From Mashantucket to Appomattox: the Native American Veterans of Connecticut’S Volunteer Regiments and the Union Navy

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From Mashantucket to Appomattox: The Native American Veterans of Connecticut’s Volunteer Regiments and the Union Navy

david j. naumec

ILLIAM H. COGSWELL, a resident of Cornwall, Con- W necticut, was “famous, locally, for building good stone walls” and for besting his opponents in town fair athletic com- petitions, especially those involving running. On 21 July 1861, Cogswell, then twenty-two years of age, enlisted as a sergeant in Company I of the Fifth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, a three-year regiment, and was mustered into service the next day. His enlistment fell just one day after the Union army’s defeat at Bull Run, and signing up with him were twenty-four of his townsmen, who comprised the majority of the company.1 That Cogswell received the rank of sergeant is, more than likely, a reﬂection of the respect his neighbors held for him and his superiors’ estimation of his capabilities. Cogswell (see ﬁg. 1),whowentontodistinguishhimselfin his service to the Union, owed little to the United States of America. As a Schaghticoke Indian, he was not considered a United States citizen and therefore was not allowed to vote.2 Simply from his appearance, many white citizens would have

1Edward C. Starr, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut: A Typical New England Town, 2nd ed. (Torrington, Conn.: Rainbow Press, 1982), pp. 289, 250; Record of Service of Connecticut Men in the Army and Navy of the United States during the War of the Rebellion (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1889), p. 250; Catalogue of Connecticut Volunteer Organizations in Service of the Untied States, 1861–1865 (Hartford, Conn.: Brown & Gross, 1869), pp. 277–78. 2American Indians did not become United States citizens until the Indian Citizen- ship Act of 1924. In the years prior to the Civil War, neither African Americans nor Native Americans in Connecticut were allowed to vote.

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Fig. 1.—Second Lieutenant William H. Cogswell, Company B, Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery. Image courtesy Trudie Lamb-Richmond.

had trouble deciding precisely how to categorize him. Indeed, white record keepers and military recruiters often classified Native Americans as “colored,” or “Negro,” or even “white.” Gauging the extent of Native American military participation in the Civil War is, then, a difficult task at best. But it is also a fruitful one, for not only does it recognize the contributions of a class of persons (and some specific individuals) who have

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 598 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY long been hidden from view, but it also highlights perceptions about race in nineteenth-century America. Focusing on one New England state in which a number of once powerful Indian groups remained active is a useful way to begin an investigation into this important topic.3

Counting and Classifying Connecticut’s Indians Currently, there is no trustworthy estimate of the number of Indians who were residing in the state of Connecticut on the eve of the Civil War.4 In the 1860 U.S. Census, only sixteen individuals from Connecticut were listed as Indian.5 In 1870, however, when “Indian” was ofﬁcially listed as a racial category on the federal census, the number of Connecticut individuals thus described jumped to 235 and, in 1880,to255.6 Even

3To accomplish this task, after intensive genealogical and historical research, I created a large dataset of Indian individuals in Connecticut, and greater New England, as well as persons of color associated with those communities and then cross-referenced these names against Civil War regimental rosters. Data on Indian populations and individual descriptions of race were gathered by researching tribal lists as found in the Connecticut Indian Papers located at the Connecticut State Archives, Connecticut court records, U.S. Census records, newspaper accounts, military records, maritime records, and local town vital records; in some cases, I relied on information provided by descendants of these Indian Civil War veterans. Other particularly useful sources include the very informative book by Barbara W. Brown and James M. Rose, Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650–1900 (New London, Conn.: New London County Historical Society, 2001) as well as genealogical materials located at the Indian & Colonial Research Center, Old Mystic, Connecticut, and the Nipmuc Nation Tribal Archives, South Grafton, Mass. I also consulted the electronic genealogical database at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, Connecticut, known as the “Persons of Color Database.” This database, which includes over 42,000 entries of historical interest regarding roughly 5,000 individuals from the seventeenth century to the present, proved extremely useful for tracking particular surnames and populations in different geographic areas. 4For the purpose of this study the term “Indian” is used to acknowledge a descent from the indigenous peoples of the region. “Men of Indian descent” also includes “Indian” but recognizes other ancestry as well, typically African and/or European, as detailed in historical records. “Person(s) of color” is an inclusive term that will be used to refer to individuals of African and/or Indian ancestry. 5Those sixteen individuals were designated with the description “I.” Although not an ofﬁcial designation in 1860, individual census takers who were familiar with the In- dians they enumerated entered the notation of their own volition. Such inconsistencies appear in Connecticut censuses upon occasion. 6U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States (Washington, D.C., 2002), table 21: Connecticut—Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 599 the 1880 figures woefully underreport the size of the state’s Native population, though, for many individuals of Indian descent continued to be listed in other racial classifications. Because white overseers appointed by the Connecticut General Assembly periodically conducted tribal censuses, data do exist regarding reservation populations.7 In 1861, for example, the overseer of the Eastern Pequot Indians counted a total of nineteen adult individuals, the Mashantucket Pequot overseer thirty-six, and the Mohegan overseer eighty Indians residing on the reservations being assessed.8 These figures, however, fail to account for those people who were associated with the community but who worked or resided elsewhere. The Native American population was highly mobile, with individuals frequently moving among communities and ethnic enclaves to foster their social relationships or better their employment op- portunities. Such individuals were considered to be transients, not belonging to any particular town or community. Individuals working at sea, crossing state borders, or residing in more than one community were easily missed by census takers. Hart Talcott, the census taker for Montville, acknowledged the impossibility of accurate assessments in 1870 when, having enumerated a total of fifty-nine Mohegan Indians residing on Indian lands in Montville, he confessed that “There are more belonging to the tribe but are scattered in other places.”9 To be sure, Native communities had seemingly lost population during the eighteenth century, most notably when they incurred heavy casualties during both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution and, secondarily, when Mohegans Samuel Occom and Joseph Johnson, champions

7Established among the various Indian communities at different times throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, overseers were to mediate disputes between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors, rent out Indian lands, manage Indian ﬁnan- cial accounts, and offer requested provisions to Indian families, paid for from tribal accounts. 8Connecticut State Library and Archives (hereafter CSL), RG 003, Records of the Judicial Department, New London County Court, Papers by Subject, Indians: box 1, Eastern Pequot, 1822–55;box2, Mashantucket Pequot, 1758–1855;box3, Mohegan, 1715–1854;box4, Niantic, 1817–54;box5, Other Indian Papers, 1760–1861, Accession 2001–034. 9U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1870: Connecticut, New London County, Montville.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 600 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of the Brothertown Christian Indian movement, led a large contingent of New England Indians to settle in Oneida, New York. Reporting on his visit to the United States in the late eighteenth century, Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur` asked, “What is become of those numerous tribes which formerly inhabited the extensive shores of the great bay of Massachusetts?” In answering his own question, he echoed the sentiments of many New Englanders: “They are gone, and every memorial of them is lost; no vestiges whatever are left of thoseswarmswhichonceinhabitedthiscountry....Theyhave all disappeared either in the wars which the Europeans carried on against them, or else they have mouldered away, gathered in some of their ancient towns, in contempt and oblivion.”10 By the turn of the century, state officials were continually re- marking that Indian communities were in decline or that most males had departed for “parts unknown.”11 In 1804, Mashan- tucket Pequot overseer Samuel Mott noted that “a great part of their able & Smart Men are gone to Settle at Brotherton with the Oneida tribe, but a Considerable Number of Aged & a Number of Females & some Males Invalids &c. are yet here.”12 Playing off such popularly held beliefs, in 1826 James Fenimore Cooper titled a novel The Last of the Mohicans, and in 1851 Herman Melville named Ishmael’s ship the Pequod after “a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.”13 But comments by foreign observers, state officials, and fiction writers of the day neglected the hundreds of Indian individuals who, although they had in fact left their homelands, still

10J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur,` Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. 122–23; Jason Mancini, “Beyond Reservation: Indians, Maritime Labor, and Communities of Color from Eastern Long Island Sound, 1713–1861,” p. 1,inPerspectives on Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Power in Maritime America, ed. Glen Gordinier (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, forthcoming fall 2008). 11CSL, RG 003, New London County Court, Papers by Subject, Indians, box 2, Mashantucket Pequot, Overseer William Morgan, 1858 account. 12CSL, RG 001, Connecticut Archives, Indians, ser. 2, 1666–1820,vol.2,p.33, 10 May 1804. 13Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, ed. Charles Feidelson (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1964), p. 104.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 601 maintained their ties with their ancestral or with other Indian communities. After the Revolutionary War, as Native peoples increasingly adopted European lifeways, resided among their non-Native neighbors, and became enmeshed in the New En- gland economy, Indian communities and individual Indians became less visible to outside observers. As Jason Mancini has shown in his study of Indian men who left the land for employment at sea, Indian mariners “contributed to the perception that [Indians had] ‘vanished’ from the southern New England region.” Moreover, Mancini goes on, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the lives and experiences of Connecticut’s Indians became “interwoven (socially, politically, economically, religiously) with their European and African neighbors[,] and the formerly visible communities began to transform into those that become increasingly difficult to ‘see’ and for white observers to document.”14 This phenomenon reshaped New En- gland’s, and greater America’s, racial perceptions of “Indians,” “Negroes,” and “colored” people and redrew the boundaries of tribal communities as well. By the mid–nineteenth century, the Indians of southern New England often did not visually fit the image of an “Indian” that America’s white population had come to expect. The effects of this increasing disjunction between static expectations and shifting realities is evident in federal census schedules, registers of seamen, and court records, where white record keepers routinely labeled people of Indian ancestry as “Negro,” “black,” “mulatto,” or “colored” or used uncertain and seemingly arbitrary terms such as “copper,” “yellow,” “dark,” or “light”; rarely does the term “Indian” make its way into official documents of the period. At the national level, the U.S. Census made no provision for people of Indian descent in the first half of the century and collected data only on “Free Persons of Color” (1820–30), “Free Colored Persons” (1840), “Colour” (1850), and “Color (White, Black, or Mulatto)” (1860). Before 1870, then, men of Indian descent who were working or residing outside of reservation communities were not enumerated as Indians. Such was

14Mancini, “Beyond Reservation,” p. 1.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 602 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the case with Mashantucket Pequot tribal members Sanford Fagins and William F. Singleton, who were listed in the 1860 federal census as “Black,” while Henry Vickers, an Indian man from Hampton, and George Cogswell were both described as “Mulatto.”15 In 1843, the House of Representatives released a report on “Free colored seamen” in which a New Englander writing in 1823 testiﬁed that “it was not uncommon to call Indians men of color.”16 This practice can be observed in maritime crew lists registered with the New London Customs House through the 1850s. Two men of possible Shinnecock descent from South Hampton, Long Island, appear in the 1858 records as “Black” (William Bunn) and “Yellow” (Abram Cuffee).17 Despite the fact that outside observers like Francis Manwaring Caulkins could describe Indians—in this case, Indians of the Mashan- tucket Pequot community at Ledyard—as “mixed with African blood, stupid, lazy, drunken,”18 individual Indians were also often respected, to various degrees, by their contemporaries. Indians who participated in the maritime world, for example, held positions ranging from entry-level tasks such as boy or cook, to highly skilled jobs such as riggers, to leadership roles as ﬁrst mates or even shipmasters. It would be fair to say that

15For Sanford Fagins and William F. Singleton, see CSL, RG 003, New London, box 2, Mashantucket Pequot, Overseer Ulysses Avery, 1861 account; U.S. Census, 1860, Conn., New London County, Preston [Fagins] and Ledyard [Singleton], Wind- ham County, Hampton, [Henry Vickers], and Litchfield County, Salisbury [George Cogswell]; Nipmuc Nation Tribal Archives, General Historical Material, Seventeenth– Twentieth Centuries, Drawer Two: 1800s—Brothertown (Kansas Claims) and Military Records, Civil War (Historical data and pension files), Service Record of the Vickers & Brown Family—American Civil War 1861 to 1865. 16U.S. Congress, 27th Cong., 3rd sess., 1842–43, House Report No. 80,FreeCol- ored Seamen: Majority and Minority Reports, State of South Carolina vs. Daley, p. 19. 17The men are identified as Indian based on surnames associated with the Shin- necock community, their racial descriptions, and their geographic area. National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA), Northeast Region (Boston), RG 026,M1162, Records of the Collector of Customs for the Collection District of New London, Conn., 1789–1938; Mancini, “Beyond Reservation,” p. 4. 18CSL, Main Vault 920 J885, Judd, Sylvester [Letters regarding Conn. History and Genealogy . . .] 1838–58, Francis Manwaring Caulkins to Sylvester Judd, 2 November 1849.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 603 these men developed a reputation for hard work.19 When he was not at sea, Mashantucket Pequot Lyman Lawrence’s neighbors hired him to perform farm labor. Writing in 1882,George Fanning of Ledyard recalled that, when he hired him around 1866, Lawrence “was a good hand—rather better than ordinary. He would do more work than any other man I could hire.” An- other farmer referred to Lawrence as “a thorough workman; there was not any of the lazy bones about him; what he did was of the best; he was a very strong man; what I call a hardy rugged, put up fellow.”20 Men like Lawrence would have been valued members of any regimental unit. Since the mid–twentieth century, historians have generally acknowledged the participation of New England Indians in the Civil War, but their service has not been thoroughly investi- gated or understood. Indian men associated with major Indian reservations have been more visible than individuals of Indian descent who lived in smaller, non-reservation Indian communities or among white neighbors. In the course of my research, I identiﬁed sixty-nine Civil War participants of Indian descent who either resided in New England and Long Island or who served in the region’s units; this number will undoubtedly grow as scholars broaden their work on the topic.21 Here I will focus, as I did in my research, on the forty-two Indians I have identi- ﬁed who had ties to the state of Connecticut or who served in state units or in the Union navy. Connecticut Indian veterans of the Civil War, although generally considered to be “colored” by their contemporaries, did not serve exclusively in Connecti- cut’s two “colored” regiments, as previous studies have implied. Indeed, men of Indian descent were mustered into service in a number of different volunteer infantry and artillery regiments

19Mancini, “Beyond Reservation,” p. 16. 20NARA, RG 094, Service Records and Pension Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780–1917, Lyman Lawrence, certificate no. 213640. 21These sixty-nine individuals were serendipitously identified in the course of my research, which focused more specifically on Connecticut Indian enlistment in the Civil War. Because I was not engaged in a broad study of New England, the figure of sixty-nine is very conservative. I mention it simply to point out that individuals of Indian descent from throughout New England and Long Island served in the Civil War and that it is not an exclusively Connecticut phenomenon.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY even before the Union established its ﬁrst colored regiment. After the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry (three-year) regiments were organized in 1863, however, most Indian recruits, with a few notable exceptions, were funneled into these colored regiments.

Connecticut Indians for the Union, 1861–63 When South Carolinian batteries sent the first shells scream- ing toward Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order to activate militia from loyal states to fill the ranks of the federal army; soon after, he called for an additional 42,000 volunteers. Connecticut swiftly mobi- lized its population, industries, and financial resources, and by the end of the year, it had raised one heavy artillery, one light artillery, one cavalry, and five infantry regiments.22 William Cogswell may well have been the first Connecticut Indian to enlist in the Union army when he joined the newly forming Fifth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry in July of that year. The Fifth Connecticut performed marches and maneuvers that were more exhausting than those of any other state regiment. After the war, Cornwall historian Theodore S. Gold related that in one instance, “when on the march many were falling out of the ranks from fatigue, [Sergeant Cogswell] grasped the muskets of three or four, carrying them for miles, showing his men what strong and willing arms could do.”23 This sort of leadership by example certainly earned Cogswell the respect of his men and the attention of his superiors. The Fifth engaged in skirmishes with Confederate forces throughout 1861 and 1862, and on 3 May 1862, Cogswell’s company participated in an attack behind enemy lines at Harrisonburg,

22W. A. Croffut and John M. Morris, The Military and Civil History of Connecticut during the War of 1861–65 (New York: Ledyard Bill, 1868), p. 43; John Niven, Con- necticut for the Union (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 69; Blaikie Hines, Civil War Volunteer Sons of Connecticut (Thomaston, Maine: American Patriot Press, 2002), p. 44. 23Theodore S. Gold, ed., Historical Records of the Town of Cornwall, Litchﬁeld County, Connecticut (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood, & Brainard Co., 1877), p. 223.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 605 Virginia, while in pursuit of Confederate General Thomas Jackson during his Shenandoah Valley campaign (March–June 1862). Records indicate that Cogswell was captured during this operation; although he was eventually released, the date of his parole is not given.24 Cogswell’s official military record claims that he was discharged from the regiment on 21 May 1862, but additional evidence suggests otherwise. Cornwall historian and Twentieth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry veteran Edward Starr wrote that Cogswell was also with the Fifth Connecticut at Winchester, Virginia, on 25 May 1862, another battle during Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, and again with the regiment when it was heavily committed at Cedar Mountain, Virginia, on 9 August 1862, during Union General John Pope’s failed Northern Virginia campaign.25 If this is the case, Cogswell may not have been willing, or been unable, to leave his company until it had been pulled from the front lines. If he had not done so earlier, Cogswell did muster out of the Fifth around July or August, but he immediately reenlisted for three years in Company B of the Nineteenth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, a three-year regiment, known as the Litch- field County regiment.26 His enlistment date was recorded as 21 July 1863, but he may not have arrived at camp until August if he was in fact fighting with the Fifth at Cedar Mountain. In any case, Cogswell was promoted to the rank of first sergeant,

