I Freed Myself by David Williams

Author:David Williams [Williams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Six hundred men of the Fifty-Fourth went in on the assault. Nearly half were captured, killed, or wounded. One of the most severely injured was Sergeant William H. Carney, a refugee from slavery in Virginia. When a color sergeant went down, Carney grabbed the flag, planted it on Wagner’s parapet, fought off attempts to capture it, and carried it away with him despite wounds to his head, chest, right leg, and arm. On arriving at a field hospital, he passed the colors to a regimental officer, reporting, to the cheers of his wounded comrades, “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground.” Carney became one of twenty-three black Civil War servicemen awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.62

The value of black troops became increasing apparent as they gained more combat assignments. To one white soldier serving in Louisiana, it was clear that blacks would indeed fight. “It has been proved where ever they have had a chance.” They proved it again at Petersburg, Virginia, when four untested black regiments sent veteran Confederates in headlong retreat. “The majority of the whites expected that the colored troops would run,” according to a correspondent on the scene, “but the sable forces astonished everybody by their achievements. With a wild yell that must certainly have struck terror into the hearts of their foes [they] charged, under a hot fire of musketry and artillery, over the rebel ditch and parapet, and drove the enemy before them.” Not content with simply taking their objective, members of the Twenty-Second Regiment laid hold of a captured cannon, swung it around, and fired into the fleeing Confederates.63

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