Army Life in a Black Regiment

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

This was at the tune of the first attack on Charleston, and the noise of this cannonading spread rapidly thither, and brought four regiments to reinforce Beaufort in a hurry, under the impression that the town was already taken, and that they must save what remnants they could. General Saxton, too, had made such capital plans for defending the post that he could not bear not to have it attacked; so, while the Rebels brought down a force to keep us from taking the guns off the wreck, I was also supplied with a section or two of regular artillery, and some additional infantry, with which to keep them from it; and we tried to "make believe very hard," and rival the Charleston expedition on our own island. Indeed, our affair came to about as much,—nearly nothing,—and lasted decidedly longer; for both sides nibbled away at the guns, by night, for weeks afterward, though I believe the mud finally got them,—at least, we did not. We tried in vain to get the use of a steamboat or floating derrick of any kind; for it needed more mechanical ingenuity than we possessed to transfer anything so heavy to our small boats by night, while by day we did not go near the wreck in anything larger than a "dug-out."

One of these nocturnal visits to the wreck I recall with peculiar gusto, because it brought back that contest with catarrh and coughing among my own warriors which had so ludicrously beset me in Florida. It was always fascinating to be on those forbidden waters by night, stealing out with muffled oars through the creeks and reeds, our eyes always strained for other voyagers, our ears listening breathlessly to all the marsh sounds,—blackflsh splashing, and little wakened reed-birds that fled wailing away over the dim river, equally safe on either side. But it always appeared to the watchful senses that we were making noise enough to be heard at Fort Sumter; and somehow the victims of catarrh seemed always the most eager for any enterprise requiring peculiar caution. In this case I thought I had sifted them before-hand; but as soon as we were afloat, one poor boy near me began to wheeze, and I turned upon him in exasperation. He saw his danger, and meekly said, "I won't cough, Gunnel!" and he kept his word. For two mortal hours he sat grasping his gun, with never a chirrup. But two unfortunates in the bow of the boat developed symptoms which I could not suppress; so, putting in at a picket station, with some risk I dumped them in mud knee-deep, and embarked a substitute, who after the first five minutes absolutely coughed louder than both the others united. Handkerchiefs, blankets, over-coats, suffocation in its direst forms, were tried in vain, but apparently the Rebel pickets slept through it all, and we exploded the wreck in safety. I think they were asleep, for certainly across the level marshes there came a nasal sound, as of the "Con-thieveracy" in its slumbers. It may have been a bull-frog, but it sounded like a human snore.

Picket life was of course the place to feel the charm of natural beauty on the Sea Islands. We had a world of profuse and tangled vegetation around us, such as would have been a dream of delight to me, but for the constant sense of responsibility and care which came between. Amid this preoccupation, Nature seemed but a mirage, and not the close and intimate associate I had before known. I pressed no flowers, collected no insects or birds' eggs, made no notes on natural objects, reversing in these respects all previous habits. Yet now, in the retrospect, there seems to have been infused into me through every pore the voluptuous charm of the season and the place; and the slightest corresponding sound or odor now calls back the memory of those delicious days. Being afterwards on picket at almost every season, I tasted the sensations of all; and though I hardly then thought of such a result, the associations of beauty will remain forever.

In February, for instance,—though this was during a later period of picket service,—the woods were usually draped with that "net of shining haze" which marks our Northern May; and the house was embowered in wild-plum-blossoms, small, white, profuse, and tenanted by murmuring bees. There were peach-blossoms, too, and the yellow jasmine was opening its multitudinous buds, climbing over tall trees, and waving from bough to bough. There were fresh young ferns and white bloodroot in the edges of woods, matched by snowdrops in the garden, beneath budded myrtle and Petisporum. In this wilderness the birds were busy; the two main songsters being the mocking-bird and the cardinal-grosbeak, which monopolized all the parts of our more varied Northern orchestra save the tender and liquid notes, which in South Carolina seemed unattempted except by some stray blue-bird. Jays were as loud and busy as at the North in autumn; there were sparrows and wrens; and sometimes I noticed the shy and whimsical chewink.

From this early spring-time onward, there seemed no great difference in atmospheric sensations, and only a succession of bloom. After two months one's notions of the season grew bewildered, just as very early rising bewilders the day. In the army one is perhaps roused after a bivouac, marches before daybreak, halts, fights, somebody is killed, a long day's life has been lived, and after all it is not seven o'clock, and breakfast is not ready. So when we had lived in summer so long as hardly to remember winter, it suddenly occurred to us that it was not yet June. One escapes at the South that mixture of hunger and avarice which is felt in the Northern summer, counting each hour's joy with the sad consciousness that an hour is gone. The compensating loss is in missing those soft, sweet, liquid sensations of the Northern spring, that burst of life and joy, those days of heaven that even April brings; and this absence of childhood in the year creates a feeling of hardness in the season, like that I have suggested in the melody of the Southern birds. It seemed to me also that the woods had not those pure, clean, innocent odors which so abound in the New England forest in early spring; but there was something luscious, voluptuous, almost oppressively fragrant about the magnolias, as if they belonged not to Hebe, but to Magdalen.

