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Many of us have seen an excellent movie called GLORY, telling the story of the doomed but heroic assault by the black troops of the 53rd Massachusetts against the formidable coastal confederate Fort Wagner. With due respect for those brave men, that movie had the wrong subject. If they wanted to tell the story of black victims of oppression and dehumanization, taking up arms and proving themselves men on the battlefield, there is an episode that does it much better than even the fight for Fort Wagner; I mean the battle of Milliken's Bend (June 7, 1863).
As the situation of Vicksburg was growing dire, and Grant's wide-ranging operations had driven any hope of support far away (taking of Jackson and battles of Champion Hill and of Big Black River Bridge, mid-May), the Confederates pinned their last hopes on attempts to break Grant's inevitably long supply lines. A union depot was known to exist at Milliken's Bend, upriver from Vicksburg, and an elite unit, General John Walker's Texas cavalry division, was dispatched to destroy it.
The Texans attacked late in the night of June 6-7. The garrison at Milliken's Bend had had some advance warning of their arrival, and were reinforced by the experienced white troops of the 23rd Iowa; but the bulk of the local garrison was made up of two nominal regiments, the Louisiana Ninth and Eleventh: black volunteers, most of them escaped slaves, who had been enlisted for only a few weeks, with as much training as could have been expected for that period, officered by white soldiers promoted directly from private for the purpose, frequently illiterate, and often armed with out-of-date, broken-down Austrian rifles. Numerically, the defenders and the attackers were about equal, but given the different levels of skill and training of the Texans, the outcome would have seemed to be inevitable. The Texans broke the Union line, screaming "No quarter! No quarter!", and the Iowans and the Louisianans became separated from each other, each understandably convinced that the other had left.
And then the unlikely thing happened. Driven from their positions, pushed back till they had their backs to the river, the Ninth and Eleventh Louisiana did not break or even waver, but met the Texans man to man. Twice they retook the battlements from which they had first been forced. Massed and pushing in a tiny space, literally face to face and eye to eye, fighting with the bayonet more than with the gun, the superior skill of the Texans ceased to matter; and the resolution of the former slaves not to be driven back, at whatever cost, became the deciding factor. The savage melee went on from dawn till midday, when the two gunboats "Choctaw" and "Lexington", warned of the attack, finally reached the battlefield, and a few rounds of naval artillery convinced the Texans to seek friendlier climates.
There was, indeed, "glory" at Fort Wagner; but Milliken's Bend, I think, means more. First, the troops of the 53rd Massachusetts were well trained and armed and meant from the start to be a front-line unit; while the 9th and 11th Louisiana were the lowest grade of troop, meant only for "garrison duty", doing the jobs that better and more expensively trained units would be wasted on; and few people would have blamed them if, faced with such a unit as the Texas cavalry, they had abandoned the field. Second, however you look at it, Fort WAgner was a defeat; Milliken's Bend was a victory. And in spite of its small scale, it was a victory of some significance. The Confederate attack had been altogether misguided: Grant's supply line no longer ran through Milliken's Bend, and even if the Texans had won they would have achieved precisely nothing. But the waste of Texans at Milliken's Bend also means that this elite unit was not sent, as its overall commander, General Taylor, had pleaded, to attack a vulnerable New Orleans; and if they had been, Grant's whole strategy might have been in trouble.
But Milliken's Bend was even more important in the larger picture of the war. Since the beginning of the year, the Emancipation Proclamation had been operative, and the Union army had begun to recruit blacks from the southern state. But doubt about the military qualities, the discipline, and the goals, of this rabble of runaway slaves, ran deep in Union minds. The reports of officers after Milliken's Bend, some of which were reprinted on Northern papers, blew away these doubts and prejudices. One surviving officer, Captain Miller, wrote a letter to an aunt, who passed it to the local newspaper: ...Our regiment had about 300 men in the fight. We had 1 colonel wounded. 4 captains wounded, 2 first and 2 second lieutenants killed, 5 lieutenants wounded, and 3 white orderlies killed and 1 wounded in the hand and two fingers taken off. The list of killed and wounded officers comprises nearly all the officers present with the regiment, a majority of the rest being absent recruiting.
'We had about 50 men killed in the regiment and 80 wounded, so you can judge of what part of the fight my company sustained. I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw how my brave soldiers had been slaughtered, one with six wounds, all the rest with two or three, none less than two wounds. Two of my colored sergeants were killed, both brave, noble men; always prompt, vigilant, and ready for the fray. I never more wish to hear the expression, "The niggers wont fight." Come with me 100 yards from where I sit and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal, and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a rebel.
'The enemy charged us so close that we fought with our bayonets hand to hand. I have six broken bayonets to show how bravely my men fought...It was a horrible fight, the worst I was ever engaged in, not even excepting Shiloh. The enemy cried, "No quarters," but some of them were very glad to take it when made prisoners... And finally, the highest praise an officer can give his men in any army: What few men I have left seem to think much of me because I stood up with them in the fight. I can say for them that I never saw a braver company of men in my life. 'Not one of them offered to leave his place until ordered to fall back; in fact, very few ever did fall back. I went down to the hospital three miles today to see the wounded. Nine of them were there, two having died of their wounds. A boy I had cooking for me came and begged a gun when the rebels were advancing, and took his place with the company, and when we retook the breast-works I found him badly wounded with one gunshot and two bayonet wounds. A new recruit I had issued a gun to the day before the fight was found dead, with a firm grasp on his gun, the bayonet of which was broken in three pieces So they fought and died defending the cause that we revere. They met death coolly, bravely; not rashly did they expose themselves, but all were steady and obedient to orders.
The Army, too, paid attention. Grant, their own overall commander, noticed how, for all their lack of training and education, the black troops had behaved well. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana wrote, "The bravery of the blacks completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops." From then on, the US Army proceeded cheerfully to recruit and train as many blacks as it could find, and by the time the war was over, one tenth of the victorious army was black. And since then, no US military has ever been able to without those whom their Indian enemies baptized the "buffalo soldiers".
Sono uomo e son soldato, viva la liberta'! says the song of the Italian volunteers, who had gathered and fought a few years earlier for a very similar cause: I'm a man, and I'm a soldier - long live liberty!. A soldier: not just a rebel, a wanderer, or a bandit. The connection between liberty and soldiering is instinctive; to draw it as a Venn diagram, not every soldier is a freedom fighter, but every person who believes in liberty is potentially a soldier. And the reason is obvious. A soldier is a man who fights in the name of his society - his country and his people, his code of laws and his values. And liberty is not an individual but a collective quality. Nobody can really be free on his own, and freedom is not a principle unless it is, at the very least, society-wide. And there is no freedom without law, nor without individual self-discipline. Freedom would not last long if all we saw in it were licence to do as we please regardless of what that did to others. Finally, there is no freedom unless free men are willing to die rather than lose it. Liberté, Liberté chérie/ Combats avec tes défenseurs!
These men - these illiterate, ragged, barefoot, shoeless runaways - knew it; knew it better, it seems, than the learned judges and the honorable representatives of our day. For this reason, having escaped the chain, the whip, and the baying hounds, they freely handed themselves over to the uniform, the hard graft of basic training, the yells of the sergeant, the burden of back-pack and rifle in the heat of a Southern summer, and the terror of death and mutilation. They knew that if they wanted to be free, they had to fight with those who fought for freedom; and that there would be no freedom for them unless it was enforced on everyone - even their masters.
And so, this Fourth of July, let us all, Americans and otherwise, think of the men of Milliken's Bend; and if and when our time comes, let us try to deserve what they took for every one of us, black, white, or green, at the price of their bodies and lives.
As the situation of Vicksburg was growing dire, and Grant's wide-ranging operations had driven any hope of support far away (taking of Jackson and battles of Champion Hill and of Big Black River Bridge, mid-May), the Confederates pinned their last hopes on attempts to break Grant's inevitably long supply lines. A union depot was known to exist at Milliken's Bend, upriver from Vicksburg, and an elite unit, General John Walker's Texas cavalry division, was dispatched to destroy it.
The Texans attacked late in the night of June 6-7. The garrison at Milliken's Bend had had some advance warning of their arrival, and were reinforced by the experienced white troops of the 23rd Iowa; but the bulk of the local garrison was made up of two nominal regiments, the Louisiana Ninth and Eleventh: black volunteers, most of them escaped slaves, who had been enlisted for only a few weeks, with as much training as could have been expected for that period, officered by white soldiers promoted directly from private for the purpose, frequently illiterate, and often armed with out-of-date, broken-down Austrian rifles. Numerically, the defenders and the attackers were about equal, but given the different levels of skill and training of the Texans, the outcome would have seemed to be inevitable. The Texans broke the Union line, screaming "No quarter! No quarter!", and the Iowans and the Louisianans became separated from each other, each understandably convinced that the other had left.
And then the unlikely thing happened. Driven from their positions, pushed back till they had their backs to the river, the Ninth and Eleventh Louisiana did not break or even waver, but met the Texans man to man. Twice they retook the battlements from which they had first been forced. Massed and pushing in a tiny space, literally face to face and eye to eye, fighting with the bayonet more than with the gun, the superior skill of the Texans ceased to matter; and the resolution of the former slaves not to be driven back, at whatever cost, became the deciding factor. The savage melee went on from dawn till midday, when the two gunboats "Choctaw" and "Lexington", warned of the attack, finally reached the battlefield, and a few rounds of naval artillery convinced the Texans to seek friendlier climates.
There was, indeed, "glory" at Fort Wagner; but Milliken's Bend, I think, means more. First, the troops of the 53rd Massachusetts were well trained and armed and meant from the start to be a front-line unit; while the 9th and 11th Louisiana were the lowest grade of troop, meant only for "garrison duty", doing the jobs that better and more expensively trained units would be wasted on; and few people would have blamed them if, faced with such a unit as the Texas cavalry, they had abandoned the field. Second, however you look at it, Fort WAgner was a defeat; Milliken's Bend was a victory. And in spite of its small scale, it was a victory of some significance. The Confederate attack had been altogether misguided: Grant's supply line no longer ran through Milliken's Bend, and even if the Texans had won they would have achieved precisely nothing. But the waste of Texans at Milliken's Bend also means that this elite unit was not sent, as its overall commander, General Taylor, had pleaded, to attack a vulnerable New Orleans; and if they had been, Grant's whole strategy might have been in trouble.
But Milliken's Bend was even more important in the larger picture of the war. Since the beginning of the year, the Emancipation Proclamation had been operative, and the Union army had begun to recruit blacks from the southern state. But doubt about the military qualities, the discipline, and the goals, of this rabble of runaway slaves, ran deep in Union minds. The reports of officers after Milliken's Bend, some of which were reprinted on Northern papers, blew away these doubts and prejudices. One surviving officer, Captain Miller, wrote a letter to an aunt, who passed it to the local newspaper: ...Our regiment had about 300 men in the fight. We had 1 colonel wounded. 4 captains wounded, 2 first and 2 second lieutenants killed, 5 lieutenants wounded, and 3 white orderlies killed and 1 wounded in the hand and two fingers taken off. The list of killed and wounded officers comprises nearly all the officers present with the regiment, a majority of the rest being absent recruiting.
'We had about 50 men killed in the regiment and 80 wounded, so you can judge of what part of the fight my company sustained. I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw how my brave soldiers had been slaughtered, one with six wounds, all the rest with two or three, none less than two wounds. Two of my colored sergeants were killed, both brave, noble men; always prompt, vigilant, and ready for the fray. I never more wish to hear the expression, "The niggers wont fight." Come with me 100 yards from where I sit and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal, and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a rebel.
'The enemy charged us so close that we fought with our bayonets hand to hand. I have six broken bayonets to show how bravely my men fought...It was a horrible fight, the worst I was ever engaged in, not even excepting Shiloh. The enemy cried, "No quarters," but some of them were very glad to take it when made prisoners... And finally, the highest praise an officer can give his men in any army: What few men I have left seem to think much of me because I stood up with them in the fight. I can say for them that I never saw a braver company of men in my life. 'Not one of them offered to leave his place until ordered to fall back; in fact, very few ever did fall back. I went down to the hospital three miles today to see the wounded. Nine of them were there, two having died of their wounds. A boy I had cooking for me came and begged a gun when the rebels were advancing, and took his place with the company, and when we retook the breast-works I found him badly wounded with one gunshot and two bayonet wounds. A new recruit I had issued a gun to the day before the fight was found dead, with a firm grasp on his gun, the bayonet of which was broken in three pieces So they fought and died defending the cause that we revere. They met death coolly, bravely; not rashly did they expose themselves, but all were steady and obedient to orders.
The Army, too, paid attention. Grant, their own overall commander, noticed how, for all their lack of training and education, the black troops had behaved well. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana wrote, "The bravery of the blacks completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops." From then on, the US Army proceeded cheerfully to recruit and train as many blacks as it could find, and by the time the war was over, one tenth of the victorious army was black. And since then, no US military has ever been able to without those whom their Indian enemies baptized the "buffalo soldiers".
Sono uomo e son soldato, viva la liberta'! says the song of the Italian volunteers, who had gathered and fought a few years earlier for a very similar cause: I'm a man, and I'm a soldier - long live liberty!. A soldier: not just a rebel, a wanderer, or a bandit. The connection between liberty and soldiering is instinctive; to draw it as a Venn diagram, not every soldier is a freedom fighter, but every person who believes in liberty is potentially a soldier. And the reason is obvious. A soldier is a man who fights in the name of his society - his country and his people, his code of laws and his values. And liberty is not an individual but a collective quality. Nobody can really be free on his own, and freedom is not a principle unless it is, at the very least, society-wide. And there is no freedom without law, nor without individual self-discipline. Freedom would not last long if all we saw in it were licence to do as we please regardless of what that did to others. Finally, there is no freedom unless free men are willing to die rather than lose it. Liberté, Liberté chérie/ Combats avec tes défenseurs!
These men - these illiterate, ragged, barefoot, shoeless runaways - knew it; knew it better, it seems, than the learned judges and the honorable representatives of our day. For this reason, having escaped the chain, the whip, and the baying hounds, they freely handed themselves over to the uniform, the hard graft of basic training, the yells of the sergeant, the burden of back-pack and rifle in the heat of a Southern summer, and the terror of death and mutilation. They knew that if they wanted to be free, they had to fight with those who fought for freedom; and that there would be no freedom for them unless it was enforced on everyone - even their masters.
And so, this Fourth of July, let us all, Americans and otherwise, think of the men of Milliken's Bend; and if and when our time comes, let us try to deserve what they took for every one of us, black, white, or green, at the price of their bodies and lives.
