A Yankee Soldier Looks at the Negro

Abstract

A YANKEE SOLDIER LOOKS AT THE NEGRO edited by William Cutten Bryant, II On July 16, 1861, Henry Martyn Cross was graduated from the Putnam Free School in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His oration "The English Language" was spoken before a backdrop of alarm. Three months earlier, Fort Sumter had fallen and President Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers had fired Henry and his classmates with excitement. On the very afternoon of their graduation, the Union army was moving out of Washington to an unforeseen disaster at Bull Run. As the months passed, Henry read law impatiently as he watched his neighbors react to the national crisis. Dr. Enoch Cross, father of the eighteen-year-old boy, and his Uncle Randolph Campbell, pastor of the Prospect Street Congregational Church, helped organize public meetings to enlist recruits and raise bounty money. Henry was stirred by their appeals to "Save the Union." He begged his father to let him ride "this tide which has of itself risen in my soul." On September 1, 1862, after the Union's rout at the second battle of Bull Run, he enlisted without leave in a regiment then being formed by his law tutor, Eben F. Stone. In Henry's words: He was put into uniform at once, before physical examination. He marched around Newburyport with the recruits, and even went to church in his new uniform. When the time came for medical examination, he was rejected by the regimental surgeon, and this he afterward learned was done at the suggestion of his father, who was a friend of the examining doctor. The humiliation of this almost crushed H.M.C. He shut himself up in his room, and for more than a day would not come out, even for his meals. He finally braced up and went to Col. Stone and told his pitiful story, and the Colonel told him that he would take him as his clerk, and on this promise he was re-examined and accepted. For three months in training camp, and six at the front, the regimental clerk slept and worked in the Colonel's tent, where he was privy to the orders and opinions of officers. Yet, as a private in Company A A member of the English Department at Columbia University, William Cullen Bryant, II, specializes in American literature. Capt. Cross, the author of these letters, was Dr. Bryant's maternal grandfather. 133 134WILLIAM CULLEN BBYANT, II of the 48th Massachusetts Volunteers, he marched, ate, stood inspection and fought in the ranks, and knew the temper of the men. In the peculiar absence of mail censorship which prevailed during the Civil War, he wrote freely to parentsandfriends his frankreactions and those of his companions, officers and men, to the conduct of the war. On New Year's Day, 1863, the regiment put to sea in a convoy bound for the south. After a rendezvous with the "Banks Expedition" at Hampton Roads, Virginia, they sailed for Louisiana and Port Hudson. Henry helped rally his comrades caught in ambush at the Pfoins Store on May 21, was beaten back with a volunteer party attacking Port Hudson the following week, joined the main attack on June 14, and after the fort's surrender on July 8, was caught in the surprise at Donaldsonville, July 13. With most Northern boys of his day, Cross held an uncomplicated ideal of national union for which he, like many others, was eager to fight when the time came. Abolition of sL·very and freedom for the black man took no controlling part in his decision. His parents' churchgoing friends were torn in their feelings when General Ben Butler— a Massachusetts man—stigmatized the escaping Negroes as chattels by calling them "contraband of war" and putting them to work as labor troops. But emancipation and the organization of colored fighting units started a wrangle in the little Yankee city. Almost forgotten by the town that had borne them were William Lloyd Garrison and his militant Abolitionist newspaper, the Newburyport Free Press. The chief journal of Henry's day, the Newburyport Herald, attacked what it called the "barbarous pitting of black men against white"—though its editor seemed oblivious...