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
to pick up stragglers, following the division with two four-mule ambulances.
“The roads are horrible,” wrote the division commander. “The wagons were
ordered to load only eight hundred pounds and they have had an awful time at
that. Some of the way we were obliged to have the men carry the loads and then
twelve mules [double teams] stalled with empty wagons.” The men marched
“sometimes over shoe tops in mud, and again through water up to our waists,”
Sgt. Charles W. Cole of the 29th Connecticut told readers of the Christian Recorder.
The division took two days to cover twenty-odd miles to Brownsville.
Assistant Surgeon Moore, who cared for the 22d USCI while Surgeon Merrill
brought up the rear of the march, told his wife that the town was “one of the
most forsaken looking holes you ever saw.” 29
Once in camp at Brownsville, the commanding officer of the 43d USCI
wrote to divisional headquarters to explain why the provost guard had arrested
fifty of his men—the equivalent of an entire company—as stragglers during
the march. In the first place, the men were “much debilitated” from twentyfive
days’ close confinement on shipboard. Going ashore, they were “ordered
to camp on ground which became flooded . . . after each shower, completely
drenching” their clothing and blankets. The regiment had had to change its
campsite three times in two days because of flooding. On the march, wagons
“were continually . . . compelling the men to dive into the dense chapperel
which grew close to each side of the road.” Finally, there was the matter of rations,
which had arrived at regimental headquarters too late to be distributed to
the men. Companies detailed men to fetch the rations and follow the column,
and the provost guard arrested them as stragglers. The 43d was last in the line
of march, “subject to all the difficulties of halting on account of delays at the
front and rapid marching to regain lost distances.” If the regiment had been
farther ahead, the men with the rations could have “passed along the flanks of
the other regiments unnoticed,” but, being so far behind, they were arrested instead.
The march to Brownsville was not as urgent as some that the XXV Corps
had undertaken in Virginia, but it was no less exasperating. 30
Lieutenant Norton had an opportunity to observe the country as his regiment
followed the route several days later, after the road had dried somewhat. He saw
a boundless prairie, dotted here and there with prickly pears and Spanish bayonet.
. . . Part of the way the road lay through mesquit chaparral, impenetrable
thickets of scrubby, thorny trees, too small for shade and too dense to admit a
breath of air. . . . In passing through some parts of the country, the chaparral
People, 24 Jun 1864, T. S. Johnson Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; W. Goodale to
Dear Children, 4 Jul 1865, Goodale Papers; Christian Recorder, 29 July and 11 November 1865;
Norton, Army Letters, pp. 267–68; 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), p. 197.
29 Maj Gen G. A. Smith to Lt Col D. D. Wheeler, 29 Jun 1865, Entry 525, pt. 2, RG 393, NA; 1st Div,
XXV Corps, GO 49, 27 Jun 1865, Entry 533, pt. 2, RG 393, NA; NA M594, roll 216, 114th USCI; Christian
Recorder, 9 September 1865; C. G. G. Merrill to Dear Father, 2 Jul 1865, C. G. G. Merrill Papers, Yale
University, New Haven, Conn.; J. O. Moore to My Dearest Lizzie, 30 Jun 1865, J. O. Moore Papers.
30 Lt Col H. S. Hall to Maj A. Ware, 2 Jul 1865, 43d USCI, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA.