Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

The South Atlantic Coast, 1863 –1865 73
Newly arrived Union troops found the South full of strange plants and animals.
Here, officers and men of the 29th Connecticut stand beneath a large tree
apparently festooned with Spanish moss.
nah, “where I think we can make a ‘ten strike.’” 40 Officers in some of the black
regiments had been worried that spring about the possibility of mutinies because
of the men’s dissatisfaction with their low pay and Congress’ inattention to the
matter; but when the men of the 54th Massachusetts received orders on 30 June
to leave their insect- and vermin-ridden camp on Morris Island and prepare for a
campaign, they were “jubilant, cheerful as can be, joking each other and anxious
to meet the Rebs.” 41
General Foster ordered three separate Union brigades to head inland during
the first week of July, a process that on the South Carolina coast amounted to
island hopping. A brigade of white troops led by Col. William W. H. Davis steamed
north from Hilton Head Island to disembark on John’s Island, about ten miles
from Charleston and a stretch of the railroad that ran west from the city parallel
to the Stono River. General Saxton’s brigade, which included the 26th USCI, left
Beaufort, on Port Royal Island, to join Davis’ brigade. General Birney’s brigade,
brought from Florida and composed of the 7th, 34th, and 35th USCIs, went up the
North Edisto River and landed on the mainland, some distance west of the first
two brigades but far enough inland to be about the same distance as the others
40 OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 2, pp. 146–47, 155–58 (quotations, p. 157); Official Records of the
Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1894–1922), ser. 1, 15: 514–15 (hereafter cited as ORN).
41 Appleton Jnl, p. 249. Complaints about insects and vermin on Morris Island are on pp. 216,
221, 237, and 245.