Such immense and lustrous butterflies I had never seen but in dreams; and not even dreams had prepared me for sand-flies. Almost too small to be seen, they inflicted a bite which appeared larger than themselves,—a positive wound, more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving more annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while tears rolled profusely down my face, from mere muscular irritation. Had I stirred a finger, the whole battalion would have been slapping its cheeks. Such enemies were, however, a valuable aid to discipline, on the whole, as they abounded in the guard-house, and made that institution an object of unusual abhorrence among the men.

The presence of ladies and the homelike air of everything, made the picket station a very popular resort while we were there. It was the one agreeable ride from Beaufort, and we often had a dozen people unexpectedly to dinner. On such occasions there was sometimes mounting in hot haste, and an eager search among the outlying plantations for additional chickens and eggs, or through the company kitchens for some of those villanous tin cans which everywhere marked the progress of our army. In those cans, so far as my observation went, all fruits relapsed into a common acidulation, and all meats into a similarity of tastelessness; while the "condensed milk" was best described by the men, who often unconsciously stumbled on a better joke than they knew, and always spoke of it as condemned milk.

We had our own excursions too,—to the Barnwell plantations, with their beautiful avenues and great live-oaks, the perfection of Southern beauty,—to Hall's Island, debatable ground, close under the enemy's fire, where half-wild cattle were to be shot, under military precautions, like Scottish moss-trooping,—or to the ferry, where it was fascinating to the female mind to scan the Rebel pickets through a field-glass. Our horses liked the by-ways far better than the level hardness of the Shell Road, especially those we had brought from Florida, which enjoyed the wilderness as if they had belonged to Marion's men. They delighted to feel the long sedge brush their flanks, or to gallop down the narrow wood-paths, leaping the fallen trees, and scaring the bright little lizards which shot across our track like live rays broken from the sunbeams. We had an abundance of horses, mostly captured and left in our hands by some convenient delay of the post quartermaster. We had also two side-saddles, which, not being munitions of war, could not properly (as we explained) be transferred like other captured articles to the general stock; otherwise the P. Q. M. (a married man) would have showed no unnecessary delay in their case. For miscellaneous accommodation was there not an ambulance,—that most inestimable of army conveniences, equally ready to carry the merry to a feast or the wounded from a fray. "Ambulance" was one of those words, rather numerous, which Ethiopian lips were not framed by Nature to articulate. Only the highest stages of colored culture could compass it; on the tongue of the many it was transformed mystically as "amulet," or ambitiously as "epaulet," or in culinary fashion as "omelet." But it was our experience that an ambulance under any name jolted equally hard.

Besides these divertisements, we had more laborious vocations,—a good deal of fatigue, and genuine though small alarms. The men went on duty every third day at furthest, and the officers nearly as often,—most of the tours of duty lasting twenty-four hours, though the stream was considered to watch itself tolerably well by daylight. This kind of responsibility suited the men; and we had already found, as the whole army afterwards acknowledged, that the constitutional watchfulness and distrustfulness of the colored race made them admirable sentinels. Soon after we went on picket, the commanding general sent an aid, with a cavalry escort, to visit all the stations, without my knowledge. They spent the whole night, and the officer reported that he could not get within thirty yards of any post without a challenge. This was a pleasant assurance for me; since our position seemed so secure, compared with Jacksonville, that I had feared some relaxation of vigilance, while yet the safety of all depended on our thorough discharge of duty.

Jacksonville had also seasoned the men so well that they were no longer nervous, and did not waste much powder on false alarms. The Rebels made no formal attacks, and rarely attempted to capture pickets. Sometimes they came stealing through the creeks in "dugouts," as we did on their side of the water, and occasionally an officer of ours was fired upon while making his rounds by night. Often some boat or scow would go adrift, and sometimes a mere dark mass of river-weed would be floated by the tide past the successive stations, eliciting a challenge and perhaps a shot from each. I remember the vivid way in which one of the men stated to his officer the manner in which a faithful picket should do his duty, after challenging, in case a boat came in sight. "Fus' ting I shoot, and den I shoot, and den I shoot again. Den I creep-creep up near de boat, and see who dey in 'em; and s'pose anybody pop up he head, den I shoot again. S'pose I fire my forty rounds. I tink he hear at de camp and send more mans,"—which seemed a reasonable presumption. This soldier's name was Paul Jones, a daring fellow, quite worthy of his namesake.