Storm Over Key West by Mike Pride

Author:Mike Pride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pineapple Press
Published: 2020-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Colonel Stark Fellows. Loomis-Wilder Family Papers (MS 496A), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

When the soldiers entered a black neighborhood, flags hung from the windows and people leapt, howled, and tossed their caps skyward. It was as if they had seen the Promised Land. It occurred to Fellows “that at last they could speak for themselves.” White people farther along the route “seemed to catch the excitement,” hailing the soldiers as they marched to meet their destiny. Even the acidic Herald offered only slightly hedged praise for the regiment: “Generally speaking, it is composed of a superior class of colored men, who appeared to be pretty well drilled and amendable to discipline.” The Times man found them “smaller than the average white regiments” and “in complexion they were generally quite dark.” Another reporter credited their marching skills to “their remarkable powers of imitation, their habits of obedience, [and] their natural love of display.” To Fellows, the men were “the lions of Thanksgiving Day.” He was proud of himself too, telling his parents: “I am the first to lead a black regiment through the city of New York. The movement was eminently successful.” His men steamed away with echoes of gratitude and even adoration ringing in their ears.

Captain Lincoln had taken advantage of the stop in Manhattan to marry. He had met Dora Whitman through an activist Unitarian group run by their pastor in Hingham, Massachusetts. They later attended Pitt Street Chapel, an abolitionist Boston church. After graduating from high school, Whitman studied for a teaching degree. The two became engaged, but for months after Lincoln joined the army, she fretted over their separation and threatened to drop him. She acted coolly toward him during frequent bouts of depression. And yet, two days before Thanksgiving, she showed up in New York for the wedding. Pastor Joseph Thompson married them.

The regiment’s destination was a thin, crooked smile of an island off Biloxi in the Gulf of Mexico, but the Continental headed first to New Orleans. As it neared the city after seven days at sea, black residents came from “the cotton and sugar fields to the river banks . . . cheering us loudly,” wrote Sergeant Taylor. The men wished “freedom and liberty to them for ever.” On December 10, the regiment landed on the western end of Ship Island, a seven-mile sliver of sand with an area of two square miles. In Union hands since 1861, its military value lay in a port deep enough to accommodate ships patrolling the gulf around New Orleans and Mobile Bay.

The 2nd set up camp within sight of Union warships and under the guns of Fort Massachusetts. The 2nd Louisiana Native Guard, a black regiment with black field officers, occupied small houses on the island. Fellows commandeered a mansion with a wraparound veranda and a cupola. Schneider joined other staff officers there for pleasant talk in clouds of tobacco smoke. The chaplain had just presided at funerals for two privates who died during the voyage, one just sixteen years old.

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