In turn, each of the women that Clayton had beaten were given the whip and their chance to lay the lash on this slaveholder’s back. He was tied to a tree and he was given 20 lashes by one of his own former slaves, a man named William Harris, who was now a member of the Union Army. The white Virginian was stripped to the waist. Clayton, the man who had allegedly administered the beatings on these women. Members of Hatton’s company managed to capture that slave owner, a Mr. And into his lines came several black freed women who all declared they had recently been severely whipped by a master. And such are my feelings that I can only say the fetters have fallen, our bondage is over.” A month later Hatton’s regiment was in camp near Jamestown, Virginia - and he didn’t miss the irony of being at Jamestown, the founding site of Virginia. He says, “Though the government openly declared that it did not want the Negroes in this conflict, I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed and ready to defend the government at any moment. Hatton, his fellow soldiers, and their families had lived generations as slaves. They were in camp New Bern, North Carolina, and he sat down to write a letter to reflect upon the circumstance that he found himself in. He was at this point, by April of 1864, a non-commissioned sergeant in Company C, First Regiment, United States Colored Troops. He had lived part of his life in Washington, DC, part of his life in Virginia, North Carolina he’d been around. He looked out of broken windows, at this abandoned plantation in the Sea Islands, through what he described as “the great avenues of great live oaks,” and he observed that quote, “All this is a universal southern panorama, but five minutes walk beyond the hovels and the live oaks will bring one to something so unsouthern that the whole southern coast at this moment trembles at the suggestion of such a thing, a camp of a regiment of freed slaves.”Īlmost two years later one of those freed slaves named George Hatton wrote a couple of letters from the front. And Higginson had his headquarters in an old plantation house. It was actually the first formally, legally, federally recognized Thanksgiving Day so decreed by Abraham Lincoln. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is in place but the final Emancipation Proclamation hasn’t quite happened yet. Higginson went on to write a great book about it called Army Life in a Black Regiment, and among the remarkable descriptions he left in that classic is this description from Thanksgiving Day 1862 so it’s November ‘62. Nearly 1,000 freed slaves were recruited among the roughly 35 to 40,000 former slaves along the Georgian/South Carolina Sea Islands. It had an amazing non-commissioned officer whose name was Prince Rivers, a man who’d been a slave yesterday but a free man by 1862, and whose white commanding officer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson said, “in another land, in another time, he could command any army in the world.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an abolitionist from Worcester, Massachusetts who ended up the colonel and the commander of that regiment. It was organized entirely and exclusively among freed slaves, along the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Professor David Blight: The first formally recognized or organized black regiment in the Civil War was known as the First South Carolina Volunteers. Introduction: Freed Slaves on the Battlefield The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 16 - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total WarĬhapter 1.
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