Natick During the Civil War: Part 9

Over 200,000 African-Americans fought in the Civil War, with most serving in the Union Army. Others (more than 18,000) were members of the Union Navy, serving as both as sailors and “shore men.” While many African-American soldiers and sailors were assigned to support roles, more than a few were mustered into fighting units, among them the Massachusetts 54^th and 55^th Colored Infantry regiments.

The importance of these formations cannot be overstated. Abolitionists and leaders in the black community, here in Massachusetts and in other Union states, insisted blacks were capable of serving with bravery in combat roles. But for every proponent of black empowerment through military service, a voice was raised to the contrary. Much of Massachusetts, like other states in the Union and New York in particular was frankly racist, with many viewing African-Americans as inferior to whites in all respects.

Here in Natick at least one newspaper, the Natick Observer was direct in its disavowal of any claim to equality made on behalf of blacks. One writer for the paper, which in its brief span of publication from 1865 to 1861, went so far as to accuse Edward Everett, a former president of Harvard and governor of the Commonwealth of the indiscretion of allowing his children to attend school with blacks. To the credit of the community, soon after publishing this bit of tripe, the paper went out of business.

Such contention was not confined to Natick: in a notorious incident in the decade before the Civil War a runaway slave named Anthony Burns was arrested under the statutes of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Burns was held in the federal lockup in present-day Post Office Square in anticipation of being returned to his southern master. A huge abolitionist rally at Faneuil Hall led to a full-scale riot and an attempt to free Burns from jail.

The rioters were unsuccessful in their efforts; on the day following the disturbance he was led down State Street, proceeded by a US military band playing “Dixie.” Most of the town turned out to see the spectacle, with one side of State Street populated by cheering southern sympathizers, the other with booing, jeering abolitionists.

Burns was returned to the South, but the circumstance of his plight (his freedom was later purchased) highlights a long-forgotten characteristic of political sentiment in the North: emancipation and the public perception of black equality needed to accomplish it was no foregone conclusion.

African-Americans in uniform

Yet political leaders like Natick’s own Senator Henry Wilson, along with his colleague Senator Charles Sumner and John Andrew, Governor of Massachusetts realized that by placing African-American in Union uniforms they would be doing the cause of emancipation an indispensable service. All three, along with leaders of Boston’s black community agitated for the formation of African-American units, but to no avail – at least until the summer and early fall of 1862 and the second year of the war.

By that time the initial euphoria preceding the first Battle of Bull Run has entirely dissipated and it had become all too apparent that the war between the North and South would be a long and bloody conflict. Hordes of volunteers, viewing the war as somewhat of a lark at its outset, suddenly were nowhere to be found. Combat, the bloodiest in American history, was depleting Northern ranks.

It was then that President Lincoln announced his intention to issue an order freeing all slaves in the Confederacy. Notably, his original order, which he issued under the War Powers Act purely through his own initiative, left untouched the slaves in the “Border States” which remained loyal to the Union.

Always with his hand on the pulse of popular sentiment (Politics is, after all, the art of the possible.) he succumbed to the entreaties of abolitionists, who while viewed as radicals and eccentrics in much of the North nevertheless made a compelling argument for the employment of blacks in the Union ranks. It was also felt that emancipation would sow dissent in the South, but in fact southern blacks, while often escaping across Union lines (where they were known as “contrabands”) remained largely inactive.

Extreme Union losses and the need to fill depleted ranks eventually would lead Lincoln to open the army and navy to blacks in early 1863. While the response from other states was immediate, New England had a problem: precious few African-American resided in the region.

A canvass was made, however, and an infantry regiment was raised, whereupon it was discovered another problem was at hand: African-American were not trusted to lead the regiments in which they would serve.

The Civil War was largely officered, at least in its senior ranks, by professional soldiers; many trained at West Point and equipped to lead by experience in the Mexican War of 1848 and along the Western frontier as Indian fighters. Thus it was decreed that whatever military know-how existed in the African-American ranks, the right to elect officers, while extended at lower ranks to whites, or receive appointment as commissioned officers, as was the case with many political leaders, including Henry Wilson and Benjamin Butler from Lowell, would be denied them.

Instead, it was decided that white officers, many from Boston’s most socially elite families, would lead the 54^th Colored Regiment, chief among them Robert Gould Shaw.

A mystery

Now comes a mystery whose origins remain little understood to this day, for it was largely from Natick that Shaw drew the bulk of the officer corps that would lead the 54^th. Some reasons for this are readily available, but remain almost entirely unproven. Among them are the obvious – that the presence of Lydia Maria Child, an early supporter of abolitionism who has been called the “the voice of the moral conscience of early abolitionism” in Natick in the 1830s – may have planted a seed of consciousness in the community.

