Chapter 12: Family, the Inflammatory Stimulus
Supplement to Endnotes
Endnote 1) Perhaps the gift-bearing women, depicted in the Philadelphia Inquirer, were the fortunate wives of other freedmen who worked for the Quartermaster’s Department, and who had better luck with getting paid; or they may have been sympathetic freedwomen from a growing community of thriving traders in Slabtown who had converted abandoned frame buildings into barns, homes and stores.
But if they were soldiers’ wives, they likely lived meagerly, if desperately. The Army, and even humanitarian agencies, like Butler’s Office of Negro Affairs, implemented programs that were insensitive and exploitative for soldiers’ wives and other women who did not have able-bodied men living with them. The government only awarded confiscated lands to male heads of household. Wives of soldiers relied on rations (along with their husbands’ erratic military pay). Many men in the Twenty-Fifth Corps had not been paid for half a year, still others for nearly ten months. Without rations many of their family members would have been living hand to mouth. (And as for the refugees who had converted abandoned lands into small, prosperous farms, the government requisitioned and sold the bulk of the harvests to Northern cities; or the fresh crops were sent to feed Federal soldiers -- though apparently not the soldiers in Cole’s sickly brigade).
One writer, in a letter to The New York Times in June of 1865 , revealed that many soldiers had not been paid for 6 months. “Many of the men are married," he wrote, “and they are almost broken-hearted because their families are suffering for the very necessaries of life.”
In short, refugees had hope and found relief through work and army programs. But their story was one of continuous desperation and fear. Robert Engs has shown how even those genuinely interested in the well-being of refugees, including volunteer missionaries from the American Missionary Association, were mostly deaf to the hopes and wishes of refugees. Agents in the Office of Negro Affairs -- a fruit of Butler’s advocacy for refugees -- were often blind to their own prejudices and harmful policies. The proposal to send refugees (mostly women) to the North to work as servants in the homes of Yankees was roundly rejected by freedwomen who insisted on remaining near their kin networks, and as close as they could to their husbands in uniform. Luckily, the worst schemes were shut down before they began; but the proposed process of shipping freedwomen to the North was fated to be a soft form of slavery. Northerners would have boarded ships and after inspection bid on desired “servants.”
Even establishing “family farms” for refugees could do little for female refugees and children, especially those who were dependent on absent black soldiers. And lastly, the crops and quarters of successful refugee farms were always in danger of being ransacked or taken by Confederates in the region, or by Union soldiers. See: Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp.25-43; Miller, The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois, p. 153; See anonymous letter to editor, in: The New York Times, June 23, 1865; there is great detail in a report about “Slabtown” and the industriousness of black Hamptonians, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 1865. For source about black families getting kicked off of land, and how after Andrew Johnson's amnesty, Confederates returned to Slabtown, demanding back rent and threatened eviction, see the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 1865.
Endnote 5) George’s older brother, Cornelius, delivered a scathing speech before the House of Representatives on February 18, 1864, in which he urged Congress to enlist slaves at a greater rate into the Union Army. In the speech, Cornelius read an extensive passage from a war letter from his brother (though he doesn’t say George’s name); in the letter, George exults in his black regiment’s potential. The speech, which was clearly shaped by dialogue between the Cole brothers, advocated better care of black soldiers’ families; and Cornelius made the case that black soldiers “manifest more sympathy toward each other than do the white soldiers.” Cornelius claimed that they were less likely to abandon comrades on the battlefield and that the soldiers’ deepest concerns were for their own aged, infirm and “helpless young.” The speech was flat wrong about black soldiers’ higher resistance to disease, and how rarely they deserted. But clearly, George and Cornelius had some appreciation of the profound communal bonds between soldiers and their kin. See: “Speech of Hon. Cornelius Cole of California, on Arming the Slaves.” Delivered in the House of Representatives, February 18, 1864 (Washington D.C: McGill & Witherow, 1864).
And of course, Butler had been perceptive about the link between black enlistment and the care of refugee families. This is why he promised rations and shelter to the families of black enlisted men. See: James Kenneth Bryant, II, “A Model Regiment," pp. 266-269.
