From The Sterling Standard, December 11, 1896

How It Was Observed By Colored Troops

The Ole Bull of the Accordian—A Sable Nightingale—Christmas Gifts—A Happy Lot of Children of a Larger Growth

I enlisted after graduation at Yale in the Twentieth Connecticut regiment and was commissioned first lieutenant of Company F. Our service during 1862 and 1863 was with the Army of the Potomac until after the battle of Gettysburg, in which we participated, when the Twelfth corps, under the command of General Hooker, “Fighting Joe,” was sent to form a part of General Sherman’s army. About this time the government was recruiting regiments of colored troops, a measure I approved, because I thought the negroes should fight for their own freedom and the elevation of their own race, and because, in other words, as was said at the time, a negro would stop a bullet as effectively as a white man. I believed, too, that properly officered and led the negroes would fight well, a belief that was confirmed by experience.

I saw four Christmases while in the army, for I was not mustered out until 1866—two with my old unit, the Twentieth Connecticut, and one, that of 1865, while on detached service as the judge advocate of a general court martial. The Christmas which especially impressed itself upon me, however, was that of 1864, which I spent with my new regiment, the Forty-fourth, U. S. C. T. This regiment was recruited from among the plantation negroes recently slaves of northern Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, with a small sprinkling from Mississippi. Dec. 25, 1864, was my first Christmas as a field officer, and with the colored troops—and with all of them—it was their first Christmas as soldiers and with many of them their first holiday as free men.

When Hood made his backward swing from Atlanta toward Nashville, while Sherman swung off on his famous march to the sea, the Forty-fourth was among the regiments left behind under Thomas to prevent the imperious Hood from reaching the Ohio. We were not with Schofield at Franklin, one of the fiercest engagements of the war. We did succeed in getting into Nashville in time to take part in the utter rout and dispersion of Hood’s army on Dec. 15 and 16, though in getting there our train ran into a cul-de-sac lined with Confederate batteries, and we were only saved from annihilation by the celerity with which we got off the train and got behind cover. That night, guided by some of our Tennessee negroes who knew the bypaths, we eluded the Confederate pickets and got into the Union lines.

After the fight we were sent to Chattanooga and went into winter quarters. Our men lived in huts, rude, but comfortable. In fact, most of them were better housed, better clothed and better fed than they had ever been, and, while subject to the restraint of military discipline, enjoyed more real freedom than they had ever before known. As Christmas drew nigh the colored troops showed anxiety to celebrate it appropiately. On all well conducted plantations in the south before the war the holiday season was alwas a time for enjoyment and feasting with the blacks as well as the whites. The bonds of slavery were temporarily relaxed, and all went in for a good time. The white troops were receiving from their friends at home reminders that they were not forgotten in the shape of packages by mail and boxes by train laden with food, drink and clothing of a kind not provided by Uncle Sam’s commissary or quartermaster. But our colored soldiers had no friends at home to send them these tokens of love and remembrance. Their friends, when not still in bondage, were poor, and homes were yet a thing of the future. But the men had their pay, and sutlers were a numerous as their prices were high. The officers of the regiment, both field and line, helped out the festivities of the black men in blue both by contributions and by teaching them how and what to buy. The result was that so far as creature comforts were concerned the men of the Forty-fourth, colored, fared remarkably well on their first Christmas of freedom and as soldiers.

The negro, like the Chinese and Japanese, is imitative; but unlike them, he is musical. As a race the negro possesses a positive genius for music both vocal and instrumental. The men of the Forty-fourth Colored were not at all behind in this regard. We had a number of string bands among the men. In fact, every company had one or more. They had some very good performers among them, some of those on the fiddle and banjo being remarkably good. They played, of course, by ear, knowing nothing of written music. There was one negro who played the accordion with remarkable skill. He was from Mississippi and had acquired this accomplishment at New Orleans, where his old master spent his winters, this man having accompanied the planter as his body servant. The man had brought with him the instrument his master had bought him. Under his manipulation the peculiar whining tone of the accordion as ordinarily played was lost.

Then, there were any number of good singers. One big fellow, the blackest man, I think, I ever saw, had a tenor voice that would have made the fame and fortune of a white man. It was clear and powerful and as sweet as a chime of silver beels. In ordinary conversation he spoke in dialect, yet in singing his pronunciation was correct, while his enunciation was perfectly distinct. He sang all the old favorite ballads of antebellum days and the war songs of the time. His favorite song, though, was one of his own composition. It was all about mocking birds and nightingales, orange groves and cotton fields, running brooks and waveless bayous, trackless forests and hunted animals. The language was crude, yet endowed with the spirit of poetry, and when he sang it in that rich voice to a strange air full of pathos and sentiment it always seemed to me somehow that the black singer was inspired by a dim recollection of his ancestral home in some vast African forest and on the bank of some great stream.

This man was the leader of a band of choral singers formed by one of our lieutenants, who had a musical turn, to sing Christmas and war songs. And how they did sing them! Christmas eve was passed in this way. Sweet and touching were the Christma carols they sang, but they were at their best when they gave musical voice to the fact that “John Brown’s soul goes marching on.” This they sang as though inspired, and when a thousand voices joined in the chorus, filling the frosty air with a great sound of chanting, the effect was one I’ll never forget. This singing and the music were the most characteristic features of our Christmas festivities, the one in which we all participated as performer or listener, and the one which afforded the most universal pleasure and delight. Thus all of Christmas eve was passed. Christmas morning my striker, a boy about 18 or 19, black, careless, shrewd, impudent and faithful, woke me up by crying:

“Crismus gif’, majah; Crismus gif’, sah. I’ze da fus’. Wot ye gwine to gib me—a drink?”

He dodged a boot and got his drink. Thus my first Christmas with the colored troops began. We of course had our indispensable military duties to perform, and we formed the regiment in hollow square on the parade ground to listen to divine service. Then the day was given up to jollity and merriment. Of course the chief interest of the day, especially with the colored men, centered in the dinner table. It is sufficient to say that they got the best dinner they had ever had. After that they whiled away the time in singing and dancing, swapping stories of their old life in slavery, now ended for them and soon to be for all whenever the stars and stripes floated; ran races and engaged in such games as their plantation life had made them familiar with and generally were boisterously merry, filling the air with their shouts of glee and unctuous negro laughter. They were a tired and happy lot of big, black, overgrown children when taps, “lights out,” sounded that night and ended a day that to many of them no doubt seemed to set for the first time the seal of reality on that wonderful possession, personal ownership.