Captain Parlin in the Civil War, Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Enlistment, Commissioning as an Officer
Sometimes I go up to Georgetown, . . . and old town--just opposite it in the river is an island, where the niggers have their first Washington reg't encamped--. . . since they have begun to carry arms, the secesh here & in Georgetown (about 3/5ths) are not insulting to them as formerly.
Walt Whitman, in a letter to his mother, July 7th, 1863
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In the year I suspect is 1892, Captain William Davis Parlin was invited to speak at a gathering of Civil War veterans and their guests at a meeting hall in his hometown of Natick, Massachusetts. Perhaps it was a 3Oth anniversary celebration of the forming of the 39th regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers or some other date pertaining to the Civil War. I have not precisely dated the speech or it's location, but in the speech he graphically describes his arduous service, first as a 2nd sergeant in the Massachusetts 39th and then as a white captain in the 1st Regiment of the United States Colored Troops in the years 1862 to 1865. The text of this speech in pencil and on lined paper has been handed down through the generations of my family. He began:
Mr. President, Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen:
My story tonight will be a very simple one. A story of personal experience of scenes that came directly under my eye.
Not making any attempt to embellish or enlarge upon them, but in a concise manner to lay before you something of the past I took in preparing my part during the Great Rebellion. I hope you will excuse the self-mention that cannot be avoided.
I shall detain you 25 minutes.
When I began research on this speech, I was struck by the repeated use of the words rebel, rebellion, and variations thereof, including the above "Great Rebellion." The terms "Civil War", and "The War Between the States," although in use, became prevalent much later. The term "rebels" connotes recklessness, impetuousity, and lawless conduct. People in the North believed the secessionists (what Whitman called "the secesh") were rebelling against the great American experiment in republican government and they were angered by it. There was outrage toward the states that seceded and a widespread feeling that the southern states and their people were traitorous enslavers of a captive people. Southerners were similarly angered by what they viewed as infringements on their freedom to conduct their affairs as they saw fit, including preservation of the institution of slavery, but also the right to export slavery to any of the territories acquired in the Oregon and Guadalupe Hidalgo treaties of 1846 and 1848. They wanted to migrate to points west and take their slaves with them. If California was part of the union, they reasoned, they should be allowed to move there with their personal property. The law said slaves were property. Each side viewed the other side as traitors and usurpers.
The speech continues:
In the summer of 1862, Co. I, 39th Regiment, Massachussets Volunteers was recruited in Natick with my name first on the enlistment roll.
We did picket duty along the Potomac and provost guard duty in Washington until the spring of 1863.
Then armed with a recommendation from Senator Henry Wilson, I presented myself in person to Secretary Stanton and was kindly received by him and sent to the Casey Examining Board where I was commissioned Captain of Co. E, 1st U.S.C. T. [United States Colored Troops].
The Regiment was then being recruited on Anacostia [actually Analosta or Mason’s] Island opposite Georgetown. It was the first of that grand body of Negro soldiers that government put into the field numbering about 300,000 men. It was then an experiment and was received with marked disfavor nearly everywhere. Union men distrusted them. Rebels were fierce in their denunciations of them.
If they could be made to fight, they would add immensely to the strength of our Northern armies. This was understood well by the rebels, hence the great hue and cry against them all through the Confederacy and among their sympathizers [in the] North.
They declared they would show no quarter to the Negroes nor their officers. One of our lieutenants (Sanborn) was shot in cold blood on a street in Norfolk while drilling the squad he had just enlisted.
In Washington, D. C. in early May, 1863, just a few months after Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, there was a major effort to recruit black regiments for the Union Army. Meetings were held in churches and in locations around the city. One such meeting, according to historian C. R. Gibbs in his book on the 1st Regiment United States Colored Troops, Black, Copper and Bright (2002), was held at Asbury United Methodist Church on May 4th, 1863. Mr. Gibbs describes the meeting:
. . . Nothing could dampen the contagious enthusiasm between speakers and the audience. But the more thoughtful attendees could not help but notice that also present that night was a squad of soldiers from the 39th Massachussets Regiment stationed there to prevent any trouble. Tension and violence between blacks and whites was growing. Contraband camps had been raided by slaveowners and bounty hunters searching for runaway slaves. Contrabands, singly or in groups, had been assaulted by pro-Confederate rowdies and thugs. A member of the city police force was reported to have said that he would put as many bullets through a nigger recruit as he would through a mad dog. . .
Sergeant Parlin of the 39th Massachusets may have been at that meeting. Given his background in Natick, a community strongly supportive of the abolitionist cause, he may have been inspired by what he saw and determined then and there to become an officer of a black regiment. In his 1915 type-written unfinished memoir in which he describes his meeting with the Secretary of War and subsequent commissioning as a Captain in the USCT, he has hand-written in the margins the date of “June 13, 1863” as the date of his exam and his orders to proceed to Mason's Island (Analosta) where he was assigned by Colonel John H. Holmes to Company E. It would have been five weeks after the recruiting event at the church and have given him enough time to correspond with his father, who would in have consulted with his friend, Senator Wilson, who arranged the meeting with Secretary Stanton. Stanton, President Lincoln's newly appointed Secretary of War, worked with Wilson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, in organizing and financing the war effort.
Captain Parlin had other inducements, most notably increased prestige and compensation: a first sergeant was paid $20 per month; a captain, $115.50 per month.
In the first two years of the war the armies of the North, comprised almost exclusively of white soldiers, had performed poorly, especially in the East. Rebel commanders and their troops proved superior in many of the initial engagements. Southern troops were frequently outnumbered in battles with Northern forces and yet fought with a tactical superiority that often brought them victory or a draw--- a moral victory. Some believed it was because Southern troops often had slaves to do much of the support work that the North had done by its enlisted soldiers. The South had the advantage of slave labor and pressure to convince Lincoln and his administration to recruit and deploy black soldiers began early in the war. In September of 1861, Frederick Douglass, the great black leader, protesting the decision to deny blacks to serve in the cause of their own liberation wrote:
What upon earth is the matter with the American government and people? . . . This is no time to fight with one hand when both are needed. . . This is no time to fight with only your white hand and allow your black hand to remain tied.
In late 1862, Lincoln approved the order to enlist black soldiers in the Union Army. At first it was not clear what their duties would be. Would they be used in the front lines or limited to non-combat roles? As this was being decided, enlistment began in earnest and black men rushed to join. The Union command decided that white officers should lead them. A campaign to recruit white officers from active units was initiated. At first the government had difficulty finding officers who would take the commands. Captain Parlin relates the following anecdote in the unfinished memoir of 1915, the year before he died:
. . . Government was having trouble getting officers of these colored troops. Sec. of War Edwin M. Stanton, had ordered Captain Elias Wright of a New Jersey regiment to raise the first regiment. Wright declined. He told me that he had always had a great repugnance against dealing with negroes. Stanton refused to let him off. Wright then resigned his commission as captain. Stanton refused this also and compelled Wright to do as ordered.
In Wright's defense, he became a fine officer of the United States Colored Troops, was later promoted several times and attained the rank of Brevet Brigadier General for exemplary service. He fought heroically side by side with his troops. To quote General Grant describing another officer (and friend) who died fighting under General Hancock, ''With him it was 'Come, boys,' not 'Go.'” He had been fighting regularly since 1961 and was actually held prisoner for a while. After achieving his Brevet General rank, Wright was severely wounded in the arm in the campaign to take Wilmington, North Carolina in early 1865. He had fought consecutively in several major battles since 1861 and was actually held prisoner by the Confederates for a while. Eventually he was awarded the rank of brevet General. When he returned to New Jersey to live out the remainder of his life, the wound regularly troubled him.
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What a buzz of excited curiosity there was when we made our first parade on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington!
There were three classes of Negro soldiers in our Army.
1st, those free before the war living in the north – intelligent & often educated, enlisting in such regiments as the 54th Mass. Good soldiers.
2Nd, those who were set free by our armies and who remained while in service a servile, dependent set.
3Rd, those who freed themselves, running away from their masters to meet the army. A wild, fearless, reckless crew . . .
From this last class our 1st regiment was made up and my Co. E the most untameable of them all.
My first appearance before them was to put a stop to a row among themselves. I made more use of sword and revolver on them than on the rebels.
It was hard work to discipline them and to keep them under control, but they made splendid fighters.
It would have done you good to see them make a charge. Heads thrown to the front. Arms close to the side. Bodies drawn up into smallest possible compass, away they would go though the air be filled with shot and shell.
At [The Second Battle of] Fair Oaks, out of 2 whole army corps, mostly white men charging along the whole line, ours was the only regiment that got into the enemy's works.
Captain Parlin was born in Natick, Massachussets in 1839. He was the son of Asher Parlin (b. 1814) who had moved to Natick when he was about 20 and established a successful house painting business. Later in life, he opened a paint supply store on Summer St. He was active in local affairs and, according to the Parlin book of of geneology The Descendants of Nicholas Parlin, 1913, ran for the Massachussets legislature against Henry Wilson (later U. S. Senator and Vice-President under Ulysses S. Grant), the man who helped Captain Parlin get his commission in the US Colored Troops. The entry claims the elder Parlin lost the election by 30 votes.
Asher Parlin was the son of Warner Parlin, a blacksmith, and Lydia Davis Parlin, who was 2nd cousin to Captain Issac Davis, the first American officer to die in the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Concord on April 19th, 1775. Isaac Davis is depicted in the noted sculpture by Daniel Chester French, The Minute Man, which is located near the Old North Bridge at Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, Massachussets.
Captain Parlin grew up in Natick and at fourteen may have been in the freshman class of the new public high school established in 1853. Natick in the 1850s, like many cities in Massachusetts, was caught up in the national debate over slavery. It was major shoe manufacturing center and produced the nationally-known and widely distributed Brogan or “1851 Jefferson” shoe, which were purchased in large numbers by southern slaveowners for their slaves (and were later issued to Union soldiers.) Henry Wilson was one of those manufacturers. Wilson was an energetic man who founded and then honed his debating skills at the Natick Debating Society. He was initially a Whig of the “Conscience” variety and not a “Cotton Whig,” i.e. a person generally opposed to slavery but not to the extent that Southerners should be pressured heavily on the subject. Many Cotton Whigs had money invested in the South or were dependent on Southern imports, most notably cotton, which fed the cloth mills in the north (and in England, where slavery had been outlawed) and their newly invented sewing machines.)
Wilson was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath in Farmingham, New Hampshire in 1812 to a poor family lorded over by a drunken father. According to Wilson’s Senate biography, the father named the boy after a wealthy man in town in hopes the man might one day name him a beneficiary in his will. When he was ten, young Jeremiah was hired out as a farm laborer and was required to live in another farmer's house and earn his keep. At age 16, he signed a contract in which he agreed to “well and faithfully serve, demean himself, and be just and true to . . . William Knight . . . as his master, and keep his secrets and everywhere willingly obey all his lawful commands . . . he shall not play at cards or dice or any other unlawful games; he shall not haunt or frequent taverns, playhouses or ale houses. . . he shall not commit fornication; he shall not contract matrimony; he shall not at any time, day or night, depart or absent himself from the service of said master without his leave.” The contract had a duration of four years, which Wilson faithfully fulfilled. To characterize it as "white slavery" would not be inaccurate. Wilson's early experience as an indentured servant likely contributed to his life-long antipathy for the institution of slavery. Upon the expiration of his contract,, he took his separation pay, legally changed his name to Henry Wilson, and began enacting the story of a self-made man on the blank slate he had made for himself. Eventually, he ended up in Natick, where in the late 1830s he became a successful cobbler housed in a tiny building called a “ten-footer” on Central St. because that is how wide the storefront was.
Although initially a compromiser, Wilson eventually became an abolitionist during the Civil War and wrote a persuasive and triumphalist book in three volumes afterward titled The History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. The book was widely praised as an accurate account of southern slavery and the political debates that led to the Civil War.
As the Whig Party began to dissolve as a hopelessly divided and ineffectual institution, Wilson flirted with the No-Nothing and Free Soil parties. After freely associating with these parties, he eventually saw that opportunity could best be realized as a Republican. He was a calculating politician, a good listener and a fast learner. After losing a race for governor as a Republican in 1853, he used his associations with both the Democratic, Free Soil and Know-Nothing parties to arrange his appointment to the U.S. Senate by the Massachussets General Court (the state legislature which appointed U. S. Senators at the time) to fill the vacancy created by Edward Everett's resignation in 1854. Everett was a learned man, a former president of Harvard, who had come to find both academic and political infighting distateful. He is best known as the featured orator at Gettysburg on the day that Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. His two-hour speech was inadvertently but accurately described by Lincoln in the text of his brief address: “. . .The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, . . .” (To Everett's credit, he immediately understood the significance of Lincoln's address and sent him a note that evening, saying in part, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.")
After taking Everett's seat, Wilson was appointed twice more to the Senate and served until 1871 when he ran for vice-President along side General Grant in his successful bid for re-election. Outside of Lincoln and his cabinet, few if any politicians did more during the Great Rebellion to preserve the Union and ensure its military success than Henry Wilson.