Another is the presence of Henry Wilson, whose powers of oratory were formidable and who was a fierce champion of abolition and an active recruiter for the Union forces. Wilson devoted himself in the Senate as chair of the Military Affairs Committee (from which Jefferson Davis, a graduate of West Point, had resigned to lead the South), to the creation and maintenance of the Union Army, a role he also played in Massachusetts to the extent he personally recruited his own regiment early in the war

More puzzling was the presence of 57 soldiers out of the approximately 700 who served from Natick, in black units. Thirty-seven were white and 20 were black. Only Boston and Cambridge sent more white officers to serve in black units, an astonishing statistic when one considers the disparity in population between Boston and Natick, for instance.

My personal theory in this regard lies in the historic origins of the community, which in the middle years of the 17^th century when it first emerged under English influence was exclusively Native American. Subsequent to King Philip’s War, however, many Indian women sought marriage among the slave population of Natick and nearby communities. The vicissitudes of war had turned marriageable Indian males into a scarce commodity.

While Native- and African Americans were non-people in colonial society, local filmmaker and antiquarian Zadi Zokou notes that over 5000 slaves were present in Massachusetts at the time of the American Revolution. It is a well-established fact that Native Americans from Natick, then known as West Needham, were combatants on the American side in the Revolution while numerous studies document the presence of Massachusetts’s Native Americans on the English side throughout the French and Indian Wars (of which there were at least five distinct episodes during the 18^th century).

Natick underwent a profound transformation beginning around 1704, when a farmer named Fisk purchased a tract of land in West Natick from a Thomas Waban. By 1725 the Native American population of the town was actively selling out to English farmers. But a remnant of Native American remained, many pursuing a life as warriors, as they had done for generations.

It is my supposition that many of the ostensibly “black” soldiers from Natick who served in the Glory regiments (the 55^th was a successor to the 54^th after the latter’s ranks were depleted by such famous, if punishing engagements at Ft. Wagner and Honey Hill), were in fact the culturally ambiguous descendents of Praying Indians, who had intermarried over the centuries with African-Americans, yet still represented a modest but significant element in the community.

Men of diverse ancestry

One can then understand the basis for Natick men like Samuel Willard Mann, Alfred Stedman Hartwell and William Nutt, among others, stepping forward to officer the 54^th. All three must have long-known Natick’s men of diverse ancestry and out of friendship and respect volunteered to serve with them in an epochal struggle that for the committed abolitionists of the town was a matter of the highest principal. For Natick’s Native American-black soldiers, it was a matter of life itself.

Mann, Hartwell and Nutt played significant roles in the war, living through it to go on to careers in law and serve in local government (two were eventually to become selectmen). Mann began his military career in the Massachusetts 20^th Infantry Regiment, which fought with valor while taking terrible losses at Antietam, one of the wars most brutal engagements. The recipient of numerous battlefield promotions, Mann was assigned to the 54^th as a captain, no doubt, because its commander, Robert Gould Shaw, had roomed at Harvard with the commander of the 20^th Infantry.

Essentially a workingman (as a leatherworker, he originally plied his trade in Westborough), he served with distinction in the attack on Fort Wagner, which led to Shaw’s death. Wounded in the leg, Mann eventually came to Natick after the war, where he worked as a school custodian and a street railway conductor. Yet his leadership skills still made him stand out, for he went on to become a selectman.

William Nutt was another Natick man who served with distinction as an officer with the 54^th, and later the 55^th. A leader in the Great Shoe Strike of 1860, which swept across Eastern Massachusetts in January of the year and has been called the first large-scale labor action in US history, Nutt had previously gone out to the Kansas Territory to work with anti-slavery groups.

Originally sent into the 54^th, he moved to the 55^th with Alfred Stedman Hartwell, where he achieved the rank of company captain. Eventually, after the battle of Honey Hill, he became a major and then regimental commander upon Hartwell’s promotion to brevet general. On returning to Natick after the war he opened a law office and achieved success as a businessman.

Hartwell, like Nutt attended Harvard and also later attended law school. Apparently a social familiar of Shaw’s, he moved rapidly through officer’s ranks to command the 55^th and after the war was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature. He then moved to Hawaii, where he practiced law and was appointed to a judgeship, later becoming chief justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court.

While all three individuals played important roles in the war and had the honor of leading colored troops who were able to demonstrate fighting skills and valor equal to any, their true place in history lies in their association with the 54^th Massachusetts Colored Infantry.

Heroic in their fortitude

Made immortal by August Saint-Gaudens’ monumental bronze frieze on the Boston Common, the 54^th, frozen in time and heroic in their fortitude, is representative of the human spirit unchained, tested in combat, and proven the equal of any. That Natick men were able to play a role in such epochal actions stands as a badge of honor for these proud veterans for all time.

But it is the members of Natick’s Indian-African-American community whose Civil War service is most intriguing. Subject to immediate execution if captured in the field of battle or impressments into slavery, they became a de facto vanguard within the Union Army for a rebirth of American freedom. For while the American Revolution set the stage for the Constitutional Convention and the Founding Fathers created a document of peerless quality, the Constitution did not speak to the issue of slavery.

