By
Eddie Griffin
ONE
HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER the great War between the States, we do not need
to blow up Stone
Mountain to find consolation for the sins of slavery. When the bereaved daughter
of Ethel Lance told the gunman in the South Carolina church shooting, “I
forgive you”, it was finished. It was out of her hands, and into the hands of
God.
Even
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He forgave,
and he is the Son of God. Are we greater than he? Could we have done better
ourselves? By virtue of a divine pardon, written in Ezekiel 18:20: The son shall not bear the guilt of the
father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son.
In
order not to hold the descendants guilty for the sin of their forefathers, Eddie G. Griffin let it go, a long time
ago. I truly believe they knew not what they were doing. To them, slavery was
about property rights and the law of property, governed, and protected by the
state. It never occurred to them that
slavery was a sin before the eyes of heaven.
They
never recognized the humanity of those they held in bondage, until the
Confederacy was collapsing. Humbled by proximity of defeat… Appomattox less
than a month away… They
asked the slaves to help fight the Yankees, with permission of the owners,
of course.
Ethelbert
Barksdale of Mississippi, in the Confederate Congress, introduced a bill
granting Davis the power to accept black men as soldiers, but only with their
masters' permission. Masters were also permitted, but not required, to
emancipate slaves who completed terms of service in the Confederate army. After strenuous debate, and with the
endorsement of General Robert E. Lee, the House of Representatives narrowly
passed.
The
contentious debates centered on the humanity of the Negro, whether he was more
than a primitive savage, with intelligence barely above a baboon, and only
capable of menial labor. In other words, was he not an inherently and genetically
retard? Therefore, if they allowed the Negro to fight in the Confederate army, wearing
the proud uniform of Dixie, then they must admit that they were wrong… wrong
about the Negro… and everything else… including their whole system of slavery. But
some senators were so hell-bent on this hierarchical ideology that it required two
senators to change their votes for passage.
Thus,
after passage of General Order #14 on March
23, 1865, it was left up to Maj,
James W. Pegram and Maj. Thomas P.
Turner to hastily put together the “Negro
Brigade” of Confederate States Colored Troops, and throw them up in defense
Richmond, while everybody else was evacuating. But it was too little, too late,
because Gen. Robert E. Lee faced two
titanic battle-hardened armies,
converging on the capital city … One Black: XXV
Corps, U.S. Colored Troops… One White: XXIV Corps.
By
April 3, 1865, Lee was forced to
evacuate Richmond. For the next six days, the Union army closed in the Army of
Northern Virginia, and tracked them until Lee was finally cornered at Appomattox.
By fate or by fortune, Col. Ulysses Doubleday, 2nd
Brig, 2nd Div., XXV Corps USCT and Col. William W. Woodward, 3rd Brig., 2nd Div. XXV
Corp. USCT, were sent into Appomattox
on April 9, 1865, as part of Union forces sent to mop up the rest of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
ONE
HUNDRED YEARS AFTER the Great War between the States, in 1965, Eddie G. Griffin was a student at
Arlington State College. We engaged in protest demonstration to bring down the Old
Dixie flag that flew over campus. We were supported by one college professor, Dr. Alan Saxe. And, it was the height
of the Civil Rights Movement.
The
battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia was raised in the prominent and
sovereign place of Old Glory. And every year when they celebrated Old South
Week on campus, white students would pull out their great-grandfather’s old
Confederate Civil War uniform, with their swords, and flags and hoopla over
Dixie and the theme “The South Shall Rise Again.”
After
a three-year fight, led by the Student Non-Violent Committee (SNCC), the flag
came down, the college underwent a name change and reorganization (now
University of Texas at Arlington), and the school’s mascot was changed from
Rebels to Mavericks.
In
retrospect, knowing now what I could not have known then, I should have pitied
them. They celebrate what never was, and reenact what never happened. But a lie
repeated often enough it becomes the truth in the mind of those who want to
believe it.
IT IS EASIER TO FORGIVE
when you know the truth. As Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth
shall set you free.” For with truth, comes the consolation of peace of mind. But
to the liar, and “those who love a lie”, the biggest lie is the one that you
tell to yourself. And, the saddest lie is the one you convince yourself is the
truth.
