Burrill Smith Jr.: From Beacon Hill to the 54th Massachusetts and a Veterans’ Post

Burrill Smith Jr. was 17 when he enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts in February 1863, among the first recruits of one of the first African American regiments to fight for the United States in the Civil War. In training he became Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s orderly, and in July 1863 he was shot in the left knee in the assault on Fort Wagner. He lived from 1846 to March 16, 1900, and spent the decades after the war as an advocate for the veterans of his regiment.

A Beacon Hill upbringing

Smith was born in 1846 and grew up on the north slope of Beacon Hill, in Boston’s free African American community, in an abolitionist household. Little is known of his childhood. His father, Burrill Smith Sr., opened the family home at 168 Cambridge Street to freedom seekers: the account book of the treasurer of Boston’s Vigilance Committee shows the committee reimbursing him in 1860 for boarding fugitives. The house also hosted Harriet Tubman. In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist Frank Sanborn wrote that she “came here Friday night and is at 168 Cambridge Street.”

The 54th Massachusetts and Fort Wagner

In February 1863 Smith enlisted in Company A of the newly formed regiment, which trained at Camp Meigs in Readville (now Hyde Park), Massachusetts. In 1897 he recalled that the regiment was mustered in 1100 strong, and that at Readville he first saw Colonel Shaw and became his orderly, remaining so while they were there.

Camp Meigs served as the training site for the 54th Regiment. Credit: Library of Congress.

After two months of training, the regiment left Boston for South Carolina on May 28 and reached Hilton Head on June 3, 1863. For the next month it stayed in camp, largely confined to “loading and discharging vessels.” Then Shaw, the regiment’s commander, expressed a wish to join the campaign to take Charleston, and the regiment joined a larger Union force on James Island for the assault on Fort Wagner. At dusk on July 18, 1863, the 54th led the attack. It breached the fort’s walls, but Confederate counterattacks forced it to retreat, with heavy casualties.

The Massachusetts 54th Regiment led the assault on Fort Wagner. Unsuccessful, they suffered significant losses. Credit: Library of Congress.

Smith described the assault three decades later. Just before the ditch the battery looked empty, and then, he said, “a cloud of men rose and fired hand grenades into us.” He was wounded in the left knee and sank down on the sand, with bodies tumbling from the parapet around him, and the assault, he said, lasted only about half an hour. When he heard the order to skirmish the bank he knew he would be discovered and taken prisoner, so he dragged himself along under fire until a soldier of the 7th Connecticut, one of those who took the wounded and dead off the field, picked him up.

Doctors moved him to a better-equipped hospital at Beaufort, South Carolina, where he stayed until December 31, 1863. He never forgot the sight there, he said, with blood everywhere and amputated limbs in view. He rejoined the regiment and served until he was mustered out in June 1865, and because of the bullet wound in his left knee he received a pension for the rest of his life.

Burrill Smith Jr.’s pension record indicates his injury and recovery in 1863, as well as his eventual mustering out in 1865. Credit: National Archives.

A veterans’ leader

By 1868 Smith was back in Boston. The city directory has him living in the family home on Cambridge Street, and he may have worked at the Post Office. He married and had two children.

In 1877 he joined the Robert A. Bell Post 134 of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), the Civil War veterans’ organization, which is considered the first all-Black G.A.R. post in the country. The post helped organize meetings, anniversaries and celebrations for veterans of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts and the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. It also held gatherings called “campfires,” which, the historian Barbara Gannon wrote, were rarely held around campfires or even outdoors and consisted of storytelling, songs, speeches serious and humorous, and recollections of the joys and anguish of military life. In 1895 the post’s members elected Smith their commander.

He was politically active too. At the 1872 convention of “Colored Citizens of Massachusetts” he added his name to resolutions calling for the election of Ulysses S. Grant. A Republican, he did not shy away from criticizing his party. A Boston Herald correspondent reported that at a meeting at the Twelfth Baptist Church in 1888, before a “packed house” of African American voters, Smith praised the party as the one that had given Black Americans whatever political liberty they had while criticizing it for being derelict and unfaithful to those who had stood by it. The meeting was open to Black Democrats as well as Republicans, and Smith said that Democrats were honest men entitled to respect, not the traitors to the race that some Republicans charged.

Memorial Day 1897 and his death

On Memorial Day, May 31, 1897, Augustus Saint-Gaudens unveiled the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial on Boston Common, and Smith joined the other surviving veterans of the 54th to attend. Beforehand he told a reporter that it would be “the happiest day of my life,” and he wanted as many veterans there as possible. He said he did not like to complain, but he thought some way should be found to carry those who could not walk, having written repeatedly to the committee in charge without an answer, and he hoped a word in the newspaper might move public opinion.

Smith died on March 16, 1900. His funeral at St. Paul’s Baptist Church on Tremont Street included delegations from the Robert A. Bell Post 134, Ladies’ Relief Corps 67, the Robert G. Shaw Veteran Association and the Ladies’ Auxiliary. His obituary in the Boston Daily Advertiser recalled that he was among the first to apply for enlistment in the 54th, was chosen by Shaw as his orderly and was a past commander of the Bell Post.

A lot in Mt. Hope Cemetery, Boston, where Burrill Smith Jr. is likely buried. Credit: NPS Photo/Gould.

Sources

• National Park Service, Boston African American National Historic Site, Answering the Call: Burrill Smith and the 54th Massachusetts, a story map that draws on Boston newspaper reports of 1872–1900 and other sources; an uncredited painting of the battle is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.