• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1137 0

was the dramatic, the almost unbelievable climax to four years of war that had promised at the outset to be nothing more than a skirmish to preserve the Union. Now they were marching into Richmond as free men, amidst throngs of cheering blacks lining the streets. Within hours, a large crowd of black soldiers and residents assembled on Broad Street, near “Lumpkin Alley,” where the slave jails, the auction rooms, and the offices of the slave traders were concentrated. Among the soldiers gathered here was Garland H. White, a former Virginia slave who had escaped to Ohio before the war and now returned as chaplain of the 28th United States Colored Troops.

I marched at the head of the column, and soon I found myself called upon by the officers and men of my regiment to make a speech, with which, of course, I readily complied. A vast multitude assembled on Broad street, and I was aroused amid the shouts of ten thousand voices, and proclaimed for the first time in that city freedom to all mankind.

From behind the barred windows of Lumpkin’s Jail, the imprisoned slaves began to chant:

Slavery chain done broke at last!

Broke at last! Broke at last!

Slavery chain done broke at last!

Gonna praise God till I die!

The crowd outside took up the chant, the soldiers opened the slave cells, and the prisoners came pouring out, most of them shouting, some praising God and “master Abe” for their deliverance. Chaplain White found himself unable to continue with his speech. “I became so overcome with tears, that I could not stand up under the pressure of such fulness of joy in my own heart. I retired to gain strength.” Several hours later, he located his mother, whom he had not seen for some twenty years.5

The white residents bolted their doors, remained inside, and gained their first impressions of Yankee occupation from behind the safety of their shutters. “For us it was a requiem for buried hopes,” Sallie P. Putnam conceded. The sudden and ignominious Confederate evacuation had been equaled only by the humiliating sight of black soldiers patrolling the city streets. For native whites, it was as though the victorious North had conspired to make the occupation as distasteful as possible. Few of them could ever forget the long lines of black cavalry sweeping by the Exchange Hotel, brandishing their swords and exchanging “savage cheers” with black residents who were “exulting” over this dramatic moment in their lives. After viewing such spectacles from her window, a young white woman wondered, “Was it to this end we had fought and starved and gone naked and cold? To this end that the wives and children of many dear and gallant friends were husbandless and fatherless? To this end that our homes were in ruins, our state devastated?” Understandably, then, local whites boycotted the military band concerts on the Capitol grounds, even after Federal authorities, in a conciliatory gesture, had barred blacks from attendance.6

Four days after the entry of Union troops, Richmond blacks assembled at the First African Church on Broad Street for a Jubilee Meeting. The church, built in the form of a cross and scantily furnished, impressed a northern visitor as “about the last place one would think of selecting for getting up any particular enthusiasm on any other subject than religion.” On this day, some 1,500 blacks, including a large number of soldiers, packed the frail structure. With the singing of a hymn, beginning “Jesus my all to heaven is gone,” the congregation gave expression to their newly won freedom. After each line, they repeated with added emphasis, “I’m going to join in this army; I’m going to join in this army of my Lord.” But when they came to the verse commencing, “This is the way I long have sought,” the voices reached even higher peaks and few of the blacks could suppress the smiles that came across their faces. Meanwhile, in the Hall of Delegates, where the Confederate Congress had only recently deliberated and where black soldiers now took turns swiveling in the Speaker’s chair, T. Morris Chester, a black war correspondent,