The
truth behind the Civil War is that the Dixie died, crushed by a humiliating
defeat. And our forefathers, the U.S. Colored Troops, played a more prominent role
in it than history gives them credit for. This is why, whenever they reenact
the Confederate side of the War, knowing the truth themselves, they intentionally
skip these key battles, simply because our Colored forefathers were the heroes…
at Battle of Appomattox,
the Battle of New
Market Heights, and select battles in Petersburg-Richmond Campaign.
BUT
IF, as they say, you can’t miss what you can’t measure, then how were we to
know the truth if it were not in the history books, or how would we know what
for to search, if there were no reference? This was ignorance and vexation of
the spirit, when you are growing up in the Deep South, with the truth being
hidden in the 1950s. It was not until the 1960s, when the Black
Consciousness Movement ushered in a second Afro-Black Renaissance. We rediscovered
the first Colored-Black Renaissance (c. 1900) and the writings of W.E.B. DuBois
who, so happened to preserved the memory of the U.S. Colored Troops of the
Civil War, and a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar entitled, “When Dey Listed Colored Soldiers”.
Up
until then, we had nothing concrete, only old wives stories and folklore about
black soldiers fighting in the Civil War. Otherwise, our forefathers in the
Union Army were completely whitewashed… not only from the charades, parades,
and reenactments of Civil War battles… but bleached from the books of history,
and purposely ignored or distorted by Hollywood (in movies like Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and most recently Glory).
NEVERTHELESS, IT IS
EASIER TO FORGIVE when you have the consolation of
knowing that we won and they lost… to God goes the Glory… It was called, by
some contemporary account, a “divine
retribution”. President Abraham Lincoln was of the persuasion that it was
Providence. I believe the same also, that it was the Will of God to “set the
captives free”.
YET: What
they said at the beginning is not what they said at the end about the
beginning. So once again, they are changing the
new history textbooks in our schools to suit their fantasies of what never
was. And, as if it were not bad enough to whitewash the U.S. Colored Troops out
of history to begin with, the revisionists are once again fabricating a new reason
as to why the war was fought.
NOWADAYS,
they are quick to point out that Lincoln did not start out to free the slaves.
In President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address of March 4, 1861, he stated that he had no
purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery
in the states where it exists. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and
I have no inclination to do so.”
Not
that Lincoln was racist, as some distorters would have us believe, but that, at
the time (1861) he would have said anything to keep the Union from falling
apart, and slaveholding states following the secession steps taken by South
Carolina, who had already seceded from the Union as early as April 26,
1852, some eight years before his election.
NOWADAYS,
they would say that the War was fought over states’ rights and not over slavery.
But Texas
Articles of Secession accused the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa of “deliberately, directly or indirectly” violating
the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article of the Constitution by not
enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law
within their borders.
It
was a war waiting to happen. Not that the Emancipation Proclamation could free
the slaves in Rebel states where it could not be enforced, but that the
Proclamation only gave our forefathers a fighting chance to win it for
themselves. Shortly after going into effect, by March 1863, the Union
officially began recruiting Colored Troops.
AFTER
concessions to truth, they now admit that there were more that the 54th Massachusetts U.S.C.T.,
that there were about 180,000 black troops who served in the Union during the
Civil War.
WRONG! It
was the XXV Corps of U.S. Colored Troops
that counted 178,895 black soldiers, but only after its reformation on December 3, 1864. These were the
survivors of many prior battles brought together for the Petersburg-Richmond Campaign, which ended with the surrender of
Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, whose Army of Northern Virginia had dwindled to
about 50,000 troops during the siege. This is what precipitated the
Call-to-Arms for slaves by General Order #14. The Confederates had hoped to
raise a force of 200,000 Colored Troops, by volunteerism or conscription. But
the few that did take up arms made a miserable showing at Richmond before its
evacuation on April 3, 1865.
After
the Battle of Appomattox Court House, April
9, 1865, thirty-nine
black Confederate soldiers were among those who were paroled.
