Negroes and the Gun (13 page)

Not all Union officers agreed with McClellan. General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, commander of the Union stronghold at Fortress Munroe in Hampton, Virginia, treated fleeing slaves as contraband of war rather than returning them to their masters. Butler's aggressiveness on this point extended to recruiting blacks as spies and scouts.

The man reputed to be the first black armed for service in the war, a fugitive slave named George Scott, was deployed under General Butler. Although Scott was a new and novel addition to the Union force, he was thoroughly familiar with firearms. He had been on the run and hiding in the South for more than a year, carrying a pistol and a bowie knife taken in a fight with his master on the eve of his escape.
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Knowledge of the local terrain made Scott a valuable scout in hostile
territory. More than a year before President Abraham Lincoln decided to deploy black troops, Scott was assigned to accompany a Union force into the Battle of Big Bethel in York County, Virginia. In violation of policy and defying the bias of many white soldiers, General Butler commanded the squad, “George Scott is to have a revolver.”

George Scott's unsanctioned service was not unique. The war emboldened a whole class of daring and defiant Negroes. Some of them fled bondage on the news or rumor of the Union advance. Many left their plantations but stayed local, subsisting off of the land, stealing and poaching food. Some of them organized into bands of maroons forging, stealing, and fighting where they must.

The knowledge and skills these men brought to the fight were acknowledged in the compliment of a Union officer that, “Nowhere in the swamps of North Carolina, can you find a path where a dog can go that a Negro does not understand.” One observer in New Bern, North Carolina, commented in 1862 that more than fifty volunteers from this class of men were serving as spies, scouts, and guides, even though they were denied the status of soldiers. These black men ventured into hostile territory without the protection of the laws of war and spent weeks in the swamps and marshes with only meager provisions “and a good revolver.”
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When war policy changed and escaping Negroes were officially accepted, if not welcomed, behind Union lines, many of them settled in contraband camps that posed their own hazards. Recent escapees and their free black brethren built communities with all of the undertakings one would expect, including provisions for their personal security. Along with schools and burial societies, the shanty communities that grew up around Union strongholds also established private militias and vigilance squads. There was no formal program for arming these groups, and we can only speculate about the ease or difficulty with which they obtained firearms.

These communities could quickly turn hazardous with the shifting tides of battle. The possibility of Confederates retaking the field and raids by Confederate guerrillas posed deadly threats. This hazard to civilians was acute in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Union and Confederate forces fighting along the Tennessee border captured and recaptured Holly Springs fifty-nine times. Confederate forces showed little sympathy for Negro noncombatants. In December 1862, Confederates raided Holly Springs, carrying off and burning Union supplies stored there under a light guard. In the midst of flames and gunfire, were “negroes and abolitionists begging for mercy.”
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In Plymouth, North Carolina, fighting again degraded into the killing of black civilians settled behind shifting Union lines. In the aftermath of battle, Confederate troops, led by Colonel James Deering, executed twenty-five black prisoners in uniform and killed at least eighty more blacks, including women and children who were fleeing into a nearby swamp.
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But Negroes were not always victims in these contests. When Confederate
defenders lost Vicksburg in July 1863, blacks celebrated by raiding the homes of their former masters. In one case, a white planter shot at a group of black women who were rummaging through what was left of his property. A week earlier, this would have been an unremarkable response to black criminality. This time, however, the planter faced the wrath of armed black men who whipped him and then put a gun to his head and demanded that he call
them
master. These men are not recorded as soldiers, and we can only guess the sources of their guns.
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Even after they were given a uniform and a government rifle, Negroes were still dogged by the racial attitudes of the day. Rank was no shield from this blight. Witness the trials of Lieutenant John V. DeGrasse, a black doctor from Boston who traveled to North Carolina to enlist black recruits. He was accosted by white Union sailors who demanded to know on what authority he was there “recruiting niggers.” When they moved in close, DeGrasse drew his revolver and faced them down. As friends ran to his aid, the situation defused without gunfire. Some said that DeGrasse's armed stand helped establish the credibility of Negro recruiters and black officers generally.

A unique hazard to black Union soldiers was the refusal of Confederates to recognize them as legitimate combatants. Confederate murders and abuse of captured Negroes was a terror that continued throughout the war. There were reports of Confederate massacres of black soldiers in Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, and Florida.

A report from the
Charlotte Observer
reflects the attitude that fueled these massacres. “Ransom's brigade,” said an enlisted man, “never takes any Negro prisoners.” Major John Graham of Ransom's outfit wrote to his father about passing through Suffolk, Virginia, where the ladies of the town implored them to “kill the Negroes.” This plea was unnecessary, he said, because “it is understood amongst us that we take no Negro prisoners.”

