Civil War buff tries to honor Mass. soldiers
The Boston Globe
October 24, 2009

“The Men of the 55^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry”
By

The 54^th and 55^th Massachusetts drew upon the same pool of recruits—the men who responded to Massachusetts’ call in 1863 to form a regiment of black troops.  Enough recruits reached  Readville’s Camp Meigs to fill two regiments, the men of the 55th being those who arrived to form a second regiment after the 54^th had met its quota.  

 Geography did have some influence on the composition of the regiments.  It stands to reason that the first men who applied for enlistment would be free and educated.  After all, they lived in the states of the northeast, in particular Massachusetts, but also New York and Pennsylvania and received news of the recruitment of black troops earlier than men who lived further south and west.  The 55^th contained more of these men—men who had to travel far, many of whom had been slaves. 

 Recruits arrived steadily at the 55th’s training camp.  On some days enrollments were few, but more often the numbers ranged from around ten to more than seventy, continuing until the regiment reached a strength of nearly 900 men.  Their average age was twenty three, average height was five feet seven inches, and almost half were literate.  The regimental history listed the men’s occupations, revealing both the variety of their skills and the limits of employment open to black Americans at the time.  Nearly two-thirds of the recruits, 596, were farmers.  Most of the remaining men held working class jobs including laborers, waiters, and a boatman.  Many had skilled trades, including cooks, blacksmiths, sailors, masons, shoemakers,  carpenters, coopers, printers, iron-workers, stone-cutters, and wagon-makers, a coppersmith, machinist, rope-maker, harness-maker, musician, and confectioner.  The recruits also included teachers, clerks, a clergyman, and a student.[i]   

A quarter of the men had escaped from slavery in Confederate states; 106 were from Virginia alone.  The four Border States were well represented by free men, with over sixty each from Kentucky and Missouri.  Relatively few men came from New England, only twenty-two from Massachusetts and a scattering from neighboring states.  One recruit escaped from slavery in the loyal Union state of Kentucky, but enlisted as a resident of Illinois (if found out he risked being returned to Kentucky as a slave, even after the end of the war until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment).  The Fifty-fifth’s enlistments depended heavily upon the recruiting drive, which was most successful in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but there were also many men from Indiana and Illinois.  At least some men from every other eastern and mid-western state and Canada joined the regiment as well as one recruit from the British West Indies and another who was born in Africa.[ii] 

The African-American museum curator who found the men of the 55^th inferior to those of the 54^th justified his remarks in part by quoting the 55^th’s first commander, Colonel Norwood P. Hallowell, that, "The squads of recruits which arrived at Readville for the Fifty-fifth could hardly at first sight have been called picked men. They were poor and ragged."[iii]  Ignoring the impact of long distance travel over hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand miles in some cases, upon the appearance of these men, the museum curator also failed to consider the remainder of Colonel Hallowell’s statement: 

The squads of recruits which arrived at Readville for the Fifty-fifth could hardly at first sight have been called picked men.  They were poor and ragged.  Upon arrival they were marched to the neighboring pond, disrobed, washed and uniformed.  Their old clothes were burnt.  The transformation was quite wonderful.  The recruit was very much pleased with the uniform.  He straightened up, grew inches taller, lifted, not shuffled, his feet, began at once to try, and to try hard, to take the position of the soldier, the facings and other preliminary drill, so that his ambition to carry "one of those muskets" might be gratified.  When finally he was entrusted with the responsible duties of a guard, there was nothing quite so magnificent and, let me add, quite so reliable, as the colored volunteer.[iv] 

Just because a number of the men in the 55th had not been born free or were not as educated or refined as some in the 54^th, does not mean that their character, nor their ability and desire to fight, was any different from that of their comrades with more fortunate life experiences in the 54^th. 

