Captain Parlin's in the Civil War, Chapter 2
Chapter 2.
Duty in Norfolk and the murder of Lieutenant Sanborn. Duty in New Bern and Plymouth, North Carolina. Dismal Swamp Raid. Ram Abermarle. Norfolk , New Berne, and back to Hampton.
The Captain continues:
Our first service in front of the enemy was at New Bern, Plymouth and Elizabeth City, N.C.
They were green troops then, knowing very little about handling fire arms. In slavery guns were kept from them.
At Wilson's Landing one darkie wanted to enlist but said he was afraid of the muskets.
On one of the first nights on picket at Plymouth, they fired repeatedly at an imaginary enemy. I was so used up in going from post to post that just at dawn when all quieted down I fell asleep standing in the middle of the road.
After that I had to take three companies in an old ferry boat to Elizabeth City. Their guns were all loaded from the picket & they could not manage to draw the charges.
One after another would go off from careless handling until they killed a negro on the wharf.
I had to hurry off the boat and have all loaded muskets discharged into the first swamp we came to.
A short time after that the Ram Albemarle came down the river, captured Plymouth and killed poor Capt. Flusser at that point.
If the death of an innocent man on the dock weren't so tragic, it would work as slapstick comedy. The Captain was struggling to teach his troops proficiency with firearms. In this instance he was commanding his company and two others as well. There was danger in having so many barely trained men armed with powerful weapons.
Eventually the Captain's troops learned to handle their weapons in time for their first engagement with the enemy which would occur in three weeks. His comment that “in slavery guns were kept from them,” reminds us while white soldiers were fighting to save the union, most black soldiers were escaped slaves fighting for freedom from bondage and never had the right to bear arms.
The CSS Ram Albemarle was a Confederate ironclad ship commissioned in mid-April of 1864. It immediately controlled Albemarle Sound and the mouth of North Carolina's Roanoke River. Control of waterways was critical for both sides as it was easier for the North to move and supply its troops and for the Confederacy to feed and convey goods for its people throughout the South. The Rebels sought control of the port of Plymouth in the Sound because it was served by the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, which ran from Wilmington, N.C., the only other port on the east coast controlled by the South, to its capitol, Richmond, Va. With control of this waterway, goods and weapons from Europe could be shipped north to Virginia as well as points south. Virtually invincible, the Abemarle wreaked destruction among Union ships that had controlled the Sound up until her launching that April. She first engaged Union paddleboat steamers, the Miami and the Southfield. The two union boats chained themselves together to try and trap the Abemarle, but she outmaneuvered them and pierced the hull of the Southfield with her battering ram, sinking her. With the Abemarle impaled in the side of the Southfield, the Miami fired her cannon point blank at the Abemarle, but the shell bounded off the iron-clad back at the Miami, killing her Captain Charles W. Flusser.
For months afterward the Abemarle controlled the Sound. She was the most successful warship in the Confederate Navy. She helped in the capture of the port of Plymouth by General Robert Hoke and controlled the Sound and the mouth of the Roanoke into the fall of 1863. On May 5th, in an engagement with four Union warships, she was hit with 500 rounds of cannon fire and although damaged, escaped victorious back into Plymouth. She resumed patrolling the sound after repairs to her smoke stack and armor. In one of the most daring missions of the war, the Abemarle was finally sunk in an act of sabotage planned and executed by an intrepid young Lieutenant, William B. Cushing, who was a student of Captain Flusser's at the US Naval Academy. He held Flusser in high regard and sought to avenge the death of his mentor. He designed two small 30-foot steamboats and fitted them with spar torpedoes on a ram. The boats were built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and towed to Norfolk. One was lost at sea during the voyage. The other made it to the mouth of the Roanoke where Cushing boarded her on October 27, 1864 and set off with a crew of thirteen for the Abemarle. The small, armed steamboat was spotted by sentries before she could ram the Confederate ship, and took heavy fire from the shore and the ship. But Cushing pushed on and was able to rise over a protective pen of logs about 30 feet from her side. When the spar-armed ram made contact with the ship, he detonated the torpedo and blew a hole six-foot wide in the hull of the ironclad. Some of his men were thrown into the water by the blast. Now the Abemarle and the launch were now bow-to-bow and the Abemarle was firing directly at the little steamer. After twice refusing to surrender, Cushing removed his shoes and shirt and dived into the river. He drifted downriver overnight, and after stealing a skiff from the shoreline, finally found safety at a Union dock. Two of his men drowned and the rest, save one, were captured. The Abemarle was seized by Union forces when the town of Plymouth was recaptured a few days later, which gave Union forces control again of the Sound and the river. Lieutenant Cushing's written report on the mission began simply: “SIR: I have the honor to report that the rebel ironclad Albemarle is at the bottom of the Roanoke River." The speech continues: This carelessness in handling muskets soon wore off and with experience they became veteran soldiers, proficient in every respect. From New Bern we went to Portsmouth, Va. on guard & picket duty. There I was often Field Officer of the Day over bothcities of Norfolk and Portsmouth. On a little wheezy ferry boat plying between Norfolk & Portsmouth run by two negroes I met my Mr. Washburn who has now for years been my right-hand man in business.
