Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen during the Civil War

4. Generals David Hunter and Rufus Saxton and Black Soldiers

4 Generals David Hunter and Rufus Saxton and Black Soldiers "HUNTER was not suited to the work and ... Rufus Saxton was." That, says Dudley Cornish in his superb Sable Arm, probably was the "conviction" of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that caused him to refuse to recognize a regiment of blacks recruited by Maj. Gen. David Hunter on South Carolina's coastal islands in the summer of 1862, but at the same time to authorize Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton to enlist blacks ofthat region into the army. Cornish finds Stanton's action "hard to understand."1 Understanding is increased by a close look at what was happening on the Sea Islands. It was a time when the president was tiptoeing toward a change in the nation's traditional policy that only whites would be allowed to be soldiers. Hunter did not smooth the way; Saxton did. At the end of March 1862, Hunter had arrived at Hilton Head to take command ofa newly designated Department ofthe South, defined to include the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.2 The department resulted from a navy-army expedition, commanded by Commodore Samuel F. DuPont and Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman, that in early November 1861 had captured Port Royal about midway between Charleston and Savannah. By the time of Hunter's coming, DuPont and Sherman had occupied the strip of coastal islands from twenty or so miles short of Charleston to the vicinity of Savannah, and Originally published in South Carolina Historical Magazine 86, no. 3 Guly 1985):165-81. Reprinted by permission of South Carolina Historical Magazine. 55 56 Black Troops some coastal points beyond in Georgia and northeast Florida. All along the Union had held Key West and soon after Hunter's arrival other Union forces took Apalachicola and then Pensacola on the Florida panhandle. The troops in Hunter's department never would number more than about eighteen thousand. Probably no general's command throughout the war was spread so thin over an area so wide.3 The Union's position seemed to offer opportunity to attack Savannah or Charleston or both, each an important Confederate port. Even before his relief by Hunter, Sherman had forces poised for an assault on Fort Pulaski, which guarded Savannah's outlet to the sea. Within days after Hunter took over, that assault was made with complete success. But a greater force would be required for capture of either port. The Union high command's priorities were elsewhere: Virginia, West Tennessee, and an imminent move on New Orleans. The Port Royal expedition had been designed initially only to secure anchorages for the Union's blockading fleet. That purpose had been more than fully achieved. 4 General Hunter, however, was hungry for further conquest. While en route to supersede Sherman, he had written Secretary of War Stanton that ifhe were reinforced by only one division he could almost guarantee that he would have the Stars and Stripes waving over Fort Sumter by the anniversary of its surrender to the Rebels.5 One of the first things that impressed him, on his arrival, was the presence within his lines of a reservoir of loyal manpower that would need only arms and training to augment his army were he able to draw upon it. That reservoir was many hundreds of blacks, lately slaves on the Carolina Sea Island plantations. When General Sherman's army had landed, nearly all the whites for many miles on either side of Port Royal had fled, but their slaves had stayed. It is said that only one white man had remained in Beaufort, the "metropolis" of the area. The blacks were nearly as many as Sherman's invading troops. The problem of care and governing of a large slave population was then quite without precedent for a Union army, and for some weeks the blacks seemed to Sherman a baffiing burden. But he and his quartermaster, Rufus Saxton, then a captain, bent to the task. In time, Sherman made imaginative provision for the blacks' employment on the plantations and their education.6 Moreover, help came from the Treasury Department, which was given responsibility for abandoned properties. In early March a Treasury agent of excep- Generals Hunter and Saxton 57 tional vision, Edward Pierce, brought a band of fifty-three people, including a dozen ladies, supported by private associations in the North, to take on plantation management and the...