Clara Barton

1821-1912

An educator and humanitarian, Clarissa

“Clara” Harlowe Barton helped distribute
needed supplies to the Union Army during
the Civil War and later founded the disaster
relief organization, the American Red Cross.

Born on December 25, 1821 in Oxford,

Massachusetts, Barton was the youngest of Stephen and Sarah Barton’s five
children. Her father was a prosperous farmer. As a teenager, Barton helped care
for her seriously ill brother David—her first experience as a nurse.

Barton’s family directed their painfully shy daughter to become a teacher upon
the recommendation of renowned phrenologist L.N. Fowler, who examined her
as a girl. She began teaching at age 18, founded a school for workers’ children at
her brother’s mill when she was 24, and after moving to Bordentown, New
Jersey, established the first free school there in 1852. She resigned when she
discovered that the school had hired a man at twice her salary, saying she would
never work for less than a man.

In 1854 she was hired as a recording clerk at the US Patent Office in

Washington, DC, the first woman appointed to such a post. She was paid $1,400
annually, the same as her male colleagues. However, the following year,
Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland, who opposed women working in
government, reduced her to copyist with a lower salary. In 1857, the Buchanan
Administration eliminated her position entirely, but in 1860, she returned as
copyist after the election of President Abraham Lincoln.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Barton quit her job and made it her mission to
bring supplies to Union soldiers in need—among them, men of the 6th
Massachusetts Infantry. This started a life-long career of aiding people in times of
conflict and disaster. In 1862, she received official permission to transport
supplies to battlefields and was at every major battle in Maryland, Virginia, and
South Carolina, where she also tended to the wounded and became known as
the “angel of the battlefield.” She was officially named head nurse for one of
General Benjamin Butler’s units in 1864, even though she had no formal medical
training. She joined Frances Gage in helping to prepare slaves for their lives in
freedom. After the war, Barton helped locate missing soldiers, mark thousands of
graves, and testified in Congress about her wartime experiences.

In 1869, Barton traveled through Europe to regain her health. While in

Switzerland, she learned about the International Red Cross, established in
Geneva in 1864. Returning to the US, Barton built support for the creation of an
American society of the Red Cross by writing pamphlets, lecturing, and meeting
with President Rutherford B. Hayes. On May 21, 1881, the American Association
of the Red Cross was formed; Barton was elected president in June. In 1882, the
US joined the International Red Cross.

Barton remained with the Red Cross until 1904, attending national and
international meetings, aiding with disasters, helping the homeless and poor, and
writing about her life and the Red Cross. She was also an ardent supporter of
women’s suffrage. In 1904, she established the National First Aid Association of
America, an organization that emphasized emergency preparedness and
developed first aid kits. Her Glen Echo, Maryland home became a National
Historic Site in 1975, the first dedicated to the achievements of a woman.
Frances Clayton
1830-unknown

Before the Civil War, Frances lived with

her husband in Minnesota. When the
fighting began, the couple set off to
Missouri to enlist, hoping that enlisting a state away could help disguise Frances’s
identity. Her husband enlisted under his real name, which has been recorded as
“John” or Elmer” in different sources, and she donned the name “Jack Williams.”
They joined a Missouri regiment that was mustered in St. Paul and for another
twenty-two months fought side by side. At the Battle of Stones River from
December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863 their service came to an end. In this
assault, General William Rosecrans helped win Union control on Central
Tennessee while Frances’s husband succumbed to a bullet on the front lines.
Forced by the ensuing battle, Frances told reporters that she had to step over his
corpse during the conflict. Shortly after this fateful day, she reported her
deception and was discharged from the army. Even though she was injured three
times during the eighteen battles she fought in, she notes that her identity was
never revealed.
Albert Cashier
aka Jennie Hodgers
1843-1915

There are over 400 documented cases of women

disguising themselves as men and fighting as
soldiers on both sides during the Civil War. The
case of Albert Cashier, born "Jennie Hodgers" with a female sex assignment, is
one of the most famous because Cashier continued to live as a man after the war
and was not discovered until a couple of years before his death. His consistent
and nearly life-long commitment to a male identity has prompted some
contemporary scholars to think of Cashier as a transgender man.

Cashier was born on December 25, 1843 in Clogherhead, County Louth, Ireland.
Not much is known about his early life, as the only account available was given by
Cashier when he was suffering from dementia in 1913.

This much is certain—on August 6, 1862, Albert Cashier, a resident of Belvidere,

Illinois, enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry. Although he was the shortest soldier
in the regiment, and kept mostly to himself, Cashier was accepted as “one of the
boys” and considered to be a good soldier.

Cashier’s regiment was part of the Army of the Tennessee and fought in over 40
engagements, including the siege of Vicksburg, the Battle of Nashville, the Red
River Campaign, and the battles at Kennesaw Mountain and Jonesborough,
Georgia. There is an account of Cashier being captured and escaping by
overpowering a prison guard, but no further details of this event exist.

Cashier served a full three year enlistment with his regiment until they were all
mustered out on August 17, 1865 after losing a total of 289 soldiers to death and
disease.

After the war, Cashier returned to Illinois where he settled in Saunemin. He

continued his identity as a man, and held many different jobs, including
farmhand, church janitor, cemetery worker, and street lamplighter. Cashier also
voted in elections at a time when women did not have the right to vote and
collected his veteran’s pension.

