13.1: The Postwar Lives of the Black Soldiers
Supplement to Endnotes
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Except for what they picked up in the army, the overwhelming majority of the soldiers in the Second Colored Cavalry could not read or write. Their presence is implied everywhere in the official war records -- as a regiment. But the same records give them almost no personhood beyond their complexion and height, and their names (which were often recorded incorrectly by officers). Newspapers did not tell their individual stories, or reprint their comparatively rare letters to home. On the whole, after the war they did not own homes, or pass down to their children the stable spaces of attics, chests and extra drawers in which loved ones might someday discover letters that only some of them could have written during the war. As aging veterans they did not have the wherewithal or desire to write memoirs, or the good fortune of worrying about much besides getting through life, one hour at a time.
Luckily, the soldiers’ pension records, housed today in the National Archives in Washington D.C., shed small beads of light on some of their individual experiences. The Civil War pensions were the product of an expanding federal bureaucracy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They consist of brittle papers -- affidavits, reports from medical examiners, internal memos -- browning from age and enclosed inside of large envelopes. The dust from these decomposing documents triggered my allergies during the weeks and weeks that I went through them, sheet after sheet, taking pictures and notes.
Mostly created in the 1880s and 1890s, these pensions often read like a record of aging men grousing about varicose veins and hemorrhoids. Some of the pensions, though, are fascinating collections of contradicting testimonies about a veteran’s “legitimate” wife, or his surviving children. Such cases tend to be more about the life of these veterans during the 1880s and after, than about how the soldiers wound up in uniform or how they experienced the war or returning home. Sprinkled throughout the thousands and thousands of formulaic testimonies of Cole’s soldiers, though, are brief -- frustratingly terse -- accounts about the veterans’ last days in slavery, about how they were married on their plantations, how and where they joined the army, how they were wounded, or fell sick, and how they fared upon returning home from Texas. As must be done with pensions for white soldiers, these claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, as ex-soldiers (and their widows and children) were attempting to trace their disabilities, decades later, to particular events in the war; the pensions are a record of millions of veterans and their kin trying to take full advantage of federal policies that allowed more and more of them monthly pension payments.
Pensions, by nature, lead us to men with broken bodies who are trying to convey their personal stories of disability and suffering. Or they lead us to the death of soldiers and the wake of grief and poverty that ensued for dependent spouses and family. But even with the skewed nature of pensions from the Second Colored Cavalry kept in mind, I have been struck by the details they provide about how their lives were altered when they fled from their owners and followed Cole’s raiders to New Bern, or when they were recruited by Cole in tidewater Virginia and North Carolina.
Here are some glimpses I can share.
There was Henry Hill. He was the first child of his enslaved mother, Eliza. As she told the pension examiner, Henry was conceived when her master impregnated her, eighteen months after she had begun living with her enslaved husband, Abram. Eliza described her boy Henry as yellow complexioned, with “tolerably” straight hair. (Others said his skin was the color of ginger cake and that his hair was kinky.) In 1863, when Cole’s white cavalry regiment was raiding nearby, Henry was sixteen and just learning to plow his master’s farm. In July, he fled alongside a fellow slave named Samuel, following Yankee raiders in Cole’s Third New York Cavalry to Union lines in New Bern. (This was just one of the many raids that summer, only weeks before the operation in which Cole was ordered to abandon many of the refugees by burning the bridge.)
Henry left behind his widowed mother, and his six-year old brother, Green Hill. He had a gift for handling horses, and found work in the quartermaster’s stable until he joined Cole’s cavalry on Christmas eve of 1863. Comrades said that right after the slaves enlisted, Butler gave the men a Christmas gift of five dollar bills. If this was the bounty that Butler secured for enlisted men, it reveals how soldiers saw it as a personal act of generosity from Butler.
