The Loyal Republic by Erik Mathisen

Author:Erik Mathisen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

African American soldiers: District of Columbia, Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln, ca. 1863–66. Photograph by William Morris Smith. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-cwpb-04294.

Other soldiers ran afoul of a U.S. Army bureaucracy that proved confusing. Some soldiers absented themselves from regiments because of the ill treatment of officers or perhaps because they wanted to serve with friends or relations. Freedmen had little say in what regiment they joined once they were mustered into the service, and many deserted not to flee the army but to join other fighting units. The haste with which soldiers were mustered and the seemingly random way they were formed into regiments undoubtedly gave freedmen the impression that they possessed some choice, though courts punished soldiers for their mistake. Henry Jones left his regiment to join another in January 1864. At his trial, he simply offered his apologies: “I am sorry I went away, and I will not do it again.” For his affront to military order, Jones was sentenced to three months’ hard labor. James Brown, also from the 2nd Mississippi, was charged with two days’ desertion, as Brown traveled to a camp outside Vicksburg to see his father. During the trial, it became clear that part of the reason why Brown had left was due to his regiment not having been made aware of their obligations as soldiers, laid out in the Articles of War. Despite evidence to suggest that the entire regiment had not been properly advised of their duties, Brown was found guilty and was docked a month’s pay.44

If cases of mistaken duty proved embarrassing for American military officials, they paled in comparison with cases in which order in black regiments broke down completely. In early December 1863, the 4th Regiment of Louisiana’s Corps d’Afrique mutinied in protest at the treatment by their white commanding officer, Lieut. Col. Augustus Benedict, who beat two teenage drummers with a cart whip without provocation. Though they had been lauded by commanders as “among the best disciplined and the best instructed regiments of this class of troops,” the regiment reacted swiftly to the beating. They took possession of their rifles and gathered together, calling Benedict out. When he refused, the rage of the crowd spilled over into indiscriminate anger at the republic Benedict represented. According to court testimony, some soldiers shouted that they “did not come here to be whipped” by white officers. Others spurred the armed crowd to “kill all the damned Yankees.” In the end, a court-martial found Benedict guilty of using excessive force, only the latest in a long string of abuses during his time in the service. In a swipe at Lorenzo Thomas and his office, Brig. Gen. William Dwight argued that the affair represented “a warning against trusting foolish and passionate officers in high command over these black troops.” Interoffice politicking aside, military justice demanded that an example be made of not only a poor excuse for an officer but also the African Americans who threatened him.

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