7.17: On Robert Dollard’s Early War
Supplement to Endnotes
​​​Robert Dollard was deeply impressed with his first encounter with a black refugee who addressed him “with so much respect.”[1] His first regiment served at Fortress Monroe, Virginia where he found himself raking hay alongside runaway slaves “as black as night” -- men who, thanks to Butler, had been labeled “contrabands” and put to work for the Union cause. Dollard sweated jowl to jowl with them and took note of their ratty clothing.
But Dollard grew increasingly frustrated, if not repulsed, by ex-slaves. Frustration led to callousness.[2] His earliest contact with “contrabands” at Fort Monroe augured trouble. At night, his comrades would “get squads of them” together and compel the runaways to dance, and to “perspire and kick up dust” for white soldiers. As another Massachusetts soldier reported home from a different camp, “there were five negroes in our mess room last night, we got them to sing and dance!” Implying that he had paid money back home at minstrel shows or knew about folks who did, he continued: “Great times. Negro concerts free of expense here.”[3]
After his time at Fort Monroe, Dollard was sent further south -- before Cole got there -- to help drive rebels from New Bern, North Carolina in the spring of 1862. According to Dollard, a prank upon slaves took place just hours after the dangerous capture of the city. Dollard had just watched an errant shot from a Union gunboat smash the intestines of a comrade “to jelly.” The butchery got so bad that soldiers in the regiment’s rear had to fix their bayonets to keep their comrades from bolting. Moments after, his comrades moved into an evacuated camp of the enemy where a destitute army of black women and children were scavenging for sheets, quilts and tobacco. While marching by one woman who had a quilt draped over her body, one of the white soldiers slipped from the ranks and mockingly inserted himself between the hanging quilt and the woman’s backside. The regiment broke out in laughter over the sexually laden prank. Dollard’s comrades would recall that the soldier tried to take the “coveted bed spread” from the “tall mulatto,” until an officer interfered on her behalf.[4]
A few months later, Dollard and his regiment spent the summer on provost (police) duty in New Bern, where the soldiers occupied opulent homes abandoned by wealthy North Carolinians. His regiment served alongside Cole’s Third New York Cavalry; they were both destined to be absorbed into the Army of the James, and soon, under Butler’s command. Dollard continued to take note of the well “behaved” blacks.
He also saw merciless treatment of them. While guarding a main road to New Bern, raiding activity brought a “stream” of refugees which included a black mother in a one-horse tip cart. She had a half dozen children who had been “born at the same time, judging by their size.” These were the very refugees who somehow made it back to Union lines during the raids. Likely because of the tragic journey of refugees, the woman had assumed motherhood over several similarly aged children. Perhaps under orders, a union officer had them hauled away to a vacant house where a comrade removed the tail board from the cart, unhitched the box in front and “gently raised” it so as to send the whole family tumbling out. After this, Dollard’s comrades, as he would put it, left the mother and children “in full possession of their new found liberty”-- but of little else. The destitute mother’s cart and horse apparently disappeared with Yankee soldiers.[5]
At another time, Dollard’s men were drilling with unloaded rifles, and given command to take aim at any object before them. One soldier took aim at a black man off in the distance, and having failed to unload his piece, accidentally blazed away at the targeted man. The bullet shot off the old man’s hat but the “the wool was only scorched a little.” In another experience, Dollard happened upon a “middle-aged contraband” selling tobacco and wares from a rough board shack. Though the refugee hadn’t suspected it, some Yankee soldier had paid him with a label from a painkiller bottle, passing it off as a North Carolina bank bill. The illiterate man laughed when Dollard informed him of the counterfeit money. This left Dollard to wonder why it was that the ex-slave was not indignant like “most white men would have been.” For Dollard, blacks tended to be naive, yet forgiving like Uncle Tom. And, as his stories make clear, he and his white comrades gave blacks many opportunities to practice forgiveness.[6]
Any comrade in his regiment, who was too vocal with anti-slavery sentiments, could expect hostility. This despite the fact that the men hailed from New England’s small towns and villages, and that so many of them eagerly took up arms in the first year of the war. As a soldier in the regiment recalled, only one man in his entire company confessed to being an abolitionist (the most radical form of anti-slavery), and he was taken prisoner back in the regiment’s first battle at New Berne.
The racial animosity in Dollard’s regiment was made clear when, in early 1863, it was transferred to Port Royal, South Carolina where some of its soldiers attacked a black settlement of refugees and cleaned out the camp, before setting it on fire. Such attacks by union soldiers on refugee settlements, especially plundering and turning refugees out of their quarters, happened since the earliest days of the war in the camps around Fort Monroe. For this act senseless act, his regiment was “exiled” to St. Helena Island, South Carolina. He recalled that “preaching abolition in the North and even shedding tears over Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not soften” the hearts of his comrades. He was talking about himself. And his Yankee comrades.
