menu_book Chapter 8

chapter eight of historical romance of the american negro by charles fowler this librivox recording is in the public domain the fight at marion tennessee the battle of nashville success of the northern armies massacre at fort pillow the rebels refused to exchange colored soldiers our defeat at olosti eighty thousand northern prisoners perishing in southern prisons the mine at petersburg the wealth of the south a soldier's song when we consider that there were two hundred thousand or more colored men in the field and that they were engaged in fights large and small somewhere or other every day all over the far-spreading south where all did so well and receive the praises of the brave and true it seems to me ridiculous at this time of day to look back and select particular actions wherein they distinguish themselves

but i am not aware that i can do any better than many worthy writers have done before me there was one circumstance however or rather course of similar circumstances that struck those of us at home who closely followed the war as detailed by private letters and dispatches in the public newspapers which was that on many memorable occasions the colored regiments saved the defeated and flying white troops from complete destruction and white men were thankful enough to be saved by our men and who could blame them they were both in the field to assist one another in every possible way i'm not claiming more for the colored troops than belongs to them but let them have their rights no just man will give them less it was in the beginning of december eighteen sixty four that a regular battle took place near marion tennessee for the destruction of the marion salt works the battle commenced in the morning and fluctuated backwards and forwards the greater part of the day

general stoneman who commanded the federals at last found himself badly beaten by the confederates under general breckinridge the national troops were in a desperate condition and nothing but destruction stared them in the face there was no time to be lost the fate of the northern army was trembling in the scales general stoneman at once ordered up the black troops whom he divided into three columns he placed general burbridge at the head of one column gave another to colonel wade and the third to general brisbane colonel wade led the right column general burbridge the left and general brisbane the centre wade got off first and sailed into the rebels in gallant style burbridge piled his overcoat on the ground drew his sword and led his column forward like lions most of the officers and all the men were on foot wade's horse was soon shot after which he led his men on foot and they were the first to strike the confederate line who fired time after time but wade's column advanced rapidly for a hand-to-hand fight with the rebels they went through the confederate lines like an iron wedge when the enemy broke turned and ran

burbridge hit with all his might on the left and brisbane's men in the centre also covered themselves with glory men never did better in this world when their guns were empty they clubbed their foes with the butt ends many of the latter jumping fully fifteen feet down the opposite side of the hill to get out of the way of our infuriated men the night was now coming on sauve qui the rebels fled in the darkness and ultimately took the north carolina road fleeing over the mountains thus ended the grand struggle for the salt works of marion tennessee our troops now advanced nor stopped till their destruction was complete we all know that it must go very hard indeed with any people when they have got no salt poor things what could they do without salt so these coveted salt works at marion were destroyed by the union army but not till the army had been first rescued from destruction by the colored troops who were attached to the service there I don't know how it happened, but somehow or other the northern generals had a great deal of confidence in colored men, whom they often put aside, and held in reserve in case of the direst necessity in the end, and when the worst might come to the worst.

It was then that our faithful fellows were called forwards to save the armies, and they saved them too, standing like walls of adamant between the white Unionists and their terrible foes. Our brave boys often did as well elsewhere as they did at Marion. It used to be the grand hue and cry in the beginning of the war that if colored men were enlisted into the armies of the Union, they would not fight like their white brothers even we ladies who surely were never intended to fight in the ranks we ladies living far away up in the north at buffalo used to laugh at the whole thing as a joke for certainly everybody knew better but that miserable parrot cry ceased after a while and was no more heard of

another grievance in the beginning of the enlistment of colored troops was to offer them smaller pay than white men some of our regiments absolutely refused to take less others took what was offered but as a general thing between congress and the states themselves all things were put right at last and justice was done by making things about even but whether right or wrong the troops never refused to do their duty it certainly was a shameful and shabby affair to offer them less because many of them certainly were superior to their white brothers in the field the color of the skin was a poor miserable reason for giving them less general t j morgan gives a long and brilliant account of his connection with several colored regiments at the department of cumberland he is also very jokey and furnished us with a great many amusing anecdotes which he loves to relate he gives us some very good sketches of the battle of nashville tennessee which occupied two days in the middle of december eighteen sixty four a thaw had set in the ice and cold had given way and general george t thomas now took advantage of the opportunity