24Niven, Connecticut for the Union, pp. 209–10; Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 250. Although Connecticut’s military records state that Cogswell’s date of parole was not given, it is possible that he was not paroled but simply released or exchanged for a Confederate prisoner. The parole system, which was in effect in the American Civil War generally between 1862 and 1864 (when General Grant halted prisoner exchanges), was similar to European systems and those used during the War of Independence. Prisoners who were released and paroled agreed not to serve in a military capacity until they were officially exchanged for an enemy prisoner; often paroled soldiers had to wait months before receiving official notification and returning to duty. Although paroling relied on the honor system, it worked well to lower prison populations. See Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much about the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know about America’s Greatest Conflict but Never Learned (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1996), pp. 348–49. 25Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 250; Starr, History of Cornwall, p. 289; Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 95; Niven, Connecticut for the Union, pp. 211–12. 26Record of Service of Connecticut Men, pp. 173, 181.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY which gave him authority over four other sergeants, eight corporals, and nearly seventy enlisted men in his company. The combat experience of men like First Sergeant Cogswell was ex- actly what Connecticut’s newly recruited regiments required, and, if anyone bothered to ask, his experience trumped his Indian ethnicity. In November 1863, the Nineteenth Connecticut was redes- ignated the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery. At that time, additional men were recruited, and William’s cousin Newton W. Cogswell signed on. Heavy artillery regiments, whose men were trained as both infantrymen and artillerists, primarily garrisoned forts around Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, a posting that made the units attractive to reenlisting veterans and new recruits alike, who thought garrison units would enjoy better living conditions than regular units and would see little combat. The Second, however, exclusively performed infantry duties, a detail to which it was again assigned on 17 May 1864, when the unit was redeployed from defensive fortifications to the Army of the Potomac, where it would participate in what came to be known as the Wilderness campaign. By 5 March 1864, First Sergeant William Cogswell had been promoted to the rank of second lieutenant.27 He, along with one other second lieutenant, was the third highest ranking man in his company with authority over all the sergeants, corporals, and privates in Company B. On 1 June, the Second Connecticut “Heavies” saw their first major action and suffered their most severe casualties of the war at Cold Harbor, Virginia. William weathered the ordeal, but among the 322 killed and wounded was his cousin Newton, who had been shot in the arm.28 Following the Battle of Cold Harbor, the regiment hunkered down in trenches and rifle pits through the end of July to do its part to hold the federal line at

27Record of Service of Connecticut Men, pp. 182, 181; Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 65. 28At the Battle of Cold Harbor, the Second Connecticut Heavy Artillery suffered more casualties in one day than any other Connecticut regiment sustained in a single day during the war. See Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, pp. 69, 289,andRecord of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 173.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 607 Petersburg, Virginia. On 19 September 1864, the Second was called into action to check the advance of Jubal Early’s forces, which had broken through Union lines at Winchester, Virginia. During this battle, Cogswell received a wound to his leg, which required amputation. Succumbing to the effects of the operation, he died on 7 October 1864.29 Whatever prejudices Corn- wall’s townspeople may have previously borne against Cogswell as a man of color, they were grateful for his leadership in white volunteer units—so grateful that, after he died, they banded together to purchase a large obelisk monument and erect it at his gravesite in North Cornwall. By any measure, the Cogswells were a remarkable family. On 6 August 1862, George Cogswell, a relative of William’s and Newton’s, enlisted in Company C of the Eighteenth Con- necticut Volunteer Infantry, a three-year regiment. Although also a resident of Cornwall, George’s enlistment was credited to the town of Norwich, which indicates that he probably took advantage of the monetary bounty a town typically offered to nonresident volunteers, thus reducing the call for the town’s own men while still allowing it to ﬁll its quotas. In 1862 Con- necticut, bounties averaged $100 from the towns, $100 from the federal government, and $90 from the state, a one-time payment that was received in addition to regular pay of $13 a month, a uniform allowance, and a maximum of $10 a month if the soldier were married with children.30 The Eighteenth Connecticut trained in Norwich and on 22 August traveled by ship to Fort McHenry, Baltimore, Maryland, but soon it was sent to the Virginia front to augment Major General Robert Milroy’s 7,000-man army.31 On 13 June 1863, Confederate Lieutenant General Richard Ewell’s Corps of 30,000 troops attacked and soon surrounded Milroy’s forces at Winchester, Virginia. On 15 June, during an attempted

29Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 66; Starr, History of Cornwall, p. 289; Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 181. 30Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 673; Croffut and Morris, The Military and Civil History of Connecticut, p. 224. 31Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, pp. 196–97.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY nighttime retreat from Winchester, the Eighteenth Connecticut and other Union regiments were intercepted by Confederate Major General Edward Johnson’s numerically superior Con- federate forces. The Eighteenth made three charges with the rest of its brigade in a desperate endeavor to escape. During the regiment’s final charge, its remaining 500 men captured and disabled a Confederate artillery battery only to be engulfed by 9,000 men from Confederate Major General Johnson’s Divi- sion. George Cogswell, wounded in the attack, was among the 511 men of the Eighteenth taken prisoner that day. Cogswell was paroled on 19 July and returned to his regiment. On 20 May 1864, he was promoted to sergeant; two months later, he was wounded at Snicker’s Ford, Virginia. Again, Cogswell survived his wound. He continued to serve with the Eighteenth until 27 June 1865, when he was mustered out of service.32 Benjamin Brown, a Nipmuc Indian of Woodstock, is another exemplary early volunteer. On 17 October 1863, President Lin- coln had called for 300,000 additional recruits to strengthen Union forces in the field; if the requisition could not be filled, a draft would again be instituted. To encourage recruitment, on 13 November 1863, Connecticut approved a state bounty of $300. When that amount was combined with the federal bounty, a new Connecticut recruit stood to make $602, while veterans who had served at least nine months were entitled to an additional $100. For young men seeking to make their way in the world, military service was becoming a lucrative option. On 12 December 1863, at the age of eighteen, Brown enlisted in Company I of the Eleventh Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, a three-year regiment, for the town of Thompson and received his bounty.33 In late 1863, recruitment for New England’s colored regiments was well underway, and although Benjamin Brown was an Indian and likely considered a colored man, he had joined a

32Record of Service of Connecticut Men, pp. 665, 685; Niven, Connecticut for the Union, p. 109; Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 197. 33Croffut and Morris, The Military and Civil History of Connecticut, pp. 459, 460; Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 463.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 609 white volunteer regiment. According to the 1860 federal census (which did not list his color), Brown resided in Providence, where he was a shoe dealer. Official documents included in his post-war military pension file describe him as a farmer, five feet, six inches tall, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a dark complexion. In 1887, his pension documents record his race as “Indian.” Brown served with the Eleventh Connecticut during the Wilderness campaign of 1864, and he fought in the battles of Swift Creek, Virginia, on 9 May 1864, and Drury’s Bluff, Virginia, shortly after on 16 May. He was also present for the Battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia, 3 June 1864, when he received a musket shot in the head as he charged the Confederate earth- works with the rest of his regiment. Surviving the ordeal, Brown was transferred to the Eleventh Veteran Reserve Corps, where he served out the remainder of his enlistment until he was discharged on 21 December 1865. Brown married after the war, helped to raise six children (whose descendants still reside in Connecticut and Massachusetts today), continued to farm, and collected a pension until he died in Woodstock in 1887.34

Connecticut Indians Resist Service, 1863 Although men of Indian descent were stepping up to military service throughout the opening years of the Civil War, not all Indian men were eager to participate in yet another bloody Anglo-American conﬂict. Prior to 1863, with the exception of United States naval service, there is no evidence that Indian men from either the Mohegan or Pequot reservations in New London County enlisted in any military units. In early 1863, however, federal provost-marshals stationed at Norwich and Montville, Connecticut, enrolled the entire male population of their recruiting districts in the draft, including many Mohe- gan Indians. In July, tribal member Anson D. Cooper wrote Colonel James Fry, the Provost-Marshal General of the United States Army, who was stationed in Washington and in charge

34U.S. Census, 1860, Rhode Island, Providence County, First Ward, Providence City; NARA, RG 094, Service Records and Pension Records of the Adjutant General’s Ofﬁce, 1780–1917, Benjamin Brown, certiﬁcate no. 247593.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of conscription, to argue the tribe’s case. Given how brilliantly it illuminates Mohegans’ views regarding their tribal history, historic relations with Euro-Americans, and the Civil War in which they are being asked to participate, the letter is offered in full; I have italicized passages that deserve special attention.