Indeed, the museum curator draws a greater dichotomy between the men of the two regiments than did Hallowell, who had also served with the 54^th and observed earlier in his statement that both “Massachusetts regiments were not composed of picked men, except as to physique.”[v]  ^{Actually, very few Civil War regiments can be said to have been composed of “picked men,” and what is so important about that term anyway?   More than anything else, perhaps, it simply betrays Hallowell’s perspective as a member of New England’s aristocracy.} 

^{The museum curator also attempts to support his position with a quotation from Sergeant George E. Stephens of the 54th} Massachusetts: "Out of upward of fourteen hundred men, these nine hundred or a thousand have been chosen [for the 54^th] ; the rest have been rejected because they did not come up to the highest standard of mental and physical proficiency."  This quotation is from a letter written by Sergeant Stephens on May 1, 1863 referencing only the 54^th Massachusetts; he makes no mention, no comparison to the 55^th Massachusetts, which would not enlist its first recruit until May 12.[vi]  Sergeant Stephens had every reason to be proud of the 54^th, but in fact his quotation does not say anything that distinguishes the 54^th from the 55^th.  The 54^th rejected nearly one-third of its recruits for medical reasons, and the 55th’s physicians rejected a large percentage as well, perhaps as many as the 54^th.  A hard life for free men in the North and, in particular, slavery left the bodies of many unable to withstand the rigors of military service, but these men should be respected for attempting to serve.  That they were unable to do so was certainly not their fault. 

Both regiments did, however, have their share of misfits and trouble makers, and acts of mutiny tied to the pay issue were arguably more serious in the 54^th than in the 55^th.  Colonel Hallowell offered insight into discipline in each:  

Every school has its obstreperous boys, every class at Harvard has its fast men, every regiment in the service had its hard characters. The problem to be solved in almost every congregation of men is not so much the care of the virtuous many as the discipline of the troublesome few.  Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was not a sentimentalist.  He imposed the strict discipline of the Second Regiment, from which he came, upon the Fifty-fourth.  The men of a slave regiment required, and in the case of the First South Carolina received, treatment very different from that required by mixed regiments like the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth.  In a slave regiment the harsher forms of punishment were, or ought to have been, unknown, so that every suggestion of slavery might be avoided.  This was Colonel T. W. Higginson's enlightened method,--the method of kindness, and it was successful.  Colonel Shaw's method was the method of coercion, and it too was successful. The unruly members of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth were stood on barrels, bucked, gagged and, if need be, shot; in fact, treated as white soldiers were in all well-disciplined regiments.[vii] 

The newspaper article disparages the service of the 55^th, asserting that the regiment “mostly did detail duty, such as building entrenchments and unloading shipments.”[viii]  ^{Once at the front, the 55th} did begin to perform a tremendous amount of fatigue duty, but so did the 54^th and the other regiments at Charleston, both black and white.  Fatigue duty is often thought, incorrectly, to be demeaning, and its role in the Department of the South is not always well understood. 

After the failed July 18, 1863 attack on Battery Wagner, fatigue duty became an integral part of warfare in the Department of the South.  Union commander Brigadier General John Quincy Gillmore abandoned infantry assaults and reverted to what he knew best, artillery and engineering, to carry on the fight.  Instead of taking Wagner to facilitate attacking Sumter, Gillmore chose to attack both simultaneously, “attempting the demolition of Fort Sumter with our heavy rifles, at a distance of two miles and upward, by firing over Battery Wagner and its garrison from ground [southern Morris Island] already in our possession,” and “contemporary with these operations” pressing “the siege of Battery Wagner.”[ix] 

Wagner was to be captured using conventional siege operations, a slow, labor-intensive process entailing the construction of a series of trenches designed to shield the advancing force from enemy fire.  Trenches thus constructed enabled attacking troops to approach under cover within a short distance of a defensive position before emerging to assault the enemy.  Given enough time, material resources, and man power, success was likely.  The shovel, “Gillmore’s rifle,” was the new weapon of infantry on Morris Island, and soldiers became “sappers,” men who dug the trenches.  The work was dangerous.  Day and night the men were targets of enemy artillery and musket fire as well as of errant Union shells.  The 54^th and 55^th participated fully in the siege operations, not only constructing trenches, but also building batteries and moving heavy weapons and ammunition to the front.  Men from the 55^th were working as sappers in the forward trenches the night the Confederates abandoned Wagner and were among the first troops inside its walls, collecting souvenirs in the process.  A few hours later Lieutenant Colonel Fox of the 55^th recorded, “we have now in our camp some of the pikes which were fixed in the ditches of Wagner and quite a number of our men have been in the Fort.”[x]

To learn more about the history of the 55^th Massachusetts, please click here and continue reading the following account and consult the bibliography at the end of the article.