5.38: Black Guides in the American Civil War
Supplement to Endnotes
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During Potter’s Raid, and other like raids, runaway slaves exploited the chaos and fled toward Union lines. This, perhaps, inflicted more damage to the Confederacy than anything directly done by Cole and his fellow Raiders. The raids relied on the help of recently recruited black soldiers, and on black scouts and local blacks. They were instrumental in targeting Rebel households. Their contributions rarely made it into official Union reports. But indignant white southerners made sure to detail how the “abolitionist” Raiders were turning the Rebel world upside down and using the knowledge and muscles of ex-slaves to do so.
Confederates reported that fifty or so black soldiers played a key role in Potter’s Raid.[1] A North Carolina soldier recalled that the raid was chiefly made up of Cole’s Third New York, and a unit made up of “mostly negroes.” Many of those black soldiers had just been recruited from the surrounding region and formed into the all-black First North Carolina Volunteers.[2] As Rebels wanted to tell it, “faithful” slaves had been compelled by the Union to steal away, often with the master’s wagon, weighed down with food and booty; One North Carolinian reported that the black soldiers “were busy the whole time of their stay, corrupting and seducing away slaves, many of whom left with them.”[3] As they saw things, and certainly some of it was true, the recently freed soldiers invited (and coerced) enslaved people to seek their own freedom.
But if the escaping slaves were to make it to Union lines, Cole’s comrades had to make it back themselves. Here again black knowledge was paramount. Cavalrymen more than foot soldiers depended on knowledge about local topography because they rarely retreated on the paths used to advance upon their targets. Local blacks, who had familiarity with back trails and hidden roads, often were the difference between capture and escape-- or life or death-- for the white Raiders.[4]
Back in the summer of 1862, Cole’s colonel, Simon Mix, had stood before a crowd in New York and argued for arming black soldiers. As he did so, he revealed the extent that Union soldiers were dependent on local blacks in North Carolina. He declared, in a laudatory, yet degrading, way, that he would put muskets in the hands of runaway slaves, “for nowhere in the swamps of North Carolina can you find a path where a dog can go that the negro does not understand.” He claimed that it was a known fact that “in all our expeditions in North Carolina we have depended upon the negroes for our guides; for without them we could not have moved with any safety. [Applause]”[5]
Cole could -- and later did -- personally testify to this. Just days after his regiment had arrived for the first time in New Bern, a contraband named Sam Williams brought intelligence to the Union officers which led to an expedition to trap Confederate cavalrymen. But when Cole’s superior officer stubbornly chose a path against the advice of Williams, the Union troopers were ambushed. More personal to Cole, though, was the fact that knowledge from a black man had led to the capturing of war trophies in December 1862, resulting in his promotion to Major.
Black southerners were so gifted in their knowledge of local topography that they might be suspected of treachery when they failed their Union friends. When Martin Robinson, a former slave, led Union cavalry to a spot in a Virginia river where it was too swollen to cross (probably because of a recent downpour), the commanding officer, Ulric Dahlgren, hanged Robinson from a nearby tree. He figured that Robinson must have been an agent for the Rebels.
Over and again, black guides came to the rescue of Union soldiers by providing crucial knowledge, leading them to shortcuts, anticipating ambushes, guiding soldiers to the missing body of a comrade, or feeding famished soldiers.[6]
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[1] In the official report only one of the Majors, Floyd Clarkson, mentions the black troops as playing a part in the expedition. At Tyson’s Creek (really Otter’s Creek), where General Potter claims he found an “intricate path” on a plantation, Clarkson states that he ordered thirty black cavalrymen off of their horses to skirmish in the woods. See: US War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881–1901) (OR), Series 1, Vol. 27, part II, pp. 973; Western Democrat, July 28, 1863.
[2] Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, in the Great War 1861-'65, Vol. III, p.173; Norris, “‘The Yankees have been here!’: The Story of Brig. Gen. Edward E. Potter's Raid on Greenville, Tarboro, and Rocky Mount, July 19-23, 1863," p. 4; Norris, Potter’s Raid, pp. 27-29.
[3] Kinchen Jahu Carpenter, War Diary of Kinchen Jahu Carpenter, Company I Fiftieth North Carolina Regiment, War between the States, 1861–’65, edited by Julie Carpenter Williams (Rutherfordton, NC: privately published, 1955), pp. 12-3; Account of the “Late Raid on Rocky Mount and Tarboro” in Western Democrat, Aug 11, 1863.
[4]Edward G. Longacre, Mounted Raids of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 12-14.
[5]John Austin Stevens, Proceedings at the Mass Meeting of Loyal Citizens : On Union Square, New-York, 15th Day of July, 1862, Under the Auspices of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, the Union Defense Committee of the Citizens of New York, the Common Council of the City of New York, and Other Committees of Loyal Citizens (New York: Published by order of the Committee of Arrangements, George F. Nesbitt & Co., 1862), pp. 89-90. Norris, Potter’s Raid, p. 7.
[6] In letters, reports and diaries, one frequently finds brief mention of the ways in which blacks served as guides to confused, endangered, or overmatched Union soldiers. For a few examples see: Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, the Common Soldier of the Union, p. 116; OR, Series 1 - Volume 46 (Part II), p. 243; Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, pp. 32, 58. For an example of how a black boy rescued a white officer who was shot point blank by a rebel and left for dead for having served in a black regiment, see: Hollandsworth Jr., James G., “The Execution of White Officers from Black Units by Confederate Forces during the Civil War," in Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War, ed. Gregory J. W. Urwin (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), p. 59. Story of Sam Williams in Christopher Jones private work, chapter 6, p.4; One fellow officer in Cole’s Third New York Cavalry, Lieutenant Enoch Stahler, reminisced that his “colored boy, Banquo” had saved his life during battle. See: Enoch Stahler, Enoch Stahler, Miller and Soldier: The First Lieutenant Third New York Cavalry, Member of the Loyal Legion (Washington, D.C: Hayworth Pub. House, 1909), pp. 2, 5; For story of Martin Robinson, see: Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees, pp. 286-87.
The Union army also employed former slaves as spies. Posing as common enslaved men, they could melt deeper into the confederate interior and obtain critical information about the enemy. Although seldom mentioned in official reports following battles, the value of black knowledge was at times confessed frankly, as Mix did in New York. In his testimony before a War Department commission, Captain Charles B. Wilder claimed from his experiences around black refugees at Fortress Monroe that “the most valuable information” the Union Army acquired, about the Confederate making of an iron-clad ship from the sunken hull of the USS Merrimack, and “the operations of the rebels came from the colored people and they got no credit for it.” Also, Cole’s soon-to-be commanding officer, Ben Butler, would even plant two black spies (a gardener and a cook) in the Confederate White House, where they reported on gatherings, table conversations, and other dialogue overheard in Jefferson Davis’s parlor. Wilder quoted in Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Families and Freedom (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 31-33; Longacre, “The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1-4)", p.143.