that presented itself to compel the rebel general hood to raise the siege of nashville it was decided that general morgan and his colored regiments should begin the attack on the union left as soon as they could see their way in the dawn of that december morning after an early breakfast morgan and his men advanced upon the rebel right with unbounded enthusiasm and struck it with all their might their attacks were simply irresistible and although the southerners fought with their accustomed stubbornness and bravery they had to give way general hood was under the impression that this attack upon his left was to be the grand attack of the day's battle but it was a feint to draw off his men from his right where general thomas struck him with awful force doubled him up and forced the whole rebel army right left and center to retreat for the space of two miles thus the first day's battle which the colored troops began was a complete success along the whole line although we lost many a brave man general hood made haste to fortify himself and threw up entrenchments on his line of battle in short he did everything that a prudent general upon the defensive could do but the white and colored troops followed up their success by attacking his forces with unwonted vigor and enthusiasm on the morning of the second day the southerners not being gods nor made even of iron now turned and fled

a general pursuit of the rebels at once began colored and white alike pressed on like hounds behind the hares we followed them all the way to franklin tennessee followed them day and night and traversed hundreds of miles with mud and rains the roads were in a dreadful condition many of our brave men lost their shoes in the deep and sticky mud but still kept on though their feet were cold and bled into the bargain At night they would take down fence rails and such like to make fires to keep themselves warm. General Hood fled away and returned no more. The Confederacy was now beginning to shake in every limb of its body.

The North determined to hold on. Thus our own 200,000 colored men contributed to the grand result. As the songs of the day said, the colored troops fought bravely. About the 20th of April, 1864, After I'd given the children their breakfast and sent them to school, the letter carrier came up the steps with another missive from my own dear Tom, and just as I had opened it to begin to read it, who came into the room but dear mother, so to work we went and read the letter together.

New Orleans, April, 1864 Mrs. Beulah Lincoln My dear Beulah, with great pleasure I sit down to answer all the delightful letters I have received from yourself and the girls. Your letters have been a very great joy to me, indeed, all the time I have been in the hospital. They have actually helped me to mend by keeping up my spirits.

At least that is what the doctors and nurses say who have read some of your letters and they like them so much. They were greatly delighted over your letters on your trip to Canada. if it had not been for my wound my residence at this beautiful hospital in the sunny south would have been almost as great a treat to me as the month you and the girls spent at richmond hill because here comes neither frost nor snow and the sun is always bright and genial and the flowers scent the air all the year round and the winds come through the open windows just laden with their fragrance but thank god i shall soon be well now and then i will go back to the war if it is not all over by the time i receive my discharge from this good hospital if the war is not over then i will go back to the field

but if it is all over and then i'm likely to get my discharge from the army and come home i've taken notes of all the active operations in which i was engaged in the field up to the time i was wounded and i think i will write and publish a book when i come home all the events let things be going as they may i'm sure that they are going ten times better now that our glorious grant has got the chief command over all the armies in the field throughout the far extended seat of war in the south before he took command even a child could see how our northern generals and colonels themselves wrangled and were jealous of one another and carried on it always appeared to me that before grant took command they wasted as much strength and national resources as the rebels themselves did too many cooks spoil the broth and they also resembled a bulky team of cross-grained mules pulling kicking and flinging against one another indeed they had a great deal to learn and that was how to agree but grant put them all to rights with a few shuffles of national cards he made all things work aright and those who were too anxious to be bosses he either set off on one side by themselves or else sent them home about their business

in this respect the rebels had been far wiser than we were they had of course their quarrels and disagreements also but never to the extent as ourselves but grant ended all that and i observe that the secession has been ailing very much ever since It will be old news to you to speak in this letter about the late massacre of white and colored officers and soldiers at Fort Pillow, where General Forrest and his men murdered hundreds of our own brave fellows in cold blood. I understand that although that massacre occurred only a few days ago, so to speak that the war cry, remember Fort Pillow, has already been made in quite a number of the most recent engagements between colored troops and rebels on the seat of war. The wholesale murder of our own men and officers at Fort Pillow is the entire conversation throughout the hospital, the city of New Orleans, and the entire South. Surely that murder was winked at by the rebel government at Richmond from the very first day when a rebel was shot dead by a former servant.

All the rebels of the South together have been more faint at heart than if they had got the leprosy. There has been a constant attempt from the first to treat colored troops not as soldiers under the United States government, but as perfect outlaws or even as wild animals themselves. A certain kind of shudder, a horror, a something that no man can describe seems to have taken possession of the rebel breast. At the very idea of letting loose their former slaves against their masters, they think that this is awful indeed and hold up their hands in holy horror. and this horror of theirs holds good not only with regard to the colored troops themselves but it is even more bitter if possible when directed against the white officers who trained them in the art of war and who led them on the battlefield it is true that we have officers chosen from among ourselves but then we are all one army and we must go shares hand in hand with the rest in the general conflict

