The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong

Every great argument in American history has a moment when somebody stops arguing and just does the thing. The doubters had spent two years explaining, in newspapers and in cabinet rooms, why Black men could not be soldiers. They would not stand under fire, the doubters said. They lacked discipline. They would break at the first volley. On the night of July 18, 1863, some six hundred of them walked down a narrow strip of South Carolina sand toward a fort full of cannon, and the argument was over.

That is the story of the 54th Massachusetts. It is a story about courage, and it is also a story about the oldest American conservative idea there is: that a man earns his standing as a citizen by what he is willing to risk for the country, and that a government which denies it to him is denying a principle it has already confessed.

The Question in 1861

When the war began, the Union Army did not want Black volunteers. The reasons were a mixture of prejudice and politics. The border states, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware, had slaveholders who stayed loyal to Washington, and Lincoln feared that arming Black men would push them into the Confederacy. The old Militia Act of 1792 had limited militia service to free white men, and that statute stood on the books for decades. Black Americans who tried to enlist in 1861 were turned away, a humiliation Frederick Douglass called out repeatedly in print.

Then the war ground on. The casualty lists grew. The Union needed men, and by the summer of 1862 Congress had passed the Second Confiscation Act and a new Militia Act that allowed the employment of Black men in the service. On January 1, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation took effect and declared that "such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States." That sentence turned a prohibition into an invitation.

Here is the point I want you to see. The Union did not recruit Black soldiers out of sentiment. It did so because it needed them, and because they were willing. The men who answered had every reason to stay home. Many were free, some were recently escaped, and all knew that Confederate policy treated captured Black soldiers as something other than ordinary prisoners of war. They went anyway.

Founding a Regiment

The governor of Massachusetts, John Albion Andrew, a fervent abolitionist, got War Department permission in early 1863 to raise a Black regiment. Massachusetts did not have enough Black residents to fill it, so recruiters went across the North. Men came from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and many other states, and some came from as far as Canada. The regiment trained at Camp Meigs in Readville, outside Boston, and it was among the first Black regiments raised in the free states.

The officers were white, which was the rule then. The governor needed a colonel with the right name and the right character, and he chose Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent Boston abolitionist family, who was already an officer in another Massachusetts regiment. He took the job. He was no saint of the cause by any account I have seen, and I will not invent one for him. What the record shows is a young man who accepted a hard assignment, drilled his men hard and stood with them when it counted.

Frederick Douglass threw himself into recruiting. His March 1863 broadside, addressed "Men of Color, To Arms," argued that a Black man who put on the Union uniform and took up the musket would earn a claim to citizenship that no power could deny. Two of his sons, Lewis and Charles, enlisted in the 54th. Lewis became its sergeant major. It was a remarkable thing for the most famous Black American in the country to give his own sons to the argument.

The 54th left Boston by transport on May 28, 1863, marching through crowds, and then the questions about their treatment began.

The Pay Protest

The first test the regiment faced was not on a battlefield. It was a pay clerk's window. Washington has always found it easier to ask a man to charge a fort than to cut him a correct check, and the check is where the 54th first had to stand its ground.

Under the Militia Act of 1862, Black soldiers were to be paid ten dollars a month, minus three dollars for clothing, which left seven. White privates drew thirteen dollars a month plus a clothing allowance. The regiment had been promised the same pay as any soldier of the Union. The terms were a lie, though a bureaucratic one, written into a statute rather than a recruiter's speech.

The men of the 54th did something remarkable. They refused the money. When the paymaster offered seven dollars they declined it, and they kept declining it for about eighteen months. Shaw and his officers backed them, and refused their own pay in solidarity. Massachusetts offered to make up the difference out of state funds. The regiment said no to that as well, because the principle was equality under the federal government, and a state subsidy would concede that the federal government could pay them less. Their families at home, many of them poor, went without the soldiers' wages for a year and a half.

Congress finally equalized the pay in June 1864, with a retroactive provision for the men who had been free at the outbreak of war. The soldiers of the 54th had won the point with discipline and patience, which are not the traditional weapons of an insurrection but are exactly the weapons of citizens who believe the law is on their side. They petitioned. They did not mutiny, and they did not desert. They insisted that the government keep its word.