Eventually the ranks of white officers in the USCT were filled by men either looking for promotion and increased pay or those strongly devoted to abolition. Among them was another young officer who volunteered to serve in the USCT, A. L. Sanborn. He is mentioned in Gibbs' books as a clerk at nearby Columbia Hospital (and in a later in a New York Times account as an employee of the Quartermaster's Department) who was recruiting black soldiers for the regiment in May of 1863 while expecting an appointment as an officer in one of its companies. He eventually received his commission and in one of the more tragic incidents of the war was murdered by an enraged white citizen of Union-occupied Norfolk while leading a company of black troops through the streets.
The killer was Dr. David M. Wright, a respected physician in the city and a slaveholder who was said to have treated his few slaves well. Allegedly, the cause of the confrontation was that some soldiers had taken up a sidewalk and driven pedestrians, including women into the street. Witnessing this, Wright, according to the New York Times, called Sanborn “a damned cowardly son of a bitch” and when confronted by the officer, apparently intent on arresting him, shot him twice in the hand and stomach. Sanborn died shortly thereafter and Wright had to be saved from Sanborn's troops by a lieutenant colonel who was passing by.
The killing of Sanborn set the city of Norfolk on edge, as did the ensuing military trial in which the doctor was found guilty and sentenced to death. Wright was described this way in Norfolk: The First Four Centuries:
A Nansemond County native, he had practiced medicine in Edenton for over 20 years before moving to Norfolk in 1854. He was a beacon of service in the next year's yellow fever epidemic, contracting the disease himself, but recovering. Tall and dignified, with long gray hair, full beard and mustache, he was said to be an "upright amiable and peaceful citizen, in his domestic affairs and affectionate husband and father." His household at twenty West Main included his wife Penelope Creecy Wright, eight children, and (in 1860) six slaves.
A few days before his execution, one of his young teenage daughters, also named Penelope, while visiting with the Doctor exchanged clothes with him in the privacy of their meeting and tried to enable his escape dressed in woman's clothing. But the ruse was discovered quickly as Wright was leaving the building. He was returned to jail and his daughter was released.
Wright's attorney's appealed the guilty verdict to President Lincoln, who had doubts about Wright's sanity. In one of the first cases in which the insanity defense was used, Lincoln sent an expert to Virginia to review the case and interview Wright. Dr. John P. Gray, Superintendant of the New York State Asylum at Utica, examined and found Dr. Wright sane. He was hanged on October 23, 1863. Wright's final statement was simply: “The deed that I committed was done without malice.” The speech continues:
After our Lieut. Sanborn was shot in Norfolk by Dr. Wright, his body was placed in a tomb and when our regiment reached there it was determined to give the rebel citizens the spectacle of a soldier's funeral and at the same time to do honor to a deserving officer.
The parade was arranged for Sunday and an express company notified to be ready to take the body north to Vermont.
it stormed that Sunday and the funeral was postponed for a week. The band of the 3rd Brigade 18th A.C. [Army Corps] being engaged in addition to our large fine drum corps.
When the second Sunday came around the body was missing. The express company, prompted as we understood by the rebel element, had sent it north the week before.