In November of 1910, Cashier was hit by a car and broke his leg, at which time his
sex assigned at birth was discovered. The local hospital agreed not to divulge his
sex assignment, and he was sent to the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy,
Illinois to recover. Cashier remained a resident of the home until March of 1913,
when due to the onset of dementia, he was sent to a state hospital for the insane.
Attendants there discovered his sex assignment and forced him to wear a dress.
The press got a hold of the story and soon everyone knew that Private Albert
Cashier had been born as Jennie Hodgers.

Many of his former comrades, although initially surprised at this revelation, were
supportive of Cashier, and protested his treatment at the state hospital. When
Cashier died on October 10, 1915, he was buried in his full uniform and given a
tombstone inscribed with his male identity and military service.
Loreta Janeta Velasquez

1842-1897?

What is known is that Velazquez was born in

Cuba on June 26, 1842 to a wealthy family. In
1849, she was sent to school in New Orleans, where she resided with her aunt. At the
age of 14, she eloped with an officer in the Texas army. When Texas seceded from the
Union in 1861, her husband joined the Confederate army and Velazquez pleaded with
him to allow her to join him. Undeterred by her husband’s refusal, Velazquez had a
uniform made and disguised herself as a man, taking the name Harry T. Buford.

Now displaying the self-awarded rank of lieutenant, Velazquez moved to Arkansas,

where she proceeded to raise a regiment of volunteers. Locating her husband in
Florida, Velazquez brought the regiment to him, presenting herself as their
commanding officer. Her husband’s reaction is not recorded in history, as just a few
days later he was killed in a shooting accident.

Velazquez headed north, acting as an “independent soldier,” she joined up with a

regiment just in time to fight at the Battle of First Manassas (Bull Run) and the Battle
of Ball’s Bluff. Shortly afterwards, she once again donned female attire and went to
Washington, DC, where she was able to gather intelligence for the Confederacy. Upon
her return to the South, Velazquez was made an official member of the detective corps.
Apparently espionage did not hold enough excitement for Velazquez, and she once
again sought action on the battlefield. Resuming her disguise as Lieutenant Buford, she
traveled to Tennessee, joining up with another regiment to fight at the Battle of Fort
Donelson on February 11, 1862. Velazquez was wounded in the foot, and fearing that
her true gender would be revealed if she sought medical treatment in camp, she fled
back to her home in New Orleans.

Still in her male disguise, Velazquez was arrested in New Orleans for being a possible
Union spy. She was cleared of the charges, but was fined for impersonating a man, and
released. She immediately headed back to Tennessee, in search of another regiment to
join. As luck would have it, she found the regiment she had originally recruited in
Arkansas, and fought with them at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862. While on
burial detail, she was wounded in the side by an exploding shell, and an army doctor
discovered her true gender. Velazquez decided at this point to end her career as a
soldier, and she returned to New Orleans.

Not content to sit out the rest of the war, Velazquez then went to Richmond to
volunteer her services as a spy. She was able to travel freely in both the South and the
North, working in both male and female disguises. It was during this time that she
married Confederate Captain Thomas DeCaulp; unfortunately, he died in a hospital a
short time later.

After the war, Velazquez married a man identified only as Major Wasson, and
immigrated to Venezuela. After his death, she moved back to the United States, where
she traveled extensively in the West, and gave birth to a baby boy. In 1876, Velazquez,
in need of money to support her child, decided to publish her memoirs. The Woman in
Battle was dedicated to her Confederate comrades “who, although they fought in a
losing cause, succeeded by their valor in winning the admiration of the world.” The
public reaction to the book at the time was mixed—Confederate General Jubal Early
denounced it as pure fiction—but modern scholars have found some of it to be quite
accurate.

With the release of her book, Velazquez may have married for a fourth time and is last
documented as living in Nevada. The date of her death is thought to be 1897, but there
is no supporting evidence for this. In response to those who criticized the account of
her life, she said that she hoped she would be judged with impartiality, as she only did
what she thought to be right.
Sarah Rosetta
Wakeman

1843-1864

Sarah Rosetta Wakeman was one of

hundreds of women who disguised
themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Unlike most of the women however, the
letters that Wakeman wrote home were preserved by her family and later published.
They give a unique picture of what it was like to undertake and maintain such a
masquerade.

Wakeman was born on January 16, 1843 in Bainbridge, New York, the eldest of nine
children in a poor farming family. Not much is known about Wakeman’s life, until
August of 1862, when she decided to leave home disguised as a man. The reasons for
this drastic decision can be guessed at—she had no prospects of marriage, her father
was in debt, and her small earnings as a “domestic” would not have been much help to
the family.

Adopting a male disguise, Wakeman signed on as a boatman doing manual labor on a

coal barge traveling on the Chenango Canal. Shortly after making her first trip, she
encountered recruiters from the 153rd New York Infantry Regiment. The offer of a
$152.00 bounty was too good to refuse, and on August 30, 1862, Wakeman enlisted
under the name of Lyons Wakeman. The regiment departed for Washington, DC on
October 17.

After serving as provost and guard duty in Alexandria, Virginia and on Capitol Hill in
Washington, the regiment was transferred to the command of Major General Nathaniel
Banks in February of 1864. On March 15, Wakeman and her regiment were sent to
Louisiana to take part in the Red River Campaign. Forced to march hundreds of miles
through swampy bayou country, with poor food and drinking water, Wakeman
persevered while hundreds of her comrades succumbed to illness.