A government that can find the money for a war but not for an honest paycheck has its priorities in the wrong order, and the regiment said so in the politest possible way. That is a conservative's story, if you ask me. It is a story about a contract, a promise and the refusal to take less than the promise. It is also a lesson in why equal treatment under the law is not a slogan. The pay gap was a law, passed by Congress and signed by the president, and only another law could fix it.

July 18, 1863: The Assault

By the middle of July the regiment was at Morris Island, near Charleston Harbor, part of a Union effort to take the forts that guarded the city, the cradle of secession. The target was Fort Wagner, also called Battery Wagner, an earthwork on a narrow sand spit with the sea on one side and marsh on the other. A frontal approach meant funneling troops down a strip so narrow that they could not spread out.

On July 16 the 54th had fought a skirmish on James Island and held its position under fire. It was a quiet proof of its steadiness that few remember. Then it was marched through rain and mud, and on July 18, after a day of heavy Union naval and artillery bombardment, Brigadier General George Strong offered Shaw a choice: the 54th could lead the assault, and Shaw accepted. It was an honor, in the army's thinking, and it was also a likely sentence of heavy loss.

The regiment formed up at dusk and advanced along the beach at around a quarter to eight in the evening. Confederate fire raked them as they closed. They reached the ditch, climbed the parapet and fought hand to hand inside the fort's walls. Shaw was shot and killed on the parapet. The attack ran out of strength, the second wave of Union brigades did not break the line, and the survivors fell back. The 54th had lost around 270 men killed, wounded or missing out of about 600 who went in. The fort held and the Union would not take it until September, when the Confederates evacuated it.

If you measure by the map, it was a defeat. The Union did not take Fort Wagner that night. But the measure was never the map. The regiment had held its ground in a charge that veteran units would have hesitated to make, and had done it in view of the army and, within days, the Northern press.

Sergeant William Carney

One name from the assault deserves to be known by every American. When the color sergeant fell, Sergeant William H. Carney took up the flag, carried it to the parapet and held on to it through a barrage in which he was wounded multiple times. He got back to the Union lines, according to the long-reported account, with the flag still up, saying that the colors had never touched the ground. I give that as the reported account, not as a quotation I can swear to word for word.

Carney received the Medal of Honor in 1900, many years after the act. He is regarded as the first Black soldier to perform an action for which the medal was later awarded, though others received it earlier. You can read what the award is and how its citations are written in What the Medal of Honor Is, Who Awards It and How a Citation Is Written.

What the Doubters Said, and What Came After

Here, in a point-by-point rebuttal, is the doubters' case at its strongest, and then the answer.

The strongest form of the doubters' argument was not mere contempt. It was an argument from experience: men raised under slavery, the claim went, had been denied the habits of command, initiative and self-reliance that make a soldier. That is an uglier argument than it sounds, because it blamed the victims of the system for the system's results. But it was the argument made by serious people, and it has to be answered with evidence.

The evidence arrived in three stages. One, Black troops had already fought at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in May 1863 and at Milliken's Bend, on the Mississippi, in June. Two, the 54th at Fort Wagner in July. Three, the volume of enlistment that followed. After Wagner, recruitment surged. By the end of the war nearly 180,000 Black men had served in the Union Army, in regiments that were called the United States Colored Troops, and about 19,000 more served in the Navy. They made up roughly a tenth of the army at the end.

Notice the shape of the answer. The doubters said "they will not." The men said "watch." There is no reply to that. The moral case for equal citizenship was always sound, but the practical case, the proof that the men who were denied the rights of citizenship were willing to pay for them, was delivered in blood on a beach in South Carolina.

A fair skeptic will say that it should not have required a sacrifice for the principle to hold, and the skeptic is right. Rights do not depend on a performance test. The Declaration says men are endowed by their Creator with rights, and a man does not earn them by passing a battlefield exam. But a republic is made of citizens who also bear duties, and the soldiers of the 54th supplied what the law's defenders had been missing: an unanswerable demonstration that they would bear the heaviest duty a citizen can bear.

