Dean Calbreath - The Sergeant: The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said: Son of an African General, Slave of the Ottomans, Free Man Under the Tsars, Hero of the Union Army

Dean Calbreath

Pulitzer and Polk Award-Winning Journalist

The Sergeant

The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said: Son of an African General, Slave of the Ottomans, Free Man Under the Tsars, Hero of the Union Army

This book is dedicated to my wife Sarah Thailing, son Ian, and daughter Ava, who put up with me for more than a decade as I researched and wrote this book, and to the men of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (African Descent) and their comrades throughout the U.S. Colored Troops, who fought to make this a better country.

T his is a true story, based largely on the writings of Nicholas Said, including a memoir in the Atlantic magazine and a letter regarding his mystical religious beliefs, both of which appeared in 1867, as well as his full-length autobiography published in 1874. Those writings have been bolstered by contemporary newspaper articles, letters, diaries, speeches, military records, and other documents, which have helped fill in some of the gaps in his writings, including his service in the Civil War. There are occasional discrepancies in his memoirs (for instance, disagreements over what year a particular event took place), so in each case I chose the version that best seemed to fit the facts and context, while mentioning in the endnotes that there is an alternate version.

Unfortunately, many of the writings and speeches quoted in the book, beginning when he first arrived in the United States, contain outdated and often offensive terms for Africans and African-Americans, including the most offensive one, which appears nearly two dozen times in the text. We debated whether to replace each reference with an n------, but eventually decided to leave the word intact to provide a more viscerally accurate view of the prejudices Said encountered on his travels in the United States, both North and South.

Cultural literacy requires detailed knowledge about the oppression of racial minorities, Randall Kennedy, an African-American law professor at Harvard, recently wrote. A clear understanding of nigger is part of this knowledge. To paper over that term or to constantly obscure it by euphemism is to flinch from coming to grips with racial prejudice that continues to haunt the American social landscape.

M ohammed Ali ben Said was born to be a fighter. His father, Barca Gana, was one of the greatest generals the kingdom of Borno ever knew. Armed with a talisman to protect him from harm, Barca Gana had a reputation for standing firm in battle when others melted away. Nobody could wield a weapon like he could. He could hurl eight spears one after another and hit his target each time. Thousands of warriors followed him into battle, clad in chain mail, with iron helmets wrapped within their turbans. As their armored horses pounded across the plains of Central Africa, they chanted praises to their general. Who in battle is like the rolling of thunder? Barca Gana. Who spreads terror in battle like an angry buffalo? Barca Gana.

Balladeers sang Barca Ganas praises. Storytellers spun tales about his victories. Dt al Harba, they called him. Lion of War. To reward his prowess, Bornos rulers made him one of the countrys wealthiest menthe governor of six provinces along the fertile Shari River, where he held a string of plantations. He was a powerful negro, of uncommon bravery, wrote British army lieutenant Dixon Denham, who befriended him. He was keen, possessed great quickness of observation, and [had a] manner, which was gentle and particularly pleasing.

As a child, Mohammed Ali ben Said practiced to be like his father, learning at a young age how to ride horses and handle weapons, for hunting if not for war. Outside the walls of Kukawa, Bornos fortressed capital, young Mohammed led armies of boys in mock battles with wooden swords and shields. Mohammed loved to boast about how his foes would scatter before him like chaff before the wind, and he looked forward to the day he could fight at his fathers side. By the time he was nine, at least three of his older brothers were already in the army, and he fully expected to join them in his teens.

But when Mohammed prepared for his first real battle, his father had been dead for nearly two decades and he was six thousand miles from Borno, baptized into a religion that his countrymen considered idolatrous, and using a name none of them would have recognized, while fighting under a flag of red, white, and blue. He would soon learn that the most daunting battles did not involve guns or swords, but how to change hearts and minds on both sides of a fight.

As dusk fell on the evening of July 29, 1863, Nicholas Said was leading a squad of soldiers through a muddy field in North Carolina, practicing for an attack on Confederate forces twelve miles down the road. In his upper twenties, Said was a sergeant in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment (African Descent), the second regiment in US history to be mainly composed of freeborn colored troops, preceded only by its sister regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Said and his men had been up since 4:30 that morning, and now, nearly fifteen hours later, they were exhausted and sweating as the sun disappeared beyond the western marshlands. Sometime tomorrow or the next day, the Fifty-Fifth was slated to face combat for the first time, and before that happened, it had to coordinate its moves with the two other regiments assigned to the attack: the First and Second North Carolina, wholly composed of now free men.

In the murky twilight, the three regiments maneuvered through a rough flatland that had once been a forest and was still studded with stumps of pines and oaks. Assembling and reassembling into different formationsby company, by column, by file, in advance, in retreatthree thousand men practiced firing their rifles in coordinated barrages, filling the air with gunsmoke as they shot blank cartridges at make-believe foes, in volleys so deafening their ears would be ringing for the next several hours.

Unlike the North Carolinians, most of whom had escaped or been freed from nearby plantations, the men of the Fifty-Fifth had come from all over the country to fight: Pennsylvania metalworkers, New York teamsters, New England sailors, and farmers from nearly every state of the Union. But of all the soldiers of African descent on the field that evening, Sergeant Said was the only one who had been born in Africa, a distinction that was as visible as the features of his face. His forehead, cheeks, and chin were scarred with an array of lines and curves marking him as a member of one of Bornos leading families, a ritualistic tattoo that gave him an aura of mystique among his fellow soldiers, many of whom knew little about Africa other than tales passed down from their grandparents or beyond.

Slender in build, average in height, with a wispy goatee and tightly clipped curls of raven-black hair, Said had inherited his fathers soldierly bearing. Standing silently and erect, he looked as if some master hand had carved the figure from some piece of black stone, an acquaintance would later write. A photograph taken shortly before he came to the Carolinas captured his tough, watchful gaze, befitting a newly minted sergeant, but barely hinted at his wiry strength (it once required four policemen to subdue him in a London brawl) and failed to capture his tattoos, hidden among the shadows of his skin.