Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Conclusion 499
than twelve thousand soldiers, roughly the same number as served in one of the
corps that made up the Army of the Cumberland, which wintered at Chattanooga. 4
To suppose that garrison duty or guarding a railroad removed troops from the
likelihood of fighting is to ignore the fluid nature of the war, especially west of
the Appalachians. Infantry escorting a wagon train might receive little warning
before finding itself heavily engaged with Confederate raiders, as could happen
anywhere from Arkansas to Virginia. The Confederate cavalry leader Nathan B.
Forrest was able to raid as far north as the Ohio River, where the 8th U.S. Colored
Artillery served in the garrison of Paducah, Kentucky, in the spring of 1864. That
December, the Confederate Army of Tennessee camped outside Nashville for more
than a week before being driven off, although Union troops had occupied the city
for nearly three years. Black soldiers who had spent the previous year guarding
the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad helped to repel this last Confederate offensive.
Even as late as the last twelve months of fighting, Union troops far in the
rear of advancing federal armies might receive a visit from a formidable body of
Confederates at almost any time. 5
While the Lincoln administration may have intended a defensive role for the
new black regiments, Union generals in the field did not hesitate to put them into
action. The best results came at first from operations for which the troops were
already well adapted, such as the early riverine expeditions in South Carolina
and Florida, where locally recruited black soldiers were operating on their home
ground. New regiments tended to do less well when their first battle was an assault
on enemy trenches: witness the disasters that befell the Louisiana Native Guards at
Port Hudson in May 1863 and the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner less than two
months later. Still, the survivors of those misconceived attacks became seasoned
campaigners. In February 1864, seven months after the reverse at Fort Wagner, the
54th Massachusetts helped to save the Union army at Olustee, Florida, while a new
black regiment in the same fight, the 8th United States Colored Infantry (USCI),
had trouble simply loading and firing its weapons. The 8th, in its turn, did well
eight months later during the fall campaign in Virginia. So did the 73d USCI (the
1st Louisiana Native Guards of the Port Hudson assault) when it helped to capture
Fort Blakely, near Mobile, in the last days of the war. 6
Black soldiers clearly had little trouble carrying out assignments when they
relied on knowledge they already possessed or when they received adequate training.
Unfortunately for them, that training could be a matter of chance. It might
depend on the preoccupations of a colonel commanding a new regiment who led
his men into battle without having taught them to load and fire their weapons or on
the racial beliefs of a general commanding a garrison, who might see black soldiers
only as a source of manual labor and deny them time for drill. Although white
4 OR, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, pp. 598, 608–09, 611, 614; vol. 31, pt. 3, pp. 548–49, 564. Winfield
Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott (New York: Sheldon, 1864), p. 627.
5 For the attack on a Union wagon train at Poison Spring, Arkansas, see above, Chapter 8; for
Forrest’s attack on Paducah, Chapter 7; for black soldiers’ part in the battle of Nashville, Chapter 9.
Other Confederate raids on wagon trains are in Chapters 7, 9, and 11.
6 On riverine operations in South Carolina and Florida, see above, Chapters 2 and 3; on Fort
Wagner, Chapter 2; on Port Hudson, Chapter 4; on Olustee, Chapter 3; on the 8th USCI in Virginia,
Chapters 11 and 12; on Mobile, Chapter 5.