Wilson was a man of boundless energy who gave countless speeches and engaged in many debates. He was tireless campaigning not only for office, but on behalf of the issues that moved him, and nearly all those issues related to slavery. Growing up as he did in Natick in the 1840s and 50s, it would have been impossible for young William Davis Parlin to not have been familiar with Henry Wilson and his strong beliefs. Nor would he have been unaware of the gradual evolution of the citizenry toward support for the abolition of slavery.
In another of his speeches circa 1890-95 which was delivered to a class of students taught by his daughter Louise, Captain Parlin reveals his excitement at the patriotic fervor that overcame Natick and Boston after Fort Sumter was attacked:
Your history has told you of the causes that led up to the Civil War - of the first gun at Sumpter [Sumter], of the call for 75,000 men and then the greater call for 300,000 more. How after Bull Run's 1st battle came such a mighty burst of patriotic sentiment through the whole North that everywhere men responded offering their lives that the union might be maintained. The old flag was never so dear, never so beautiful as then. Every where it was hung out. You should have seen Washington St between Boylston and State in Boston then. It was ablaze with the red, white and blue. Every store and office almost displayed its colors until the air between the walls on either side was a mass of bunting. Only a few months before I had seen Wendell Philips the noted abolitionist pass along that same spot in the middle of the street, with a great body guard of his friends about him who dared not let him go alone from the hall where he had spoken to his home on Summer St. for fear of mob violence. No danger of mob violence to him after Bull Run. That battle served to unite the whole north in a determination to fight Secession. Down with Secession! Fight to the bitter end! was the cry. I remember how glad was Henry Wilson then as returning from Washington he met this mighty uprising of a great Northern People. Before had been uncertainty, doubt as where the people were, but now plain as the day they showed that come what would to them the Republic should be saved.
Then this hall resounded with patriotic speeches. Co H - 13th regiment went South from here and then about a year after in 1862 came the greater War Meetings. Senator Wilson spoke at one or more of them. Our [The Rev.] Mr. Patterson of Roxbury repeated Patrick Henry's notable treason speech. Leonard Finch, Simon Mulligan, G. P. Fay and others presided – I was secretary all through. Night after night we would crowd in here and the recruiting went on until 100 names came on the roll.
The Captain's enlistment in the Massachussets Volunteers and the issuance of his uniform was described in the 1915 typed document this way:
The regiment was assembled at Wakeville, Mass., and after marching through Boston, was entrailed for Washington. With knapsack, gun and equipments my brother Herman declared, “it was too heavy a load for me”, that my physique was not made up for that kind of work. However I weathered it all and was soon able to hold my own with my comrades. I was made second Sargeant under E. H. Brigham, Captain.
We did picket duty along the Potomac river and provost duty in the city of Washington until the spring of 1863.
Herman Fletcher Parlin was one of two younger brothers of William Davis Parlin. He was born in 1843, four years after William. Early in 1864 he volunteered in the Second Company Massachusetts Volunteer Sharpshooters also known as the Andrew Sharpshooters, named for Massachussets Governor Andrew. He fought at the Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse. His story will be told later in this narrative.
Because Captain Parlin's father, Asher, was well-acquainted with Senator Henry Wilson and because officers for the USCT were in demand, 24 year-old William was able to secure a relatively high rank in the United States Colored Troops. Not even officers graduating out of West Point or Annapolis were awarded the rank of captain or its naval equivalent, Lieutenant. Captain Parlin in the 1915 document states that Henry Wilson “had known of me from a boy.” Wilson, as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, was atop the pyramid of those who were organizing and financing the Union war effort. (Wilson inherited the chair of the committee when Senator Jefferson Davis resigned from the Senate to return to Mississippi. Shortly after, he was elected President of the Confederacy.)
Sergeant Parlin used his connections to one of the most influential, newly-empowered Republican Senators in Washington to acquire the rank of Captain in the United States Army. He would later prove deserving of that rank through courage and sacrifice on the battlefield.
Although he never expresses himself on the issue, Captain Parlin's decision to seek a commission as an officer in the newly-formed regiment of the USCT reveals him to be a true son of the state that had been the heart of the Abolitionist movement for several decades. Natick, in Middlesex County, was as active in the abolitionist crusade as any town of comparable size. In his biography of Henry Wilson, Ernest McKay describes the situation: “In the small villages and rural areas there were mechanics, farmers and small businessmen who pressed forward with the unpopular cause. Henry Wilson was one of these. Wilson was not afraid to speak up about slavery in unfriendly quarters. But by 1840, it was no longer an heroic thing to do since his constituency in Middlesex County was already a stonghold of abolitionist principles.” (pg 23-24.)
