Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

The South Atlantic Coast, 1861–1863 33
Members of Company A, 1st South Carolina, take the oath at Beaufort, South
Carolina, late in 1862.
should be used as fatigue parties and on all fatigue duty.” On 9 August 1862, having
been unable to pay the men or issue commissions to the officers, Hunter disbanded
the regiment. He then went north on leave. Maj. Gen. Ormsby M. Mitchel arrived in
September to take command of the Department of the South and its troops. 23
One company of the 1st South Carolina had managed to escape disbanding.
The recently promoted Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, the military superintendent of
plantations, had dispatched Capt. Charles T. Trowbridge’s Company A to St.
Simon’s Island, Georgia. Saxton was worried about raids from the mainland
on all the Sea Islands, but especially St. Simon’s, with its four hundred selfsustaining
and armed black residents. These had recently driven off a party of
rebel marauders, Saxton told Secretary of War Stanton. A Confederate general
had urged that the defenders of St. Simon’s, if captured, “should be hanged
as soon as possible at some public place as an example,” as though he were
suppressing a slave rebellion. Saxton requested authority to enroll five thousand
quartermaster’s laborers “to be uniformed, armed, and officered by men
detailed from the Army.” When permission arrived, he set to work at once. 24
The problem, as Saxton saw it, was that the number of potential recruits on
the islands was limited. “In anticipation of our action,” he told Stanton in mid-
October, “the rebels are moving all their slaves back from the sea-coast as fast as
they can.” In response, federal troops would reach the slaves by raiding up the region’s
numerous rivers. These raids would constitute an important part of military
23 OR, ser. 1, 14: 376, 382; A. H. Young to My Dear Susan, 12 Jul 1862 (“the best”), A. H. Young
Papers, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.; Dudley T. Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in
the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1956), pp. 48–49 (“General Hunter”).
Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 13–15, tells the story of Hunter’s early
efforts to recruit black troops.
24 OR, ser. 1, 6: 77–78 (“should be hanged”), 81; 14: 374–76 (“to be uniformed”).