8.6: The Invention of Samuel Johnson
Supplement to Endnotes
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Of all the former slaves who made up the Second Colored Cavalry, Samuel Johnson stood apart. His name was probably the only one printed in wartime newspapers read by powerful white men. (After the war, another of Cole’s men, Wyatt Outlaw, would gain unsought fame when he was brutally murdered by the Klan.) Few Americans would have known anything about Samuel Johnson other than his vivid testimony of the massacres at Plymouth which made its way into investigations and newspaper reports. Men of political gravity uttered his name and read his account. General Butler claimed that he was “much moved” by its detail. He said that he had examined Johnson closely and then forwarded the affidavit to Grant. Lincoln’s cabinet discussed it.
The names and voices of ordinary white soldiers were rarely acknowledged in such powerful circles. That kind of recognition was rarer still for black soldiers who were assigned to uncelebrated drudgery, who could not be promoted to battlefield commands, and who, on the whole, were worn too thin by life, and because of illiteracy less capable of leaving behind a lasting account of their war experiences.
I have concluded, though, that Samuel Johnson, the regiment’s most influential black soldier during the war, was not real. His gripping story -- his very personhood -- were fabrications, probably cultivated in Ben Butler’s imagination to feed his political appetite.
A close reading of Johnson’s testimony raises questions about its credibility. On the affidavit, there is an “x” mark by Johnson’s name, signaling his illiteracy. Yet his words have a marked fluidity and complex phrasing from start to finish: “After being captured I was kept at Plymouth for some two weeks and was employed in endeavoring to raise the sunken vessels of the Union fleet.”
Butler, or the scribe, perhaps prettied up Johnson’s English. But equally strange is that, though Johnson was in grave danger of capture, he somehow had something like a bird's eye view, witnessing all kinds of atrocities in various locations.
And finally, there is no trace of a "Samuel Johnson" in the regimental records.
I searched over 340 pension index files from the Union Army, looking for a “Samuel Johnson” who, while not in the regimental books, might somehow be connected to Cole’s regiment. Though I didn’t find any, I located over 90 soldiers who were listed under the name “Samuel Johnson” or “Sam Johnson,” and who served in colored regiments.
It’s complicated. Black soldiers in Cole’s regiment reported that from the time of enlistment, officers recorded their names incorrectly. More complicated still, a handful of “Samuel Johnsons” took on other aliases; and men by other names used “Samuel Johnson” as their alias. I found “Samuel Johnsons” in other black cavalry regiments (Third, Fourth, and Fifth), but these regiments served in distant Mississippi, Kentucky and New Orleans-- places far away from Plymouth. I discovered a Samuel Johnson in the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, which fought alongside Cole’s regiment in the Army of the James; but this Samuel Johnson was recorded in his company muster rolls as “present” during the months that the “Samuel Johnson” who supposedly witnessed the atrocities would have been in captivity. I also read through pensions from various “Samuel Johnsons” who might have been at one time in Cole's regiment, like a Samuel Johnson in the Second Colored “Infantry” instead of “Cavalry” (which, any way, served in the Florida gulf region).
There is one remote possibility. In the pension record of Thomas Foster, a Sergeant who was in Cole’s regiment, there is a brief affidavit that includes the testimony of a Samuel Johnson. In this affidavit, a Samuel Johnson said that he had served in “Battery (B) 2 Artillery and Co C. 2nd Regiment USC Colored Troops.” But the “Samuel Johnson” who testified of the atrocities in Plymouth was in company D, not C, and in the cavalry, usually written as the “US Colored Cavalry,” not “USC Colored Troops.”
I’ve been looking for a needle in a haystack filled with pins and nails.
As I see it, the vivid details in the affidavit about the Plymouth massacre don’t add up. Butler’s vouching for the details and specificity rule out the possibility that the affidavit was just sloppily composed with the wrong name and unit assigned to a lowly black soldier. Plus, the details are clear about “Samuel Johnson” being a soldier in Cole’s regiment. The testimony states that he was an Orderly Sergeant in Company D, serving under George W. French, a white officer who was in Cole’s regiment (and who indeed was captured at Plymouth and died in captivity, and therefore unavailable for examination).
In his letter to Grant, Butler attested to the reliability, assuring Grant that the witness was intelligent and that he had stuck closely to the true details. Yet nowhere did I find any Samuel Johnson who fits with these supposedly reliable truths.
My best guess, and it is only a guess, is that the affidavit was an artful way to publish scandalous details about an actual massacre that, like Fort Pillow and Suffolk, was immediately covered in the fog of war. An imaginary witness, like “Samuel Johnson,” was a godsend for radical Republicans who wanted clear, damning evidence, undiluted by the words of an actual soldier who would have had to be close enough to the atrocities to testify in detail, yet far enough away to escape capture or death.
