Yet whatever prejudice might say, the hard fact now was that colored men were being enlisted as soldiers in large numbers and that there were times when it was impossible to avoid using them in combat. The use of Hinks's division was an example. They had stormed rifle pits and captured guns, and although Hancock's veterans saw in that fact nothing more than evidence that the Confederacy had only second-rate troops in line, Baldy Smith—who was far from being prejudiced in their favor—said afterward that Negro soldiers under certain circumstances might be as good as any.¹⁷

No matter how it might use them, however, the army certainly had not assimilated them. It had not tried to and if it had tried it would have failed, and it did not matter much anyway for it was no longer possible for this army to be homogeneous. It had become a representative cross section of an extremely mixed population; and now, as a final step, it contained long columns of colored men whose memories, as one of their officers said, were "a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography," the residue of chanted spirituals and the preaching of untaught plantation clergymen, men who in their innocence attributed every historic event to the doings of the great Moses.¹⁸

When Ferrero's dark battalions came up to the sheltered area just behind the front, they added a new dimension to army life and gave it a strange wild flavor. Always there had been groups of soldiers to sit around campfires in the evening, singing about their homesickness and the girls they wanted to get back to, about their comradeship, and, occasionally, about their patriotism, but when these black soldiers sang there was a haunting and a mystery in the air. For if the white soldier looked back with profound longing to something precious that had been left far behind, the colored soldier's homesickness seemed to be for a place where he had never been at all. He had nothing to look back to. Everything he could dream of lay ahead of him, and his dreams were apocalyptic, not to be expressed in ordinary words.

So when the colored troops met by the campfire to sing— and it was their favorite way to spend the evening—they sang made-up, spur-of-the-moment songs, which had never existed before either in words or in music, songs which grew out of the fire and the night and the dreams and hopes which hovered between fire and night forever.

All of the colored troops were officered by white men, and these white officers listened, fascinated, to the campfire singing, and when they wrote about it they tried to tell why it moved them so deeply. There would be a hundred men sprawled in a fire-lit circle, dark faces touched with fire; and one voice would go up, rich and soft and soaring;

I know moon-rise,

I know star-rise—-

and half a dozen men would come in with a refrains

—Lay dis body downa

The singer would grope his way two lines nearer to the thought that was drawing him on:

I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight-—

and now more voices would sound the refrains

Lay dis body down.

Finally the song would be finished, and a white officer who . listened said that the chanted refrain would sound like "a grand creation chorus":

I'll walk in de graveyard,

I’ll walk troo de graveyard

To lay dis body down.

I go to de judgment in de evening of de day

When I lay dis body down.

And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

When I lay dis body down.¹⁹

They were men coming up out of Egypt, trailing the shreds of a long night from their shoulders, and sometimes they sang in the wild imagery of a despairing journey through parted waters to a land of promise;

My army cross over,

My army cross over—

O Pharaoh's army drownded—

My army cross over.

We'll cross de mighty river,

We'll cross de River Jordan,

We'll cross de danger water....

My army cross over.²⁰

Most of the men were straight from the plantation. On many matters their ignorance was absolute. Yet they were men without doubts, and always their faith reached out to the future. A man in the VI Corps, talking to one of them, learned that men who could not read one word of Scripture could cite Biblical authority for their belief that the North would win the war. There was a prophecy, they said, which foretold that while the South would prevail for a time, in the end it would be overthrown. The VI Corps soldier searched his own Bible and at last concluded that the reference was to words in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Daniel;

"And in those times there shall many stand up against the King of the South: also the robbers of thy people shall exalt themselves to escape the vision; but they shall fall. So the King of the North shall come, and cast up a mount, take the most fenced cities; and the arms of the South shall not withstand, neither his chosen people, neither shall there be any strength to withstand." ²¹

A Rhode Island soldier who had served along the Carolina coast remembered how a group of fugitive slaves had come within the Union lines after a harrowing nine-day flight through swamps. One man explained his perseverance: "I seed de lamp of life ahead and de lamp of death behind," and another said that, on coming up to the Federal outposts, "When I seed dat flag, it lift me right up." Even before they left slavery, they had their own idea of what the war was about. A Pennsylvania soldier on that same Carolina expedition asked a slave if he knew why the Yankees had come, and the slave replied that of course he knew—"to kill Massa and set de darkeys free." A Wisconsin man who escaped from a prison pen in the Deep South took refuge in the hut of an aged slave who had never before seen a Union soldier, and he asked the old man if he would betray him. "No sah," replied the old man emphatically. "There's not a slave in South Carolina who would betray you." One officer discovered that before the war the Southern slaves had known about the Fremont campaign of 1856, and the campaign of 1860. Some of them told him that they had refused to work on March 4, 1861, expecting their freedom to date from that day.²²

A Connecticut soldier who watched contrabands at work unloading ships at the Alexandria piers noticed that whenever there was a breathing spell some of the men would stretch out on the nearest pile of barrels or boxes, take out a spelling book, and laboriously study it. As a general thing, he said, they worked very hard: "All they want to encourage them is talk of freedom, and then the dirt will fly high and fast." They disliked to be called "contrabands," and when they were made soldiers they were intensely proud of their status as combat men. A white woman who visited her husband at army headquarters near Petersburg told about meeting a wounded Negro soldier who was trudging along the road toward the base hospital at City Point, loaded down with his musket, cartridge box, and haversack. Her husband told him to throw his load away, but the man begged to be allowed to carry it all the way to the hospital: "I don't want de fellows at de hospital to mistake me for a teamster." ²⁸