Gen. Wilde [Wild] and Col. Holman were indignant but were not to be outwitted in that way. The parade was held and Mr. Washburn had the privilege of playing dirge after dirge over an empty coffin.
We did not know how much breath he had wasted until we met him in Natick after the war was over. He says they played one dirge over 19 times on that march without a rest.
Only a few months before one of our Lieutenants was killed on the street in Norfolk while recruiting for our regiment.
While Captain Parlin tells the story of Lieutenant Sanborn's military funeral in absentia, the book Norfolk: The First Four Centuries describes a civic funeral held for the young soldier: “. . . the city on July 14th gave Lieutenant Sanborn a civic funeral, with all places of business closed, with all church bells tolling, and the city council in attendance.”
The mention of Mr. Washburn who played the dirge over an empty coffin and who served as the Captain's "right-hand man in business" for over 27 years helps date the speech. If he was hired in 1865 or the year after then the speech was probably delivered in 1892, on the thirtieth anniversary of the forming of Parlin's Massachusetts regiment.
While stationed at Portsmouth we were taken by General Wild on a raid through the Dismal Swamp, marching on the tow path. We foraged as we went, some times having nothing to eat but corn meal which was mixed with water spread on a board and baked or dried before the fire. Then plenty of pork, chickens, etc. I had a good servant and he stumbled on so many chickens and turkeys that we tired of them.
One day near South Mills we captured a man who was reported to be a Lieut. of guerrillas.
At night a court consisting of three captains and our Maj. Wright as president, was convened to try him. We had marched all day and being tired I fell asleep while the evidence was being given. It was a case of life and death for the poor fellow who could not have been sleepy.
Maj. Wright was reprimanded by Gen. Wild because we sent the man to Norfolk for further trial but the Maj. felt it hardly just to condemn him with one third of the jury asleep.
[The following was crossed out from his speech]:
At Elizabeth City our Col. Holman concocted a brilliant scheme for capturing guerrillas. Two regiments with colors flying and drums and bugles making all possible noise were marched out through the country. At a cross roads, three companies of us quietly left the command and hid in the woods while the balance of the troops marched on for a mile or more. Kept up with the noise. Built fires and went into camp.
At dark we quietly put out pickets to capture stray guerrillas. It came on to rain one of those cold northers that chill you through and through & we had at last to build fires so the plan failed. One old darkie and a mule team was all the spoil[s] of the night. [Cross out ends]
I never knew the results of that Dismal Swamp raid, only that we supported a brigade for just about two or three weeks in the country and hung one guerrilla. It was said that the rebs hung three of our stragglers in retaliation.
The Dismal Swamp raid led by Brigadier General Edward Augustus Wild was widely reported by the press in both the South and North. It was denounced for brutality in the South and a subject of controversy in the North. Between December 5th and December 24th, 1863, Wild led a march of four black regiments including the 1st, the 5th and the 10th USCT and the 2nd North Carolina Colored Volunteers from Portsmouth, Virginia through the swamplands of southern Virginia and into Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The Great Dismal Swamp is an area that spreads from near Portsmouth south to Elizabeth City, North Carolina and is believed originally to have covered over one million acres. In the late 1700s, a canal that connected and facilitated trade between Chesapeake Bay and Abemarle Sound was was dug at the eastern edge of the swamp. During the Civil War, the Swamp became a refuge for runaway slaves, Indians, Confederate guerillas and common criminals.
The purpose of Wild's raid was to free and recruit slaves in the area and to aid residents of North Carolina who were loyal to the Union and had come under increasing attack by Secessionists and their guerrillas. It succeeded and is remembered with contempt by descendants of local citizens who who witnessed it.
As befits his name, Edward Wild, Parlin’s commanding officer, was one of the most decisive, reckless, fanatical and courageous officers in the Union Army. He was a stern abolitionist who battled not only Confederates and Southern slave owners, but his superior officers. He was arrested several times for insubordination but usually avoided being reprimanded. These arrests were often for trivial offenses, for example the failure wear a proper dress coat while on parade or failure to report to duty in a timely fashion, but they indicate an inability to get along with his superiors, several of whom he held in contempt. He was wounded several times-- twice severely. At The first battle of Fair Oaks in June of 1862, he was shot in his knee and the right hand. At South Mountain three months later he was shot in the left arm and had it amputated at the shoulder. For the rest of his life he wore a device on his shoulder that supported his clothing.
