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
USCI’s “digging rifle pits, dangerous position,” on 26 July, four days before
the projected attack. The same day, Sgt. William McCoslin sent a letter to the
Christian Recorder, saying that the 29th USCI had “built two forts and about
three miles of breastworks, which shows . . . that we are learning to make
fortifications, whether we learn to fight or not. We are now lying in camp, . . .
resting a day or two. . . . We have worked in that way for eight or ten days without
stopping.” The drill that Burnside urged Ferrero to institute was probably
barely enough to teach men who had seen only a few months’ service to move
from column into line “by the right companies, on the right into line wheel, the
left companies on the right into line, and . . . the leading regiment of the left
brigade to execute the reverse movement to the left,” a sequence of movements
to secure the wrecked enemy trenches on either side of the crater that would
have bewildered untrained men. In any case, a shortage of officers hampered
training of any kind. “The regiment by sickness and details is very short of officers
for duty,” the commanding officer of the 19th USCI complained just a
week before the assault. “The labor upon the remaining officers . . . is so great,
that it is almost impossible in so new a regiment, that they would do justice to
themselves or their commands.” The men of Ferrero’s division might have been
ill prepared to lead the assault, even if Meade’s qualms had not sidelined them,
but the other divisions of Burnside’s corps had little more experience than Ferrero’s,
either on the drill field or in battle. 46
The IX Corps was unique in the Army of the Potomac. It had its beginnings in
the summer of 1862 and was composed of federal regiments withdrawn from the
Carolinas to strengthen Union forces in Virginia after McClellan’s failure to take
Richmond that spring. This was the first instance of the Army’s stripping other
departments to reinforce operations closer to Washington, a practice that persisted
for the next two years.
By the summer of 1864, only twelve of the forty-one white regiments in the
corps had served with it since arriving from the Carolinas. Eight of the others
had joined in time for the Virginia and Maryland campaigns during the summer
and fall of 1862 and the IX Corps’ expeditions to Mississippi and Tennessee in
1863. Of the remaining twenty-one regiments, seventeen dated from the summer
of 1863 or later. Most of those had mustered in during the spring of 1864
and had no more experience than the black soldiers in Ferrero’s division. Two
of the seventeen were heavy artillery with twelve companies each rather than an
infantry regiment’s ten; three others were dismounted cavalry, also with twelve
companies each. These regiments served to increase the size of the IX Corps,
but they added little to its experience. The proportion of veteran soldiers was
even smaller than the presence of the twenty older regiments would suggest,
for disease and battle had thinned their ranks and the draft had only partly filled
them again. “Imagine a thousand men, exposed to wind & weather, dust, smoke
46 Ibid., pp. 58 (“instructed”), 136 (“by the right”), and pt. 3, p. 304 (“the proposed”); Lt Col J.
Perkins to Maj C. W. Foster, 23 Jul 1864, 19th USCI, Entry 57C, RG 94, NA; Rogall Diary, 26 Jul
1864; Report of the Joint Committee, 2: 106; Edward A. Miller Jr., The Black Civil War Soldiers
of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Colored Infantry (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1998), p. 55 (“built two”); Noah A. Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the
Civil War, 1862–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 232.