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quickly formed in Boston and New Bedford (including black men whom the governor had been forced to reject at the outset of the war), there were insufficient numbers of blacks in Massachusetts to make up an entire regiment. The governor thereupon secured the support of a wealthy abolitionist who agreed to help finance the enlistment of blacks throughout the North, largely by employing as recruitment agents such leading black spokesmen as Martin R. Delany, John Mercer Langston, John S. Rock, William Wells Brown, Charles Lenox Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass. These were all familiar names in black abolitionism, most of them had worked actively to eradicate racial discrimination in the North, and several of them had only recently endorsed emigration to Haiti or Central America before being dissuaded by the reality of an antislavery war. “Action! Action! not criticism, is the plain duty of this hour,” Douglass declared, in a broadside intended to attract blacks to the Massachusetts regiment. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers and sisters shall march out into liberty.”31

The recruitment drive was highly successful. By May 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the most celebrated of the northern black regiments, was ready to leave Boston for Hilton Head, South Carolina, where it had been ordered to report to General David Hunter. With some 20,000 cheering Bostonians lining the streets, and the regimental band playing the John Brown anthem, the troops made their way to the Battery Wharf. “Glory enough for one day; aye, indeed for a lifetime,” remarked William C. Nell, a veteran black abolitionist. Frederick Douglass was there, not only to view the results of his recruitment activities but to see off his two sons, Lewis and Charles, who had been the first New York blacks to enlist in the regiment. Martin R. Delany’s eighteen-year-old son, Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany, had left his school in Canada to join the regiment. And on the balcony of Wendell Phillips’ house, overlooking the parade, stood none other than William Lloyd Garrison, who was observed resting his hand on a bust of John Brown.32

Two months later, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment made its famous assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold situated at the entrance to Charleston harbor. The attack was repulsed, with considerable loss of life (Robert Shaw, the white regimental commander, was among those killed), but black troops had fought valiantly. And that was what mattered. “It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race,” proclaimed a New York newspaper, “as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees.” Even the enormous expenditure of black lives could be viewed as a necessary sacrificial offering. “Do you not rejoice & exult in all that praise that is lavished upon our brave colored troops even by Pro-slavery papers?” abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld asked Gerrit Smith. “I have no tears to shed over their graves, because I see that their heroism is working a great change in public opinion, forcing all men to see the sin & shame of enslaving such men.” Two days after the battle, Lewis Douglass informed Amelia Loguen, his future wife, that he had not been wounded. “Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here.… Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war.”33

With the successful organization of two Massachusetts regiments (the surplus of volunteers for the 54th became the 55th Massachusetts Regiment), several northern states undertook to form similar contingents and employed black leaders to find the necessary men. The enthusiasm which brought about the Massachusetts regiments, however, proved to be less contagious than had been expected.