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
which it would not do for officers’ wives. Although this solution might work
for soldiers whose wives were already close by, it clearly would not help those
whose families were in Maryland or the North. 106
When the order to prepare for a move reached the troops, rumors burgeoned.
Early in 1863, when the 1st South Carolina Volunteers received orders
for Florida, stories circulated that the men would be sold into Cuban slavery to
raise money for the war. This time, rumor had it that the men of the XXV Corps
would go south to pick cotton until the war was paid for. Officers assured their
men that it was not so, but many remained suspicious. Nevertheless, few deserted
before boarding the transports, and only a handful of incidents occurred
that amounted to mutiny. 107
Embarkation began on 25 May and ended at noon on 7 June, when the
transport with General Weitzel and his staff aboard weighed anchor. Unlike the
responsibilities that faced the Union force in most of the occupied South, those
of the XXV Corps in southern Texas had less to do with the reestablishment
of civil government and protection of the rights of new black United States
citizens than with international diplomacy and simple law enforcement. During
the war, the regiments that belonged to the corps had spent periods that varied
from four months to eighteen months in Virginia, the least typical theater of
operations in the South. Before they mustered out, they would serve for similar
periods in the most unusual region of the postwar occupation—the Rio Grande
border with Mexico.
106 Maj Gen E. O. C. Ord to Brig Gen G. H. Gordon, 12 May 1865, Entry 5046, pt. 2, RG 393,
NA. For the 114th USCI, see W. Goodale to Dear Children, 20 Apr 1865, W. Goodale Papers,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 656–61;
Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, pp. 49, 291–92. Miller, Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois, pp. 153–54,
offers a good, brief summary of morale in the XXV Corps in May 1865.
107 OR, ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 3, p. 1262; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 723–27;
Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, p. 219; Miller, Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois, p. 153. For the rumor
about black soldiers being sold in Cuba, see Chapter 1, above.