11.11: On the Controversial Fall of Richmond
Supplement to Endnotes
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In the first days of the war, few would have believed that the end lay four years away, and that when Richmond did fall, armed black soldiers would be among the first to rush through its streets. Some claimed that when Rebel forces set fire to Richmond and fled, black troops had been the first to enter the city. Others denied it. Still others said that blacks would have been the first had they not been robbed of the honor.
Cole’s superior, General Weitzel, recalled that one of his black cavalry regiments were fated by accident to be best positioned to enter first. But, at the last moment, the black troopers were held back so that white soldiers could move in before them. Some participants depicted a foot and hoof race with black and white men vying desperately to make claims on the historic moment.
Storytelling and memory, stirred by ambition and pride, immediately clouded the truth. Cole’s surviving letters shed no light on the controversy, because neither he nor his soldiers were near the contested glory. Just two weeks prior to Richmond’s fall, the Second Colored Cavalry, which had camped at Richmond’s threshold, was dispatched to Norfolk, for Provost Guard duty, far from the historic drama. The transfer of his regiment from the symbolic center of the war, and thus from the nation’s gaze, foreshadowed the fate of the rest of the black corps.[1]
Regardless of who entered first, some of the soldiers in the black Twenty-Fifth briefly shared in the occupation of fallen Richmond, and days later in the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. But as it happens when soldiers converge upon a city, some men, black and white, cavorted through the night and raised hell. There were widespread reports of pillaging and carousing. And many of the complaints were directed toward black soldiers. The reputation of the Twenty-Fifth Corps was permanently sullied when it was reported that on a late night, April 11, two sergeants and a corporal, all three black, robbed a house and raped two white women, one of them a girl thirteen years of age. (The rape happened -- if it happened -- just hours after Butler’s meeting with the worried Lincoln, if that happened!)[2]
The cluster of troubling reports, much of it from embittered Rebels, bolstered critics’ claim that black men were not fit for military service -- and that arming them and giving them a uniform had turned freedom into license. Even Major General Weitzel, who had little affection for his black soldiers, but who clearly felt his own honor tarnished by the allegations, defended the behavior of his men. He called the accusations “racist exaggerations,” and argued that the troubles came from escaped inmates and enraged Rebels, some of them clothed, he claimed, in uniforms discarded by Union soldiers. Some Union commanders, who did believe the gist of the reports, placed the true blame on incompetent white officers. Even the Commanding General of the Army of the James, Edward O. C. Ord, who made no secret of his low regard for black troops, claimed that the conduct of black soldiers in Richmond had been exemplary.[3]
After the black troops were cast out of the fallen capital, the Richmond Whig reported that the “real secret” of the transfer of the black troops was that in occupied Richmond, white Union soldiers could not bear to see black men in uniform sharing the symbolic triumph.[4] It was a poorly kept secret.
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[1] Just when Union soldiers first stepped foot into Richmond was and is a point of contention and confusion. For accounts that black troops were forced to yield at the last instant to their white counterparts, see Dallas D. Irvine, “Evacuation and Occupation,” in Journal of American Military Institute 2, no.3 (1939): pp. 76–77; Godfrey Weitzel, Richmond Occupied (Richmond: Richmond Civil War Centennial Committee, 1965), p. 10. In his work that emphasizes camaraderie and alliance between black soldiers and their white officers, Joseph Glatthaar claims that blacks entered Richmond first. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), p. 208; For a similar account, see: Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 292.
One of the most detailed and thorough historical accounts of the troops that entered Richmond shows that soldiers and officers from various regiments believed that their regiment had been the first. See: Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), pp. 417-424.
[2] William A. Dobak, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army, Center of Military History, 2011), pp. 419-420.
[3] Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees, pp. 288-289; Dobak, Freedom by the Sword, pp. 420-2; James Kenneth Bryant II, “The Model 36th Regiment: The Contribution of Black Soldiers and Their Families to the Union War Effort, 1861–1866” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2001), pp. 324-26.
[4] See Richmond Whig, June 19, 1865, p. 2; OR, Series 1, Vol. 46, Part I, pp. 139-40. For examples of other tensions between white and black union soldiers see: Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union.(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 121; Jordan, Black Confederates, p. 293-94.