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Originally Posted by nbforrest Can you provide sources for the claims that some were sent into slavery or that white officers were executed? I would be interested to see some, since I've never come across them before...would be interesting to see the scope, etc. |
- At Milliken's Bend: "Attackers cried, 'No quarters for white officers, kill the ****ed Abolitionists, but spare the ******s.' and during the course of the battle they executed at least two white officers." [Joseph T. Glatthaar,
Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers, p. 133]
- "Wartime atrocities against the USCT were commonplace, as Confederates first hoped to discourage blacks from enlisting and later sought revenge for their contributions to the Union Army. Initially they were frequent yet isolated incidents. In Louisiana after the Battle of Milliken's Bend a Confederate deserter reported that they had executed an officer and a few enlisted men, and not long afterward some Rebels beat some black troops and hung two others. Similar executions also ocurred in Kansas and North Carolina." [Ibid., pp. 155-156]
- "Southern guerrillas, too, proved to be a problem. Some Confederates and partisans surrounded a foraging party of twenty men from the 51st U.S. Colored Infantry under a lieutenant and forced them to surrender. They then murdered and mutilated teh Federals, shooting the lieutenant through the mouth and leaving him for dead, although he lingered on for another ten days. In Kentucky some guerrillas attacked a guard of ten men from the 108th U.S. Colored Infantry, killed three of them, and then butchered their bodies. Six weeks later in Georgia, guerrillas killed three black troops from the 40th U.S. Colored Infantry and split their heads open with an ax." [Ibid., p. 157]
- "For black outfits, the possibility of execution if they fell into the clutches of the Confederates was an incentive to fight even more aggressively. Nevertheless, sometimes it was a question fo surrendering or being annihilated, and then their officers opted to place their own lives and those of their men in the hands of the Confederate foe.
"Needless to say, black prisoners of war had nowhere to hide, and they were exclusively at the mercy of the Rebels, who sometimes committed atrocities and other times treated them as ordinary prisoners. For their white officers, though, it was not always so obvious whom they commanded, and occasionally they had opportunities to protect themselves when captured in large battles by claiming they served in white units. In a fight in Tennessee in November 1864, two officers from the 44th U.S. Colored Infantry told their captors they served in their original white volunteer regiments and the scheme worked temporarily, but Confederates later executed them." [Ibid., pp. 158-159]
"The actual practice of Confederate forces in the field was considerably less extreme than advocated by the directives spilling out of Richmond. Captured white officers from black regiments were
for the most part handled as prisoners of war, though sometimes as second-class ones. Efforts were made to return ex-slave prisoners to their owners, though it remains unclear how often this happened or how many men were affected. Perhaps the most tragic fate awaited free blacks captured in arms, a group that was usually held apart from exchanges." [Noah Andre Trudeau,
Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1863-1865, p. 61]
- "The Battle of Poison Spring, April 18, 1864, was one of the most complete victories ever won by Confederate forces in Arkansas. Fewer than four thousand cavalrymen sprang a cleverly laid ambush within the hearing of thirteen thousand Union soldiers in nearby Camden, capturing a large wagon train carrying food for their foes. As the exulting Rebels scattered the train's escort, they refused to take prisoners from its largest unit, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Thus a glorious Confederate triumph was transformed into Arkansas's most notorious war crime." [Gregory J. W. Urwin, "'We Cannot Treat Negroes ... As Prisoners of War': Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas,"
Civil War History, Vol. 42, No. 3, September, 1996, p. 193]
- Lt. Gen. E. Kirby Smith to Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor: "I have been unofficially informed that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms. I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers." [OR Series II, Vol 6, pp. 21-22]
-"In raids on Pine Bluff and Clarksville, Arkansas, between the fall of 1863 and the spring of 1864, Rebel irregulars shot or hanged captured black soldiers. Confederate guerrillas in Missouri habitually executed any male slaves caught trying to sneak off to Union recruiting stations. In a skirmish south of Lake Providence, Louisiana, on June 29, 1863, a Texas colonel directed his cavalry brigade to charge a fort held by two companies of black infantrymen and to 'take none with uniforms on.'" [Urwin, "We Cannot Treat Negroes ..." op. cit., p. 203]
See also James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., "The Execution of White Officers from Black Units by Confederate Forces During the Civil War,"
Louisiana History, Vol 35, Fall, 1994, pp. 475-489 and Brainerd Dyer, "The Treatment of Colored Union Troops by the Confederates, 1861-1865,"
The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 20, No. 3, July, 1935, pp. 273-286.
Regards,
Cash
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