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—SERGEANT PRINCE RIVERS,

1ST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS,

UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS1

Lieutenant, de old flag neber did wave quite right. There was something wrong about it,—there wasn’t any star in it for the black man. Perhaps there was in those you made in de North; but, when they got down here, the sun was so hot, we couldn’t see it. But, since the war, it’s all right. The black man has his star: it is the big one in the middle.

—TOM TAYLOR,

UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS2

How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man.

—W. E. B. DU BOIS3

ON APRIL 12, 1864, George W. Hatton found cause for celebration and reflection. Three years had passed since Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, and he could only marvel at the changes which had taken place in his own life and in the lives of his people. “Though the Government openly declared that it did not want the negroes in this conflict,” he noted, “I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed and ready to defend the Government at any moment; and such are my feelings, that I can only say, the fetters have fallen—our bondage is over.” Hatton was a sergeant in Company C of the 1st Regiment, United States Colored Troops. The regimental chaplain—among the first black men ever so designated—was Henry McNeal Turner, a native of South Carolina but most recently pastor of the Israel Bethel Church in Washington, D.C. Encamped near New Bern, North Carolina, the regiment awaited the orders that would take them into Virginia for what promised to be the final assault on the Confederacy. To many of the soldiers in this regiment, it all seemed incredible. “Who would not celebrate this day?” Sergeant Hatton asked. “What has the colored man done for himself in the past three years? Why, sir, he has proved … that he is a man.”

Less than a month later, Hatton’s regiment reached Wilson’s Landing, only a few miles from Jamestown, where (as the sergeant duly noted) some 264 years earlier “the first sons of Africa” had been landed on American soil. The region took on a special meaning, too, for several of the soldiers in the regiment who had labored as slaves there. The memories they retained of those years were no doubt revived when several black women entered the camp, still bearing the marks of a severe whipping recently administered to them. While out on a foraging mission the next day, the soldiers captured the man who had meted out that punishment—“a Mr. Clayton, a noted reb in this part of the country, and from his appearance, one of the F.F.V.’s [First Families of Virginia].” Before an obviously appreciative audience, which included the black women he had whipped, the slaveholder was tied to a tree and stripped of his clothes; William Harris, one of his former slaves before fleeing to enlist in the Union Army, took up a whip and lashed him some twenty times, “bringing the blood from his loins at every stroke, and not forgetting to remind the gentleman of days gone by.” The whip was then handed over to the black women, who “one after another,” as Sergeant Hatton afterward wrote, “came up and gave him a like number, to remind him that they were no longer his, but safely housed in Abraham’s bosom, and under the protection of the Star Spangled Banner, and guarded by their own patriotic, though once down-trodden race.”

That night, Sergeant George Hatton tried to sum up his impressions of this almost unreal experience. He confessed that he was at a loss for the proper words. “Oh, that I had the tongue to express my feelings while standing upon the banks of the James river, on the soil of Virginia, the mother state of slavery, as a witness of such a sudden reverse! The day is clear, the fields of grain are beautiful, and the birds are singing