Clare P. Weaver - Thank God My Regiment an African One

THANK GOD
MY REGIMENT
AN AFRICAN ONE

Colonel Nathan W. Daniels of the 2nd Regiment Louisiana Native Guard Volunteers. This photograph was taken on January 12, 1864, while Daniels was in Washington, D.C. Roger D. Hunt Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute

The Civil War Diary of
Colonel Nathan W. Daniels

EDITED BY C. P. WEAVER

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press

Copyright 1998 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America
Louisiana Paperback Edition, 2000

Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn
Typeface: New Caledonia
Typesetter: Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Daniels, Nathan W., d. 1867.

Thank God my regiment an African one : the Civil War diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels / edited by C.P. Weaver.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8071-2566-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Daniels, Nathan W., d. 1867Diaries. 2. United States. Army. Native Guard Infantry Regiment, 2nd (1862-1863) 3. Ship Island (Miss.) 4. New Orleans (La.)HistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Personal narratives. 5. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Personal narratives. 6. LouisianaHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Regimental histories. 7. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Regimental histories. 8. SoldiersUnited StatesDiaries. 9. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Participation, Afro-American. 10. Afro-American soldiersHistory19th century. I. Weaver, C.P., 1939- II. Title.
E510.5 2nd.D36 1998
973.7463dc21

98-10522
CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Foreword
by Edwin C. Bearss

SHIP ISLAND, MISSISSIPPI
January 12-April 28, 1863

NEW ORLEANS
April 29-September 26, 1863

Appendix 1:
Officer Roster

Appendix 2:
Enlisted Roster with Company Officers

Appendix 3:
Ships and Captains

MAP

PHOTOGRAPHS AND PRINTS

Edwin C. Bearss

I entered on duty as a historian at Vicksburg National Military Park on September 28, 1955. Although a Civil War buff since the mid-1930s, I possessed scant knowledge or appreciation of the significance of African American soldiers and sailors in our nations defining conflict. I had grown up in Montana, where I knew two black familiesthe Proctors and the Englishesthe only ones in the area. I had served in a segregated Marine Corps and attended undergraduate school at Georgetown University, where there were few, if any, African American students in the late 1940s. The first time I met, worked with, and got to know black professionals was during the three and a half years I spent at the U.S. Naval Hydrographic Office at Suitland, Maryland. In 1953-1954, I attended Indiana University and, while there, wrote my graduate thesis, Patrick Cleburne: Stonewall Jackson of the West. A proposal by General Cleburne to enlist blacks in the Confederate army was suppressed by the government and undoubtedly shortcircuited his brilliant military career.

Autumn 1955 was an eye-opening time for a Yankee historian to arrive in Mississippi. Seventeen months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, had determined that separate educational facilities were intrinsically unequal, intrinsically outlawing racial segregation in the nations public schools, and in August, six weeks before I traveled south, Emmett Till had been murdered in Sumner, Misissippi, his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

In familiarizing myself with the Vicksburg campaign, I learned that black troops had seen bloody, no-quarter-asked-or-given fighting at Millikens Bend, Louisiana, on June 7, 1863. The 11th Louisiana Infantry (African American descent) suffered terrible casualties30 killed, 119 wounded, and 293 missing. Also while at Vicksburg, I became aware of the significant service in Mississippi during the second half of the war by the 3rd U.S. Colored Cavalry, led by Colonel Embury D. Osband. During the Vicksburg campaign, Osband commanded Major General Ulysses S. Grants escort. Soon after the end of the war, he was poisoned under still-mysterious circumstances at Greenville, Mississippi; he was buried in the Vicksburg National Cemetery.

In 1963, while undertaking research into military operations in and around Thibodaux, Louisiana, during October 1862, I became aware of the Louisiana Native Guards, whose 1st Regiment was among the participating Union units. The newly organized regiment played only a minor role in this campaign, and Brigadier General Godfrey Weitzel, the officer in charge and a protg of Major General Benjamin Butlers, treated the unit and its personnel in a patronizing manner. Yet this brief introduction to the Native Guards whetted my interest in the Native Guards, and during the summer of 1965, my last in Mississippi, I had an opportunity to look at a different aspect of that story.

Pierce Reeder, postmaster of Leola, Arkansas, contacted me on behalf of the Grant County Chamber of Commerce. Governor Orval Faubus had recently signed into law legislation establishing Jenkins Ferry, the site of a bitter Civil War battle, as a state park. Out of this contact came my study Steeles Retreat from Camden and the Battle of Jenkins Ferry, published for the Arkansas Civil War Commission in 1966. Among the battles highlighted in the book were Poison Spring and Jenkins Ferry. In the former, a disaster for the Union, one of the key participating commands was the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, which on October 29, 1862, at Island Mound, Missouri, had become the first black unit to see combat in the Civil War (more than six months before the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantryfeatured in the movie Glorywas mustered into Federal service). At Jenkins Ferry (April 30, 1864), the 2nd Kansas stood tall, charging and capturing in bitter fighting two cannons manned by Ruffners Missouri Battery.

A 1967 Louisiana History article by Mary F. Berry, Negro Troops in Blue and Gray: The Louisiana Native Guards, reintroduced me to this unique unit. Until then I had believed that Martin R. Delany, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, had been the first African American officer to hold a field grade, as noted in the popular American Heritage Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1960. The editors of this work seemingly were unaware of the large number of black line officers and one field-grade officerMajor Francis E. Dumasin the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Regiments of Native Guards.

This was to be my last encounter with the Louisiana Native Guards for quite some time. Following my 1966 transfer to the National Park Services Washington, D.C., headquarters, I did not have an opportunity to revisit them until the late 1970s. At that time I was assigned to prepare a comprehensive cultural history of Ship Island, one of the units in Gulf Islands National Seashore. The most impressive and significant abovegrade feature on the island is the third-system masonry fort, commonly called Fort Massachusetts. Commenced in 1859, the fort was largely completed during the war years. Intimately associated with both the barrier island and the fort from January 1863 until their October 1865 muster out of Federal service were the 2nd Louisiana Native Guards, redesignated the 74th Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops, on April 4, 1864.