Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

494
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
suits. The order might have had greater effect if there had been enough troops to
cover the region, but there were not. 82
Congress attempted to remedy this lack on 28 July, the last day of the session,
by passing an act that increased the size of the Army. The peacetime establishment
expanded by four regiments of cavalry, two of them with black enlisted men.
The nine infantry regiments that had been raised in 1861, with three battalions of
eight companies each, were broken up into twenty-seven ten-company regiments
to match the organization of the ten senior infantry regiments. This added fiftyfour
infantry companies to the force. In addition, the act created four new infantry
regiments with black enlisted men (another forty companies) and four regiments
of wounded veterans, which, when organized, garrisoned Washington, D.C.; Nashville,
Tennessee; and posts along the Canadian border, releasing regiments of ablebodied
troops for service in the South or West. In all, the act added 48 companies
of cavalry and 134 of infantry—more than fourteen thousand officers and men—to
the Regular Army as it had existed since the spring of 1861. Still, the new organization
added little to the enforcement of congressional Reconstruction measures;
for while more than one-third of the infantry served in the South for at least a few
years, all of the new mounted regiments went west. 83
As commanding officers in the South looked around them in the summer
of 1866, what they saw was not encouraging. Lt. Col. Orrin McFadden of the
80th USCI reported “very little change ” around Alexandria, in central Louisiana.
“Union men whether of northern or southern birth are living in extreme jeopardy
of their lives.” He mentioned “extremely bitter feeling” against Henry N. Frisbie,
former colonel of the 92d USCI, who ran a plantation some twenty miles from
Alexandria. “The only ground . . . for this hostility,” McFadden wrote, “is the fact
that Col. F. treats his laborers decently, and accords to them the common rights of
humanity.” Besides legal harassment in the courts, Frisbie had received threats that
led him to arm his plantation hands that spring. 84
The number of former Union officers who stayed in the South to farm after the
war is uncertain, but there were certainly scores, if not hundreds, of them among
the thousands of Northerners who took up plantation agriculture. Frisbie was not
the only one to arm his workers; some thirty-five miles northeast of Vicksburg,
Morris Yeomans’ plantation was home to fifty veterans of his former regiment,
the 70th USCI. Surrounded by “those who have not ceased to be our constant and
unrelenting foes,” they went “thoroughly armed,” Yeomans told a staff officer at
82 Maj Gen O. O. Howard to Lt Gen U. S. Grant, 3 Jul 1866, quoted in Grant Papers, 16:
229. The text of Grant’s order is on p. 228. Queries from officers in the South about the effects of
Johnson’s proclamation and Grant’s order appear on p. 229 and in McPherson, Political History,
p. 17. See also James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), pp. 77–82, 92–94; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 239–
51; Simpson, Reconstruction Presidents, pp. 92–99.
83 Heitman, Historical Register, 2: 601, 604. Troop stations appear in the Army and Navy
Journal, 28 July 1866 and 20 July 1867. Heitman, Historical Register, 2: 601, shows five of six
mounted regiments as having ten companies each, but the Army standardized the size of cavalry
regiments at twelve companies in 1862. Mary L. Stubbs and Stanley R. Connor, Armor-Cavalry,
Part 1: Regular Army and Army Reserve, U.S. Army Lineage Series (Washington, D.C.: Office of
the Chief of Military History, 1969), p. 16.
84 Lt Col O. McFadden to 1st Lt N. Burbank, 12 Jul 1866, Entry 25, Post of Alexandria, LS,
pt. 4, RG 393, NA; H. N. Frisbie to Maj W. Hoffman, 22 May 1866, Entry 1757, pt. 1, RG 393, NA.