But this was not the last important battle the Phalanx took part in. Butler, after sending the larger portion of his forces to join the Army of the Potomac, was not permitted to remain quiet in his intrenchments. The confederates felt divined to destroy, if not capture, his base, and therefore were continually striving to break through the lines. On the 24th of May, General Fitzhugh Lee made a dash with his cavalry upon Wilson's Wharf, Butler's most northern outpost, held by two Phalanx Regiments of General Wilde's brigade. Lee's men had been led to believe that it was only necessary to yell at the "niggers" in order to make them leave the Post, but in this affair they found a foe worthy of their steel. They fought for several hours, when finally the confederate troops beat a retreat. An eye witness of the fight says:
"The chivalry of Fitzhugh Lee and his cavalry division was badly worsted in the contest last Tuesday with negro troops, composing the garrison at Wilson's Landing; the chivalry made a gallant fight, however. The battle began at half-past twelve p. m., and ended at six o'clock, when the chivalry retired, disgusted and defeated. Lee's men dismounted far in the rear, and fought as infantry; they drove in the pickets and skirmishers to the intrenchments, and made several valiant charges upon our works. To make an assault, it was necessary to come across an opening in front of our position, up to the very edge of a deep and impassable ravine. The rebels, with deafening yells, made furious onsets, but the negroes did not flinch, and the mad assailants, discomforted, returned to cover with shrunken ranks. The rebels' fighting was very wicked; it showed that Lee's heart was bent on taking the negroes at any cost. Assaults on the center having failed, the rebels tried first the left, and then the right flank, with no greater success. When the battle was over, our loss footed up, one man killed outright, twenty wounded, and two missing. Nineteen rebels were prisoners in our hands. Lee's losses must have been very heavy; the proof thereof was left on the ground. Twenty-five rebel bodies lay in the woods unburied, and pools of blood unmistakably told of other victims taken away. The estimate, from all the evidence carefully considered, puts the enemy's casualties at two hundred. Among the corpses Lee left on the field, was that of Major Breckenridge, of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry. There is no hesitation here in acknowledging the soldierly qualities which the colored men engaged in the fight have exhibited. Even the officers who have hitherto felt no confidence in them are compelled to express themselves mistaken. General Wilde, commanding the Post, says that the troops stood up to their work like veterans."
Newspaper correspondents were not apt to overstate the facts, nor to give too much favorable coloring to the Phalanx in those days. Very much of the sentiment in the army—East and West—was manufactured by them. The Democratic partizan press at the North, especially in New York and Ohio, still engaged in throwing paper bullets at the negro soldiers, who were shooting lead bullets at the country's foes.
The gallantry and heroic courage of the Phalanx in the Departments of the Gulf and South, and their bloody sacrifices, had not been sufficient to stop the violent clamor and assertions of those journals, that the "niggers won't fight!"
Many papers favorable to the Emancipation; opposed putting negro troops in battle in Virginia. But to all these bomb-proof opinions Grant turned a deaf ear, and when and where necessity required it, he hurled his Phalanx brigades against the enemy as readily as he did the white troops. The conduct of the former was, nevertheless, watched eagerly by the correspondents of the press who were with the army, and when they began to chronicle the achievements of the Phalanx, the prejudice began to give way, and praises were substituted in the place of their well-worn denunciations. A correspondent of the New York Herald thus wrote in May:
"The conduct of the colored troops, by the way, in the actions of the last few days, is described as superb. An Ohio soldier said to me to-day, 'I never saw men fight with such desperate gallantry as those negroes did. They advanced as grim and stern as death, and when within reach of the enemy struck about them with a pitiless vigor, that was almost fearful.' Another soldier said to me, 'These negroes never shrink, nor hold back, no matter what the order. Through scorching heat and pelting storms, if the order comes, they march with prompt, ready feet.' Such praise is great praise, and it is deserved. The negroes here who have been slaves, are loyal, to a man, and on our occupation of Fredericksburg, pointed out the prominent secessionists, who were at once seized by our cavalry and put in safe quarters. In a talk with a group of faithful fellows, I discovered in them all a perfect understanding of the issues of the conflict, and a grand determination to prove themselves worthy of the place and privileges to which they are to be exalted."
The ice was thus broken, and then each war correspondent found it his duty to write in deservedly glowing terms of the Phalanx.
The newspaper reports of the engagements stirred the blood of the Englishman, and he eschewed his professed love for the freedom of mankind, and particularly that of the American negro. The London Times, in the following article, lashed the North for arming the negroes to shoot the confederates, forgetting, perhaps, that England employed negroes against the colonist in 1775, and at New Orleans, in 1814, had her black regiments to shoot down the fathers of the men whom it now sought to uphold, in rebellion against the government of the United States:
"THE NEGRO UNION SOLDIERS.
"Six months have now passed from the time Mr. Lincoln issued his proclamation abolishing slavery in the States of the Southern Confederacy. To many it may seem that this measure has failed of the intended effect and this is doubtless in some respects the case. It was intended to frighten the Southern whites into submission, and it has only made them more fierce and resolute than ever. It was intended to raise a servile war, or produce such signs of it as should compel the Confederates to lay down their arms through fear for their wives and families; and it has only caused desertion from some of the border plantations and some disorders along the coast. But in other respects the consequences of this measure are becoming important enough. The negro race has been too much attached to the whites, or too ignorant or too sluggish to show any signs of revolt in places remote from the presence of the federal armies: but on some points where the federals have been able to maintain themselves in force in the midst of a large negro population, the process of enrolling and arming black regiments has been carried on in a manner which must give a new character to the war. It is in the State of Louisiana, and under the command of General Banks, that this use of negro soldiers has been most extensive. The great city of New Orleans having fallen into the possession of the federals more than a year ago, and the neighboring country being to a certain degree abandoned by the white population, a vast number of negroes have been thrown on the hands of the General in command to support and, if he can, make use of. The arming of these was begun by General Butler, and it has been continued by his successor. Though the number actually under arms is no doubt exaggerated by Northern writers, yet enough have been brought into service to produce a powerful effect on the imaginations of the combatants, and, as we can now clearly see, to add almost grievously to the fury of the struggle.