FOOTNOTES:
[143] Washington Correspondent of the New York Tribune, December 2, 1863.
Part 7.
THE NEGRO IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION.
CHAPTER XIX.
NEGROES AS SOLDIERS.
Gen. Benj. F. Butler commanded a number of Negro Troops at Fort Harrison on the 29th Sept., 1864. After white troops had been driven back by the enemy, Gen. Butler ordered his Negro troops to storm the fortified position of the enemy at the point of the bayonet. The troops had to charge down a hill, ford a creek, and—preceded by axemen who had to cut away two lines of abatis—then carry the works held by infantry and artillery. They made one of the most brilliant charges of the war, with "Remember Fort Pillow" as their battle-cry, and carried the works in an incredibly short time.
Nearly a decade after this battle, Gen. Butler, then a member of Congress from Massachusetts, said, in a speech on the Civil Rights Bill of this affair:
"It became my painful duty to follow in the track of that charging column, and there, in a space not wider than the clerk's desk, and three hundred yards long, lay the dead bodies of five hundred and forty-three of my colored comrades, fallen in defence of their country, who had offered up their lives to uphold its flag and its honor, as a willing sacrifice; and as I rode along among them, guiding my horse this way and that way, lest he should profane with his hoofs what seemed to me the sacred dead, and as I looked on their bronze faces upturned in the shining sun, as if in mute appeal against the wrongs of the country for which they had given their lives, whose flag had only been to them a flag of stripes, on which no star of glory had ever shone for them—feeling I had wronged them in the past, and believing what was the future of my country to them—among my dead comrades there, I swore to myself a solemn oath—'May my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,' if I ever fail to defend the rights of those men who have given their blood for me and my country that day and for their race forever, and God helping me, I will keep that oath."