MAYBE,
the War was a free-for-all, with everybody
fighting for a different reason. One thing for sure U.S. Colored Troops were
fighting to free their brothers and sisters from bondage. The regimental blue
battle flag of the 6th U.S.C.T. bore the slogan: Freedom for
All… an angel with her wings hovering over a Colored soldier. The
battle flags of other Colored units were of like motivation. The Call of
Freedom,
To
the victor goes the honor, whereas the vanquished put lipstick on pigs. Except that whitewashing history does not
beautify the pig. Therefore, I say, “Let the dead bury the dead, and let
the Confederacy have its heroes, and let Dixie mourn for its Lost Cause till Resurrection Day.” I should
not begrudge them of their icons. Because I am reminded that if you pull on a
thread, you unravel the whole suit, Dixie is in our DNA. With so many thousands of streets, schools, cities, parks,
buildings, monuments, and counties named after Confederate heroes, even if it
were possible to erase and rename them all, as some would suggest, we
would no longer recognize where we live or where we are going.
Why
have Pavlovian conniption, foam at the mouth, chase our tail, and bark at the
moon, when we see Old Dixie waved in our face or come across the statue of a Confederate
hero… like the bust of Gen. John Gregg sitting at the entrance of
the courthouse in Longview, Texas, the seat of Gregg County, which was named in
his honor in 1873… Didn’t he die at the Battle
of New Market Heights on October 7,
1864, facing Gen. Charles Paine’s
division of U.S. Colored Troops?
Here
was a man, with no pre-war military experience, who was defeated in one battle
after another, dethroned from his horse twice by a bullet to the neck, only to
be resurrected and promoted time and again and finally being put in command of
the famed Hood’s Texas
Brigade called “the finest brigade of Robert E. Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia. He,
along with Gen. Martin
Gary's dismounted
cavalry brigade, was entrusted with the heavy
fortified defenses at New Market Heights,
which guarded the back door to the capitol city of Richmond.
Here he faced Paine's three brigades
- commanded by Colonels John Holman, Alonzo Draper and Samuel Duncan, with the
6th USCT Regiment and its blue battle flag being part of the Duncan
Brigade.
CALL IT DESTINY: Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler recommended that
Paine’s division lead the Union attacks… he
believed blacks would fight as well as whites, and New Market Heights offered a
perfect opportunity for the USCTs to prove their ability (Source: National Park Service)…
The Battle of New Market Heights (Sept.
29-30, 1864) was another, in a string of suicide missions Colored Troops.
CALL IT LUCK: In
a dense morning fog, the advancing troops came upon tangled, swampy ground, and
the advance became very confused… only
one division - Paine's USCTs - was able to get through the swamps, and of that
division, only one brigade, Col Duncan's, advanced toward the Rebel works.
CALL IT TRAGIC: Upon
clearing the swamps and leaving the other regiments tangled up in the rear,
Paine's division came upon a double line of abatis - felled trees that
defenders used to slow an advance. Soon,
axe-wielding pioneers were cutting their way through when the Confederates
opened fire. Duncan’s men had to lay their muskets aside in order to chop
through heavy logs of obstruction. In doing so, John McMurray, Capt. of Co. D, 6th
USCT, lost over 85% of his men before clearing
a way for the next brigade to come through.
CALL IT BRAVERY: Sgt.
Maj. Thomas R. Hawkins rescued the blue battle flag with
one hand, while carrying Old Glory in the other. He survived the Battle of New
Market Heights, only to die of his wounds in 1870, and posthumously awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor.
CALL IT PROVIDENCE:
After losing over 50% of their men against Gen. John Gregg’s Texas Brigade, one
by one they come through an open field, waded through a swamp, and charged up the
hill of the enemy’s earthworks, and engaged them in hand-to-hand combat, until
they were routed. The smaller army of U.S. Colored Troops overran the larger
terrified Confederate forces, and opened the door to Petersburg and Richmond.
After
Lee received the bad news on September 30, 1864, he immediately ordered Gregg
to counterattack, thus sending him to his death.
