Report of General Rufus A. Saxton to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton
Official Records of the War of Rebellion — 30 December 1864
By your instructions of August 25, 1862, I was authorized and instructed to organize and receive into the service of the United States as soldiers “volunteers of African descent” not exceeding 5,000, and to detail officers to command them.
The special duty of this force was to guard the plantations and settlements in the department and to make incursions into the rebel territory for the purpose of bringing away the negroes, the only laboring force of the rebels, and thus reducing their military strength. I invited the people to embrace the opportunity and privilege of aiding to achieve their permanent freedom. They were assured that their enlistment would be entirely voluntary; that no force would be used to compel them to enlist. The First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers was mustered into the service of the United States in October, 1862, and placed under the command of Col. T.W. Higginson, an able and accomplished officer. The career of this pioneer regiment, the first colored regiment ever mustered into the U.S. Army, its perfect discipline and efficiency are matters of history.
The claim of this regiment is that its earlier struggles, its drill and discipline, its expeditions along the southern coast, it made Port Hudson and Fort Wagner possible, because it opened for colored soldiers an opportunity.
Subsequently I was relieved from the duty of recruiting by the major-general commanding, General Gillmore.
The whole number of colored troops recruited in the department, both by myself and others, falls much short of the number contemplated in your instructions.
The failure is owing to several causes. When first invited to enlist the negroes had hardly learned to realize the promised change in their condition — to comprehend as a possibility that they had been so suddenly lifted out of the utter degradation of chattelism to the dignity of the right of bearing arms. They were far from being sure of their freedom.
Several occurrences had led them to doubt our good faith, who professed to come as their deliverers. They were fully aware of the contempt, oftentimes amounting to hatred, of their ostensible liberators. They felt the bitter derision, even from officers of high rank, with which the idea of their being transformed into available soldiers was met, and they saw it was extended to those who were laboring for their benefit. When their own good conduct had won them a portion of respect, there still remained widespread distrust of the ultimate intention of the Government.
A large number was required as laborers in the various departments of Government service. But one of the chief causes of failure is the fact that a comparatively few of the negroes are physically fit for soldiers; many suffer under some visible or concealed infirmity, produced by the rigor, cruelty, and barbarity of their treatment, and the evidences of the most unsanitary conditions of life on the plantations. In these circumstances the recruiting went on slowly, when the major-general commanding (General Foster) ordered an indiscriminate conscription of every able-bodied colored man in the department. As the special representative of the Government in its relation to them, I had given them earnest and repeated assurances that no force would be used in recruiting the black regiments. I say nothing of this order, in reference to my special duties and jurisdiction and the authority of the major-general commanding to issue it; but as an apparent violation of faith pledged to the freedmen, it could not but shake their confidence in our just intentions, and make them the more unwilling to serve the Government.
The order spread universal confusion and terror. The negroes fled to the woods and swamps, visiting their cabins only by stealth and in darkness. They were hunted to their hiding places by armed parties of their own people, and, if found, compelled to enlist. This conscription order is still in force. Men have been seized and forced to enlist who had large families of young children dependent upon them for support and fine crops of cotton and corn nearly ready for harvest, without an opportunity of making provision for the one or securing the other.
Three boys, one only fourteen years of age, were seized in a field where they were at work and sent to a regiment serving in a distant part of the department without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
A man on his way to enlist as a volunteer was stopped by a recruiting party. He told them where he was going and was passing on when he was again ordered to halt. He did not stop and was shot dead, and was left where he fell. It is supposed the soldiers desired to bring him and get the bounty offered for bringing in recruits.
Another man who had a wife and family was shot as he was entering a boat to fish, on the pretense that he was a deserter. He fell in the water and was left. His wound, though very severe, was not mortal. An employee in the Quartermaster’s Department was taken, and without being allowed to communicate with the quartermaster or settle his accounts or provide for his family, was taken to Hilton Head and enrolled, although he had a certificate of exemption from the military service from a medical officer.
I protested against the order of the major-general commanding (General Foster) and sent him reports of these proceedings, but had no power to prevent them. The order has never to my knowledge been revoked.
It was generally believed that the commission with which I was intrusted was given with a view to a critical test experiment of the capabilities of the negro for freedom and self-support and self-improvement, to determine whether he is specifically distinct from and inferior to the white race, and normally a slave and dependent, or only inferior by accident of position and circumstances, still a man, and entitled to all the rights which our organic law has declared belongs to all men by the endowment of the Creator.
I believed myself charged with a mission of justice and atonement for wrongs and oppressions the race had suffered under the sanction of the national law. I found the prejudice of color and race here in full force, and the general feeling of the army of occupation was unfriendly to the blacks. It was manifested in various forms of personal insult and abuse, in depredations on their plantations, stealing and destroying their crops and domestic animals, and robbing them of their money.
The women were held as the legitimate prey of lust, and as they had been taught it was a crime to resist a white man they had not learned to dare to defend their chastity.
Licentiousness was widespread; the morals of the old plantation life seemed revived in the army of occupation. Among our officers and soldiers there were many honorable exceptions to this, but the influence of too many was demoralizing to the negro, and has greatly hindered the efforts for their improvement and elevation.
There was a general disposition among the soldiers and civilian speculators here to defraud the negroes in their private traffic, to take the commodities which they offered for sale by force, or to pay for them in worthless money. At one time these practices were so frequent and notorious that the negroes would not bring their produce to market for fear of being plundered. Other occurrences have tended to cool the enthusiastic joy with which the coming of the “Yankees” was welcomed.
