Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
Carolina were able to raise their own garden crops and poultry and often sold
the products of their labor. 2
Outnumbered by their slaves, South Carolina planters had lived for generations
in fear of bloody revolt. In 1739, the Stono Rebellion may have involved
as many as one hundred slaves. Denmark Vesey’s 1822 conspiracy in Charleston
had occurred within living memory. More than a generation later, when the Union
fleet bombarded Confederate shore defenses on 7 November 1861, whites on the
South Carolina Sea Islands seized what movable belongings they could and sailed,
steamed, or rowed for the mainland, fearing for their lives more than for their
property. As federal troops went ashore the next day, they found the islands’ black
residents in possession of the town of Beaufort and the surrounding country. Planters’
houses had been looted and, on some plantations, cotton gins smashed. Former
slaves wanted nothing more to do with the cotton crop that they had just finished
picking. They intended to devote their energies to growing food instead. 3
Union authorities saw the future differently. Cotton would help to pay for the
war and at the same time turn slaves into wage workers. Northern manufacturers
wanted to assure a steady supply of cotton, and their employees feared that a northward
migration of newly freed Southern blacks would depress wages. The landing
in the Sea Islands thus had support from important sections of the Northern public,
besides representing one of the first Union victories of the war. 4
The Department of the Treasury assumed responsibility for enemy property—
real estate and cotton, around Port Royal Sound—and Treasury agents soon swarmed
on Hilton Head and other islands. Leading them was Lt. Col. William H. Reynolds,
who had been a Rhode Island textile manufacturer before the war. His state’s governor
had introduced him to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase (the governor’s
future father-in-law), who appointed Reynolds to head the agency’s cotton gatherers.
Also active in the Sea Islands was William H. Nobles. Although Nobles had resigned
his commission as lieutenant colonel of the 79th New York Infantry, other Northern
administrators still addressed him by his old rank. Reynolds, Nobles, and their
assistants moved at once to seize goods, including wagons and draft animals, that
might contribute to federal revenues. Their avidity riled Brig. Gen. Isaac I. Stevens,
commanding the District of Port Royal, who allowed the Treasury agents a free hand
in collecting cotton while warning them not to touch “such quartermaster and commissary
stores as my parties may take possession of.” 5
To superintend the Sea Islands’ black residents, Chase named the Massachusetts
abolitionist lawyer Edward L. Pierce, who already had several months of experience
working with Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s original “contrabands” at Fort Mon-
2 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 177–78.
3 OR, ser. 1, 6: 6; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 389; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The
World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 588–97; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal
for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), pp. 16, 104–
07.
4 John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.
323–25.
5 OR, ser. 1, 6: 200–201 (quotation, p. 201); Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, p. 19; Ira
Berlin et al., eds., The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge