XIII. a Massachusetts General, Rufus Saxton.
Complaint has sometimes been made of Massachusetts that the state did not provide a sufficient number of officers of high grade for the regular army during the Civil War. Be that as it may, one of the most eminent of such officers has just died, being indeed one whose actual fame may yet outlast that of all the others by reason of its rare mingling of civil and military service.General Rufus Saxton was born at Greenfield, Massachusetts, on October 19, 1824, graduated at the military academy in 1849, was made brevet second lieutenant, Third United States Artillery, July 1, 1849, second lieutenant, Fourth Artillery, September 12, 1850, and captain and assistant quartermaster, May 13, 1861. He was chief quartermaster on the staff of General Lyon in Missouri and subsequently on that of General McClellan in western Virginia, and was on the expeditionary corps to Port Royal, South Carolina. In May and June, 1862, he was ordered north and placed in command of the defenses at Harper's Ferry, where his services won him a medal of honor; after which he was military [176] governor of the Department of the South, his headquarters being at Beaufort, South Carolina; this service extended from July, 1862, to May 18, 1865, when he rose to be colonel and brevet brigadier-general of volunteers. He was mustered out of the volunteer service January 15, 1866, but rose finally to be colonel and assistant quartermaster-general in the regular army, March 10, 1882. He retired from active service October 19, 1888, having been made on that date a brigadier-general on the retired list. This is the brief summary of what was, in reality, a quite unique career.
The portion of this honorable life upon which his personal fame will doubtless be founded is that from 1862 to 1865, when he was military governor of the Department of the South. In this capacity he first proved possible the distribution of the vast body of free or fugitive slaves over the Sea Islands, which had been almost deserted by their white predecessors. This feat was accompanied by what was probably in the end even more important,--the creation of black troops from that centre. The leadership in this work might have belonged under other circumstances to Major-General Hunter, of Washington, District of Columbia, who had undertaken such a task in the same region (May 3, 1862); but General Hunter, though he had many fine [177] qualities, was a thoroughly impetuous man; whimsical, changeable, and easily influenced by his staff officers, few of whom had the slightest faith in the enterprise. He acted, moreover, without authority from Washington, and his whole enterprise had been soon disallowed by the United States government. This was the position of things when General Saxton, availing himself of the fact that one company of this Hunter regiment had not, like the rest, been practically disbanded, made that the basis of a reorganization of it under the same name (First South Carolina Infantry). This was done under express authority from the War Department, dated August 25, 1862, with the hope of making it a pioneer of a whole subsequent series of slave regiments, as it was. The fact that General Saxton was a Massachusetts man, as was the colonel whom he put in charge of the first regiment, --and as were, indeed, most of the men prominent from beginning to end in the enlistment of colored troops,--gave an unquestioned priority in the matter to that state.
It must be remembered that this was long before Governor Andrew had received permission to recruit a colored regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, whose first colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, a young hero of Boston birth. The fact that this was the first black regiment [178] enlisted at the North has left a general impression in Massachusetts that it was the first colored regiment; but this is an error of five months, General Saxton's authority having been dated August 25, 1862, and that of Governor Andrew January 26, 1863. The whole number of black soldiers enlisted during the war was 178,975 (Heitman's “Historical Register,” page 890), whose whole organization may fairly be attributed, in a general way, to the success of General Saxton's undertaking. In making this claim, it must be borne in mind that the enlistments made by General Butler at almost precisely the same time in New Orleans consisted mainly of a quite exceptional class, the comparatively educated free colored men of that region, the darkest of these being, as General Butler himself once said, “of about the same complexion as the late Daniel Webster.” Those New Orleans regiments would hardly have led to organizing similar troops elsewhere, for want of similar material. Be this as it may, the fact is that these South Carolina regiments, after their number was increased by other colored regiments from various sources, were unquestionably those who held the South Carolina coast, making it possible for Sherman to lead his final march to the sea and thus practically end the war. As an outcome of all this, [179] General Saxton's name is quite sure to be long remembered.
It is fair now to recognize the fact that this combination of civil and military authority was not always what Saxton himself would have selected. There were times when he chafed under what seemed to him a non-military work and longed for the open field. It is perhaps characteristic of his temperament, however, that at the outset he preferred to be where the greatest obstacles were to be encountered, and this he certainly achieved. It must be remembered that the early organizers and officers of the colored troops fought in a manner with ropes around their necks, both they and their black recruits having been expressly denied by the Confederate government the usual privileges of soldiers. They had also to encounter for a long time the disapproval of many officers of high rank in the Union army, both regular and volunteer, this often leading to a grudging bestowal of supplies (especially, strange to say, of medical ones), and to a disproportionate share of fatigue duty. This was hard indeed for Saxton to bear, and was increased in his case by the fact that he had been almost the only cadet in his time at West Point who was strong in anti-slavery feeling, and who thus began with antagonisms which lasted into actual [180] service. To these things he was perhaps oversensitive, and he had to be defended against this tendency, as he was, by an admirable wife and by an invaluable staff officer and housemate, Brevet Major Edward W. Hooper, of Massachusetts, who was his volunteer aide-de-camp and housemate. The latter was, as many Bostonians will remember, of splendid executive ability, as shown by his long subsequent service as steward and treasurer of Harvard University; a man of rare organizing power, and of a cheerfulness which made him only laugh away dozens of grievances that vexed General Saxton.
As an organizer of troops General Saxton's standard was very high, and he assumed, as was proper, that a regiment made out of former slaves should not merely follow good moral examples, but set them. As all men in that day knew, there was a formidable variation in this respect in different regiments, some of the volunteer officers whose military standard was the highest being the lowest in their personal habits. General Saxton would issue special orders from time to time to maintain a high tone morally in the camp, as he did, indeed, in the whole region under his command. He was never in entire harmony with General Gillmore, the military commander of the department, whose interest was thought to lie chiefly in the artillery service; [181] and while very zealous and efficient in organizing special expeditions for his own particular regiments, Saxton kept up, as we thought at the time, a caution beyond what was necessary in protecting the few colored regiments which he had personally organized. When the Florida expedition was planned, which resulted in the sanguinary defeat at Olustee, he heartily disapproved of the whole affair. This he carried so far that when my own regiment was ordered on the expedition, as we all greatly desired, when we had actually broken camp and marched down to the wharf for embarkment in high exultation, we were stopped and turned back by an order, just obtained by General Saxton from headquarters, countermanding our march and sending us back to pitch our tents again. It was not until some days later had brought the news of the disastrous battle, and how defective was the judgment of those who planned it, that General Saxton found himself vindicated in our eyes. The plain reason for that defeat was that the Confederates, being on the mainland and having railway communications, such as they were, could easily double from the interior any force sent round by water outside. This was just what had been pointed out beforehand by General Saxton, but his judgment had been overruled. [182]
General Saxton was a man of fine military bearing and a most kindly and agreeable face. Social in his habits, he was able to go about freely for the rest of his life in the pleasant circle of retired military men and their families in Washington. He and his wife had always the dream of retiring from the greater gayety of the national metropolis to his birthplace at Deerfield, Massachusetts. Going there one beautiful day in early summer, with that thought in mind, they sat, so he told me, on the peaceful piazza all the morning and looked out down the avenue of magnificent elms which shade that most picturesque of village streets. During the whole morning no wheels passed their place, except those belonging to a single country farmer's wagon. Finding the solitude to be somewhat of a change after the vivacity of Washington, they decided to go down to Greenfield and pass the afternoon. There they sat on a hotel piazza under somewhat similar circumstances and saw only farmers' wagons, two or three. Disappointed in the reconnoissance, they went back to Washington, and spent the rest of their days amid a happy and congenial circle of friends. He died there February 23, 1908. To the present writer, at least, the world seems unquestionably more vacant that Saxton is gone.
