Supplement to Endnotes

​​

Historians stumble upon strange things from the past. Things said or done that make little sense. Often, a“strange" comment requires no commentary or context from past actors because the meaning was clear; it required no clarification. I find the brief mention of this book fascinating.  

      From the trial, we learn that when Fox agreed to “send up a corporal and two guards” to have Edwards bound, Sergeant Samuel Brown, one of the black officers who watched the murder unfold, suddenly “walked off.” At some point, Brown was ordered to put away his gun. Perhaps this was why he cut away from the conflict. Perhaps his gut made him withdraw. He had been on the wrong end of Fox’s revolver earlier that year when Fox, with waving gun, forced a soldier named Hatch to tie him (Brown) up.

      But as Brown walked away, he noticed some black guards coming through the company streets. These guards appear to have been different from the ones who were ordered to come and tie up Edwards. Instead of going straight to the standoff, they first ducked into the orderly’s tent. Brown followed them in.

      Brown testified of something strange and that warrants close reading, though it was apparently of little importance to the white men who administered the court martial. He said:

 

I saw some guards coming to the tent. I walked to the orderly’s tent, and there was a little book there and I looked at that.

 

As if realizing he had strayed from what the trial officers wanted to hear, Brown immediately shifted the focus of his testimony back to the actual struggle between Fox and Edwards, saying nothing more about the book inside the tent. There were no follow-up questions; the Judge Advocate, after all, was there to understand the thinking of Fox, not the secondary experiences of black soldiers.[1]

      The bizarreness of the story demands attention. In the throes of such murderous tension, Brown walked away and crowded into a tent to look at a book with two comrades. It will remain a mystery what book it was, though it had to have had some relationship to the violence that escalated just outside the tent flaps.

      Sergeant Brown and his comrades might have found comfort in a biblical passage or a hymnal. The timing of the gathering, though, seems too peculiar for such a thing. Perhaps Brown and his comrades huddled beneath the canvass, frantically fumbling through the Articles of War, or maybe the Lieber instructions, a code for soldierly conduct that Lincoln had signed the previous summer. But it seems more likely that the soldiers joined together, with time running out, to glean the words of Cole’s confusing order.

      It was, after all, in the tent of a black orderly that these men sought out this book. At one point in the trial, the judge handed a copy of the order to Fox’s captain, Silliman B. Ives, asking him if he recognized it. Ives responded that he did. When further questioned if Cole’s order had been “issued properly” throughout the company, Ives answered affirmatively. “Yes,” he told the court, “it was copied in all the books.”[2]

      Orderlies were to attend to various needs of the company and, as one contemporary handbook stated, “to carry orders, messages, &c.” If the company orderly did not have a regimental order book (with Cole’s order) in his tent then he still would have delivered the order to others. It was directed toward all the white officers, after all.[3]

      A literate former slave entrusted to deliver messages between his officers might have paid close attention to orders, even copying them down or attempting to put them to memory. Black non-commissioned officers -- like Sergeant Brown -- who were selected from hundreds of ex-slaves and required to do basic administrative duties, were more likely to be literate than the rank-and-file soldiers. Perhaps the details of the order had been part of an internal debate among the black soldiers. Brown might have been seen as an interpreter who could extract meaning from dense military orders, like a reverend might from the book of Isaiah.[4]

      If so, they were caught between the harsh realities of military authority and their long-held faith that words -- that books --  would empower them. They may have wavered at the last moment on their plans to use Cole’s order to justify violently turning the tables. They also may have had less violent plans and wanted instead to dispute the matter with Fox. When, moments later, they witnessed Fox kill Edwards, they learned how the power of words was an illusion in the face of armed white officers who interpreted words differently.  The seemingly arbitrary powers of their white commanders extended to the power over words (a power they had long associated with their masters’ prerogatives).[5]

 

----

​

[1]See Sergeant Brown’s testimony on pages 21-22 in Court Martial of Edwin R. Fox, NN2550, NARA. Corporal Foster’s testimony in typed portion pages 16-18.

 

[2]Court Martial of Edwin R. Fox.  Captain Ives’ second testimony found in typed portion,  page 28.

 

[3]See: August Valentine Kautz, Customs of Service for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers as Derived from Law and Regulations and Practised in the Army of the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), pp. 42-43.

      Interesting note that before the war in “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Henry David Thoreau claimed that John Brown had passed through Massachusetts and showed a few people his “little ‘orderly book’” which contained the “the names of his company in Kansas, and the rules by which they bound themselves.” See: Elizabeth Hall Witherall, ed., Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 398.

 

[4]As one handbook put it, orderlies were “soldiers selected on account of their intelligence, experience and soldierly bearing....” See: August Valentine Kautz, Customs of Service for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers as Derived from Law and Regulations and Practised in the Army of the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), pp. 42-43.

 

[5]Thomas Webber, Deep Like Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community 1831-1865 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978).