Mohegan, July 25, 1863. Col. J. B. Fry:

To your honor, sir, at this horrible crisis, amidst feudal corruption and shedding of blood, a very important and delicate question has arisen upon which the destiny not only of the few but millions are held, therefore herein your official attention is precisely called in behalf of the Mohegan tribe of Indians now residing upon the Mohegan Reservation in the county of New London and State of Connecticut, where we have lived and possessed in a tribal form for time immemo- rial, and through all the vicissitudes of the past and through all the pilgrim’s strife and colonial struggles for life and possession upon this continent, we have been their help, and with all we have always had privilege of voluntarily proving to be their allies of war, and for the last 250 past years up to the present time we have with them and their descendants, now the citizens of the United States, cherished and maintained the most friendly relations toward each other, and now at this moment we are the U.S. alliance of peace alike to the North and South, East and West, and the same with all nations that we know of, and wish to remain so. We, the said Mohegan tribe of Indians, have possessed and occupied our said Mohegan reserved land in our old aboriginal title for about 200 years, with definite boundaries and sequestered from any town or county in said State, and never through all the elapse of time prior to the present day have we been reckoned as citizens of any State or citizens of the United States, nor citizens of any State or nation, except as members of the said Mohegan tribe and relatives to that natural and native allegiance that we were first found or discovered with; nor have we or our land ever been taxed by any State or the United States, nor any foreign State or nation on this globe. Notwithstanding all this, whether it be through incapacity or misunderstanding, your official subordinates, Mr. I. Bromley, the Provost-marshal at Norwich, and H. Palmer, in the town of Montville, in said State, have taken the liberty to enroll some of the said Mohegan tribe for the present draft and without our

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 611 consent, which we claim is contrary to the present conscription law and contrary to all law and reason with which we are connected in that respect. Furthermore, we claim it is contrary to the provisions made in the Constitution of the United States respecting Indians not taxed, which may be found in article I, section 2, clause 3, and a conﬁrmation of the same in article I, section 9, clause 4, where it may be readily perceived that we are unlawfully and unreasonably dealt with. And now the above reasoning we hope will be taken into your ofﬁ- cial consideration, and in our behalf we solicit your favor by rejecting our names from any enrollment or draft that might be injurious to us, or whose consequences might work death to our small number that has already been reduced by war and other pestilence.Sir,wewait with intense interest for an agreeable answer to this appeal. Please direct to Norwich, Conn. Most respectfully, yours, sir,

Anson D. Cooper, Indian Advocate.35

As in prior conflicts in which Connecticut Indians served, Indians were not considered citizens, could not vote, and were not taxed, but in times of war Connecticut officials and military recruiters turned to Indian communities for recruits. Memo- ries of the massive losses Mohegans had suffered while fighting for the American cause during the Revolutionary War just two generations earlier were clearly fresh in the minds of many in the Mohegan community.36 As evident in Cooper’s letter, the Mohegan Indians clearly thought of themselves as a sovereign nation at peace with all other nations of the world and all

35U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Ofﬁcial Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 3,vol.3 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899), pp. 567–68. 36At least forty-two individuals of Mohegan descent served during the Revolutionary War, and at least twenty-two became casualties (killed, wounded, captured). For more information on the scale of Connecticut Indian service during the American Revolution and the casualties they suffered, see my forthcoming publication: “ ‘And all the Tribes to which we belong, were all Warmly engaged in Favour of the United States in America – By which, most all our young men are Swept off from the Face of the Earth’: Connecticut Indians in the War of Independence,” Connecticut History 47 (forthcoming Fall 2008).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY regions of the United States. To further strengthen their argu- ment, as presented by Cooper, the Mohegans cited their prior service and specifically mentioned that “war and other pestilence” had reduced their numbers, an understatement at best. Understanding perfectly well that the federal provost-marshals were illegally enrolling their men in the draft, the Mohegans tactfully referenced the Constitution, their tribal status, and their traditional land base to defend their position. It is unclear if Colonel Fry nullified the illegal enrollments, but I have identified no Mohegans who were drafted into service in either Connecticut or Rhode Island. Respect for the Mohegans’ pe- tition may have been extended to the neighboring Pequots as well, who would have been included in the recruiting district of Norwich. There is no record of a Pequot being enrolled in the draft or being drafted, although many volunteered or served as substitutes later in 1863, when Connecticut began recruiting for the state’s first “colored” regiments.

Connecticut Indians Join the United States Colored Infantry, 1863–65 In July 1862, Congress passed two acts authorizing the enlistment of African American soldiers, and toward the end of 1862, Secretary of War Stanton empowered Major General Benjamin Butler of the Gulf Department to organize contraband slaves into “Native Guard” regiments on a limited basis. Ofﬁcial enrollment of African Americans, however, did not begin until after President Lincoln issued the ﬁnal Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, after which colored units were formed on a regular basis.37 Historians have, perhaps under- standably, almost universally discussed colored units as if they were composed solely of African Americans, but the regiments were in actuality not monolithic. Euro-Americans, Indians, and individuals with origins such as China, East India, St. Helena, and Spain served alongside their black comrades in Connecticut

37Keith P. Wilson, Campﬁres of Freedom (Kent, N.H.: Kent State University Press, 2002), pp. 1–2.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 613 units.38 For Connecticut Indians, as for white officers, colored units offered another outlet for military service as well as, perhaps more important for many, an opportunity for promotion. Samuel Vickers, a thirty-nine-year-old Indian, possibly of Nipmuc descent, appears with his wife and six children in the 1860 census, where he is listed as a mulatto farmer living in Hampton, Connecticut. Henry and Charles Vickers, twenty- three and twenty-two years old, respectively, resided in the same household as their mother, two small children, and a woman who may have been Charles’s wife. In 1860 Henry and Charles also resided in Hampton, not far from Samuel, and were described as mulatto farmers as well. On 13 November 1861, Samuel Vickers enlisted in the Twelfth Connecticut Vol- unteer Infantry, a three-year regiment known as the “Charter Oak Regiment”; Charles and Henry enlisted the following day. After the regiment was fully recruited and equipped, the men were sent south to New Orleans to join other federal troops preparing to push up the Mississippi River. The Twelfth Con- necticut saw little action until 27 October 1862, when Union forces attacked Confederates at Georgia Landing, Louisiana. In January, the regiment was part of a combined Union offensive that destroyed the Confederate gunboat Cotton.39 Meanwhile, Major General Butler was re-forming Confed- erate “Native Guard” units into Union regiments in Louisiana and recruiting new colored regiments as well. Although filling the units was proceeding apace, finding white officers to lead them was a challenge. Captain John William De Forest of the Twelfth Connecticut—an emerging Connecticut author who had written such works as History of the Indians of Con- necticut (1851)andSeacliff (1859) and who had traveled to the Middle East and Europe in 1855—considered applying for a

38CSL, RG 013, Records of the Military Department, 169 A, Connecticut National Guard—Civil War Colored Regiments, Enlistment Papers, box 1, A–M, 1863–64,and box 2,N–Z,1863–64: Apdola, birthplace China; Daniel Newport, East India; John Lopez, Spain; Marrian Maser, St. Helena. 39U.S. Census, 1860, Connecticut, Windham County, Hampton; Record of Service of Connecticut Men, pp. 491, 471; Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 150.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 614 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY commission in a newly formed colored regiment. Writing home in late 1862, he shared his reservations:

It would be a comfortable position, I suppose; but there are some obvious serious disadvantages. The colored troops will probably be kept near here and used to garrison unhealthy positions; they will be called on for fatigue duty, such as making roads, building bridges and draining marshes; they will be seldom put into battle, and will afford small chance of distinction.

Pursuing the matter, De Forest met with one of Butler’s aides, a Colonel Deming. After detailing the character of the ofﬁcers who might serve and the duties that would likely be assigned to African American troops, Deming strongly recommended that De Forest not apply “for fear it might be successful.” De Forest took Deming’s advice, “decid[ing] to ﬁght my way on in the Twelfth.”40 The three Indian men of Hampton—Samuel, Charles, and Henry Vickers—did not, like De Forest, shy away from seeking commissions in the newly formed colored regiments. Eleven years earlier, when writing about the Indians of northeast Con- necticut, where the Vickerses’ hometown of Hampton was located, De Forest had stated that the Native people of those parts “had no petitions to present to the Legislature: there were no long and expensive law suits to be sustained against them; and no committees to be appointed to examine into, and settle, the state of their affairs. For this reason there are almost no records concerning the Indians of this part of the State, and very little can be related of them, except a few unimpor- tant anecdotes.” De Forest calculated that in 1774, 142 Indians had lived in northeast Connecticut, but “since that time their diminution has still continued; and it is now more than thirty years since the last of the Killingly band, a pious female named Martha, was laid in her unpretending grave. Of the other Indi- ans of this part of the State I do not know that now even one

40John William De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946), pp. vii, 50, 51.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 615 exists.”41 Ironically, in 1862, the author of the History of the Indians of Connecticut was serving with three Indians of the very group he had, in 1851, declared extinct. Unlike the privileged De Forest of Company I, the Vick- erses, privates in Company G, had little chance of receiving commissioned ranks such as lieutenant or captain—let alone colonel, as De Forest had considered pursuing—but the military command that sought trained, experienced soldiers found a role for the three Indian men as noncommissioned officers. On 26 February 1863, Henry Vickers was discharged from his three-year commitment as a private in the Twelfth Connecti- cut and was promoted to the rank of sergeant in Company E, Seventy-sixth United States Colored Infantry (USCI). Having the distinction of being a colored man in nineteenth-century American society, Henry was able to cross freely between white and colored volunteer units, and he secured a noncommissioned rank, a position reserved for men of color. Vickers may have viewed his transfer as a good career move, for he would go on to achieve the rank of sergeant, enjoy a pay increase, and may also have avoided combat by performing garrison and fatigue duties, as De Forest had feared. On 1 March 1863, Charles Vickers followed his brother’s lead: he was discharged from the Twelfth Connecticut and received a promotion as first sergeant in Company K, Seventy-sixth USCI. Samuel Vickers was discharged on 3 April and was promoted to corporal in Company E, Seventy-sixth USCI. The rank of corporal brought Samuel more responsibility at a nearly equivalent pay rate, but he may simply have wanted to serve in the same regiment as his relatives. At least one other soldier of the Twelfth Connecti- cut Volunteer Infantry also resigned to take a position in the Seventy-sixth USCI. Corporal Henry E. Blakeslee, of Hartford, Connecticut, from Company C was promoted to first lieutenant of Company K and served alongside Charles Vickers.42 Unlike

41John W. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, Conn.: Wm. Jas. Hamersley, 1851), pp. 376, 381. 42Record of Service of Connecticut Men, pp. 491, 480.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 616 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Vickers, Blakeslee was white and therefore was able to receive a lieutenant’s commission. The Seventy-sixth USCI did not initially perform garrison duty as expected but participated on 14 June 1863 in the ﬁnal disastrous assault on Port Hudson, Louisiana, which occurred in conjunction with Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicks- burg campaign.43 After word was received that Vicksburg had fallen, the Confederate garrison at Port Hudson capitulated on 9 July 1863, and the Seventy-sixth performed garrison duty at forts along the Mississippi River. On 3 October 1863, working in that capacity, Samuel Vickers died, likely from disease. Charles Vickers was discharged due to disability, of unspeciﬁed type, on 2 February 1865.44 The Seventy-sixth USCI continued to function as a garrison force until 9 April 1865, when the regiment participated in the assault on Fort Blakely, Alabama. Confederate military units began surrendering in May, but the men of the Seventy-sixth still had time to serve on their enlistments. Union commanders had one last operation for these troops to execute. On 17 May 1865, Major-General Philip H. Sheridan received orders from Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant assigning him command of all forces west of the Mississippi. Sheridan had orders not only to secure the surrender of Confederate General Kirby Smith but to place a large body of troops along the Rio Grande as a show of force against the French- and Austrian-supported Mexican government. The Seventy-sixth USCI, along with most colored units still in service as well as other Union forces, was sent to Texas. The regiment remained on guard along the Rio Grande until the end of the year. Henry Vickers survived the war and was honorably discharged on 31 December 1865. Charles continued to reside in northeastern Connecticut following the war, but he had relocated to Webster, Massachusetts, by 1870, when the

43National Park Service, Soldiers and Sailors System, Seventy-sixth Regiment, United States Colored Infantry, http://civilwar.nps.gov, accessed September 2006. 44Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 491.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 617 census listed him, with his wife and child, as a mulatto farm laborer.45 The Vickerses, Indian men who were discharged from a Con- necticut volunteer unit and promoted to ranks reserved for men of color in the United States Colored Infantry, not only illus- trate the complex perceptions of race in nineteenth-century America but challenge prevailing notions of who the colored troops were as well. With the Vickerses’ example before them, scholars will, it is hoped, search state muster rolls for other such cases of “dual” military service. Connecticut’s Colored Regiments, 1863–65 In addition to joining federal colored regiments being formed in the South, Connecticut Indians joined colored regiments being organized within the state. By the spring of 1863, Lincoln ofﬁcially authorized states to raise colored infantry, artillery, and cavalry regiments to be mustered into federal service. In August 1862, Connecticut Governor William Buckingham openly questioned the usefulness of such a strategy:

It seems to me that the time may yet come when a regiment of colored men may be proﬁtably employed. But now, if a company . . . should be introduced into a regiment, a regiment into a brigade, it would create so much unpleasant feeling and irritation that more evil than good would result.46

Buckingham issued his comment less than a month before the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in United States history, nine months before the crushing Union defeat at Chancel- lorsville, and almost a year before the violent draft riots in Northern cities and the loss of 360 Connecticut men on the ﬁelds of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. By August 1863,thegover- nor had reversed his opinion about colored units in the face

45Philip Henry Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army (New York: C. L. Webster and Company, 1888), pp. 210–15; Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 491; U.S. Census, 1870, Massachusetts, Worcester County, Webster. 46Niven, Connecticut for the Union, p. 87.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 618 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of staggering casualty lists, public anger about the draft, and increasing manpower concerns. That same month, the General Assembly passed a bill authorizing Buckingham to organize Connecticut colored infantry units. He wasted little time in doing so. In July 1863, Governor James Smith of Rhode Island was permitted to raise the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Ar- tillery (Colored), a three-year regiment, and on 28 August, the first company was mustered into federal service. Connecticut began to recruit men for the Twenty-ninth Connecticut Vol- unteer Colored Infantry, also a three-year regiment, in August but was not able to fill the regiment that year.47 In the interim, early Connecticut colored volunteers and substitutes were sent to the Fourteenth Rhode Island. The records of Rhode Is- land’s Adjutant General’s office lists eighty conscripts in the unit, sixty from Connecticut and twenty from Rhode Island. In addition, the records of Connecticut’s Adjutants General credit six colored men who served in the Fourteenth Rhode Island either as volunteers or as substitutes.48 Five of the six—James J. Brayton, James Congdon, Edward Hazard, William H. Simons, and John Simons—were men of Indian descent. It is unclear who served in which capacity, but James Congdon may have been a substitute because he deserted from Providence on 23 November, a practice common among substitutes.49 The six Connecticut volunteers and sixty conscripts would be the first and last colored troops sent from the Nutmeg State to serve in the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. Filling the ranks of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut proved difficult because, after a year and a half of war, Connecticut residents of every color well understood the dangers of

47William H. Chenery, The Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored) in the War to Preserve the Union, 1861–1865 (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham, 1898), pp. 7–8; Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 260. 48Edward C. Mauran, Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Rhode Island for the Year 1863 (Providence, R.I.: Alfred Anthony, Printer to the State, 1863), p. 5; Record of Service of Connecticut Men in the Army and Navy of the United States during the War of Rebellion (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood, & Company, 1864), pp. 844–45. 49Chenery, The Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, p. 214.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 619 military service, and many sought to avoid it if they could. When William Bowen, an African American carpenter from Farmington, was drafted in August, he promptly hired a white substitute to take his place.50 To bring the regiment to strength, the state offered more generous state bounties and dispersed military recruiters throughout New England and the South to enlist any person of color, from Canadian Indians in the north to contraband slaves from the south, willing to serve. The Twenty-ninth Connecticut reached its capacity in Jan- uary 1864, but due to a lack of officers, the regiment was not mustered into service until 8 March. With the ranks of the Twenty-ninth filled, the state began recruiting for a second colored unit, the Thirtieth Connecticut Volunteer Colored Infantry, a three-year regiment. Because the federal government urgently required troops for the front lines at Petersburg, Virginia, four companies of the Thirtieth were dispatched to Cold Harbor before the regiment’s other companies had been brought to strength. Upon arriving in Virginia on 4 June 1864, the Thirtieth Connecticut was consolidated with soldiers recruited in New York to form the Thirty-first United States Colored Infantry.51 Surviving muster rolls and enlistment papers for the Twenty- ninth and Thirtieth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry regiments reveal that state officials successfully recruited men of various ethnicities and backgrounds throughout the Union. All these men had one thing in common: they were considered to be colored. A twenty-six-year-old sailor named Apdola listed his birthplace as China, and the recruiter recorded his complexion as “colored.” Daniel Newport, a twenty-six-year-old laborer at the time of his enlistment, served as a substitute for a white resident of Burlington, Connecticut. Newport listed his birthplace as East India and was recorded as having a “black complexion.” Friday Kanaka, a Hawaiian man, enlisted in the Thirti- eth Connecticut for the city of Hartford on 1 February 1864. Connecticut officials also seemed to have good luck recruiting

50Niven, Connecticut for the Union, p. 89. 51Hines, Civil War Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, pp. 260, 266.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 620 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY sailors from the docks of New York City. On 3 February 1864, John Lopez, a twenty-ﬁve-year-old sailor from Spain, and Mar- rian Maser, a twenty-four-year-old sailor from Saint Helena, were recruited in the city, and both were recorded as being of a “colored” complexion.52 Included among the ranks of the Connecticut colored regiments were at least sixteen Indian men and individuals of Indian descent—Nipmuc, Mashantucket, Eastern Pequot (in both regiments), and one Tuscarora—from Windham and New London Counties who had not previously served in the Civil War; there are other persons of color in the units who are likely of Indian descent but have not yet been positively identiﬁed as such. Representative of this new chapter in Civil War recruiting is William F. Singleton, who was mustered into service as a sergeant in Company A, Thirtieth Connecticut, on 22 July 1863.53 Sergeant Singleton appears on Mashantucket Pequot tribal rolls, but in both the 1860 census and in his pension record, he is described as “black.”54 In 1860, Singleton was probably working as a farmhand because, according to the census, he was residing with a white farmer, John P. Gore (who would serve as the Mashantucket Pequot overseer from 1861 to 1866). As a recognized tribal member, Singleton was not likely eligible for the draft, as the Mohegans had made clear, and so he may have served as a substitute for a citizen from one of Groton’s surrounding towns. Serving with Sergeant Singleton in Company A was Mark D. Babcock, another Mashantucket

52CSL, RG 013, Records of the Military Department, 169 A, Connecticut National Guard—Civil War Colored Regiments, Enlistment Papers, box 1, A–M, 1863–64 (Ap- dola), and box 2,N–Z,1863–64 (Newport); Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 491 (Kanaka); CSL, RG 013, 169 A, box 3, Muster and Descriptive Lists—Twenty- ninth Colored Connecticut Volunteers, 1863–64 (Lopez and Maser). 53Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 884; Catalogue of Connecticut Volunteer Organizations, p. 922. 54CSL, RG 003, New London County Court, Indians, 1716–1855,box2, Mashan- tucket Pequot, 1758–1855, Overseer Ulysses Avery, 1861 account; U.S. Census, 1860, Connecticut, New London County, Ledyard; NARA, RG 094, William F. Singleton, certiﬁcate no. 696444.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 621 Pequot, who volunteered for military service on 19 March 1864 and was credited for the town of Portland.55 In 1864, as Connecticut was struggling to meet the additional enlistment quotas set by the draft, some draftees apparently visited the Mashantucket Pequot reservation to search out and hire substitutes. Although it cannot be firmly established that Singleton served in that capacity, Amasa Lawrence, another Mashantucket Pequot, certainly did. John Brewster, a farmer from Ledyard, approached Lawrence, who was fifty-three years old. Although military recruiters were instructed not to enlist men over the age of forty-five, Lawrence was accepted for service.56 In addition to paying Lawrence a bounty, Brewster saw to it that a Norwich photographer captured Lawrence’s image (see fig. 2), one of the few identified likenesses of a Connecti- cut soldier of the colored regiments.57 Lawrence was mustered into service in Company K, Twenty-ninth Connecticut on 9 August 1864, where he served alongside three other men of Indian descent—Noyes J. Hoxie, Augustus Harry, and Ammon Potter—who were associated with the Pequot communities in Ledyard and North Stonington. Of these men, only Ammon Potter is specifically designated as a “substitute or draftee”; he is credited for the town of Bristol. When the Twenty-ninth was sent to the trenches of Petersburg, Virginia, Amasa Lawrence’s true age was discovered, and he was discharged for disability on 26 September 1864.58

55Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 885; Catalogue of Connecticut Volunteer Organizations, p. 922. 56Enrollment Act (1863) (Conscription Act), http://law.enotes.com/major-acts- congress/enrollment-act-conscription-act, accessed September 2006. 57Amasa Lawrence, Carte de visite, n.d. (1864), photographer Nathan D. Morgan, Archives and Special Collections, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, Conn. A handwritten note on the reverse side of the image states “Chief of Pequots/G. D. Brewster’s substitute.” 58U.S. Census, 1910, Connecticut, New London County, Ledyard, Pequot Reserva- tion (Noyes J. Hoxie); U.S. Census 1880, Connecticut, New London County, Stoning- ton (Augustus Harry). Harry was likely of Narragansett descent and is found residing in Stonington and interacting with individuals residing on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. U.S. Census, 1900, Connecticut, New London County, North Stonington, Indian Population (Ammon Potter); Record of Service of Connecticut Men, pp. 879–80.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 622 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Fig. 2.—Private Amasa Lawrence, Company K, Twenty-ninth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry (Colored), Carte de visite, n.d. (1864), photographer Nathan D. Morgan. Image courtesy Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Archives and Special Collections, MSS 2, 19970055.

Unlike the American Revolution, in which Pequot men had fought alongside their neighbors, in the Civil War, Pequot men were ﬁghting in place of their neighbors. On 15 August 1864, Sanford Fagins, a Mashantucket Pequot, was mustered into service in Company D, Twenty-ninth Connecticut. Fagins

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 623 had been hired as a substitute by Seth Maine of Preston, a neighbor who had served as the tribe’s overseer in 1859.On the 1860 census, Fagins was labeled as a “black” farm laborer; he resided with Charles Hewitt in Preston, on the outskirts of the Mashantucket reservation and only a few residences away from Maine’s.59 Indian men continued to enter the War between the States as volunteers in the Twenty-ninth Connecticut. Lyman Lawrence, Amasa’s nephew, was one, with an enlistment date of 5 Jan- uary 1864 and assigned to Company I. Although he resided in Ledyard, Lyman was credited for the town of Guilford, which suggests that he may have taken advantage of a bounty offered by that town. John Nichols of Company B (for the town of Hampton), Gad W. Apes of Company F (for Hartford), and Horace Simons of Company H (for Griswold) all enlisted.60 Indian men associated with the Nipmuc community in northeast Connecticut, south central Massachusetts, and northwest- ern Rhode Island joined the Twenty-ninth as well. Marcus and Stephen M. Lewis of Thompson, Connecticut, signed on to Company I on 5 January 1864, followed by John A. Glasgow on 4 March 1864.61 Phillip Fatty, a Cattaraugus Seneca recruit from New York, served in Company F and was credited to the town of Glastonbury.62 The Twenty-ninth Connecticut and the Thirtieth Connecti- cut/Thirty-ﬁrst United States Colored Infantry were mustered into service before the close of the Petersburg campaign. During the siege, the Twenty-ninth manned the trenches, assaulted Fort Harrison, fought along Darbytown Road, and engaged Confederate troops at Kell House. On 2 April 1865,

59Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 868; U.S. Census, 1860, Connecticut, New London County, Preston. 60Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 878 (Lawrence), p. 865 (Nichols), p. 872 (Apes), p. 876 (Simons). 61Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 877 (Glasgow), p. 878 (Lewis); Nipmuc Nation Tribal Archives, General Historical Material, Seventeenth–Twentieth Centuries, Drawer Two: 1800s—Brothertown (Kansas Claims) and Military Records, Civil War (Historical data and pension ﬁles). 62Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 872; U.S. Census, 1920,NewYork, Cattaraugus County, Allegany Indian Reservation.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 624 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Companies C and G of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut were the ﬁrst infantry units to enter Richmond after the Confederates evacuated the city, and they occupied it until the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on 12 April 1865. Unlike other Connecticut units, the Twenty-ninth was not mustered out of service but, because its soldiers still had time left in their enlistments, in early May it was detailed with the rest of the Twentieth Corps to General Sheridan’s command. The men of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut embarked from City Point, Virginia, and were transported to Texas, where they spent the remainder of their service on guard around Brownsville. The unit was mustered out of service 14 October 1865 and discharged at Hartford in November.63 During its year and nine months of service, the Twenty-ninth Connecticut suffered 388 casualties—men who were wounded, killed, or died out of combat. Among the wounded was Ly- man Lawrence, who received a musket ball to his shoulder during the assault on Fort Harrison, also known as the Battle of Chapin’s Farm (28 September 1864); after a brief hospital stay, he returned to active duty with the regiment on 19 December. Lawrence never fully recovered from his wound but remained with the regiment until he was discharged on 24 October 1865.64 His injury was so severe that he could no longer work as either a mariner or a farmhand, as he had prior to the war. The Thirtieth Connecticut/Thirty-ﬁrst United States Colored Infantry was also sent to Petersburg in June 1864. Although they initially guarded wagon trains, soon the soldiers were on the front lines. Less than a month after it arrived for duty, the regiment participated in one of the deadliest engagements of the war. Following two assaults on 17 and 18 June, federal forces had advanced to within 130 yards of the main Con- federate line. Union General Ambrose Burnside authorized a proposal by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants of the

63Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, pp. 260–62; Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, pp. 208–9. 64Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 878; NARA, RG 094, Lyman Lawrence, certiﬁcate no. 361162.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 625 Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, who had been a mining engineer before the war, to dig a mine underneath the Confederate line, pack it full of gunpowder, and explode it, thereby blowing a gap in the Confederate defenses around Petersburg.65 By 23 July the mine was complete. The plan of attack originally submitted by Burnside to Major General George Meade relied on General Edward Ferrero’s Ninth Corps, Fourth Division—the colored troops—to lead the assault. The division, of which the Thirty-first was a part, trained for several weeks to lead the attack through the forced breach in the Confederate line. Meade, however, had reservations, which he shared with Grant. “If we put the colored troops in front (we had only one division) and it should prove a failure,” Meade warned, “it would be said, and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front.”66 On the afternoon of 29 July, twelve hours before the mine was due to explode, Burnside received word that one of the white divisions was to lead the attack. Burnside quickly chose the First, which had little time to prepare for its role. After Union engineers exploded the mine on the morning of 30 July, the First Division rushed into the huge crater that had been formed and that would give the battle its name. Union forces tried to advance but were repelled by musket and artillery fire. The Second and Third followed, but they too were pushed back into the crater. Ferrero’s Fourth Division, including the Thirtieth Connecticut/Thirty-first USCI, received orders from General Burnside to “advance at all hazards.” Likely relying on its several weeks of targeted training, the Fourth charged around the left side of the crater, which was filled with thousands of Union soldiers, and crashed into the Con- federate line. The Fourth was able to recover some fallen battle

65Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., The Way to Appo- mattox: Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 4 (New York: Thomas Yoseloff Inc., 1956), pp. 545–46. 66The Way to Appomattox, p. 548.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 626 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY flags and capture some three hundred Confederate prisoners, but, not receiving any additional support, it began to fall back into the crowded crater. This final charge having failed, general panic overtook Union forces, with many men running to the rear. The Connecticut regiments lost half of their effective strength that day, and all of the state’s officers were killed or wounded.67 Two Indian men who enlisted in the Thirtieth Connecticut/Thirty-first USCI were casualties of the Battle of the Crater. Clinton Mount Pleasant, a Tuscarora Indian from New York who enlisted in Company F of the Thirtieth Con- necticut Volunteer Infantry for the town of East Granby, was killed, while Private Austin George, a Mashantucket Pequot Indian also of Company F, was wounded in his left shoulder. Because thousands of men had been wounded that day, George did not receive treatment for eighteen days; following his operation, he remained in a Philadelphia hospital until February 1865. George was discharged on 8 June 1865,and like his cousin Lyman of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut, he suffered lingering effects from his injury, which hindered his ability to work in the post-war years. Following the Battle of the Crater, the Thirtieth Connecticut/Thirty-first USCI took on new recruits. It participated in actions around Bermuda Hun- dred and joined other federal units in the pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Following Lee’s surrender, the regiment was sent to Texas, where it mustered out of service in October and was discharged at Hartford in December 1865.68 From the opening shots of the war in 1861 to the surrender of Confederate armies in 1865, Connecticut Indians and men of Indian descent enlisted as volunteers, draftees, and substitutes in federal infantry and artillery regiments. They initially served in volunteer units, but because Indians were generally viewed as colored in nineteenth-century America, Connecticut Indians

67The Way to Appomattox, pp. 550–56; Niven, Connecticut for the Union, p. 255. 68Record of Service of Connecticut Men, p. 890; Laurence M. Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 156; NARA, RG 094, Austin George, certiﬁcate no. 75324; Hines, Volunteer Sons of Connecticut, p. 267.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 627 were often recruited into colored regiments when they were ﬁrst authorized in 1863. Nonetheless, Indians of southern New England retained a certain degree of social mobility during the American Civil War, serving as both “insiders” and “outsiders” within the segregated Union military establishment.

Connecticut Indian Mariners Join the United States Navy Although many African American and Native American seamen had served on Continental and state vessels during the War of Independence, in August 1798, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert decreed that thereafter “No Negroes or Mulatoes are to be admitted” to the navy or marine corps. This official policy was not, however, enforced, and as the United States entered an undeclared war with France in the late 1790s, it was soon abandoned. From the War of 1812 through the late 1830s, increasing numbers of men of color were not only participating in the seafaring trades but were also enlisting aboard United States naval vessels. In 1839, responding to complaints that blacks were edging whites out of service positions, the Navy Department limited black enlistments to five percent of available slots. The five percent quota remained in effect until Civil War demands forced the navy to reconsider its policy. As early as 1861, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells, a Hartford resident, ordered that freed slaves, or contraband, could and should be employed aboard United States Navy ships; soon free men of color from the Northern states were permitted, along with other freedmen, to enter the service as landsmen and seamen.69 Rensailer Babcock, an Indian who had been born in North Stonington, Connecticut, was living with his mother in 1837 in Preston, where he appears on town rolls as a pauper and is classified as “colored.” In his military pension, he is described as having been (in 1864) a thirty-year-old laborer, five

69James Barker Farr, Black Odyssey: The Seafaring Traditions of Afro-Americans (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1989), pp. 114, 115, 121, 132–33.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 628 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY feet, five inches tall, of a “yellow” complexion, with black eyes and black hair. On his death certificate in 1911, his color is given as “white.” Babcock first enlisted in Company G, Eighth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry on 21 September 1861, but he deserted on 6 December while his regiment was positioned near Annapolis, Maryland. Babcock successfully evaded military officials for nearly two years, until Connecticut’s Third District Provost Marshal apprehended him on 5 September 1863 in Mystic, Connecticut. Immediately jailed at Fort Trum- bull, in New London, Babcock was shortly thereafter sent to the “Hard Labor Prison” at Norfolk, Virginia. In Virginia, he was tried before a General Courts Martial and was sentenced to be “shot to death by musketry at such time and place the Comd’g Genl. may direct.”70 The court’s proceedings were approved, but Babcock was permitted to choose between death by firing squad or reenlisting in the military for three years. He chose to reenlist. On 4 May 1864, Babcock was transferred to the U.S. Navy and was mustered into service as a seaman at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on 1 July 1864 aboard the USS Commodore Perry, an armed, side-wheel ferry charged with patrolling the inland and coastal waters of the Virginia coast.71 On 30 September 1864, Babcock joined the crew of the USS Minnesota, the wooden Union steam frigate that had battled the Confeder- ate ironclad CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads months earlier.72 During the three months Babcock spent aboard the Minnesota, the vessel served as the flagship of the North At- lantic Blockading Squadron. On 31 December 1864, Babcock returned to the USS Commodore Perry, where he remained until 31 March 1865. He was discharged from the navy on 24 October 1865. Following the war, Babcock returned to Mystic and later resided in New London, Montville, and Waterford.

70NARA, RG 094, Rensailer Babcock, certiﬁcate no. 4742. 71NPS Soldiers and Sailors System, Rensailer Babcock, United States Navy, http:// www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/sailors trans.htm, accessed September 2006. 72NavyHistory.Com, U.S. Naval Ships History, http://www.historycentral.com/ NAVY/Steamer/starsandstripes.html, accessed September 2006.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 629 He later found employment as the “post light keeper” on the Thames River, and he also worked as a mail carrier. Despite his desertion record and courts martial conviction, Babcock drew a government pension. When he died in 1911, his funeral was conducted by his comrades at the Grand Army of the Republic W. W. Perkins Post No. 47, and he was buried in the G.A.R. plot in New London.73 Malbro Gardner, a Pequot Indian from North Stonington, is typical of the many men of Indian descent who served in the U.S. Navy. He enlisted at New London on 9 Septem- ber 1862, at the age of twenty-three, as an ordinary seaman. Gardner’s service record described him as a mariner by trade, ﬁve foot, six inches tall, and born in North Stonington. He was mustered into service on 8 October 1862 aboard the USS Stars and Stripes, a screw steamer built in Mystic by Charles Mallory, where he would continue to serve throughout his enlistment. After a year of hard service in 1862, the vessel was recommissioned in September 1863, a month before Gardner was assigned to it, and absorbed into the East Gulf Blockad- ing Squadron; throughout 1863, Stars and Stripes operated off the coast of Florida. During Gardner’s time aboard it, Stars and Stripes captured the sloop Florida, sent landing parties to destroy salt works on Marsh Island, and, under heavy ﬁre, destroyed the blockade-running schooner Caroline Gertrude at the mouth of the Ochlockonee River on 29 December 1863. Two days later, Gardner was discharged from the navy. No further military records survive to detail Gardner’s service, but he likely returned home to North Stonington. Seventeen years later, he appears in the 1880 census as residing with another Civil War veteran of Indian descent, Gad Apes of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut, and is described as a “mulatto” farm laborer.74