The regiment finally saw action at Pleasant Hill, Louisiana on April 9, 1864. Standing
shoulder to shoulder with the men in her company, Wakeman fired round after round
into the advancing Confederates, beating them back six times. While the 153rd fought
gallantly, the Union army was forced to retreat back down the Red River, fighting
another engagement at Monett’s Bluff on April 23rd. Holding back the Confederates
once again, the army finally reached safety at Alexandria, Louisiana in early May.

On May 3, Wakeman reported to the regimental hospital, suffering from chronic

diarrhea. She was transferred to a hospital in New Orleans, arriving there on May 22.
By this time she was gravely ill and on June 19, 1864, she died. There is no record of her
true sex ever having been discovered, and she was buried under the name Private
Lyons Wakeman at Chalmette National Cemetery near New Orleans. In one of her
letters home, she had written “I don’t know how long before I shall have to go into the
field of battle. For my part I don’t care. I don’t feel afraid to go.”
Sarah Emma
Edmonds
1841-1898

Sarah Emma Edmondson was born in New

Brunswick, Canada in December of 1841. Her father was a farmer who had been hoping
for a son to help him with the crops; as a result, he resented his daughter and treated
her badly. In 1857, to escape the abuse and an arranged marriage, Edmondson left
home, changing her name to Edmonds.

Edmonds lived and worked in the town of Moncton for about a year, but always fearful
that she would be discovered by her father, she decided to immigrate to the United
States. In order to travel undetected and to secure a job, she decided to disguise herself
as a man and took the name Franklin Thompson. She soon found work in Hartford,
Connecticut as a traveling Bible salesman.

By the start of the Civil War in 1861, Edmonds was boarding in Flint, Michigan,
continuing to be quite successful at selling books. An ardent Unionist, she decided that
the best way to help would be to enlist under her alias, and on May 25, 1861, Edmonds
was mustered into the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a 3 year recruit.

Although Edmonds and her comrades did not participate in the Battle of First
Manassas on July 21, they were instrumental in covering the Union retreat from the
field. Edmonds stayed behind to nurse wounded soldiers and barely eluded capture to
return to her regiment in Washington. She continued to work as a hospital attendant
for the next several months.

In March of 1862, Edmonds was assigned the duties of mail carrier for the regiment.
Later that month, the 2nd Michigan was shipped out to Virginia as part of General
McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign. From April 5 to May 4, the regiment took part in the
Siege of Yorktown.It was during this time that Edmonds was supposedly first asked to
conduct espionage missions. Although there is no definitive proof that Edmonds ever
acted as a spy, her memoirs detail several of her exploits behind enemy lines
throughout the war, disguised variously as a male “contraband” and an Irish peddler.

On May 5, 1862, the regiment came under heavy fire during the Battle of Williamsburg.
Edmonds was caught in the thick of it, at one point picking up a musket and firing with
her comrades. She also acted as a stretcher bearer, ferrying the wounded from the field
hour after hour in the pouring rain.

The summer of 1862 saw Edmonds continuing her role as a mail carrier, which often
involved journeys of over 100 miles through territory inhabited by dangerous
“bushwhackers.” Edmonds’ regiment saw action in the battles of Fair Oaks and
Malvern Hill, where she acted once again as hospital attendant, tending to the many
wounded. With the conclusion of the Peninsula Campaign, Edmonds returned with her
regiment to Washington.

On August 29, 1862, the 2nd Michigan took part in the Battle of Second Manassas.
Acting as courier during the battle, Edmunds was forced to ride a mule after her horse
was killed. She was thrown into a ditch, breaking her leg and suffering internal injuries.
These injuries would plague her for the rest of her life and were the main reason for her
pension application after the war.
During the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 11-15, Edmonds served as an orderly
for her commander, Colonel Orlando Poe. While her regiment did not see much action,
Edmonds was constantly in the saddle, relaying messages and orders from
headquarters to the front lines.

In the spring of 1863, Edmonds and the 2nd Michigan were assigned to the Army of the
Cumberland and sent to Kentucky. Edmonds contracted malaria and requested a
furlough, which was denied. Not wanting to seek medical attention from the army for
fear of discovery, Edmonds left her comrades in mid-April, never to return. “Franklin
Thompson” was subsequently charged with desertion.

After her recovery, Edmonds, no longer in disguise, worked with the United States
Christian Commission as a female nurse, from June 1863 until the end of the war. She
wrote and published her memoirs, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, the first edition
being released in 1864. Edmonds donated the profits from her book to various soldiers’
aid groups.

Edmonds married Linus Seelye in 1867 and they had three children. In 1876, she
attended a reunion of the 2nd Michigan and was warmly received by her comrades,
who aided her in having the charge of desertion removed from her military records and
supported her application for a military pension. After an eight year battle and an Act
of Congress, “Franklin Thompson” was cleared of desertion charges and awarded a
pension in 1884.

In 1897, Edmonds was admitted into the Grand Army of the Republic, the only woman
member. One year later, on September 5, 1898, Edmonds died at her home in La Porte,
Texas. In 1901, she was re-buried with military honors at Washington Cemetery in
Houston.
Louisa
May
Alcott
It was November 1862.
Louisa May Alcott had just turned thirty, and she had spent much of that year
reluctantly teaching kindergarten. Her family was in dire financial straits, and she
had failed to earn a profit from the few short stories she had sold that year. So she
made a decision: she would go to Washington to serve as a nurse. Her absence
would mean one less mouth for her family to feed, and besides, she wrote in her
journal, “help needed…and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way.”

