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
ninety-odd escaped slaves who had joined Captain Trowbridge’s raid earlier
that month. They had not yet had time for much drill, but they had certainly
come under fire. 29
The 1st South Carolina’s camp, as Chaplain James H. Fowler put it, was to
be “a field for work.” It is clear from the context of the chaplain’s remark that
he meant philanthropic and missionary work, but Higginson began “tightening
reins” and imposing a training regimen that within a month brought his command
to a pitch that won Saxton’s approval. “I stood by General Saxton—who is
a West Pointer—the other night,” the regiment’s surgeon wrote home, “witnessing
the dress parade and was delighted to hear him say that he knew of no other
man who could have magically brought these blacks under the military discipline
that makes our camp one of the most enviable.” Although volunteers came in
“tolerably fast,” by early December their number was still two hundred short of
the minimum required to organize a regiment. Higginson decided to send two
of his officers “down the coast to Fernandina and St. Augustine” to recruit in
northeastern Florida. 30
The least populous state in the Confederacy, Florida remained an afterthought
of federal military policy throughout the war. Except for the Union advance in the
Mississippi Valley, operations outside Virginia were of secondary importance to
the Army’s leaders. Least important in their eyes were coastal operations. After
Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan failed to capture Richmond in the spring of 1862,
he drew reinforcements from North Carolina and the Department of the South. The
decrease amounted to more than half the Union troops in North Carolina and onethird
of those farther south. 31
Florida’s east coast lay within the Department of the South. Beginning at the
St. Mary’s River, which formed part of the state’s border with Georgia, a series of
anchorages stretched some eighty miles south, as far as St. Augustine. These had attracted
the attention of Union strategists during the war’s first summer. South of the
St. Mary’s, the estuary of the St. John’s River led to Jacksonville, the state’s thirdlargest
town. From there, a railroad ran west to Tallahassee, and beyond that to St.
Mark’s on the Gulf Coast. 32
Production of Sea Island cotton in Florida had expanded greatly during the
1850s. Toward the end of the decade, the crop nearly equaled that of South Carolina.
The three counties along the coast between the St. Mary’s River and St.
Augustine were home to 4,602 slaves (39 percent of the region’s total popula-
29 Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, p. 47. For more on nineteenth-century ideas about
intelligence, see William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866–1898
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), p. 295n42.
30 Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, pp. 47 (“tightening”), 245 (“a field”), 250 (“down the
coast”), 252 (“tolerably fast”); “War-Time Letters from Seth Rogers,” pp. 1–2 (“I stood”), typescript
at U.S. Army Military History Institute (MHI), Carlisle, Pa.
31 OR, ser. 1, 9: 406, 408–09, 414; 14: 362, 364, 367. Stephen A. Townsend, The Yankee
Invasion of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), shows that from late
1863 to the end of the war, Union troop strength on the Gulf Coast of Texas fluctuated according
to manpower needs elsewhere. The Department of the South was subject to similar demands from
the summer of 1862 through the summer of 1864.
32 OR, ser. 1, 6: 100. Pensacola’s population was 2,876; Key West’s 2,832; Jacksonville’s 2,118.
Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, p. 54. The strategists’ conclusions about
northeastern Florida are in OR, ser. 1, 53: 64–66.