it was not only a great crime in general forrest and his rebels murdering hundreds of union men at fort pillow but it was the greatest blunder they have yet committed as they will themselves find out at once instead of making over two hundred thousand men afraid of them or deterring them from the battle entirely we shall only go into battle ten times more eagerly than before and do fighting ten times more valiant than ever a shutter has already run over the entire north that will do more to unite the whole union than if we had gained one of the greatest victories of war The Southern policy from Jefferson Davis downwards is to ignore us completely as men and to treat us as goods and chattels still. Jeff even issued a proclamation against Benjamin F. Butler at New Orleans,

treating him as an outlaw for organizing regiments of colored troops or in fact for pressing their former slaves into the war in any shape or form. At the same time, they themselves have made use of their slaves to throw up breastworks and to do all kinds of labor almost from the hour when they themselves at first rebelled their theory is that they have a perfect right to use their slaves to fight against the union and we who own the whole nation must not indeed even touch them with our little fingers this will never do because it is a game the two of us at least cannot play at it will never be known until the great day of judgment what became of all the colored soldiers who fell into the hands of the rebels it is true that the rebel authorities directed them to be handed over to the states to which they belonged to be dealt with by the civil laws of those states

out even this is a subject upon which i can obtain no information whatever i can only say that their path is unknown and they have never been seen alive after their capture of other things we are more certain the southern soldiers have been seen killing their colored prisoners on the battlefield killing them in hospitals and in many ways awarding to them the treatment we would give to any wild animal that we shot at a hunt from the very first the rebels at richmond have refused to exchange colored prisoners like white prisoners of war they have never even exchanged a single man there is an old saying that those whom the gods intend to destroy they first make mad that is insane we do not thank the rebel crew for attempting to treat us as outlaws and wild beasts but we will do one thing for them for all this we will now assist in pulling down their confederacy far faster than we have done before as to the murder at fort pillow the whole thing was of course a put-up job after fighting all the morning and finding ten times more trouble to get into the fort than they ever expected at one p m they sent in a flag of truce but whilst they pretended to be parleying around

that flag of truce the rebels rapidly and quietly pushed their men up on the sides of the fort which was contrary to the laws of war and then breaking off the truce made a sudden rush into the fort and took it then we surrendered but the rebels would not receive our surrender and their massacre began they shot down and killed our officers and men in every possible way after they had given up their weapons of war general forrest and other rebel commanders were there and allowed the carnage to go on that afternoon and next morning the rebels took our men nailed some of them to the floors of old wooden buildings to which they next set fire and thus burned them while yet alive then they called out others one by one and shot them as fast as they appeared one of the principal white officers was murdered on the road as the rebels were marching away from the fort at least he never came through alive no doubt that congress will appoint a commission of inquiry at once and make a complete examination of the whole affair and the entire truth will be established from the mouths of those white and black soldiers who escaped in the meantime we have facts enough at hand to put all the above beyond the shadow of a doubt it was horrible my dear beulah i had much more to write to you about but the doctors will be here in a quarter of an hour and as i wish you to receive my letter without delay i will now draw it to a hurried end and leave the balance for my next epistle in the meantime my dear beulah

keep the girls steady at school for after good religion i think that good education put to good use is the grandest ornament in the world and in a woman i think it looks splendid also give all my love to mr and mrs john b sutherland and give them a reading of this letter and let our children read it too by all means i just feel my dear as if i could go on writing to you for a month you are such a comfort but good-bye god bless you tata your thrice loving tom my indulgent and kind readers i would be glad if i could draw down the veil upon the disasters and defeats we met with from the hands of the rebels whilst our brave men were battling for freedom and the reunion of all the states but alas that would never do and i must tell the whole truth on both sides we had our victories in plenty and there was a general caving-in of secessia going on continually but oh dear me what drawbacks and disasters there are for the historian to tell The whole nation was still smarting from our signal defeat at Olostee, Florida, when the butchery at Fort Pillow fell upon us like a thunderstorm in summer.

I can't tell which was the worst in its way, our complete defeat, our flight and almost total annihilation at Olostee or the barbarous murders at Fort Pillow. our defeat at olestee took place on the twentieth of february eighteen sixty four we must in the first place thank our general gilmore for disobeying orders and leading his black and white troops into the perfect trap which the rebels had prepared for us among the forest trees at olestee battle, wildly rushed one regiment after another into the powerful rebel position that lay concealed between two swamps, where our poor fellows were just mown down like grass before the scythe. When eight hundred colored soldiers and six hundred white ones had thus been placed

hors de combat, we turned and fled for Jacksonville, and all along the way the rebels followed up our retreat, and all the fugitives alike shared the disasters of a defeat which was most complete in every part. The exaltation at the south, of course, was as great as our depression of spirits at the north, for it was another Braddock's defeat over again, but then war is as much of a game as a game of cards or a game at the checkerboard. Thus one was in joy whilst the other was in grief,

