| | 1 | Author: | Villard, Oswald Garrison | Add | | | Title: | The Negro in the Regular Army  | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | WHEN the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment stormed Fort
Wagner July 18, 1863, only to be driven back with the loss of its
colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, and many of its rank and file, it
established for all time the fact that the colored soldier would
fight and fight well. This had already been demonstrated in
Louisiana by colored regiments under the command of General Godfrey
Weitzel in the attack upon Port Hudson on May 27 of the same year.
On that occasion regiments composed for the greater part of raw
recruits, plantation hands with centuries of servitude under the
lash behind them, stormed trenches and dashed upon cold steel in
the hands of their former masters and oppressors. After that there
was no more talk in the portion of the country of the "natural
cowardice" of the negro. But the heroic qualities of Colonel Shaw,
his social prominence and that of his officers, and the comparative
nearness of their battlefield to the North, attracted greater and
more lasting attention to the daring and bravery of their exploit,
until it finally became fixed in many minds as the first real
baptism of fire of colored American soldiers. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
|