Louisa’s father, the prominent educator, philosopher, and abolitionist Bronson Alcott,
held his four daughters to high educational and moral standards, and Louisa, as a
result, was as serious-minded as she was witty. She was determined to prove her
worth. Although anxious about her upcoming service, Louisa was confident that the
adventure would do her good – “whether I come out alive or dead.”

So, armed with a glowing recommendation from Hannah Stevenson, a respected

nurse, and “full of hope and sorrow, courage and plans,” she departed her home in
Concord, MA for Washington in December 1862.

Once in Washington, Louisa threw herself into her work at the Union Hotel hospital
in Georgetown. Just as for many of her fellow nurses, her days were a tiring
whirlwind of dressing wounds, cleaning and sewing bandages, supervising
convalescent assistants, fetching bed linens, water, and pillows, assisting during
surgical procedures, sponging filthy, broken bodies (a shocking experience for an
unmarried lady!), writing letters on behalf of the sick and injured, and feeding those
too weak to feed themselves.

Being, as she wrote, a “red hot Abolitionist,” she was less than happy at the prospect
of being asked to care for Confederate soldiers. When one injured Rebel was
brought in, she privately resolved “to put soap in his eyes, rub his nose the wrong
way, and excoriate his cuticle generally.” Louisa showed no remorse for her partisan
sentiments, but she was deeply fond of her Union patients, writing:

Though often home sick, heart sick & worn out, I like it – find real pleasure in
comforting tending & cheering these poor souls who seem to love me, to feel
my sympathy though unspoken, & acknowledge my hearty good will in spite of
the ignorance, awkwardness, & bashfulness which I cannot help showing in so
new & trying a situation.

One patient in particular caught Louisa’s attention: John Suhre, a blacksmith who
was admitted, badly wounded, after the defeat of Ambrose Burnside’s forces at
Fredericksburg. She was moved by the quiet dignity with which he faced his
rapidly-approaching death, impressed by his simple devotion to his mother, and was
drawn to a face she described as “most attractive” and “comely featured.” When the
hospital surgeon gave her the task of telling John that his wound was a fatal one,
Louisa struggled to compose herself. “Such an end seemed very hard for such a
man,” she later wrote, “The army needed men like John, earnest, brave, and faithful;
fighting for liberty and justice with both heart and hand, true soldiers of the Lord.”

Just a few weeks into her service, Louisa confessed in her journal that “bad air, food,
water, work & watching are getting to be too much for me.” The Union Hotel was a
grim, dirty place crowded with patients and medical workers. “A more perfect
pestilence-box than this house I never saw,” was Louisa’s disparaging assessment.
Louisa’s attempts to keep the place well-ventilated – inspired by her admiration of
Florence Nightingale’s techniques and innovations – were often futile. The diet for
patients and workers alike – consisting of “the inevitable fried beef, salt butter,
husky bread & washy coffee” – was repetitive, unhealthy, and stodgy; a far cry from
the ascetic vegetarian diet her father Bronson encouraged his family to follow.
Louisa worked twelve-hour shifts, often taking the night watch, and the gruelling
schedule soon began to take its toll.

By mid-January she was unable to continue with her nursing duties, and was
confined to her room, diagnosed with typhoid pneumonia. She was zealously dosed
with calomel, a poisonous mercury compound widely used during the Civil War. Her
condition worsened, and she slipped in and out of consciousness, haunted by
alarming hallucinations – including one vivid fever dream in which she was stoned
and burned for being a witch. The hospital doctors, Army Superintendent of Nurses
Dorothea Dix, and her fellow nurses all tried to convince her to return home.
Eventually, the hospital matron telegraphed Bronson Alcott, who hurried to fetch his
gravely ill daughter. Louisa was too weak to protest; her career as a Civil War nurse
was over.

A combination of the rigours of Louisa’s nursing service, her serious illness, and the
treatment she received, profoundly affected her health. She was never fully well
thereafter. Trying to alleviate the chronic pain she suffered, she experimented
throughout her life with a range of homeopathic remedies, from massages and
electromagnetism to hydropathic baths and mind cure – all to little effect. She died
in 1888 at the age of just 55. Her words, and her beloved characters, however, live
on.
Dorothea Dix
1802-1887

Dorothea Dix was an early 19th century

activist who drastically changed the medical
field during her lifetime. She championed
causes for both the mentally ill and indigenous populations. By doing this work,
she openly challenged 19th century notions of reform and illness. Additionally, Dix
helped recruit nurses for the Union army during the Civil War. As a result, she
transformed the field of nursing.

Dix was born in Hampden, Maine in 1802. Little is known about her childhood.
However, historians believe that her parents suffered from alcoholism and her
father was abusive. Due to this abuse at a young age she moved to Boston to
stay with her grandmother. Dix attended school in Boston and tutored children.
She became ill several times and was forced to stop teaching. During one of her
bouts of illness her physicians suggested she spend time in Europe. While
visiting overseas, Dix met with groups of reformers interested in changing the
way the mentally ill were cared for. Once Dix returned to the United States, she
set out to tour mental hospitals across the country. She often reported her
findings to several politicians. Dix pushed states to care for the unfortunate.
Although many politicians disagreed with her work, she moved forward. She
eventually established asylums in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Illinois. She
worked to pass federal legislation that would create a national asylum, though
the bill did not pass. Dix also toured overseas, reporting on the conditions of
hospitals in various countries.

When the Civil War started, Dix completely dedicated herself to the Union cause.
She was designated as the Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union Army.
Although many believed she set impossibly high standards for recruited nurses,
the army of nurses was extremely successful and crucial in advancing the role of
nurses in the war and in the medical field. Dix was also known for treating both
Confederate and Union soldiers, a practice which gained her respect from many.
During a period when male doctors openly expressed disdain for female nurses,
Dix continued to push for formal training and more opportunities for women
nurses. Over the course of the war she appointed more than 3,000, or about
15%, of Union Army nurses. She stepped down from the position in 1865.

After the war, Dix raised funds for the building of a national monument to honor
deceased soldiers, which stands at Fort Monroe, Virginia today. She continued
fighting for social reform throughout her life. Her work in support of better care for
the mentally ill culminated in the restructuring of many hospitals both in the
United States and abroad. After suffering from illness, Dix returned to New
Jersey where she spent the remainder of her life in a specially designed suite in
the New Jersey State Hospital. She died on July 17, 1887 and is buried in
Cambridge.
The 54th Massachusetts Infantry
The 54th Regiment
Massachusetts
Infantry was a
volunteer Union
regiment organized in
the American Civil
War. Its members
became known for
their bravery and fierce fighting against Confederate forces. It was the second
all-black Union regiment to fight in the war, after the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer
Infantry Regiment.

From the beginning of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln argued that the
Union forces were not fighting to end slavery but to prevent the disintegration of the
United States. For abolitionists, however, ending slavery was the reason for the war,
and they argued that black people should be able to join the fight for their freedom.
However, African Americans were not allowed to serve as soldiers in the Union Army
until January 1, 1863. On that day, the Emancipation Proclamation decreed that
“such persons [that is, African American men] of suitable condition, will be received
into the armed services of the United States.”

Early in February 1863, the abolitionist Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts

issued the Civil War’s first call for black soldiers. Massachusetts did not have many
African American residents, but by the time 54th Infantry regiment headed off to
training camp two weeks later more than 1,000 men had volunteered. Many came
from other states, such as New York, Indiana and Ohio; some even came from
Canada. One-quarter of the volunteers came from slave states and the Caribbean.
Fathers and sons (some as young as 16) enlisted together. The most famous
enlistees were Charles and Lewis Douglass, two sons of the abolitionist Frederick
Douglass.
To lead the 54th Massachusetts, Governor Andrew chose a young white officer
named Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw’s parents were wealthy and prominent abolitionist
activists. Shaw himself had dropped out of Harvard to join the Union Army and had
been injured in the Battle of Antietam. He was just 25 years old.

At nine o’clock on the morning on May 28, 1863, the 54th’s 1,007 black soldiers and
37 white officers gathered in the Boston Common and prepared to head to the
battlefields of the South. They did so in spite of an announcement by the
Confederate Congress that every captured black soldier would be sold into slavery
and every white officer in command of black troops would be executed. Cheering
well-wishers, including the anti-slavery advocates William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell
Phillips and Frederick Douglass, lined Boston’s streets.

“I know not,” Governor Andrew said at the close of the parade, “where in all human
history to any given thousand men in arms there has been committed a work at
once so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory as the work committed to you.”
That evening, the 54th Infantry boarded a transport ship bound for Charleston.r

Colonel Shaw and his troops landed at Hilton Head on June 3. The next week, they
were forced by Shaw’s superiors to participate in a particularly destructive raid on
the town of Darien, Georgia. The colonel was furious: His troops had come South to
fight for freedom and justice, he argued, not to destroy undefended towns with no
military significance. He wrote to General George Strong and asked if the 54th might
lead the next Union charge on the battlefield.

Even as they fought to end slavery in the Confederacy, the African American soldiers
of the 54th were fighting against another injustice as well. The U.S. Army paid black
soldiers $10 a week; white soldiers got $3 more. To protest against the inequity, the
entire regiment–soldiers and officers alike–refused to accept their wages until
black and white soldiers earned equal pay for equal work. This did not happen until
the war was almost over.

On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts prepared to storm Fort Wagner, which
guarded the Port of Charleston. At dusk, Shaw gathered 600 of his men on a narrow
strip of sand just outside Wagner’s fortified walls and readied them for action. “I
want you to prove yourselves,” he said. “The eyes of thousands will look on what you
do tonight.”

As night fell, Shaw led his men over the walls of the fort. (This was unusual;
typically, officers followed their soldiers into battle.) But the Union generals had
miscalculated: 1,700 Confederate soldiers waited inside the fort, ready for battle.
The men of the 54th were outgunned and outnumbered. Two hundred and eighty
one of the 600 charging soldiers were killed, wounded or captured. Shaw himself
was shot in the chest on his way over the wall and died instantly.

To show their contempt for the soldiers of the 54th, the Confederates dumped all of
their bodies in a single unmarked trench and cabled Union leaders that “we have
buried [Shaw] with his n******s.” The Southerners expected that this would be such
an insult that white officers would no longer be willing to fight with black troops. In
fact, the opposite was true: Shaw’s parents replied that there could be “no holier
place” to be buried than “surrounded by…brave and devoted soldiers.”

The 54th lost the battle at Fort Wagner, but they did a great deal of damage there.
Confederate troops abandoned the fort soon afterward. For the next two years, the
regiment participated in a series of successful siege operations in South Carolina,
Georgia and Florida. The 54th Massachusetts returned to Boston in September
1865.
 Robert Smalls

1839 – 1915
Robert Smalls was born into slavery in
Beaufort, South Carolina. His mother,
Lydia Polite, was a slave who was owned
by Henry McLee, who likely was Smalls’
father; as a result, young Robert
received favoritism and worked in the
house. His mother had grown up in the fields, and while she now worked in the house,
she feared Robert would grow up without knowing the plight of the slaves forced to
work in the fields. His mother requested that he be sent to work in the fields. It was her
intentions to illustrate to Robert the full horror of slavery, and for him to witness
whippings of the field hands, which was a common occurrence in their world. After
seeing the brutality of the institution, the injustice drove Robert to defiance, frequently
finding himself in the Beaufort jail. His mother began to fear for his safety, so she
arranged with McLee to send Robert to Charleston, where he would work as a laborer.
At the age of twelve, Smalls was sent to Charleston, making only one dollar a week,
with the rest of his wage sent back to his master.

Smalls worked many jobs while in Charleston, most around, and on, the Charleston
harbor. On December 14, 1856, Robert married Hannah Jones, an enslaved hotel maid.
With permission, they were able to move in together. The couple had two children ,
Elizabeth Smalls, and Robert Smalls Jr. His marriage and their children would lead
him into a personal rebellion. Smalls saved his life’s fortune and attempted to buy the
freedom of his wife and children; however, her owner demanded eight-hundred dollars
when Robert had barely saved one hundred. Robert knew if he and his family were in
chains, they could not be sure of a future together, and it would have taken him decades
to save that much money. Smalls told his wife they would one day escape from slavery.

After the war broke out, Robert was assigned to the CSS Planter, a Confederate military
transport. Smalls piloted the Planter throughout Charleston harbor, gaining the
confidence and trust of the crew and the white Confederate officers. Knowing the crew
trusted him, Smalls devised a plan of escape. He convened with other slaves on board
and they agreed to rebel against their Confederate owners. One night when the
Confederate Officers left to sleep on the shore, Smalls and the crew took the ship. They
sailed to another dock and picked up Smalls’ and the other members of the crew’s
families. Robert copied the captain’s manners and even wore a similar big straw hat to
fool officials at Confederate harbor forts. When out of range of cannon fire, he replaced
the rebel flags on board with white bed sheets and captained the ship to the Union
blockade. Robert surrendered the Planter and its cargo to the United States Navy. He
immediately volunteered his knowledge about Charleston’s defense to the Union.
Smalls’ understanding of the Charleston defenses proved invaluable, as Smalls’ intel
directly led to the capture of Coles island a week after his escape. Rear Admiral Samuel
Francis Du Pont wrote to the Navy Secretary in Washington, Robert “is superior to any
who have come into our lines — intelligent as many of them have been.”

The people of the North widely celebrated Robert and his crew. Congress awarded
Smalls and his crewman half of the value of the Planter. Smalls briefly served in the US
Navy under Admiral Du Pont, but only as a civilian, he later traveled to Washington to
meet with President Abraham Lincoln. Smalls hoped to persuade Lincoln to permit
black men to serve for the Union army. Soon after the meeting, Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton officially permitted 5,000 black Americans to fight for the Union. Afterward,
Smalls became a pilot of a Union ship, the USS Crusader, and later the restored
Planter. He was later promoted to captain, the first black man to achieve this rank. The
US government later disputed that he was ever a member of the Navy at all, as he had
not been officially commissioned. In 1897, by an act of Congress Smalls was granted a
pension equal to that of Navy captain, confirming his service.

After the war, Smalls returned to his native South Carolina. When he returned, he
bought his former master’s plantation and home, as Union tax authorities had seized it.
In 1868, after the passage of the 14th amendment, Smalls was elected to the South
Carolina House of Representative and later to the South Carolina Senate. In 1874,
Smalls was elected to the US House of Representatives. As a member of Congress, he
fought against the disenfranchisement of black voters in South Carolina and the whole
of the South. He represented South Carolina’s fifth congressional district from 1875 to
1879 and from 1882 to 1883. Smalls served South Carolina’s seventh congressional
district from 1884 to 1887. In the 1890s he was offered a colonelcy in the Spanish
American war and was offered the post of minister in Liberia, he turned down both
offers. Smalls was an essential leader in the community even into his old age.

Robert Smalls died of malaria and diabetes in 1915. This remarkable individual
witnessed slavery, emancipation, the right of African American men to vote, and even
rose in the ranks of the US government. W.E.B. Dubois said on the history of freedom
that, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again
toward slavery.” Smalls was lucky to live in that moment in the sun. He died as the
South worked to recreate a form of slavery through the black codes and Jim Crow.
Despite this, Smalls died refusing to engage in pessimism, leaving one message on his
tombstone about the future of his country and his race, it reads, “My race needs no
special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal
of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
Andre Cailloux

Andre Cailloux was a Black businessman and

soldier in the Civil War.

Cailloux was born a slave on a plantation

owned by Joseph Duvernay near Pointe a la
Hache in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
When he was 5, his Master died and he
became the possession of his Master’s widow,
who moved him and his parents to New
Orleans. As a teenager, he was trained in the
craft of cigar making and learned to read, possibly at the factory, where it was common
to have a storyteller who read to workers as they rolled cigars.

At 21, Cailloux was emancipated and married Felicie Coulon, also recently freed. He
adopted Felicie’s son and together, the couple had four more children. He educated his
two sons at a school run by local black intellectuals. In 1852, Cailloux bought a piece of
property for $200 at Prieur and Perdido streets. A few years later, he bought a Creole
cottage uptown on Baronne Street for $400. By 1860, he also owned a shop in
Faubourg Marigny.
That same year which was during the antebellum era in New Orleans, Cailloux joined
the Friends of Order, which elected him secretary. Although there are no pictures of
Cailloux and he left no letters or journals, he does appear in the writings of others. By
all accounts, he was trusted and well-liked, a good-looking man who participated
actively in the social life of the Black Creole community and cut a handsome figure in
his uniform. A boxer and horseman, he was known for his manners and his character.
He took pride in calling himself "the blackest man in New Orleans."
When the Civil War began, many of the benevolent societies formed units in the
Louisiana militia. It was traditional for free people of color to offer their military service
to the government in power. They had done so since colonial times. It was expected of
them and it would have aroused suspicion had they declined. So Friends of Order
became the Order Company in the Louisiana Native Guards, and Cailloux enlisted 100
men, including working slaves, runaway slaves and free Black men. He was made their
captain.
"The Confederates were nervous about the presence of Black troops," said historian
Joseph Logsdon at the University of New Orleans. "They didn’t know what was on their
minds. People living in a slave society have constant fears of a revolt." When New
Orleans fell to the Union forces, the Native Guards disbanded. But when Union Gen.
Benjamin Butler took the reigns of power in the city, he needed troops. He wasn’t going
to find them among the white population of Louisiana, and he wasn’t going to get any
more form Washington. So he turned to the Native Guards, who offered their services.
Cailloux’s company became the colored company, carrying the banner for the 1st
Regiment. The fall of Post Hudson in most people’s minds signaled a major turning
point in the war. It showed that blacks were not just docile recipients of these favors of
Father Abraham but they were active participants in their own liberation and the defeat
of slaveholders.
On May 27, 1863, General Nathaniel P. Banks launched a poorly coordinated attack on
the well defended, well fortified Confederate positions at Port Hudson. As part of the
attack, Cailloux was ordered to lead his company of 100 men in an almost suicidal
assault against sharpshooting Confederate troops. Cailloux’s company suffered heavy
casualties, but Cailloux, shouting encouragement to his men in French and English, led
several increasingly futile charges. On his last charge, a Minié ball tore through his
arm, which was left dangling uselessly by his side. Severely wounded, Cailloux
continued to lead the charge until a Confederate artillery shell killed him.
William Jackson
The entire Civil War was filled with many
individuals who attempted to infiltrate the enemy
and learn more about the tactics, plans and
weaknesses of the other side. You can be sure
both the Union and the Confederacy had men
and women attempting to make their way into the inner ranks of the other side.
However, the Union had a secret weapon that the Confederacy could never have
imagined – black American spies.

William Jackson was not just a runaway slave who conferred inside information to the
Union – he was actually a long-term union agent who served as a slave at Jefferson
Davis’ estate in Richmond, Virginia only to funnel information obtained during his
slavery there to Union intelligence. General Lee acknowledge the impressive power of
“negro ingelligence” when he wrote, “The chief source of information to the enemy is
through our Negroes.” It was clear that the Union leadership understood that the failure
of the South to recognize black men and women as legitimate, intelligent human
beings was a major weakness that could be exploited.

Because southern officers and military leaders classified the negroes on the same level
as their farm animals, they grossly misjudged the apparent intelligence and wit of the
black people. As Jefferson Davis and his military leaders discussed war plans at Davis’
estate, William Jackson could spy on the conversation as he served them, performing
menial tasks throughout the household.

Davis and his men completely ignored Jackson – assuming he did not understand, and
did not care, about the matters they were discussing. Little did they know that Jackson
was one of America’s first and most effective agents – having perfectly infiltrated the
inner sanctum of the enemy and extracting some of the most guarded military secrets
of the Confederacy.
John Lawson
Born June 16, 1837, in Pennsylvania,
Lawson joined the Navy while living in
New York City in 1863.He was able to
enlist following President Abraham
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He
was given the rank of landsman. A
landsman, Neal noted, was the lowest
rank of the U.S. Navy, and given to
recruits with little or no experience at sea.
They performed menial, unskilled work
aboard ships. Such were Lawson’s duties
aboard the USS Hartford on Aug. 5,
1864, during an engagement of successful attacks against Fort Morgan in the Mobile
Bay.

“Wounded in the leg,” Neal wrote of Lawson, quoting from the official citation, “and
thrown violently against the side of the ship when an enemy shell killed or wounded the
six-man crew as the shell whipped on the berth deck.

“Lawson, upon regaining his composure, promptly returned to his station and, although
urged to go below for treatment, steadfastly continued his duties throughout the
remainder of the action.” It was during his battle that Admiral David Farragut, the
commander of the ship, shouted his famous phrase, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed
ahead!”

Lawson was given a medal of honor for his bravery.

Neal doesn’t provide much detail about Lawson’s life, but information about him and
his legacy are available at the U.S. Navy database and many publications that offer
extensive coverage of Black veterans.

After being discharged from the Navy, he returned to the Philadelphia area, where he
became a devout family man, earning his living as a vendor. Some historians, including
the eminent W.E.B. Du Bois, often categorized vendors as hucksters, a rather
pejorative term for a less than honorable dealer. In his classic study “The Philadelphia
Negro,” Du Bois listed a total of 37 hucksters in the city. Their number was fourth on
the list of occupations in the city at that time, trailing only janitors, laundrymen,
construction workers or kalsominers and cigar makers.

Lawson died in Philadelphia on May 3, 1919. Many members of his extended family
resided in Camden, N.J., and several of them assembled to commemorate his life in
2004 at Mount Peace Cemetery in Lawnside, N.J. They had come to dedicate a new
burial spot and tombstone for Lawson. His original gravesite is not known since a fire
destroyed burial records and cemetery maps, and his tombstone sank and what
remained was unreadable.
Harriet Tubman

1820-1913

They called her “Moses” for leading enslaved

people in the South to freedom up North. But
Harriet Tubman fought the institution of slavery
well beyond her role as a conductor for the
Underground Railroad. As a soldier and spy for
the Union Army during the Civil War, Tubman
became the first woman to lead an armed military
operation in the United States in what is known as the Combahee Ferry Raid.

By January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, Tubman had
been in South Carolina as a volunteer for the Union Army. With her family behind in
Auburn, New York, and having established herself as a prominent abolitionist in Boston
circles, Tubman, at the request of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, had gone to
Hilton Head, South Carolina, which had fallen to the Union Army early in the war.

For months, Tubman worked as a laundress, opening a wash house, and serving as a
nurse, until she was given orders to form a spy ring. Tubman had proven herself
invaluable at gathering clandestine information, forming allies and avoiding capture, as
she led the Underground Railroad. In her new role, Tubman assumed leadership of a
secret military mission in South Carolina’s low country.
“First and foremost, her priorities would be to defeat and destroy the system of slavery
and in doing so, to definitely defeat the Confederacy,” said Brandi Brimmer, a history
professor at Spelman College and slavery historian.

Tubman partnered with Colonel James Montgomery, an abolitionist who commanded the
Second South Carolina Volunteers, a black regiment. Together, the two planned a raid
along the Combahee River, to rescue slaves, recruit freed men into the Union Army and
obliterate some of the wealthiest rice plantations in the region.

Montgomery had around 300 men, including 50 from a Rhode Island Regiment and
Tubman rounded up eight scouts, who helped her map the area and send word to the
slaves when the raid would take place.

“She was fearless and she was courageous,” said Kate Clifford Larson, historian and
author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.
“She had a sensibility. She could get black people to trust her and the Union officers knew
that they were not trusted by the local people.”

The night of June 1, 1863, Tubman and Montgomery, on a federal ship the John Adams,
led two other gunboats, the Sentinel and Harriet A. Weed, out of the St. Helena Sound
towards the Combahee River. En route, the Sentinel ran aground, causing troops from
that ship to transfer to the other two boats.

As explained in Catherine Clinton’s book, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom,

Tubman, who was illiterate, couldn’t write down any intelligence she gathered. Instead,
she committed everything to memory, guiding the ships towards strategic points near the
shore where fleeing slaves were waiting and Confederate property could be destroyed, all
while leading the steamers away from known torpedoes.

“They needed to take gunboats up the river,” said Clinton. “They could have been blown
up if they hadn’t had her intelligence.”

Around 2:30 a.m. on June 2, the John Adams and the Harriet A. Weed split up along the
river to conduct different raids. Tubman led 150 men on the John Adams toward the
fugitives. Tubman, later commenting on the raid, said once the signal was given, she saw
slaves running everywhere, with women carrying babies, crying children, squealing pigs,
chickens and pots of rice. Rebels tried chasing down the slaves, firing their guns on them.
One girl was reportedly killed.

As the escapees ran to the shore, black troops in rowboats transported them to the ships,
but chaos ensued in the process. Tubman, who didn’t speak the region’s Gullah dialect,
reportedly went on deck and sang a popular song from the abolitionist movement that
calmed the group down.

More than 700 escaped slavery and made it onto the gunboats. Troops also disembarked
near Field’s Point, torching plantations, fields, mills, warehouses and mansions, causing a
humiliating defeat for the Confederacy, including the loss of a pontoon bridge shot to
pieces by the gunboats.

The ships docked in Beaufort, South Carolina, where a reporter from the Wisconsin State
Journal heard what had happened on the Combahee River. He wrote a story without a
byline about the “She-Moses” but never mentioned Tubman’s name. He wrote that
Montgomery’s “gallant band of 300 soldiers under the guidance of a black woman, dashed
into the enemies’ country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars
worth of commissary store, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror to the heart of
the rebeldom brought off bear 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property,
without losing a man or receiving a scratch.”

But Tubman’s anonymity came to an end in July 1863 when Franklin Sanborn, the editor
of Boston’s Commonwealth newspaper, picked up the story and named Harriet Tubman, a
friend of his, as the heroine.

Despite the mission’s success, including the recruitment of at least 100 freedmen into the
Union Army, Tubman was not compensated for her efforts on the Combahee Ferry Raid.
She had petitioned the government several times to be paid for her duties as a soldier.
“She was denied because she was a woman,” says Larson.

“By the time we get to the Emancipation Proclamation, we have Lincoln setting out
concrete spaces for black men and their recognition in military service,” said Brimmer. “But
there's not really a vision for the work of women who function in the military bearing arms,
particularly black women.”

Tubman would eventually get a pension, but only as the widow of a black Union soldier
she married after the war, not for her courageous service as a soldier.