Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Conclusion 503
railroad construction and in 1871 helped to found Aiken County, where he served
as a judge in later years. 15
Somewhat more typical of black veterans was Harry Williams of the same
regiment, who had led twenty-seven South Carolina slaves to freedom in November
1863. He moved to Savannah after the war and worked with his brother cleaning
houses and offices. He “taught a night school one year,” as he told a pension
examiner in 1889, “and he was in politicks and stumped as a speaker in political
campaigns and [was] interested in public affairs.” His political activities may have
been the reason he moved north after the 1876 presidential election heralded the
end of Reconstruction. Williams worked as a waiter and boarding-house keeper in
Philadelphia and a laundryman in New Jersey until his death in 1917. 16
About three thousand veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops enlisted in the six
new black regiments of the Regular Army in 1866 and 1867. While they represented
only 2 percent of black Civil War veterans, they made up half the strength
of the new regiments and furnished them with most of their noncommissioned
officers. For the vast majority of these soldiers, a single enlistment in the regulars
was enough. One such was Henry James, former sergeant major of the 3d USCI,
who had led an expedition into the interior of Florida during the last days of the
war. In October 1866, he joined the 9th U.S. Cavalry. On a scout in western Texas
three years later, he contracted an infection of the urinary tract that necessitated his
discharge for disability. He died at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1895. 17
That was longer than most black veterans survived the war, as the federal census
of 1890 showed. Successful pension applicants tended to be among the longer
lived, for as successive Congresses expanded eligibility, the ranks of pensioners
grew. William A. Messley was one such applicant. As a first sergeant in the 62d
USCI, Messley had taken command of a company at Palmetto Ranch, Texas, when
the commissioned officers were out of action. After the war, rheumatism crippled
him. He wrote to the Commissioner of Pensions in 1887: “Hundreds of Times have
I wished for death to relieve me of this Everlasting disease.” Yet he lived on for
nearly thirty more years, dying at Chicago in 1916. Dick Brown, taken prisoner in
September 1864 along with half of the 100th USCI, tried to continue blacksmithing
after the war, but rheumatism prevented it. “I have not been able to make more
than half a hand at my trade since my discharge,” he attested in 1891. “Some days
15 “War-Time Letters from Seth Rogers,” p. 7 (quotation), typescript at U.S. Army Military
History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.; Report of the Eleventh Census, Part 2, p. 807; Foner, Reconstruction,
pp. 62, 570; Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, p. 246; Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political
Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977),
pp. 76–80; Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction,
1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 27, 393–94.
16 Pension File SC738833, Harry Williams, Civil War Pension Application Files (CWPAF),
Record Group (RG) 15, Rcds of the Veterans Admin, National Archives (NA). Quotation from
applicant’s affidavit, 11 Jun 1889.
17 Pension File C2747723, Henry James, CWPAF; William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips,
The Black Regulars, 1866–1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), pp. 13, 24; Donald
R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 2004), p. 39.