Wild was a medical doctor from Massachussets who, while on his honeymoon in Constantinople in 1855, joined the Turkish military as a battlefield doctor in the Crimean War apparently to augment his medical training. He spent fifteen months in Turkey, nine of those tending the sick and wounded. He was in the region for more than two years. When the war ended, he resumed his honeymoon. His wife was apparently a patient woman.
In the raid on into the Great Dismal Swamp, Wild's African Brigade, as it became known, fought guerrillas, freed slaves, arrested rebels, burned or confiscated crops, and seized farm animals and personal property of suspected rebel sympathizers. His actions provoked outrage throughout the South and criticism in the North. Hostility toward black troops was high in the South and the thought of being subjugated by them horrified many Southerners. Wild arrested women thought to be aiding Southern irregulars, took at least one woman hostage and threatened to hang her if one of his captured Negro troops was hung. She spent time in prison and was later released. Later, shortly after the brigade arrived at Wilson's Wharf on the James River, in one incendiary incident, he allowed escaped black slaves to whip their reportedly "cruel" master, who had been stripped of his shirt for the ordeal. In the execution of one thirty-year old guerrilla fighter during the expedition through the Dismal Swamp, Wild pulled the trap on a gallows that was hastily constructed by his men. The condemned man's neck did not break and he remained alive for at least 20 minutes before dying of strangulation. Wild then pinned a sign on the corpse: “This guerrilla hanged by order of Brig. General Wild. Daniel Bright of Pasquatonk County.”
The material results of the raid may be summed up as follows: Between 2,000 and 3,000 slaves were released from bondage, with whom were taken 350 ox, horse and mule teams. and from 50 to 100 saddle horses, some of them valuable animals. The guerillas lost thirteen killed and wounded, ten dwelling houses, with many thousands of bushels of corn belonging to them were burned beside the two distilleries, four of their camps were destroyed and one of their number was hanged; and 100 rifles, uniforms, infantry equipment &c, fell into our hands as spoils, with a loss on part of the brigade of 12 killed and wounded and one man taken prisoner. Besides this 14 rebel prisoners and four hostages were brought in. A comparatively small number of men were enlisted-- not more than 100 in all-- a large proportion of the able-bodied slaves having previously left their masters the facilities for escaping being especially great in the region visited.
The Confederate government in Richmond accused Wild of committing atrocities and sent Brigadier General Matt Ransom's brigade in North Carolina to destroy his brigade, but Wild and his men made it back to Norfolk before the rebels found them, although a few bluecoat stragglers were killed after retreating into a house, which was promptly set on fire by the rebels. Wild praised the performance of his black troops. They had covered over 300 miles. He wrote that they had “marched wonderfully, never grumbled, were watchful on picket, and always ready for a fight.” Sergeant Major Milton M. Holland (a member of the 5th Regiment), whose father was a white slave-owner and mother a slave, in a letter to an Ohio newspaper summed it up:
I must say of the 5th, that after twenty days of hard scouting, without overcoats or blankets, they returned home to camp, which the soldiers term their home, making twenty-five and thirty miles per day. Several of the white cavalry told me that no soldiers have ever done as hard marching through swamps and marshes as cheerfully as we did, and that if they had to follow us for any length of time it would kill their horses.
Holland was later awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism at the Battle of New Market Heights. His description of the men marching and fighting three weeks without blankets or overcoats in the month of December is confirmed by other accounts of the raid.
These accounts also reveal that the soldiers on this march kept warm when they could by making bonfires of wood from fence rails, houses and out buildings. Although the soldiers may have felt cold by not having blankets or coats, they continually looked for ways to reduce the weight they carried. In his school speech, Captain Parlin describes the situation during hi early days as an enlisted man:
How heavy were our knapsacks then. The loving ones at home with the tenderest solicitude had fitted us out with all the comforts they could, little essentials that at first seemed indispensible, little essentials that at first we would not think of parting with, medicines for possible ailments –salves and liniments-extra wraps, & ---- pins & needles & thread, books and stationary, games, filters for bad water, revolvers & ammunition for close fighting, knives & forks & spoons etc.
We soon found that salves and liniments, and medicines were easier carried by the surgeons, that government made walking arsenals enough of us without the burden of private pistols and ammunition. Knives and forks and spoons can come down to a combination –everything was reduced to a minimum. One man tired of it with his marching and threw away a comb and needle. He could not possibly spare more and he was determined to lessen his load. My shoulders and back received a severe scorching by the sun while washing my one shirt.
Captain Parlin does not describe Wild's Raid in much detail. I suspect his reticence was owed in part to his discomfort at some of the things he witnessed. In a speech presented decades later celebrating the exploits of Union soldiers, the indignities committed were perhaps too sensitive a topic. They were arguably war crimes. To add a little levity in the way of gallows humor, he relates the story of falling asleep during the trial of the captured guerrillla. This is in contrast to the actual occurrence of Wild's summary execution of Daniel Bright after trial by a drumhead court. It might have been that that hanging, the taking of female hostages, the pillaging and burning of people's houses did not sit well with Captain Parlin—that this was not the kind of war for which he had volunteered.
Nevertheless, Wild's raid was widely reported in the north with stern disapproval by publications with Southern sympathies. There was controversy over what constituted ethical warfare. But the New York Times did not seem to take exception. Its reporter submitted several dispatches that made the front page of the Times. One of the headlines describes the affair:
General Butler's Department; Invasion of North Carolina by Gen. Wild's Colored Battalions. Great Guerrilla Hunt by the Sons of Ham. Four Camps and Much Property Destroyed. Prisoner, Captured---A Guerrilla Hanged—and Thousands of Slaves Set Free.
Parlin's speech continues:
At Portsmouth, we tried to teach our men to read, employing a company teacher with whom the men divided their rations. W. L. Coolidge used to send me copies of a Child's Paper and it would have repaid him for all of his trouble and expense to have seen how eagerly they poured over those pages trying to spell out the sentences.
When at Portsmouth, Lieut. Addison Bean was my close companion. We were both in hospital there, I with chills and fever, while over his head on a placard, which was over every bed, was “General Debility.”
This worried him continually. He said it meant general bummer & it should not be over him. It is related of him that while a sergeant of the 13th regiment & in charge of ambulances, mounted on a white horse, he forced these ambulance drivers down to the skirmish line picking up & caring for the wounded right in the teeth of the enemy. They respected his bravery and did not fire at him.
Back at New Bern [North Carolina] we had a few months more of guard duty, building fortifications etc. with Picket's division always in front of us. (Gen Picket more than any other rebel officer that we heard from threatened vengeance to all officers of negro regiments.)
The Captain was aware General Pickett interpreted the rules of war even more loosely than General Wild. Pickett, at the time head of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina in the Army of the CSA, had in the first three days of February, 1864, been unsuccessful in a daring two-pronged, amphibious and ground assault on New Bern, which had been in the hands of Union forces since 1862. But in that battle, Pickett captured as many as 325 prisoners, among them members of Company F, 2nd North Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Carolinians who were loyal to the Union. (The company had been sent as re-inforcements to New Bern but was cut off and surrounded by Confederate Major General Robert F. Hoke and his men.) Of that 325, Pickett claimed that 53 were suspected of being deserters from the Confederate Army or Partisan Ranger units before they had enlisted in the Union army. Between February 5th and 22nd , 1864, he court-martialed and hung 22 of these men in the City of Kinston. After being warned in an exchange of letters with Union Major General John J. Peck not to execute the men, Pickett replied that the men had already been executed and that “ . . . I would respectfully inform you that had I caught any Negro who had killed an officer, soldier, or citizen of the Confederate States I should have caused him to be immediately executed.”
Pickett was investigated for war crimes after the war and there were widespread demands to prosecute him for the Kinston hangings. After the surrender at Appomattox, Pickett fled to Canada to avoid possible prosecution. He was eventually saved by the intervention of General Grant, who had known Pickett at West Point. In 1874, during Grant's presidency and a year before his death, Pickett was granted a full pardon by Congress, in an “act to remove the political disabilities of George E. Pickett of Virginia.”
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