One of the few white officers to effectively combat atrocities against black prisoners, General Edward Wild, was court-martialed for the attempt to protect his black troops. His sin was taking hostages from the families of Confederate guerrillas and publicizing that his captives would get the same treatment as his black soldiers in Confederate hands.
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As word spread about Confederate abuse of black prisoners, Negro soldiers themselves resolved to retaliate. Following the murder of black troops captured at the Battle at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Negro soldiers adopted the battle cry “Remember Fort Pillow,” and retaliated by executing Confederate prisoners in Louisiana and South Carolina. One eyewitness, a cavalryman from Maine, wrote home, “we had 200 niggers soldiers with us it did not make eny difference to them
about the Rebs surrendering. They would shoot them down. the officers had hard work to stop them from killing All the prisoners. when one of them would beg for his life the niggers would say rember Fort Pillow.”
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Fig. 3.2. Coverage of the New York draft riots. (“The Riots at New York—the rioters burning and sacking the colored orphan asylum,” wood engraving,
Harper's Weekly
magazine, August 1, 1863, p. 493.)

As the war chewed up resources and Union fortunes flagged, Congress enacted conscription that sparked draft riots in the North, and this riot rage was naturally channeled at blacks. In the summer of 1863, draft riots in New York City left 120 Negroes dead, thousands more injured, and a black orphanage in ashes.
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The gruesome details of these riots are well chronicled. Accounts like that of the hapless man hoisted up a tree while chunks of his flesh were carved out and thrown to the quivering mob fuel the intuition that blacks fled and cowered under a wave of unhinged violence
.
But some of them plainly fought back. Although the end result was tragic, Augustus Stuart was one who fought.

Stuart was armed with a pistol when he was set upon by a roving gang. He managed to escape the immediate attack, but in the fading light, he mistakenly perceived a company of soldiers as the mob back in pursuit. Stuart fired at them, and one of the mounted soldiers, appreciating only that he had been shot at, charged Stuart with his sword and ran him through.

Guns rendered a better result for a group of black laborers who were attacked by a mob of “two or three hundred vagabond Irishmen.” They fought off the attack with revolver fire until police arrived. The mob actually attacked the police in an attempt to get at the blacks but was repelled.
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We do not know whether or how often other versions of these scenarios
repeated during the draft riots. Nor do we know how many blacks retreated to some dark, quiet place and rode out the riots, quietly clutching guns. But in a related context, the calculations of Northern blacks illustrate a discernible culture of armed self-defense.

In 1864, 144 delegates met at the National Convention of Colored Men, in Syracuse, New York. This meeting was the genesis of the National Equal Rights League, one of the earliest national civil-rights organizations. Notable in attendance were Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet.
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Not everyone in Syracuse was friendly to the Convention of Colored Men. Before the proceedings even began, a group of Irish immigrants accosted Garnet, one of them kicking him from the behind and another sending him to the dirt with blow to the head. When Garnet's friends learned of the assault, they grabbed their revolvers and went searching for the attackers, who now had scattered into the night. While it is unclear whether Garnet was armed at the time of the attack, the report of his friends' armed response suggests the habits of the group.

One of the other men at the meeting, Abraham Galloway of North Carolina, was widely known to travel armed, and researchers report that this was typical of convention delegates, several of whom were fugitives from slavery. These men were painfully aware of the draft riots in New York City only a year earlier. Plus they had lived and fought through the full range of hazards that plagued Negroes through the middle of the nineteenth century. It would be surprising if they were not armed.
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The end of the Civil War left an army of occupation in the South. The natural tensions of military occupation were exacerbated by black troops. When the 46th US Colored Infantry entered Union-occupied territory in Mississippi, white planter John Bobb could not abide the insult of black soldiers on his property, picking his flowers. He attacked one of them with a brick. The soldier, Sergeant William Anderson, responded with superior force, shooting Bobb dead.
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These sorts of conflicts became more common with the changing complexion of the federal army. Only a fraction of Union troops occupied the South after the war, and the balance mustered out according to length of service. Because blacks were not admitted into ranks until the middle of the war, they were retained at a higher rate, making the occupying force “blacker” than the one that won the war. Estimates put black soldiers at about 10 percent of fighting forces. But by the last quarter of 1865, blacks made up about one third of the occupation army
.
Many Southerners took this as a deliberate Union insult.
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The recorded violence is surely only a fraction of the total, but it confirms that Negroes with guns and the authority of uniforms grated hard on defeated Confederates. One cryptic report of the killing of a black soldier explains the
outcome as a predictable result of the soldier taking “rather more liberty than an Anglo-Saxon likes to submit to.” Considering that prewar legal standards had justified white-on-black violence for offenses like “insolence,” it is easy to understand how Negroes in uniform, behaving like soldiers, inflamed many whites.
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Fig. 3.3. Henry Hyland Garnet. (Albumen silver print by James U. Stead, ca. 1881.)

The spectacle of Negroes with guns actually sent one old man into hysterics. As a column of Negro soldiers passed by to the cheers of a boisterous entourage of freedmen, the old Southern gentleman threw up his hands in horror and pleaded, “Blow Gabriel blow, for God's sake blow”—an evident plea for the world to end.
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