In the summer, Henry’s mother finally fled to New Bern (leaving Green behind with others). She took shelter for three nights in “a house crowded with colored people.” She first found work washing soldiers’ clothes, and then cooking for men in the city’s recruiting office; she rented a bed from a free black woman, and she spent time in a refugee camp where she drew rations as a soldier’s dependent mother. Somehow, she retrieved the bed and clothing that Henry had left behind for her, probably put in the care of a refugee. She sent word to Henry, through a couple of his comrades who were home on furlough, that she had fled to New Bern and desperately wanted to hear from him.
When Henry found out, he asked his comrade, Rollin Wright, to pen a letter for him. Henry signed his name at the bottom and enclosed a few dollars in the envelope. The letter, for some reason, did not make it into Eliza’s hands until a comrade delivered it at the end of the year. Not able to read or write her own name, Eliza asked Mrs. Orten, a white woman, to read her the letter. Betsy Williams, a black woman, read it to Eliza again. And a woman named Gatsy read it to the anxious mother yet again. The months-old letter said that Henry had not been well. But by the time Eliza heard her friends read the worrisome news, her son had been dead for nearly two months. Soon after he had dictated the letter, Henry was admitted to an army hospital for bronchitis, and transferred from one hospital to the next, before dying of consumption in November.
There was Alexander Harris. In Brazos Santiago, Alexander began suffering from what his comrades called “salt water scurvy.” In his own words, before the war he was “solid as a dollar.” But after his discharge he went straight to live with his younger sister who nursed his ailing body. He tried his hand at barbering, and as a butcher, but frequent attacks sapped him of strength. He became a town pauper and within fourteen years after the war was “a total cripple” left to beg for his daily bread.
William Davis, of Suffolk, was an oysterman before the war. In the spring of 1864, he was jolted violently while in the saddle and ruptured his right testicle on the pommel of his saddle. In the trenches at Deep Bottom, heavy cannonading blew out his right ear, and left him mostly deaf in his left. The war that was supposed to have ended, continued on and on for him. Long after he returned to Suffolk, even in the quiet of the evening, he heard “roaring and ringing” in his head.
Anthony Hawkins was probably one of the last men forced onto the ship before it set off for Texas. He had been promoted to bugler and played in the regimental band, the group that most doggedly resisted Dollard’s pleas to get on the vessel. Nelson had fled his master in 1863 and in New Bern became the personal servant of one of Cole’s fellow officers in the Third New York Cavalry. He was later recruited by Cole and mustered in at Fort Monroe where his officer, Captain Ives, asked his name. After Nelson Hawkins told him, Ives replied that he would call him “Hopkins” instead. Nelson protested but his captain insisted that the new name would be “more handy.” And so Hawkins became Hopkins. But “the boys,” Nelson remembered, called him by his true name. His former Sergeant, Richard R. Johnson (black), testified to the pension agent that he had only known the soldier as “Hopkins,” revealing, it seems, how promoted black men were not always considered one of the “boys.” (Richard Johnson, by the way, was one of the black officers who ordered the troops onto the ships; and he later testified against one of the mutineers.)
During the pension process Nelson Hawkins had trouble proving his wartime sickness as he had understandably avoided the army hospitals in Texas, opting instead to take his chances with remedies in his own tent. He needed corroborating affidavits from his white officers if he hoped to get a pension. Only Edwin Fox supplied a testimony, and did so from El Paso, Texas where he had begun his life as a borderland desperado. Fox (who was trying to secure his own pension for his wasted health) gave key testimony supporting Hawkins’ injuries. Fox, of course, had to carefully step around his dismissal for murdering a soldier, and how he actually was not a U.S. soldier in Texas but a troubled veteran who couldn’t stay away from army life. With the subtle diction of a lawyer, Fox told the pension agent that he had been “in” the regiment until the first day of 1865, and was “with” the Regiment “until it mustered out in 1866.” (The fine distinctions did not fool the pension agents.)