On October 7, 1864, one week
after losing the Battle of New Market Heights, General John Gregg was killed along
the Charles City Road, near Richmond, Virginia, trying to lead a counterattack
at the Battle of Darbytown and New Market Roads.
Responding to the loss of Fort
Harrison and the increasing Federal threat against Richmond, Gen. Robert E. Lee directed an
offensive against the Union far right flank on October 7. After routing the Federal cavalry from their
position covering Darbytown Road, Field’s and Hoke’s divisions assaulted the
main Union defensive line along New Market Road and were repulsed. Confederate Gen. John Gregg of the Texas
brigade was killed.
THE END OF WHAT MAKES A
HERO:
For the gallantry and
valor, above and beyond the call of the duty, FOURTEEN of
the U.S. COLORED SOLDIERS WHO FOUGHT THE BATTLE OF MARKET HEIGHTS received
Congressional Medals of Honors from Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, most on April 6,
1865… with Sgt. Maj. Thomas R. Hawkins
receiving his posthumously in 1870.
FACT IS:
They were never forgotten for the selfless sacrifice of over 50% of their men. Today,
they are buried with double honors in our National Cemeteries, and their
histories preserved by the National Park Service. And if that were not honor
enough, Gen. Benjamin Butler created
a special Butler
Medal for the entire division that survived the crossing and turned the
tide of battle, and hence the war, at New Market Height, opening the way to Richmond
and Petersburg.
The
Butler Medal, officially known as the Army of the James Medal, was named for
General Benjamin F. Butler, who commissioned a medal to honor African American
troops in his command for gallantry during the Battle of Newmarket Heights on September 29, 1864. The medal is
silver, inscribed on the obverse with “Ferro Ilis Libertas Perveniet” and on
the reverse with “Distinguished Courage Campaign Before Richmond 1864.”… The
Butler Medal holds the distinction of being the only medal ever struck for
black troops.
AFTER
A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS--- Eddie G. Griffin can forgive the Confederacy of
slavery, because I find more consolation the of my forefathers, especially those
from the XXV Corps who finished the job of freeing the last slaves in Texas…
the 38th U.S.C.T. who came through the Battle of New Market Heights to
Petersburg on to Texas to free the last slaves in held in chattel bondage … deployed to Texas, May 24 and June 6, 1865… engaged at
various points along the Rio Grande in the southern portion of the state,
including Brownsville and Brazos Santiago, Galveston on the gulf coast, as well
as at Indianola, Texas,
now a ghost town at the bottom of the Gulf, like the lost city of Atlantis.
Listed
below are 9 out of the 14 Medal of Honor winners and Butler Medal recipients:
Col. Alonzo Draper's
brigade (5th, 36th, and 38th USCT)… Pvt.
William Henry Barnes, Co. C, 38th
USCT, 1st Sgt. Powhatan Beaty, Co. G, 5th USCT, Pvt. James H. Bronson, Co. D, 5th USCT, Sgt. Maj. Milton
Murray Holland, Co. C, 5th USCT, 1st Sgt. Robert
A. Pinn, Co. I, 5th USCT, Pvt. James Daniel Gardner, Co.
I, 36th USCT, Cpl. Miles James, Co. B, 36th USCT, Pvt.
James H. Harris, Co. B, 38th USCT, and 1st Sgt. Edward Ratcliff, Co. C, 38th
USCT.
IN
MEMORY OF WILLIAM HENRY BARNES, who survived to reach Texas... the first among
the three over top at New Market Heights… engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand
combat, while bleeding from a shoulder wound, yet defying every bullet… walking
over and through Gregg’s Texas Brigade… marching right into Petersburg… boldly
coming into Texas to finish capturing the state, and freeing the last slaves on
June 19, 1865, Juneteenth.
After
all this, he dies, less than two years later, of tuberculosis in an Army
hospital in Indianola on Christmas Eve,
December 24, 1866. A marker in his memory was placed in San Antonio National Cemetery, San Antonio, Texas.
And
so I forgive the Confederacy for the sin of slavery, in memory of my forefathers
who fought their way to victory over slavery.