Captain Parlin describes his appointment in his 1915 memoir this way:
After the conversation with my father in Natick, Senator Wilson sent me a letter requesting me to present in person to Secretary Stanton an enclosed letter. I did so and after a pleasant short conversation with the Sec., was sent directly to the Casey examining board in the same building, the Capitol where I passed as Captain, and ordered the same day (June 13th 1863) to report to Col. Holmes commanding the 1st U. S. Colored Troops at Mason's Island [aka Analosta Island], opposite Georgetown, D. C., I was there assigned to Company E already mainly recruited.
It was a daring choice for young Parlin to participate in such a radical social experiment, but one that is understandable given the views of his sponsor, his father and of his townsmen.
The Captain's view of his black recruits at this point is at times patronizing, patient, and occasionally dismissive as he worked with his fellow white officers to form a cohesive fighting force. His task was the same as that of any officer charged with training new recruits.
Although mostly respectful of his troops, his description of Negros in general runs afoul of today's racial sensitivities. He uses the term “darkey” on occasion and in one anecdote that is meant to inject some levity into the speech, recites a story about a black soldier who shows him a Minie ball that bounced off his forehead, which the Captain claims is proof of the thickness of the Negro skull. He was a product of his time.
It should have come as no surprise to the Captain that escaped slaves would eventually turn into “splendid fighters,” as he describes them. They were accustomed to taking orders as slaves and they also had the added inspiration of fighting for the freedom of millions of their people, the vast majority of whom were still enslaved in the South. If the North were to lose the war, they would be fugitives subject to arrest, punishment and perhaps execution for treason for taking up arms against the Confederacy. They had every reason to become “splendid fighters.”
Because blacks were considered sub-human by many Confederate (and Union) soldiers, war crimes against them once they began to fight on the front lines while not widespread did occur. Battles at Fort Pillow and the Crater at Petersburg are only two examples. A general order issued by President Jefferson Davis on December 24, 1862 stated that black soldiers were not entitled to prisoner of war status if captured:
. . . all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong to be dealt with according to the laws of said States.
With inflammatory language, the order also flaunts special enmity for General Benjamin Butler, under whom Captain Parlin would serve in the Army of the James and who was the first Union military officer to claim that slaves were “contraband” and did not have to be returned to their masters, something that was, inconceivably, required by law at the time. It begins:
Now therefore, I Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and in their name do pronounce and declare the said Benjamin F. Butler to be a felon deserving of capital punishment. I do order that he be no longer considered or treated simply as a public enemy of the Confederate States of America but as an outlaw and common enemy of mankind, and that in the event of his capture the officer in command of the capturing force do cause him to be immediately executed by hanging. . .
As for white officers who served under General Butler:
That all commissioned officers in the command of said Benjamin F. Butler be declared not entitled to be considered as soldiers engaged in honorable warfare but as robbers and criminals deserving death, and that they and each of them be whenever captured reserved for execution.
Captain Parlin understood that if captured he could be subject to summary execution. He had heard “the great hue and cry against them [black troops and their officers] all through the Confederacy . . “
If captured, he knew his prospects would be grim, that Confederate soldiers commanding officers might consider it more efficient to proceed without even a drumhead court martial.
With these threats in the air, it is not surprising that there were soldiers on both sides who assumed that if they killed opposing troops in the act of surrender, they would not likely be held accountable. In the end, very few were. Highly publicized atrocities committed by confederates against black soldiers at Fort Pillow inflamed passions among black troops, and may have moved black soldiers in the First Regiment to kill Confederates in the act of surrender at Petersburg on June 15, 1864 at the end of the battle in which Captain Parlin was first wounded. Captain Parlin hints that atrocities occurred. Henry McNeal Turner, the First Regimient's black chaplain at the time, confirms it and then seems to make light of it. Later, at the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg at the end of July, Confederates were again accused of a massacre of USCT troops who were attempting to surrender. Was it in retaliation for acts committed on June 15th?
Throughout his speech, the Captain praises his troops as “splendid fighters." His pride in having trained them to be competent soldiers is evident. At the end of his term of service, he had come to believe they were the equal of any regiment in the army.
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