As for Nelson Hawkins’ health, a black comrade, Samson Farrier, recalled that the soldier’s illness began with piles (hemorrhoids) while they were laboring at Dutch Gap. (In his own pension, Farrier said that his officers changed his name to “Fay.”) But it was in Texas, that Hawkins suffered from diarrhea and began spitting up blood. It was there that he and others contracted “bone scurvy.” He hopped and limped from one place to the next. Surgeon Manley had him eat stewed prickly pears. A comrade recalled that many of the men, not just Hawkins, were almost blind after sunsets, suffering from what they called “moon blindness.”
For this, Manley prescribed raw beef and liver. But, as Hawkins put it, “it
didn’t do much good!!” He returned to North Carolina with only a few teeth in
his mouth.
Trim Hopkins -- his true name was Hopkins -- was part Indian, and older than most
of his comrades. He looked to be in his forties. He was a free man before the war began, and though he could not write, was promoted to Corporal and then to Sergeant. His wife, Caroline Overton, was a personal cook for Colonel Cole. Richard R. Johnson -- the black Sergeant who, as he saw it, did his duty during the mutiny by siding with his white commanders -- recalled that the nearly six-foot Trim had his wife “with him all the time” during the war. Just before Richmond fell, Trim got “very sick” with “summer complaint” -- severe diarrhea. One day, as the rumors spread about picking cotton in Texas, Trim and Caroline deserted together.
There was George Cratch, a slow-witted, large-framed soldier, who was not sure of his age. He and a group of refugees escaped to Union lines in New Bern. After he was recruited, probably by Cole himself, the men made their way northward to Fortress Monroe and enlisted. During some of the first drills under Cole, Cratch’s large “dark boy horse” fell on him and snapped the bones in the soldier’s lower leg. One of his comrades tried to immediately pull Cratch from the horse, but was ordered back into line. After the men were finally allowed to haul him to his tent (years later, Cratch remembered the names of every man who carried him), the regimental surgeon, Dr. Manley, tried to reset his shattered bones, strapped boards on his leg, and then applied horse liniment to his ankle. Cratch had ambitions to bear the colors; but after his injury he was converted into a cook for his captain. He returned home to Craven County, North Carolina, a hobbled veteran who others would remember for his crooked-legged gait and his stooping. He limped about with a stick, a shoe on his good foot and the other wrapped “in a mass of old rags and leather.” His suffering was masked by a “grinning, good natured face.”
Decades after coming home, Cratch applied for a pension and needed his officers to
testify about his injuries. He was confused and saddened when he got news that Captain Wilson, whom Cratch had served and fed daily, somehow did not remember Cratch’s injury. When asked by the pension agent how Wilson could have forgotten, Cratch said he wasn’t sure how his captain could forget him, but that the white officers “cared little for the colored men any how.” John Jones, a white officer who also remembered almost nothing about Cratch, admitted that it was easy to forget the men. “The facts are,” Jones told an examiner, “we had so little to do with the men we did not even know their names.”
Similar vignettes appear again and again in the decomposing pensions: Wives in Virginia, traipsing back and forth between contraband villages and the regiment’s camp. Men bolting from slavery during raids in North Carolina. Souring relations between officers and troops. Scrotums ruptured or torn on the pommels of saddles. Misery at Dutch Gap. Bloody hemorrhoids. Laying rail in Texas for Uncle Sam. Swollen, cracked feet in the baking sands along the Mexican border. Blindness and hunger. Rotting gums. Ineffectual folk remedies. And soldiers returning home with missing teeth-- some fated to limp about Norfolk or New Bern, or to wear glasses with green lenses prescribed for their failing eyes.
The sad images in the pensions do not constitute the sum of these soldiers’ lives, of course. But they are an unusually rich body of primary sources to understand black life after the war.
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For more on this, see a great work on the promise of underutilized pensions records: Donald R. Shaffer and Elizabeth A. Regosin, eds., Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction Through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (New York: New York University Press, 2008).