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
a brick, and he got up and came after me again, and then I knocked him down
with a brick.
The investigator concluded, “I shall endeavor to teach the inlisted men . . . to avoid
if possible difficulty with citizens, yet I will at the same time teach them never to
do so at the expense of their dignity and mand-hood and to disgrace the uniform
they wear.” Although such attacks made up only a small part of the violence directed
against freedmen, they became more frequent in the last months of 1865.
In December, reports appeared of black soldiers shot dead by white civilians at
Atlanta and in Calhoun and Hinds Counties, Mississippi. 22
Besides white Southerners, another group that was often hostile to black soldiers
and civilians was the body of white federal troops in the South. Most of
these men did not differ in their attitudes from the unfavorable national consensus
regarding black people, and they often used their authority as members of the
occupying force to annoy and injure black civilians and, at times, the black men
who were their own comrades in arms. One such incident occurred in Washington,
D.C., in October 1865. The 107th USCI had just arrived from North Carolina to
take up garrison duties around the capital and pitched its tents near the Soldier’s
Rest, a transit camp at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot, near the Capitol.
On the morning of 14 October, 3 officers and 1,576 enlisted men of the 6th U.S.
Cavalry arrived, having just turned in their horses before taking ship for Texas.
The officers quickly “left for points ‘up town,’” the quartermaster in charge of
the Soldier’s Rest learned, presumably in search of amusement. Within hours, “a
difficulty occurred . . . followed by blows, showers of stones and one gun shot”
that killed a soldier of the 107th. Authorities summoned five other regiments to
the scene before the riot subsided. Similar conflicts occurred in Charleston, South
Carolina, and in other cities where black and white soldiers with too few officers
and too much time on their hands encountered each other. 23
Most of the violence directed against black people in the South came on impulse
from individual whites. According to one count of more than fifteen hundred
attacks on black Texans during the years from 1865 to 1868, nearly 70 percent
were individual acts. The unpredictable nature of such violence made it all the
more intimidating, but what drew national attention to the campaign to subjugate
the freedmen was its most distinctive feature: groups of men who rode disguised,
22 Maj D. Conwell to Capt R. Wilson, 20 Dec 1865 (quotations verbatim), 5th USCA, Regimental
Books, RG 94, NA; Lt Col G. Curkendall to Brig Gen D. Tillson, 26 Dec 1865 (G–18–1866), NA
M752, roll 20; Maj Gen M. F. Force to Maj M. P. Bestow, 12 Dec 1865 (F–226–MDT–1865), Entry
926, Dept of the Cumberland, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA; Lt Col M. H. Tuttle to 1st Lt W. H. Williams,
21 Dec 1865, 50th USCI, Entry 57C, RG 94, NA; Joe G. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–
1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 421.
23 Capt W. W. Rogers to Capt A. H. Wands, 15 Oct 1865 (R–655–DW–1865); Capt E. M. Camp
to Colonel Taylor [Col J. H. Taylor], 17 Oct 1865 (quotations), filed with (f/w) RG–655–DW–1865;
Brig Gen F. T. Dent to General [Brig Gen A. V. Kautz], 14 Oct 1865; all in Entry 5382, Dept of
Washington, LR, pt. 1, RG 393, NA. 6th U.S. Cavalry return, Oct 1865, NA Microfilm Pub M744,
Returns from Regular Army Cav Rgts, roll 61; Mark L. Bradley, Bluecoats and Tarheels: Soldiers
and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009),
pp. 66–67, 123–24; Robert J. Zalimas, “A Disturbance in the City: Black and White Soldiers in
Postwar Charleston,” in Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era, ed.
John David Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 361–90.