73NPS Soldiers and Sailors System, Rensailer Babcock; NARA, RG 094, Rensailer Babcock, certiﬁcate no. 4742; New London Day, 4 April 1911,p.6. 74NPS Soldiers and Sailors System, Malbro Gardner; NavyHistory.Com, US Naval Ships History; U.S. Census, 1880, Connecticut, New London County, North Stoning- ton.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 630 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Dwight Gardner of North Stonington, who is probably related to Malbro, enlisted at New London one day earlier than Malbro. Dwight’s naval record describes him as sixteen years of age, ﬁve feet, eight inches tall, and of a “yellow” complexion and notes that he enrolled as a landsman.75 No additional material concerning his naval service has been located. Another representative of Connecticut Indians’ naval service is Simeon Simons, a Pequot Indian. Simons enlisted in New Bedford on 18 January 1862, at the age of twenty-seven, for a three-year term as an ordinary seaman. His naval record lists his birthplace as Norwich and characterizes him as a “mulatto” laborer, ﬁve feet, nine inches tall. Simons was mustered into service and served aboard the USS Wamsutta beginning on 3 July 1863.76 Attached to the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, the Wamsutta was to intercept blockade runners and carry out operations against Confederate vessels. The ship was decommissioned in September 1863. There is no record of Simons’s further assignments during the remainder of his enlistment or of his discharge date. These brief synopses of Babcock’s, the Gardners’, and Simons’s records give a general sense of Native American naval war service, but they merely scratch the service of what is undoubtedly a much larger contribution to the Civil War effort. Further detailed research into United States naval service records and pension records will certainly uncover other notable instances of Indians’ involvement in the War between the States.

Conclusion Indians, not recognized as American citizens during the Civil War, were not obliged to serve in the conﬂict. While some In- dians stood on that principle and petitioned to have their fellow Native Americans exempted from being enrolled in the draft, others joined white and/or colored volunteer units or enlisted

75NPS Soldiers and Sailors System, Dwight Gardner. 76NPS Soldiers and Sailors System, Simeon Simons; NavyHistory.Com, U.S. Naval Ships History.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 631 in the Union navy. Although, given the absence of diaries and letters, Indians’ personal motivations for donning a Union uniform cannot be determined, clearly some were caught up in the patriotic fervor that swept New England after the fall of Fort Sumter. Others may have followed family members and neighbors into the war; some were eager to receive the considerable monetary bounties offered by town, state, and federal governments; and some were enticed by the large sums of cash neighbors or outsiders put up as incentives to lure substitutes. Indians’ white counterparts shared all of these motivations. Government pension records and years of disability payments bear witness to the fact that a number of Native Americans continued to ﬁght the war as they battled to regain their lives in the face of the physical wounds and ailments they had suffered while on campaign. Although some Indians wished to forget their wartime experiences, others joined their fellow veterans in commemorating their shared experience by participating in the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ group that played a prominent social and political role in post–Civil War America. As a lasting testimony to their service to the United States, many Indian men were granted a military headstone upon their death, paid for by the government, at the family’s request. These white marble markers can be found in both town and tribal cemeteries throughout New England, from Mashantucket to Block Island. Perceptions of race in New England had changed drastically in the seventy-eight-year period between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the War between the States. In the eighteenth century, those seeking access to or ownership of Indian reserved lands had devised an artful strategy of discrediting Indians’ racial purity, that is, their very “Indianness,” to dispute their property rights. In 1731,for example, the Mashantuckets had sued Groton’s proprietors, who had encroached upon lands in the western portion of their reservation; they won. Twenty years later, however, the proprietors appealed the case on the grounds that a number of the families were not, in fact, Mashantucket: “The Quocheats belong to Mohegan. . . . The Woquandom belong to Stonington [Eastern Pequot]....TheCharlesbelongtoLong

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 632 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Island [Montauk].”77 The Groton proprietors, who had called attention to Indians’ traditional practice of inter-community marriage, had targeted the identity of certain Mashantucket residents and, thereby, the legitimacy of their land claims. The western half of Mashantucket was ultimately lost in 1762.78 Many Native men of New England had fought in the Seven Years War (1754–63) and the Revolutionary War (1775–83), and the male populations of all Indian reservations and communities had sustained staggering losses. Following the Revo- lution, as Indian males left reservations and other enclaves in increasing numbers to find work in urban areas, in the maritime world, or on surrounding farms, Native communities struggled to readjust to their changing demographics. At an accelerating rate, Indian women married, and had children with, men of African and European descent. By the nineteenth century, Native communities throughout New England became progressively more diverse. Although most whites living in proximity to large Indian communities recognized them as such, as did their state appointed overseer and many state officials,79 in the opinion of non-Native observers, many Indian individuals simply did not visually fit the common conception of what an Indian should be. To some outsiders, like Captain John William DeForest, Indians had, quite simply, vanished from New England. As in the U.S. Census prior to 1870, they had been absorbed into the larger category of “colored.” During the Civil War, that label offered Indians a unique degree of flexibility, as the Vickers family of Hamp- ton, Connecticut, demonstrates; listed in the 1860 census as “mulatto,” the men were able to enlist in the white Twelfth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry and later, as “colored men,” transfer into the Seventy-sixth United States Colored Infantry. Connecticut Indians’ ability and readiness to serve in both ca- pacities has made it especially difficult for historians to trace Natives’ service: they are often overlooked as white, if they

77Jason Mancini, “The Roots of Diversity at Mashantucket,” Cross Paths 11 (Sum- mer 2008): p. 12. 78Mancini, “The Roots of Diversity at Mashantucket,” p. 12. 79Mancini, “The Roots of Diversity at Mashantucket,” p. 13.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 633 happened to have enlisted in a unit such as the Twelfth Con- necticut, or as black, if they fought with regiments like the Seventy-sixth USCI. Acknowledging the presence of the nation’s Indian soldiers and sailors and their contribution to the North’s war effort is important not only because it helps us gain a better understanding of the complexities of the American Civil War but because it allows us to honor those who answered the call to military service and who “gave the last full measure of devotion” to the Union cause. Whenever I am in Boston, I visit the Shaw Memorial, Augustus St. Gaudens’s magniﬁcent monument to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry on Boston Common, to pay my respects to those brave men who wore the Union uniform. My gaze is unfailingly drawn to the drummer boys at the head of the column, who led Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and their comrades into battle. One of the musicians depicted on St. Gaudens’s monument was named Alexander Johnson. He identiﬁed himself as a Narragansett Indian, and he enlisted in the Fifty-fourth at the age of sixteen.80 When I think of that Narragansett drummer

80Johnson’s service record states that he was sixteen at the time of his enlistment, resided in New Bedford, and listed his occupation as a seaman. His last known address, in 1894, was Worcester. See Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment; History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry 1863–1865 (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company Publishers, 1990), p. 351.On16 November 1901, Alexander Herbert Johnson filed a Kansas Claim application for a share of the money appropriated by Congress to settle the claims of New York Indians who had been promised land in Kansas under the terms of the treaty of Buffalo Creek, New York, on 15 January 1838. Johnson identified himself as Narragansett and his wife, Mary Ann Johnson, also filed a Kansas Claim and also identified herself as Narragansett. Johnson’s father, not identified as Indian, may not have been, but Johnson described his mother’s side as being comprised of both Narragansett and Brothertown Indians. Mary Ann identified her mother as Narragansett and Brothertown Indian, while she described her father as Montauk Indian. Interestingly, Mary Ann also listed her grandparents on both her mother’s and father’s side; they have the surnames of Vickers, Curless, and Hemingway, all of which are known Nipmuc surnames. Having ties to the the Brothertown Tribe was the basis for Alexander and Mary’s application. See NARA, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] 1793–1989, 75.12.2, Records relating to Kansas Claims of New York Indians, Textual Records: Applications, 1901–4, Alexander Herbert Johnson, Mary Ann Johnson. In 1907,theWorcester Telegram featured a story on Johnson’s service in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts: “the first colored drummer boy to enlist for the Civil War, whose picture is on the monument to Col. Robert G. Shaw in front of the Boston state house[,] says he has beat a drum every day he has been able since his childhood” (“Drummer of War Renown,” Worcester Telegram, 29 September 1907).

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Fig. 3.—Alexander H. Johnson, Musician, Company C, Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Image courtesy Worces- ter Historical Museum, Worcester, Mass.

Fig. 4.—Memorial to the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, Boston, Mass., by Augustus St. Gaudens, close-up of musicians. Photograph courtesy David B. Rhoads.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.596 by guest on 27 September 2021 INDIAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS 635 boy in that “brave black regiment,” I wonder to myself how many other infantrymen memorialized in bronze could be of Nipmuc, Wampanoag, or Narragansett descent as well.

David J. Naumec is a museum consultant currently working with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center’s Research Department. A graduate of the Tufts University His- tory and Museum Studies M.A. program, he specializes in early American history, Connecticut history, and American military history.

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