The Constitution Behind the Regiment

Now measure it against the text. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" and "To provide for calling forth the Militia." Congress had the power to enlist whomever it chose. The obstacle in 1861 was not constitutional, it was a statute and a prejudice. The Militia Act of 1792 limited the militia to white men, and an ordinary law can be repealed by an ordinary law, which is what happened in 1862.

Then consider Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided in 1857, in which Chief Justice Taney wrote that Black Americans, free or slave, were not and could not be citizens of the United States. The 54th were free Black men in a federal uniform six years later, and their service was a refutation of that holding in flesh and bone. The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 would overturn it in text: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The soldiers had made the argument. The amendment wrote it down.

I would press the point harder than the usual commentary does. The men who spoke most often about a limited federal government in 1863 were not the people refusing to serve alongside Black soldiers. The principle at stake in the 54th was the principle that a government's laws must apply equally to all who bear its burdens. A conservative who believes in the rule of law, in equal justice and in the dignity of the individual has no reason to hesitate about this regiment. Its soldiers were the Founders' proposition, in uniform. For the great statement of that proposition, read The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence, delivered four months after Wagner.

The Story Behind the Story: Reading the Record Honestly

There is a temptation, in every retelling, to polish the heroes. Resist it. Shaw was an officer of his time and class. The Union Army was not a crusade against racism, and many Northern soldiers held views we would call appalling. The Union's own officers sometimes mistreated the Black regiments, assigned them to labor details and kept them out of the fight. The regiment's service at Wagner was a reversal of that policy, achieved against resistance.

Honest history is stronger history. The heroism of the 54th does not need a sanitized background. It shines more brightly against the facts: a government that paid its Black soldiers less, a public that doubted them and a fort that was nearly impregnable. The same honesty applies to the Confederates, who often refused to treat captured Black soldiers as lawful prisoners, a fact that made every Black soldier's enlistment an act of extra risk.

The same standard of fairness applies to how we remember. For a short list of how to judge the Founders and the generation after them without whitewash or erasure, How to Judge the Founders Fairly Without Excusing Slavery or Erasing Them sets out the method. And for another life that crossed the lines of the war, read Harriet Tubman Led Rescues, Spied for the Union and Raided the Combahee River. For the soldiers' descendants in the next century, there is The Harlem Hellfighters Spent 191 Days Under Fire and Came Home Heroes.

What Came After

The war ended in April 1865. The victory had been paid for in part by men who a few years earlier could not legally have served. What came next was the long argument over whether the promise they had earned would be kept. The first stage of that story, the schools and churches and farms the freed people built, is told in Reconstruction's Promise and the Freedmen Who Built Schools, Churches and Towns. The generosity of the surrender terms at Appomattox is told in Appomattox and the Generous Surrender Terms That Began to Heal a Nation.

For the 54th, memory has been kind in one respect. A great memorial to Shaw and the regiment stands on Boston Common, facing the State House, and it has been there for more than a century. It is a monument to the men as much as the colonel. Americans who walk past it, and the schoolchildren who are taught about it, are being taught the same lesson the regiment taught the Army: a country is not defined by what it says on its good days but by who pays for its promises on its bad ones.

The Case in Brief

1. In 1861 the Union Army refused Black volunteers, resting on the militia statute of 1792 and on prejudice, and the question of whether free Black men would fight was open.
2. The 54th Massachusetts, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and including Frederick Douglass's sons, answered it at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, at a cost of about 270 of some 600 men.
3. The regiment's eighteen-month pay protest showed the same principle at work on a smaller scale: equal treatment under the law, demanded by lawful means, until Congress equalized pay in June 1864.
4. Nearly 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army, and their service refuted Dred Scott's holding in practice before the Fourteenth Amendment refuted it in text.
5. The lesson for citizens is that rights are endowed by the Creator and do not depend on a performance, but a republic's citizens also bear duties, and those who bore them deserve the honor of the record.

What you can do: read the Fourteenth Amendment's first section aloud, then visit the Massachusetts State House's Shaw memorial or its online records and teach the story of the 54th to someone younger than you.