From Enslaved to Soldier on the Georgia Coast, 1862–1863

A story from Fort Pulaski National Monument.

When Fort Pulaski fell in April 1862, the Union tightened its hold on the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Almost at once, and quietly, the Army began testing a controversial idea: African Americans as soldiers.

Freedom seekers on Cockspur Island. NPS.

The fort as a refuge

As the U.S. Army closed in, Confederates abandoned their coastal cotton plantations and left behind a large population of enslaved people. Soon after the Army took Fort Pulaski, freedom seekers began escaping from nearby plantations to the fort. The people in the photograph above, some of them in cast-off soldiers' clothes, lived in the fort's outbuildings.

The Army put some of the men to work as labourers around the fort, and freedom seekers also guided Union boats through the coastal marshes near Savannah. General David Hunter, who commanded U.S. forces in Georgia and South Carolina, was a committed abolitionist, and he had bigger plans for the newly freed men.

Hunter's proclamations

• April 13, 1862: two days after the battle for Fort Pulaski, Hunter proclaimed freedom for all enslaved people on Cockspur Island.
• May 9, 1862: he issued a second proclamation, declaring all enslaved people in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida free.

President Abraham Lincoln disowned the May order at once. Emancipation touched millions of dollars of Southern wealth, and it was to be decided at the highest levels of government, not by a general in the field.

General David Hunter. Library of Congress.

The Hunter Regiment

Hunter began recruiting African American men on nearby Hilton Head Island as soldiers. He pictured an armed force of formerly enslaved men living among the rest of the island's Black population, and to set his loyal soldiers apart he dressed them in bright red trousers.

His officers began training the recruits while Hunter asked Washington for equipment and weapons. But the War Department did not back his unauthorised experiment. Without its support or money, Hunter disbanded the regiment within a few months. The "volunteers" went home to their families without pay, and Hunter asked for a new posting.

Within weeks, though, he was proved right: the War Department raised an official African American regiment off the Georgia coast.

Company E, 4th United States Colored Infantry. Library of Congress.

The experiment becomes official

In August 1862 the War Department sent General Rufus Saxton, another convinced abolitionist, to the Georgia coast to oversee the many formerly enslaved people now under U.S. control on the coastal islands. Soon after he arrived, Saxton won official permission to raise a regiment of African American soldiers.

Recruiting was slow at first. Men remembered what had happened in Hunter's regiment, and the lack of pay was a major obstacle. In the end, though, the 1st South Carolina Infantry was formed, with Thomas Higginson, a Massachusetts abolitionist, as its colonel.

Higginson admired his men and encouraged them to learn to read and write in the evenings, once drill was over. "Their love of the spelling book is perfectly inexhaustible," he wrote.

Within three months the regiment was sent on missions along the coast, skirmishing with small enemy forces, and Higginson was pleased. He wrote that they seemed especially suited to offensive operations and irregular warfare, with dash, resourcefulness and a deep knowledge of the country.

The 1st South Carolina kept up its raids along the coast through the winter of 1863. By spring the War Department was satisfied, and the official raising of African American regiments began soon after.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Enslaved to Soldier on the Georgia Coast", Fort Pulaski National Monument. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/enslaved-to-soldier-on-the-georgia-coast.htm
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.