Eli George Biddle walked out of a Boston classroom and into the 54th Massachusetts

On February 14, 1863, Eli George Biddle attended school in Boston as the students gathered to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Every voice but his joined in. To a young Black man, the claim that America was a “sweet land of liberty” did not ring true. After a confrontation with his teacher he left school, walked the streets, came to a recruiting office for the new 54th Massachusetts Regiment and enlisted for three years. Only nine others had signed up before him.

This account follows a National Park Service story map of his life. Biddle, who was also called George Eli Biddle, was one of the oldest surviving veterans of the regiment.

Early years

Biddle was born in Pennsylvania around 1846 and later settled in Boston as a painter. Little is known of his early life, but the 1850 federal census for Bart Township, Lancaster County, lists the family, with 4-year-old Eli highlighted.

The 1850 census page for Bart Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, enumerating free inhabitants.

Camp Meigs and Fort Wagner

Biddle, in Company A, trained for three months at Camp Meigs in Readville, learning to shoot, drill and march as a unit after a medical examination. On May 28, 1863, the regiment paraded through Boston to the harbor and boarded the steamer De Molay.

Camp Meigs, where Biddle trained in 1863. Credit: F. Moras, Library of Congress.

On July 18, 1863, the regiment joined a large Union force at James Island, South Carolina, for the assault on Fort Wagner. Company A was placed at the head of the column on the far end of the right wing, a position of honor the generals gave in recognition of the regiment. Biddle’s gun was blown out of his hands by a nearby explosion, and in the dark he found his company had retreated without him. The story map relays a reporter’s later account of his crawl back to his comrades under fire. Its accounts differ on whether he was wounded: one says he was not hurt in the battle, another that he reached his comrades with a severe shoulder wound. Either way, he spent three months in a hospital before returning to Company A. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw died in the attack. Records are vague on the rest of his service, but show that in 1865 he served for a short time as an orderly in the Regimental Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina.

After the war

He went back to painting for a few years. In 1881 he became a local preacher and in 1883 an ordained deacon. While preaching in Worcester, Massachusetts, he attended divinity school at Yale and received a Divinity degree, and he preached at churches in Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, among them the AME Zion Church on Columbus Avenue in Boston. He also edited the church newspaper, The Star of Zion, where his words often appeared on the front page.

Biddle spoke out against injustice. On July 17, 1917, he joined former comrades at a Faneuil Hall meeting, organized to mark the anniversary of the attack on Fort Wagner, that also addressed recent inequalities and atrocities against Black Americans.

Gettysburg, 1938

For the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the park held a “Blue and Grey Reunion” for the last Civil War veterans, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt invited Biddle. Union and Confederate veterans shook hands across the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge. Biddle later recalled that the former Confederate across the wall observed that they had once shot at each other and that both had missed.

Veterans at the 1938 “Blue and Gray Reunion” at Gettysburg. The story map places Biddle in the group on the right, second from the right. Credit: National Archives.

Last years and legacy

Biddle attended Boston’s Memorial Day gatherings every year, often with his grandson, who later recalled marching in the parades, and on Memorial Day 1939 was elected Chaplain for the Massachusetts Department of the Grand Army of the Republic. He died on April 8, 1940 and was buried on April 12 at Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston with full military honors.

His descendants carried on the family tradition of education and service, and helped found the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Company A reenactors. His name is on a street sign at the intersection of Hubbard Avenue and Walnut Street in Cambridge, near the family’s former home.

Sources

• National Park Service, Boston African American National Historic Site, "Eli George Biddle: Faithful until the End" story map (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/eli-george-biddle-storymap.htm); a painting of the Battle of Fort Wagner is left out, and the quotations are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.