W. T. Sherman, 12 Apr 1866, Entry 352, RG 94, NA; Capt W. H.
Abel to Brig Gen W. Birney, 6 Feb 1865 (“must be”), Entry 533, XXV Corps, Letters . . . Rcd by Divs, pt.
2, Polyonymous Successions of Cmds, RG 393, NA; Maj J. P. Roy to Maj Gen D. E. Sickles, 10 Nov 1866
(“which were”), Microfilm Pub M619, LR by the AGO, 1861–1870, roll 533, NA; ORVF, 8: 249, 255, 261,
306. Jeffrey J. Clarke and Robert R. Smith note the problem of U.S. Army infantry leadership late in the
Second World War in Riviera to the Rhine, U.S. Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army
Center of Military History, 1993), pp. 570–73. David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System,
the British Army, and the British People, c. 1870–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.
321, tells how the problem affected the British Army during the same period.