IV. Soldiers of the Corps d'Afrique will not be allowed to leave their camps, or to wander through the parishes, except upon written permission, or in the company of their officers.
V. Unemployed persons of color, vagrants and camp loafers, will be arrested and employed upon the public works, by the Provost Marshal's Department, without other pay than their rations and clothing.
VI. Arrests of persons, and seizures of property, will not be made by colored soldiers, nor will they be charged with the custody of persons or property, except when under the command, and accompanied by duly authorized officers.
VII. Any injury or wrong done to the family of any soldier, on account of his being engaged in military service, will be summarily punished.
VIII. As far as practicable, the labor of persons not adapted to military service will be provided in substitution for that of enlisted men.
IX. All regulations hitherto established for the government of negroes, not inconsistent herewith, will be enforced by the Provost Marshals of the different parishes, under the direction of the Provost Marshal General.
By command of Major General Banks:
RICHARD B. IRWIN,
Assistant Adjutant General.
In the department the actual number of negroes enlisted was never known, from the fact that a practice prevailed of putting a live negro in a dead one's place. For instance, if a company on picket or scouting lost ten men, the officer would immediately put ten new men in their places and have them answer to the dead men's names. I learn from very reliable sources that this was done in Virginia, also in Missouri and Tennessee. If the exact number of men could be ascertained, instead of 180,000 it would doubtless be in the neighborhood of 220,000 who entered the ranks of the army. An order was issued which aimed to correct the habit and to prevent the drawing, by collusion, of the dead men's pay.
The date of the first organization of colored troops is a question of dispute, but it seems as if the question might be settled, either by the records of the War Department or the personal knowledge of those interested. Of course the muster of a regiment or company is the record of the War Department, but the muster by no means dates the organization of the troops.[16] For example, a colonel may have been commissioned July, 1862, and yet the muster of his regiment may be September 1862, and even later, by two months, as is the case in more than one instance. It is just as fair to take the date of a soldier's enlistment as the date of the organization of a regiment, as that of the date of the order detailing an officer to recruit as the date of the colonel's commission. The writer's discharge from the Second Reg't. Louisiana Native Guards credits him as enlisting on the 1st day of September, 1862; at this date the 1st Reg't. La. N. G. was in the field, in November the Second Regiment took the field, so that the date of the organization of the first regiment of colored troops was in September, 1862. Col. Higginson, says in his volume: