Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Between Dec. 7 and 14, 1863, a new regiment was organized at St. Louis's Benton Barracks: the 1st Missouri Colored Infantry, later renamed the 62nd Regiment, United States Colored Troops. Unheralded in their time and mostly forgotten in ours, soldiers of the 62nd were nevertheless responsible for changing the very essence of the Civil War and were instrumental in creating what may have been the first permanent memorial to Abraham Lincoln anywhere in the country.
The 62nd was organized in a slave state, but this was not as remarkable as it might seem: By December 1863, such regiments had been organized in Union-controlled sections of South Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Like previously organized units, the 62nd included both freeborn African-Americans and fugitive slaves from the Confederate states. But it also included dozens of slaves who had run away from slaveholders loyal to the Union, as the Final Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863 had no legal effect in Missouri, and slavery was still very much in operation for thousands of blacks in the Union.
Several units of African-Americans soldiers demonstrated their bravery in combat – the 1st Kansas at Island Mound, Mo., the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner – but the 62nd had no such heroics. The men spent their first year on picket duty across Louisiana, and then were transferred to Brazos Santiago, a Texas barrier island. There they blocked Confederates from resupplying through the twin cities of Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Tex., though they mostly fought mosquitoes, heat and the Gulf Coast humidity.
The 62nd was involved in just one battle — indeed, the last pitched battle of the Civil War, more than a month after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. On May 11, 1865, it was among those troops who approached the Confederate encampment in Brownsville, initiating a three-day battle in and around Palmito Ranch that ended with a Union retreat. By May 13 all those involved knew that the largest Confederate armies had surrendered and Jefferson Davis was on the run, but the Texas units refused to surrender, especially to a Union force that included African-American troops. Some even struck out for Mexico instead of admitting defeat.
So why is the regiment noteworthy? The 62nd contributed to the meaning of the Civil War not through their actions on the battlefield but in their long, uneventful stretches in camp. Like many others, Missouri's colored troops spent nights around the campfire learning to read and write.
In St. Louis in 1863 and early 1864, when the troops were waiting to be deployed, the locally organized Western Sanitary Commission had provided literacy lessons, and the soldiers' progress so impressed the regiment's first lieutenant, Richard Baxter Foster, that he decided to continue instruction himself throughout the war.
At Fort McIntosh, Tex., as the units were ordered to disband, Foster remarked that "it was a pity these men should find no schools when they returned to Missouri, and that the education so happily commenced should cease," and he wondered whether that need be the case. "The past was dead and must soon be buried," Foster recalled thinking. "An era had commenced in which all things should become new."
Officers and enlisted soldiers conferred, and resolutions were drawn up and signed on Jan. 14, 1866: The 62nd would establish a school in Missouri "for the special benefit of freed blacks" so that "emancipated slaves, who have neither capital to spend nor time to lose, may obtain an education." Speaking from experience, they wrote how "the freedom of the black race has been achieved by war, and its education is the next necessity thereof."
Both colored troops and their white officers contributed to this completely new proposition — an institute of higher education for African-Americans, created by African-Americans. Foster and the other officers contributed over $1,000, while their soldiers managed $4,000. Another black Missouri regiment, the 65th, added $1,300 — once again, a tremendous sum for the time, let alone from enlisted men. Decades later, Foster still recalled the generous contribution of Samuel Sexton, an African-American soldier who managed to give $100, from a salary of $13 per month.
As Foster took the funds to St. Louis and sought a university willing to create a program for African-Americans, the Western Sanitary Commission leaders were busy collecting funds nationwide for a Lincoln memorial. "The colored people have lost their best friend," Charlotte Scott told her local minister; she had heard the news of Lincoln's assassination while still laboring in the house of her former master, even in the Northern city of Marietta, Ohio. She gave the first $5; from there, donations poured in: $4,200 from colored troops at Vicksburg; $3,200 from another colored regiment; $500 from a battery unit; and more, until over $16,000 was amassed. "In the fullness of their hearts the colored soldiers would push out their last 'greenback,' saying, 'Take it all,'" the officers wrote, saying that they had instituted a policy of no more than five dollars apiece to curtail the exuberance.
As Foster sought support, he worked under a deadline. The officers of the 62nd had agreed that if $20,000 were not raised by July 1, 1867, the soldiers' contributions would be refunded. After a February 1866 meeting, Foster wrote that "To day [I] consulted Gen. Fisk, Mr. Fishback, Dr. Post, Dr. Eliot and Mr. Yeatman, all of whom are warmly interested in the education of the colored race, and all seem to think that our enterprise will fail." Foster, rejecting their logic, did not elaborate, but the reluctance of these prominent white educators and officers suggested how shallow the support for African-American education remained.
Unsuccessful in St. Louis, Foster brought the 62nd's bid to open higher education for African-Americans to Jefferson City, Missouri's capital. Unable to find a partner for an integrated school, he became convinced that "my best course was to establish the school, and make it at least deserve to live." On Sept. 16, 1866, Foster opened Lincoln Institute, now Lincoln University, for classes.
Though the exact story of the naming seems lost, the choice was obvious: "The institution bears the grandest name in American history," a Chicago newspaper later remarked. "We trust its career may prove as beneficial to the colored race as Lincoln's act of emancipation." Henry Brown, a veteran of the 62nd, was both a student in the first class and a member of the school's board of trustees. Brown embodied the power of emancipation that the 62nd had nurtured, and that they had made into a legacy for Abraham Lincoln.
Related
Civil War Timeline
An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.
To keep the school open, Foster still needed more funds. He secured $2,000 from the Freedmen's Bureau, and on the third try, he convinced legislators to give the school land-grant status and a designation as a "normal" teachers' school. Yet the legislature provided one more fund-raising hurdle: State funding would be guaranteed only when the Lincoln Institute board raised another $15,000. Working with white and black members of the institute board — including the Rev. Moses Dickson, an African-American leader of the Missouri Equal Rights League, as well as Arnold Krekel, a German-born former slaveholder — Foster scraped together the necessary money by the deadline, making it possible to dedicate the new building in 1871.
An essential contribution came from the Western Sanitary Commission, holder of Charlotte Scott's $5 donation and all those other donations toward a Lincoln memorial. Though the commission eventually paid for the statue entitled Freedmen's Memorial, in Lincoln Park, behind the Capitol in Washington, in 1876, it seems more appropriate to judge Lincoln University as their first permanent commemoration of the slain president.
But most of the credit belongs to the instigators of the effort, and at Lincoln University, they received it. Even as Fisk, Howard and other private schools for African-Americans were founded by white leaders, Foster wrote, "Only in Missouri is there a STATE normal school for training colored teachers, and Missouri owes it to the 62nd regiment."
Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.
Sources: Adam Arenson, "The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War"; Richard Baxter Foster to F. A. Seely, April 16, 1867, Freedmen's Bureau Field Office Records for Missouri, Letters Received, M1908, roll 11, frames 226-232; Richard Baxter Foster, "Historical Sketch of Lincoln Institute, Jefferson City, Missouri … Upon the Dedication of the New Building" and "Some Aspects of Black Education in Reconstruction Missouri"; W. Sherman Savage, "The History of Lincoln University"; William Greenleaf Eliot, "The Story of Archer Alexander from Slavery to Freedom"; Gary R. Kremer, "James Milton Turner and the Promise of America: The Public Life of a Post-Civil War Black Leader"; William A. Dobak, "Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867."
Adam Arenson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of "The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War" and a co-editor of "Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire." He is conducting research on African North Americans who returned from Canada to the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction. More information about the book, his Back to the Battlefield musings and current research can be found on his Web site.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Opinionator | Disunion: Fighting for the Legacy of Lincoln
Dengan url
http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2013/12/opinionator-disunion-fighting-for.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Opinionator | Disunion: Fighting for the Legacy of Lincoln
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Opinionator | Disunion: Fighting for the Legacy of Lincoln
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar