11.12: The Foreboding Ending of the War
Supplement to Endnotes
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The accusations about the conduct of black soldiers after Richmond, and the post-Butler regime, did not bode well for the welfare of black soldiers or their families.
General Ord, the new commander of the Army of the James, had wanted for some time to shut down Butler’s experimental black army.[1] Cole, perhaps blinded by the relief of having rid himself of Butler, at first claimed Ord to be a “very fine man.” But soon he sensed from headquarters a marked disregard for black troops. He blamed this on Ord’s Chief of Staff, General Turner, “an ass of the unmitigated type” who “hates colored troops.” By early spring, it was clear that the new cadre of commanders were, for the most part, of the same unmitigated kind.[2]
Brigadier General William Birney, an abolitionist, was not fooled for an instant. He quipped that Ord “spelt ‘negro’ with two G’s.” Birney surely knew, though, that Ord’s orthographic sins were as prevalent as dice and drink in the camps. Cole’s superior, Brevet Brigadier General August V. Kautz, for instance, saw his black soldiers as a millstone hanging from his neck -- a cursed weight to which he jealously clung nonetheless. Only days before he led his men into Richmond, Kautz claimed that General Ord had recently dismissed him from his command over white cavalry in order to humiliate him. And “thinking that I would decline and thus get rid of me,” Kautz told his female friend, “[Ord] sent me to the niggers.” With nary a whiff of shame about his aversion to black soldiers, or for his opportunism, Kautz continued that he could not “decline the niggers” and lose his command with Richmond ready to fall. He comforted himself with the fact that if any of his men were to fall in battle he would feel less sorrow “than if my troops were white.” And if Kautz should die, his only wish was that his body would be buried beside fellow white soldiers.[3]
And Charles Francis Adams, Jr. -- after a glorious entry with his black soldiers into Richmond had turned to shame and internal fighting among officers -- increasingly blamed his soldiers for his reversal in fortune. Weak and sick from malaria, and angry about his turn of misfortune, Adams believed that his men’s propensity for stealing horses (their own had been taken from them by the War Department), had ruined his reputation.[4] Just four weeks after Richmond, he wrote in ways that must have shocked his anti-slavery family. He wrote that his colored cavalry deserved and needed the sternest of discipline from their commanders. “I no longer wonder slave drivers were cruel,” he confessed. “I no longer have any bowels of mercy.”[5]
Mercy was in short supply, especially for refugees in the contraband camps. General Ord wrote the Secretary of War to suggest that the ragged tents captured from confederate camps and condemned wagon covers be used to make clothing for black refugees. He wanted female refugees to do the work of converting tattered, mildewed and sun baked canvass into clothing for freedmen and women. Ord’s request did not spring from some deep concern for women and children in the refugee camps. He wanted to liberate his department of what he saw as dead weight, and to purge his command of dependency.
He bristled at Butler’s promises, made at the enlistment of black recruits, that the U.S. would clothe and shelter their families. He threatened that if he couldn’t terminate the rations for black soldiers’ children and wives, he would “gather [them] into buildings and open a grand general washing establishment” for the city where they would wash citizens’ clothing for free. When Ord -- the commanding officer of the largest contingency of black soldiers in the U.S. Army -- looked upon the wives and children of soldiers and refugees in general, he saw parasites. “A little hard work and confinement,” he wrote, “will soon induce them to find employment....”[6]
For thousands of black soldiers like those serving under Cole, the recent exile from Richmond brought them closer to their wives, children, and parents who lived in the Union refugee camps. They had reason to believe that they only needed to hang on a little longer until they would be reunited with family. They could see that the war was ending. Everywhere, the fighting had petered out despite a few hopeless stands in the confederacy.[7] Black soldiers watched their own officers, and white counterparts exit the army in droves. By late May, less than two months after the fall of Richmond, the War Department had approved the resignations of over sixty officers from the Twenty-Fifth Corps alone. And some white artillery units that had been attached to the Twenty-Fifth made successful pleas to be unyoked from the black corps. A sympathetic Grant relieved them from their fears and allowed them to muster out in Washington D.C.[8]
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[1] Bernarr Cresap, Appomattox Commander: the Story of General E.O.C. Ord (San Diego and New York: A. S. BaKingdom: A.S. Barnes, 1981), pp. 139-40; Longacre, “Black Troops in the Army of the James, 1863-65,” in Military Affairs, February 1981, p. 6.
[2] George Cole to Cornelius Cole, February 13, 1865, from “camp.” Cole Family Papers, UCLA. On the new conservative triumvirate that doomed black troops and civilians, especially pertaining to Richmond, see: Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent, p. 43.
[3] August V. Kautz to Mrs. Savage, March 29, 1965. August V. Kautz Papers, typescript. Illinois State Historical Society.
[4] See: Michael deGruccio, “Manhood, Race, Failure, and Reconciliation: Charles Francis Adams Jr. and the American Civil War,” New England Quarterly 81, no. 4 (December 2008): 636–75. Adams had pushed to get horses for most of his soldiers, as the War Department had taken mounts away from his troopers. But upon entering Richmond, nearly half of his men entered by foot. Adams’s troopers must have felt like incomplete soldiers without their mounts. See Warner, “Crossed Sabres,” pp. 404–6.
[5] Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (H.Q. Fifth Mass. Cavalry) to John Quincy Adams II, May 2, 1865, Adams Letters, 2:269. 72.
[6] General E.O.C. Ord to Secretary Stanton in: OR, Series 1, Vol.46, part III, p. 1116; Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, pp. 121-22.
[7]See General Order, no. 108 in OR, Series 1, Vol. 49, part II, p. 948
[8] Dobak, Freedom by the Sword, pp. 423-34; Edward A. Miller, The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-Ninth U.S. Colored Infantry (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), p. 154.