Their disappointment at not getting the lands they had selected at the invitation and under the supposed guaranty of the Government, I have referred to. They had been promised land on conditions they were ready and offered to fulfill. The land was denied to them; they could not understand the reasons of law and expediency why the promise was broken to the hope.
When they were invited to enlist as soldiers they were promised the same pay as other soldiers; they did receive it for a time, but at length it was reduced, and they received but little more than one-half what was promised. The questions of the meaning and conflicts of statutes which justified this reduction could not be made intelligible to them. To them it was simply a breach of faith. It is first of all essential to the success of the efforts of the Government in their behalf that the negroes shall have entire confidence in its justice and good faith. These things fill them with doubt and apprehension. They know as yet very little of potential mechanism or gradation of authority, and hence every white man is in their eyes the Government.
Their conceptions are too confused to enable them to distinguish clearly between official acts and the wanton outrages of individuals. I had no independent power to prevent or punish these violences and wrongs. The aid and protection in my operations which the commander of the department was instructed to afford were not always promptly or efficiently rendered.
In all matters relating to my special duties I was declared independent of the other military authorities. I was deeply sensible of the importance of maintaining harmonious relations with those authorities. I have never consciously invaded their functions. I have scrupulously endeavored to avoid exercising or claiming any power which was not clearly conferred by my instructions, or which would bring me into collision with other authorities; yet my operations have been interfered with in every step I have taken. My authority has been questioned by the department commanders, explanations of my official acts demanded, those acts annulled, and subordinate officers sustained and encouraged in preventing the execution of my orders.
These frequently occurring and harassing conflicts of jurisdiction, when harmony of councils and concert of action were vitally important, compelled me to ask very earnestly to be relieved from my special duties. Having experienced embarrassments in the past, I could not hope they would be lessened in the future by one less friendly to the work I had to do. I will not recapitulate the frequent occasions of disputed jurisdiction in which I have been most unwillingly involved with the other military authorities. I have sometimes yielded without controversy and sometimes reported and referred the question to the department to which I am responsible. I could scarcely carry out measures of importance with the confidence and vigor necessary to success when the first movement might be contested with questions of jurisdiction to be settled at every step. I was put upon my defense and required to prove before an authority to which I was not responsible that the official acts I contemplated were not usurpations. So far as these things affect me personally, I would be silent concerning them. I do not refer to them in a spirit of personal complaint, but only in their relation to the people whose interests were intrusted to my charge, and my own ability to fulfill the beneficent intentions of the Government toward them. I was the organ of communicating to them the purposes of the Government as conveyed in your instructions in their general scope and the particular measures devised for their good. Their frequent disappointments, though for causes over which I had no control, which, being political considerations, they had not the faintest understanding of, weakened their confidence in me and impaired my influence and usefulness.
Amid all their griefs and disappointments they seem to have kept bright their faith in Mr. Lincoln. Their hope and confidence in him never wavers. They regard him as their great friend and deliverer, who, though often thwarted in his purpose of good by malign influences, will at last bring them to the promised land.
The experiment with the freedmen in this department is a success. The only use I wish to make of this catalogue of difficulties is as an illustration of the fact which forms the summary and substance of this and all other true reports of the freedmen in their new conditions — amid all their obstructions, and in spite of all, they have made constant progress and proved their right to be received into the full communion of freemen.
They have shown that they can appreciate freedom as the highest boon; that they will be industrious and provident with the same incitement which stimulates the industry of other men in free societies; that they understand the value of property and are eager for its acquisition, especially of land; that they can conduct their private affairs with sagacity, prudence, and success; that under freedom’s banner these sea islands are not destined to become a howling wilderness, but will flourish more than ever when cultivated by freemen; that they are not ignorant from natural incapacity, but from the brutishness of their former condition; that they are intelligent, eager, and apt to acquire knowledge of letters, docile and receptive pupils; that they acquire to adopt as fast as means and opportunity admit the social forms and habits of civilization; that they quickly get rid of in freedom the faults and vices generated by slavery, and in truthfulness and fidelity and honesty may be compared favorably with men of any other color, in conditions as unfavorable for the development of those qualities; that they are remarkably susceptible of religious emotions and the inspirations of music; that, in short, they are endowed with all the instincts, passions, affections, sensibilities, powers, aspirations, and possibilities which are the common attributes of human nature.
They have given the highest proof of manhood by their bravery and discipline on many a battle-field where defeat, they well knew, had for them no mercy. They have conquered a recognition of their manhood and right to be free and vindicated the wisdom and justice of your first order to place arms in their hands (which I had the honor of receiving and executing). The senseless prejudices and bitter contempt against their race are disappearing before their peaceful and orderly conduct under their trials and provocations, their patient hope and heroism in war. Events for four years have been disciplining the mind of the nation to prepare it to give them full recognition and ample justice.
In this view it may be that the obstacles which beset their earlier path toward freedom were blessings, normal elements for the solution of the great problem of their manhood and their rights; as the atrocities and diabolisms, the murders and martyrdoms, the countless sacrifice of noblest lives in this war, may have been necessary to convince the American people of the utter and irredeemable barbarism of slavery and to inspire them with a determined purpose to build themselves up into a new nation and a new Union upon the enduring foundation of justice, freedom, and equal rights of all men.
It has been my earnest endeavor to carry out to the extent of my ability your views and purposes with regard to the people committed to my charge, and to inaugurate in this department the wise and humane policy contemplated in your instructions to me.
In the hope that I have been in some degree successful, I am sir, with great respect, your obedient servant.
R. Saxton, Brigadier-General of Volunteers
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