It was clearly easier to get away with creating an imaginary black soldier than a white one. A testimony by a fictitious black soldier would be harder to expose, or less likely to attract questions from literate comrades who might learn of the affidavit from a newspaper, or from locals in a Yankee town who closely tracked their village boys and shared letters.
Still, Cole and many of the white soldiers would have almost certainly got wind of such a scandalous fabrication. In the few surviving war letters from Cole there is no mention of the ordeal. (Then again, sources from Cole and his regiment provide only fragments. And there is some proof that neither Cole nor his officers took much notice of their black subordinates.)
I have to admit, though, that if Butler did fabricate the affidavit, it’s strange -- given all the bad blood toward Butler -- that nobody exposed his schemes.
I am not alone in my conclusions and would have been too timid to voice them if not for the careful essay, “Massacre at Plymouth, April 20, 1864,” by Weymouth T. Jordan and Gerald W. Thomas. The authors pointed out many of the same inconsistencies that I had discovered. They noted that while “Samuel Johnson” claimed he was an Orderly Sergeant in Dollard’s company, regimental records show that during the massacre, a Henry Williams had been serving in that position.[1]
It is possible that “Johnson” was just a servant (perhaps coerced into servitude by Lieutenant French) and that those who wrote the affidavit transformed him into a soldier to give him more credibility. But the regiment’s records suggest that Cole’s officers preferred to force soldiers, not civilians, to be their servants (as the soldier would get paid by the government, instead of by the officer, who could then pocket his allowance).
As for motivation, Ben Butler, who was outraged by the moderate policies of Lincoln, and the president’s failure to take retribution for Fort Pillow as he had promised, might have fabricated vivid testimony to help stir up controversy and apply pressure on the presidency. Such testimony would only help Butler with his political ambitions (though, as we will soon see, by the summer of 1864 his military failures had destroyed any chance he had to challenge Lincoln for the White House).
Maybe Butler had decided not to let honesty get in the way of truth and justice. Maybe he reasoned that his imaginary “Samuel Johnson” gave a voice to thousands of real, but silenced black soldiers. If Butler, who was famously well-read, did fabricate the testimony, it is interesting that he awarded the fictitious, illiterate black soldier the name of Samuel Johnson, one of the most important “men of letters” in English history. The legendary Samuel Johnson was an eighteenth-century poet and author who compiled one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. This dictionary remained the standard for almost 180 years, shaping the English language in immeasurable ways. If Butler -- a man committed to transforming ex-slaves into self-sufficient freedmen -- invented an ordinary soldier and named him after the immortalized wordsmith and lexicographer, he may have been archly winking to his close friends who knew, that, thanks to him (Butler), the poetic testimony came forth from the mouth of an illiterate slave.
There’s more. The two other men whose names appear on the affidavit were no strangers to controversy. Captain John Cassels, who took down the testimony, was so mired in controversy that when Butler first arrived to the Army of the James, he (Butler) hired secret investigators to verify if Cassels had indeed accepted bribes. In his autobiography, Butler insisted that the investigations proved Cassels’ absolute innocence.
And then there is John I. Davenport. More than a decade after the war, Davenport, who was the only listed witness to the testimony, and who had served as Butler’s acting aide-de-camp, would be investigated by the House of Representatives for his supposed malfeasance as Supervisor of Elections in New York City. The investigation concluded that Davenport, a strident Republican, had manipulated election results, including arresting thousands of immigrants to keep them from casting their Democratic votes. Davenport would also spend years personally investigating the forgery of a famous “Morey letter” that was falsely attributed to James A. Garfield, the Republican nominee for the Election of 1880. Davenport published his own 150-page report that concluded that Democratic operatives had falsified the letter in order to paint Garfield as a candidate who would open the doors to much despised Chinese immigration. In his report, Davenport scrutinized handwriting to prove the letter’s forgery. In short, the sole witness to Samuel Johnson’s testimony, like Butler, was a warrior against corruption, and yet suspected to be one of its most skilled practitioners.
What is clear, is that Butler and his officers imagined black men being, saying, and doing things that commanders -- for selfish or moral reasons -- needed black men to be, say and do. Imaginary black soldiers, after all, cooperated with commanders’ ambitions. Dollard’s stories of loyal “Uncle Toms,” or Cole’s ruminations about his bright future as he walked among his bare-backed recruits, are of a piece with Butler’s “Samuel Johnson.”
Marginalized humans were easily molded into supporting characters in the grand stories that ambitious men wanted to tell about themselves.
The world I have tried to retrieve, that Cole’s story illuminates, is one rife with humans desperate to make themselves, even if it required making up other selves, like “Samuel Johnson.”
[1] Weymouth T. Jordan Jr., and Gerald W. Thomas, “Massacre at Plymouth: April 20, 1864,” in The North Carolina Historical Review, Volume LXXII (number 2), April, 1995, pp. 125-197.