Read Capitol Men for Free Online

a total of 37,000 sacrificed their lives. The famous assault on Fort Wagner by the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers on July 18, 1863, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, is the best-known tale of blacks' Civil War heroism, although Higginson's men skirmished with rebels as early as the winter of 1862–63 along South Carolina's coastal rivers, and ex-slaves showed tremendous valor that spring on the lower Mississippi below Vicksburg, where, on May 23, 1863, black Louisiana regiments advanced against Confederate shellfire at the Battle of Port Hudson.
    Two weeks later Confederate forces attacked the federal encampment at Milliken's Bend in an effort to break the supply line supporting General Grant's siege of Vicksburg. The bloody fight became a grudge match between newly minted black soldiers and their former masters. "The planters had boasted," reported the black writer William Wells Brown, "that, should they meet their former slaves, a single look from them would cause the negroes to throw down their weapons, and run." But when the two sides converged, the black troops, although outnumbered, countercharged the advancing enemy. "It was a genuine bayonet charge, a hand-to-hand fight, a contest between enraged men: on the one side, from hatred of a race; and on the other, desire for self-preservation, revenge for past grievances, and the inhuman murder of their comrades." That the fight was fierce and unrelenting was seen clearly in its aftermath. "White and black men were lying side by side, pierced by bayonets, and in some instances transfixed to the earth. In one instance, two men—one white and the other black—were found dead, side by side, each having the other's bayonet through his body."
    Of the thousand or so black soldiers engaged in the battle, 652 were reported killed, wounded, or missing, several times the loss of 160 white Union troops. But an enduring statement had been made. A federal captain on the scene, after walking among the dead and dying on the stillsmoldering battlefield, told a Northern newspaperman, "I never more wish to hear the expression,'
The nigger won't fight"'

    For all the freedmen who served under arms, the near-overnight conversion from chattel to soldier, "from the shame of degradation to the glory of military exaltation," had been overwhelming. For Robert Smalls, whose theft of the
Planter
had brought him acclaim and even influence with the authorities in Washington, the effect was hundredfold: national magazines sang his praises, a fort near Pittsburgh was named for him, while back home in the Sea Islands his childhood was re-counted by many with special pride and remembered for its early indications of his heroic character.

    THE BATTLE OF PORT HUDSON
    No one, however, could accuse him of resting on his laurels, as he went on to participate in seventeen deadly encounters with the enemy. The most dramatic came on April 7, 1863, when Smalls piloted the double-turret ironclad
Keokuk
in a fleet of six Union ironclads attempting to retake Charleston. The rebels, having thoroughly mined the waters around Fort Sumter and carefully rehearsed how to concentrate their shore-based artillery in case of assault, pounded the invading federal boats. Two small Confederate ironclads, the
Chicora
and the
Palmetto State,
also engaged the Yankee intruders. The lead Union vessel, the
Weehawken,
got caught in a defensive net while another, the
New Ironsides,
stalled and blocked the ships following in its wake. Smalls's wheelman, standing directly beside him, was killed by a blast to the face, and the
Keokuk,
struck nearly a hundred times by blistering cannon fire from Fort Sumter, was disabled and eventually sank. Smalls was one of the few survivors.
    The South thrilled to the victory. A year before at Hampton Roads, in March 1862, the fabled shooting match between the federal ironclad
Monitor
and its Southern counterpart, the
Merrimac,
had ended in a draw, but the repulsion of Union ironclads at