Endnote 12) Cole’s troops linked military service and family, more perhaps than refugees from other parts of the South did. Slaves from Border States like Kentucky or Maryland, for example, tended to equate joining the army with personal freedom that held little immediate promise for kin. The status of refugee slaves there had not been altered by the Emancipation Proclamation, and there were no federally sanctioned contraband camps to which they could reliably and safely bring their families. They risked putting their families in danger of violent retribution from enraged masters whose slaves Lincoln had promised would remain in bondage.
In contrast, the details of the Emancipation Proclamation made it so that refugees across tidewater Virginia or North Carolina who ran from slave quarters achieved freedom by simply crossing into Union lines. When they arrived they usually had options to work as laborers in and around Fort Monroe. In the first years, they generally did not feel the desperate need to join the army for freedom or survival. In fact, lagging interest in enlistment along the tidewater towns encouraged widespread use of press gangs (sometimes made up of black soldiers) which kidnapped black men who had other means or plans of providing for family. In the war’s first year, when freedpeople rushed to Union lines at Fort Monroe, General Butler paid some laborers double what they could make in the Army when black soldiers only netted $7 per month. (Butler paid some laborers as much as $16 per month.; and some blacks could earn as much as $25 per month working for one of the military departments, thanks to an omission in the pay limits listed in the Confiscation Act.)
But this pay for black laborers in Virginia was significantly reduced when Butler was sent to New Orleans. When Butler returned, the labor supply had mushroomed, as refugee camps swelled. Over the span of the war, dependable employment became harder to find as more and more refugees competed for jobs in the region -- or when, as often happened, the quartermaster stiffed black laborers of their promised pay. Unless Cole’s men had been “pressed” into service, they had made a choice to join the military. Joining the army seemed the most secure way for them to protect uprooted kin.
See: Longacre, Army of Amateurs, pp. 53-4; Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, The Black Military Experience, 363-5; for press gangs, see: Berlin, et al., Freedom’s Soldiers, pp. 18-19; Berlin et al., Families and Freedom, pp. 95-117.
Endnote 15) David, the Cole patriarch, had often repeated the phrase, “tell them it is well with me.” It sounds like it was a phrase he used to remind his children, dispersed across the map, to write often. But it also sounds like it was a sort of command to tell others that his parents were in good hands, likely inspired by Isaiah of the Bible who assured Bible readers that “it will be well” with the righteous and that the fruits of their labor would surely be rewarded. Father Cole so often repeated these words that his family had them inscribed on his gravestone. Around the time George and Mary had moved to Syracuse, he received his father’s last letter to him. It closed with this plea. Cole claimed that during the heightened danger of battle he had no power to make life well for his family. See: Isaiah 3:10.
Endnote 17) Army and newspaper reports painted images of thorough preparation instead of startling negligence. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, so patriotic and martial in its depiction of black units, should be taken with a grain of salt. One report, however, suggested in passing that the preparation was chaotic. The dispatch provided a glimpse of the disarray. But only a glimpse. The dispatch said that as the first flotilla hurried to embark for Texas, Major General Weitzel, commander of the 25th Corps, and his staff, officers, and chaplains, rushed and bustled “as if for their lives.” See: The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 6, 1865.
I find this newspaper to be only partly reliable because its triumphalist descriptions of the war often get in the way of facts or details. In another report of the mutiny itself, the correspondent admitted his reluctance to divulge the mutinous behavior of black troops; clearly he was an advocate for arming black men, and idealized the relationship between the Federal Government and black troops. Some of the claims about the mutiny didn’t add up. There is little mention of the women and family at the wharf. And one ship was described as a commodious vessel, especially retrofitted for the comforts of the black soldiers. “In no instance has the ship been crowded.” The army stocked the vessel with the “best” and “freshest” rations. Given the widely reported physical toll that the passage took on various regiments, it seems likely that the reporter merely reported what staff in the U.S. Army told him. This report was duplicated in The New York Times, June 16, 1865.
Endnote 21) The Commission’s energies had been focused on a war that had supposedly ended, and the many malnourished soldiers who would soon return home. Soldiers in Texas preyed upon the livestock and gardens of locals who were unlucky enough to live close to one of the forts. In late July, the Corps headquarters began encouraging commanders to search for the Agave plant which, it was claimed, would cure scurvy. Upon Weitzel’s urging, companies began sending scouting battalions on fifty to sixty-mile quests to find the aloe-bearing maguey, a formidable looking plant with serrated-edged leaves that narrow to sharp, hide-puncturing tips; See report on the Sanitary Commission in: Philadelphia Inquirer, June 2, 1865; Hemenway, Intensely Human, pp. 131-132.
Endnote 25) An aged Edwards Nelson, almost forty years after he had been the first soldier forced onto his regiment’s ship to Texas, stated, “I have misery inside of me & in my back.” After listing his officers’ names (only fumbling on Dollard’s), and (without being prompted) briefly telling the pension examiner how Lieutenant Fox had murdered Henry Edwards, Nelson stated: “All we did in Texas was to do garrison duty and work on the railroad.” See pension file of Nelson Edwards, Co. C. The railroad work was regularly mentioned in pension affidavits. See, for example, pension records of the following soldiers from the Second Colored Cavalry: David Hill, co. D; Peter Fuller, Co. C; Francis Hyman, Co. C.
Endnote 27) This powerful plea was written in December 1865, at Brazos Santiago, Texas. The letter was penned by anonymous black soldiers from Virginia to an unidentified Washington official. These soldiers, who served in the First Colored Cavalry, shared roughly the same geographic and cultural backgrounds, skills, and sensibilities as soldiers from Cole’s own Second Colored Cavalry. They were recruited and prepared at the same time under the orders of General Butler. See: Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York, New York Press, 1992), pp. 533-534.
Endnote 28) Some three months after Mary left Texas for New York, George requested a twenty-day furlough on Christmas day, 1865, claiming his case was “one of immediate urgency.” It is not clear if he received it, or why he deemed it so dire. See: Cole Pension File, document entitled “Head Quarters Department of Texas, Galveston, Texas, December 25, 1865.”
Endnote 33) On February 24, Stanton made a list of brevet recommendations --which included Cole’s name -- which he then sent to President Johnson, who in turn, recommended the list to the U.S. Senate. See: Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America, from February 13, 1866, to July 28, 1866, Inclusive. Vol. XIV, Part II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887), pp. 744-745.
Endnote 34) In the 1930s his identification medal was found during an excavation in Parker County, some 500 miles from Brazos Santiago. How Cole’s disc ended up there, will likely remain a mystery. There is evidence from the trial record that he and his officers sometimes took off to hunt game on the Texas plains. But 500 miles away seems improbable. He might have lost it while returning home on furlough or while mustering out, though the Houston and Texas Central RR -- the only rail that would run near the excavation in the Civil War era -- had yet to be completed. And, anyway, it is not clear why he would return home through the Texas frontier. It is also possible that he lost the medal when he returned to the Southwest after his trial. I have no record, however, of his going to Texas. This explanation would also mean that he continued to wear the disc long after the war, and lost it somehow in the 1870s. I think it is most likely that Cole lost it while serving along the border of Mexico, and that somebody found it and brought it to Parker County where it was lost again or discarded. For hunting, see testimony of Frank Garret in Syracuse Journal, April 25, 1868, and in Remarkable Trials of All Countries with the Evidence and Speeches of Counsel, Court Scenes, Incidents, &c., pp. 243-246.
Now for a strange, inexplicable thing that happened while researching all of this. (I repeat here what I wrote in supplemental footnote #7, chapter 4.) From early on in my research, I knew that so much of Cole’s story was tied -- at least in a literary way -- to George Washington and the long shadow of the bold American experiment. I had come to see that George Cole and his twin brother (who died soon after birth) had been born in a time when the fading heroes of revolution were on the minds of his parents. Never did I suspect that the supposed “medal” lost by Cole, had actually been an identification disc with George Washington on it. It was David Burrows who directed me to the truth about Cole’s “medal of copper” through an email. One day, I was searching for his email to thank him. When I found our initial email exchange I noticed that he had written the email to me on February 22 (2021), the day of George Washington’s Birthday! Months later, I was re-reading the original letter from 1935, where the man from Texas described this supposed medal. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Mr. Alderdice wrote that original letter to Washington DC on February 22!