He candidly admitted that his regiment had been “less tolerant in many respects” than Confederate masters had been. Once aboard the ship, headed for St. Helena -- an island with proud freed people -- the men grew wild with drink, gambling, wrestling and all kinds of mischief. Some of the soldier got into the rations and took to “flouring the niggers” on board -- throwing baking flour on ship-locked deckhands and officers’ servants.[7]
When, less than a year later, Dollard accepted a commission in Cole’s Second Colored Cavalry, he surely felt the scorn from some of his Bay State comrades. His early war prepared him for the racial brutality to come.
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[1] In the nineteenth century, Americans bought more copies of Stowe’s novel than any other book, save the Bible. And those who did not read the novel could still take part in the transatlantic Uncle Tom mania by attending the many minstrelsy shows that borrowed themes from the book. Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), p. 332. Meer demonstrates how the novel served as part of a larger web of minstrelsy and theatrical appropriations in the 1850s. Blackface interpretations of Uncle Tom often fomented as much pro-slavery sentiment as they did abolitionism. Regardless of Beecher Stowe’s original intentions, the novel provided an elastic framework for imagining African Americans, one where derision and sympathy coexisted.
[2] And it was his callousness that led him -- years later, despite his fantasies about loyal slaves -- to candidly expose the sickening, ordinary cruelties perpetrated by him and his white comrades.
[3]Henry Warren Howe, Passages from the Life of Henry Warren Howe, Consisting of Diary and Letters Written during the Civil War, 1816-1865. A Condensed History of the Thirtieth Massachusetts Regiment and its Flags, Together with the Genealogies of the Different Branches of the Family (Lowell: Mass., Courier-Citizen Co., Printers, 1899), p. 93. Kate Masur points out how, during the Civil War, the term “contraband” was an enormously elastic notion that allowed abolitionists, northern blacks and pro-slavery folks to discuss the unstable category of southern blacks during the upheaval of war and emancipation. Masur argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, Americans still used the figure of the contraband in literature, theatre and music, but that the image of the contraband was flattened to one of docility, laziness, torpidity and other themes of minstrelsy. We should read Dollard’s recollections of freedmen, keeping in mind that his descriptions of “contrabands” jibed with what many of his contemporaries wrote at the turn of the century. On the other hand, this distinction can be grossly overstated as many soldiers during the war viewed blacks through the lens of minstrelsy. What is interesting about Dollard is that he remembers “contrabands” through the dual image of minstrelsy and the anti-slavery bible, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—suggesting that these two lenses were not just available for different folks to debate emancipation, but that many Americans looked through various lenses at the same time. See: Kate Masur, “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation': The Word ‘Contraband' and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States," Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (March, 2007), pp. 1050-84, especially, pp. 181-83 .
[4] Dollard, Recollections of the Civil War and Going West to Grow Up with the Country, pp. 61-67; James A. Emmerton, A Record of the Twenty-Third Regiment Mass. Vol. Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (Boston: W. Ware & Co., 1886), p. 95.
[5]Dollard, Recollections of the Civil War and Going West to Grow Up with the Country, pp. 69-71
[6] Blacks were frequently swindled out of money by their “liberators.” As military governor of South Carolina, General Rufus Saxton reported, while lands had been auctioned off, and “many freedmen had by industry and thrift acquired considerable property,” freedmen often suffered at the hands of sharpers and speculators. The army of occupation, according to Saxton, was guilty of insult, abuse, depredations to blacks’ plantations, stealing, destroying crops, and rape. “The morals of the old plantation life,” Saxton continued, “seemed revived in the army of occupation.” As for swindling blacks out of their wares, by exploiting their illiteracy, and inexperience with a wildly confusing nexus of bank notes and bonds, Saxton continued, “there was a general disposition among the soldiers and civilian speculators here to defraud the Negroes in their private traffic, to take the commodities which they offered for sale by force, or to pay for them in worthless money.” See: Dollard, Recollections, pp. 72-3; Letter from General Saxton to Edwin M. Stanton, December 30, 1864 in OR, series 3, IV, Section 2, pp. 1022-1031; For a purported incident in which Union soldiers in Louisiana traded soap wrappers for African-Americans’ precious metals, see: A. J. H. Duganne, “Camps and Prisons", Subscribers' ed. (New York: S.N., 1865), pp. 103-07.
[7] Between February and March of 1863 the regiment experienced its own series of mutinies and harsh punishments. One must wonder if these tensions had anything to do with the burning of the refugee camp, and how much they were related to the Emancipation Proclamation. See: Dollard, Recollections of the Civil War, pp.87-89; Emmerton, A Record of the Twenty-Third Regiment Mass. Vol. Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865, pp. 137-38. For regular destruction of freedpeople’s camps, see: Robert Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 31-36.