Some would have it that the Civil War was an effort to save the Union. Certainly that was the position of Natick’s soldiers when queried many years after the conflict as members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veteran’s fraternal organization. Others would say the South, as a means to prove the primacy of States Rights, prosecuted a war in whose loss lay the final proof of the primacy of the Constitution and the triumph of federalism.

Others, like Gary Wills in his slim volume, Lincoln at Gettysburg, point to the epochal effect of Lincoln’s brief address and what effectively became a revision of the Constitution in the popular imagination. Culminating in the 13^th Amendment, which declared freedom for all in a nation reborn and sealed in all its benefits under federal law.

I would suggest the Gettysburg Address laid the groundwork for the modern epoch in America. Even now, it yields priceless fruit in a nation that welcomes all regardless of race, creed or color, yet still, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, struggling to overcome prejudice and oppression.

Deep wellsprings

But who was this man whose influence reached to Natick and a thousand other northern towns; whose iron will, deep wellsprings of generous spirit and ultimate death and martyrdom aligned him with the over 360,000 Union soldiers who heard his call and laid down their lives in response; whose sacrifice ensured the future of a nation whose hard earned democratic values nourish our own lives with an incomparable bounty of peace, prosperity, safety and comfort?

Thousands have sought to answer that question, but among them all none seems more acute, to my mind, than the incomparable Carl Schurz. In his youth a revolutionary driven from his homeland of Germany after the failed revolution of 1847, Shurz’s trajectory across the American landscape in the Civil War years and beyond was as high as it was wide-ranging.

As a US Senator, general in the Union army, reformer, newspaper editor and intimate of scores of American leaders, including Lincoln, Schurz was possessed of a sharply critical mind (Lincoln felt its acid edge, along with the slings and arrows of a legion of harsh critics and outright enemies.) and a provocative style, born, perhaps, in the political debates and endless polemics of the German revolution of 1848.

It is in his summing up of Lincoln that Schurz’s voice reaches out across the years. Now obscure and almost forgotten, Schurz emerges, powerfully, in Looking For Lincoln, by Peter B., Peter W., and Peter W. Jr. Kunhardt.

The Kunhardt book, while suffering from occasional lapses in style, is rich in first-person accounts of Lincoln’s life, going far to illuminate the reality surrounding an individual who has assumed mythic status in the American experience. Also, it contains what may be the most comprehensive set of photographic images of the president in his mature years ever assembled in a single volume,

While marshalling a vast collection of Lincoln history, memorabilia, and recollections by friends and political colleagues, the Kunhardts also give ample space in Schurz, whom the 16^th president found intriguing for his direct style and pungent wit. Using a combination of editorial comment and Schurz’s first-hand observations allows the Kunhardts to take the measure of a figure who stands along with Washington and Roosevelt, yet somehow transcends them.

Pungent candor

As quoted from the book, the following is a combination of Schurz’s comments and the observations of the authors. Its pungent candor seasoned by a large dose of intuition seems to me to reflect the melancholic, “warts and all” pictures of the man made during his tenure as president while piercing to the heart of his greatness.

The very secret of Lincoln’s success came from a “weird mixture of qualities and powers in him, of the lofty and the common, the ideal and the uncouth.” These powers gave Lincoln a “singular power over minds and hearts and fitted him to be the greatest leader in the greatest crisis in our national life.”

Schurz pointed to his (Lincoln’s) tremendous growth as a man – from inglorious beginnings to the highest reaches of secular power, to his moral vision and courage – by which he was able to preside over the Civil War and the end of slavery; and perhaps most of all to his awe-inspiring eloquence.

Schurz described the Second Inaugural Address as “like a sacred poem,” and that “no American president had ever spoken words like these to the American people.”

It was this great soul that reached out across the Union, even to Natick, reconceived it, insisted on its inclusiveness, even to the extent of refusing the right of the South to succeed, even at the sacrifice of a generation on the field of combat, even against the impatience of abolitionists on his left and contempt of those who would reconcile with the South and slavery on his right.

That he should join with the Union dead as a martyr to the cause of freedom and the preservation of the nation marks him among a handful of individuals whose contribution of our own lives is inestimable in its grandeur and expression of personal freedom.

Washington led us to our independence; Roosevelt stood with Churchill against totalitarianism while endowing us with a permanent source of nurture in our old age and adversity. But Lincoln bound us together, annealed us in fire and rescued us from the ignominy and even oblivion of devolving into a second-rate power mired in the moral swamp of slavery.

Natick participated in that miracle; Natick stood in the fire, shared in the victory of reunification and helped ensure that our nation would endure.

Next in Natick In The Civil War —the meaning of the war and its aftermath.

Peter Golden views the social and natural environment through the lens of local history. Contact him at psg@goldenpr.com.