Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

The South Atlantic Coast, 1861–1863 53
ment in the attack, but not by much:
the 7th New Hampshire and 48th New
York, with strengths that were about
three-quarters and two-thirds that of
the 54th Massachusetts, lost 216 and
242—smaller totals, but just as large,
or larger, percentages. Total Union
losses were 246 killed, 880 wounded,
and 389 missing. 70
The missing men represented a
worry for the 54th Massachusetts, as
other black soldiers taken prisoner
would for their regiments throughout
the war. The Confederacy’s first
official reaction to the Union’s
raising black regiments had been to
declare that captured officers and
men of those regiments would be
tried in state courts on charges of
insurrection, a capital offense. The
federal government soon announced
policies of retaliation for mistreatment
of prisoners; and for the rest of the
war, the matter depended largely on
the judgment of the generals on both
sides who commanded field armies
and geographical departments. 71
Officers and men of the 54th
Massachusetts learned eventually
that twenty-nine of the men reported
missing at Fort Wagner had been taken
prisoner; the rest had been killed.
Word reached the regiment in December
that two of the prisoners, Sgt. Walter
A. Jeffries and Cpl. Charles Hardy,
were to have stood trial for insurrection
but that a prominent Charleston
Sgt. Maj. Lewis Douglass of the
54th Massachusetts was a son of
the abolitionist
Frederick Douglass.
attorney, Nelson Mitchell, had volunteered to defend them. Mitchell, according
to rumor, pointed out that the court would have to try Jeffries and Hardy at
the place where they had committed the offense of insurrection and that Fort
70 OR, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 1, pp. 10–12, 362–63; Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, p. 105; Peter C.
Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985–1992), 5: 241 (quotation).
71 Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, pp. 201–03. For examples of discussion at the local level, see
correspondence of Brig. Gen. Q. A. Gillmore, commanding the Union Department of the South, and
General P. G. T. Beauregard, commanding the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia,
and Florida, July–August 1863. OR, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 2, pp. 11–13, 21, 25–26, 37–38, 45–46.