Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

38
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton’s headquarters at Beaufort stood between two other large
planters’ houses.
any suggestion from any person, broke forth in the song, ‘My country tis of
thee.’” 35
Some of the white visitors on the speakers’ platform began to sing, too, but
Higginson hushed them. “I never saw anything so electric,” he wrote:
It made all other words cheap, it seemed the choked voice of a race, at last
unloosed; nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have
dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will
not believe it. . . . Just think of it; the first day they had ever had a country, the
first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people,—& here
while others stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words these simple souls
burst out in their lay, as if they were squatting by their own hearths at home.
35 Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, pp. 75–76 (“& from”); Chase Papers, 3: 352. Higginson
wrote that “a strong but rather cracked & elderly male voice, into which two women’s voices
immediately blended,” began the singing. Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, pp. 76–77. Surgeon
Rogers first heard a woman’s voice, as did Harriet Ware, one of the “Gideonite” teachers on the Sea
Islands. “War-Time Letters from Seth Rogers,” p. 5; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, p. 130. For
Brisbane’s career, see Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, p. 176; Chase Papers, 3: 354.