in the same way the dark night follows the bright day and sunshine gives way to shadow. It is the self-same with the individual as with the nation, which one of us has not had a grand day of triumph as well as is night of fortune and distress what proportion our defeats bore to our victories i am at this time unable to say but i know they were a very high percentage of the whole as we found out to our cause it is not my intention to open up the whole question but there is at

least one horror that i must mention besides actual conflict on the battlefield which is that the nation lost about eighty thousand men that were starved to death i might almost say or perished through misusage and neglect and the want of all comforts in the southern prisons at Richmond, Andersonville, and elsewhere. While we were fattening their men in our northern cities and exchanging them as prisoners of war so they might take the field against us once more,

our poor fellows who were merely skin and bone were returned to us only to remain mental and bodily wrecks on our hands the rest of their days. Few of them indeed were ever found fit to go back to the field again. Thus 80,000 men, some at least of whom were colored, died in the South from want of sufficient food, from cold in the winters, and almost every other conceivable and bad reason, such as the want of medicine, proper nursing and attention during sickness,

and so forth. No wonder, then, that our people used to associate the murders at Fort Pillar and the deaths in the southern prisons together. We also met with a great defeat at the explosion of the mine at Petersburg on the 30th of July 1864. That turned out one of the greatest blunders and most bungled affairs of the whole war. It was decided that the colored troops should lead the charge into Petersburg after the explosion had cleared the way for the advance and attack.

Then a general, who ranked higher in a spirit of jealousy, countermanded the first and best arrangements and ordered his white troops to lead the advance. Then the mine itself did not explode until some hours after the appointed time. When the explosion came, the advance and attack were so bungled that the whole affair turned out a complete failure. The attacking troops were also caught inside the crater in a perfect trap, and the colored troops who were sent in to their aid

fared no better. In fact, at last, there was neither advance nor retreat for anyone, and things were even worse than at Olesti, and all had to surrender in a body prisoners of war. Thus all our labors were thrown away at Petersburg on that fatal morning through jealousy and every kind of bungling and mismanagement. General Grant has recorded it in his life that if the first arrangements had been carried out, they would no doubt have succeeded in capturing the city.

But such are jealousy and ignorance. These were the two grand causes of the disaster of the Union armies during the first half of the war, and all these misfortunes happened in the face of an ever watchful and desperate enemy who had staked everything on the issue life fortune and all an enemy fighting with all his might for the institution of slavery and for the control of his own land and government without interference from uncle sam but so it has ever been with all wars that the historian has ever recorded nations have their dark days as well as their bright ones and if we had great and crowning victories we also had our defeats in dark days before my dear tom got wounded and was taken to the hospital at new orleans i received a letter from him describing a march his regiment had down the banks of a beautiful river

in mississippi after which they came upon the boundaries of one of those grand mansions that i alluded to before as almost excelling the princely palaces of the grandees of europe we used to think riverside hall something continues my dear letter writer but riverside hall was nothing to belmont as this place was called the family had all left and there was nobody in and about the princely place no wonder that the slaveholder had grown rich with a thousand people to work for them for nothing and themselves pocketing the entire proceeds of their labours and toils all they had to do was to bank their money and lay it out in eating and drinking and right as living as the bible tells us no wonder that they had pleasant trees and shrubbery and fine streams gliding through the park here the smooth lawns reminding one of the garden of eden before the fall of our first parents no wonder that they had grand statuary all along their graveled walks along which fine carriages and lordly companies on foot glided along their sunny way in the palmy days of slavery now departed to return nevermore

in the sunny south this day we march down the banks of one of the sweetest rivers i've seen in the state of mississippi i've written a few verses on the subject written them on a marble table in the interior of splendid belmont a mansion which for glory and for beauty it would dazzle your eyes to look upon here are the lines i composed upon the southern river across the bridge we made our way the dancing waves sang loud and gay and warm and bright the sunbeams lay upon the southern river and countless birds sang in the trees our banners fluttered in the breeze all eyes were charmed midst scenes like these all down the southern river our hearts were light our bands did play upon that glorious sunny day the sunny south the sunny south these words were ever in each mouth suggesting things of love and youth along the southern river and still we marched and laughed and sang and down the flowery banks we sprang the wild woods with the echoes rang all down the southern river until we came to belmont grand the finest mansion in the land that on the rising ground doth stand beside the southern river thus my tom wrote about the southern river and the sunny south after this i never wondered more why the slaveholders fought so hard to gain their independence no wonder when they fought for belmont etc chapter eight