A Regular Army enlisted man watched some of Ferrero's men marching up toward Petersburg and noted that many of them had taken off their shoes and were carrying them on their bayonets, going along barefooted. In the evening he went to their camp and observed evening roll call: "There were so many Jacksons and Johnsons that the first sergeant numbered them as high as 'Johnson Number Five.' They appeared to be very proud of being soldiers and serving with white troops." ²⁴

From the beginning it was realized that the effectiveness of colored troops would depend largely on the way the regiments were officered, and what would now be called an officer-candidate school was set up in Philadelphia. Non-commissioned officers and privates in the Army of the Potomac could apply for admission to this school, and if recommended by their own officers and approved by an examining board they would get thirty days training and then would be commissioned to command colored soldiers. The rank and file seems to have been of two minds about this arrangement. Some felt that it was a good idea, that the standards were high and the training thorough—one man said he knew colonels in white regiments who could not get an examining board recommendation for a second lieutenancy—but others believed that the examinations and instructions "were not practical, but scholastic and theoretical," and that most of the men who were commissioned were not up to their jobs.²⁵

Certain it was that these strange new regiments needed good leadership. They were reluctant to take orders from non-coms of their own color—it was common to hear the complaint, "I don't want him to play de white man over me"— and a company commander had to be careful to treat his sergeants with formal military courtesy, always addressing them by their titles and in general following precise Regular Army routine. The colored enlisted man who had a complaint or problem was quite likely to try to by-pass his company officers and go direct to his colonel, and one of the colonels meditated on the reason for this: "The Negroes have acquired such a constitutional distrust of white people that it is perhaps as much as they can do to trust more than one person at a time." He added that in training and disciplining the men it was vital "to make them feel as remote as possible from the plantation," and said that the habit of obedience was worthless unless the officer managed to instill a stout feeling of self-respect along with it. An officer of polished manners could do better with colored troops than with white volunteers, who preferred a certain roughness of manner in their officers.²⁶

In camp, the colored men made excellent soldiers. They picked up the drill quickly, learning it more easily than white recruits did. The different companies in a regiment would vie with each other for excellence on the parade ground, and sometimes would get into furious fist fights while arguing as to which company was the best. During that Carolina expedition, where local contrabands were organized into a regiment, there was one day a parade of colored soldiers through the city of Beaufort, with the band of a Maine regiment leading the way, and it was a big experience. A colored sergeant said afterward: "When dat band wheel in before us and march on—my Godl I quit dis world altogedder!" And a private related: "We didn't look to de right nor to de left. I didn't see nottin' in Beaufort. Every step was worth half a dollar."

Some of the ordinary problems of army discipline seemed to be non-existent. Desertion was utterly unknown, and there was very little drunkenness. The men especially enjoyed practice on the target range. When one made a good shot there would be a gleeful chorus of "Ki! Old man!" and if an unskilled recruit fired his piece into the dirt there would be "such infinite guffawing and delight, such rolling over and over on the grass, such dances of ecstasy" that the colonel would remember it and put it in his memoirs.²⁷

There were a few little subsidiary problems connected with the use of colored troops. The colonel of the 36th U.S. Colored Infantry told how a detachment from his regiment in the spring of 1864 was sent across from Point Lookout to the Rappahannock River area to destroy certain Rebel installations. One group, commanded by colored non-coms and with no white officers present, had a fight with some Confederates and did very well, capturing certain prisoners; and the problem was that the men wanted to kill all of the prisoners forthwith, being restrained only by their sergeant. On the other side of the ledger there was the example of Fort Pillow, a Mississippi River post held by colored troops, which had been stormed in recent months by Bedford Forrest's command. After the surrender some of Forrest's tough troopers got out of hand and turned the occasion into something like a lynching bee. The colored troops with the Army of the Potomac could read no newspapers and got their information of far-off events Heaven knows how, but every one of them knew about Fort Pillow. General Hinks, with colored men in his command, urged that all of them be armed with repeating rifles in place of the regulation muzzle-loaders. His men, he said, "cannot afford to be beaten and will not be taken," and ought to have the best arms the country could provide. His request was ignored, but the making of it was significant.²⁸

As a general thing the Negro soldiers seemed to hold very little personal animus against their former masters. A white officer discovered, rather to his surprise, that they had neither hatred nor affection for the men who used to own them. They never mentioned their masters except as natural enemies, yet it was the class they hated, not the individuals in the class. They saw slavery, said this man, as "a wrong which no special kindnesses could right."²⁹

When Ferrero's troops were brought up the Confederates in the Petersburg line quickly learned about it, and they despised the whole IX Corps because of it. On Burnside's front the fighting became vicious. There were no picket-line truces and no lulls in the fighting. Off to the left, where Warren's men held the line, tolerant Southerners might call, "Down, Yank!" before opening fire, but there was no more of that in Burnside's sector. Sharpshooters kept their pieces trained on the firing slit and they were shooting to kill.⁸⁰