Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to his father
H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y
Point Lookout, Md., November 2, 1864
You all appear to entertain curious ideas of Point Lookout and my duties while here. A safer residence or one to my mind less inviting could not well be found. The Post here is established on a low, sandy, malarious, fever-smitten, wind-blown, God-forsaken tongue of land dividing Chesapeake Bay from the Potomac River. It is remarkably well adapted for a depot of prisoners, as it is not only notoriously unhealthy, but most easily guarded. The prisoners’ pens and public buildings are situated on almost an island, and, while only a narrow beach at two points connects this with the main, the whole establishment quietly reposes under the broadsides of various gunboats which garnish this shore. Thus but a poor chance for escape or outbreak is offered to the prisoners. Nor do I think that any very strong desire to get away exists among them as a mass. To be sure they do not here live in luxury, but neither do they starve, and, judging by appearances, for they look tough and well, imprisonment does not disagree with them. The prisoners’ pens are large enclosures, containing several acres, surrounded by a board fence some fifteen feet high, round the outside of which, and four feet from the top, runs a gallery on which sentinels are posted. From this vantage ground they observe the proceedings of our captive and deluded brethren and shoot them, if necessary. Inside, the pens are nothing but large camps, for the prisoners have canvas tents and the devils are more ingenious in making themselves comfortable than I ever supposed southern men could be. It’s a queer, unreal spectacle to go through these pens. During the daytime the fashionable streets are thronged with a gaunt, unkempt, strangely clad multitude of all ages and all styles of dress. The peculiar type of southern man, long, wiry, dirty, unshorn and dressed in the homespun yellow, stands strongly out, and mixed in altogether in one cut-throat throng, you meet the pure white trash of the slave states and men bearing marks of refinement, old men who ought to know better and lads with faces as smooth as an egg. Necessity is the mother of invention and their necessities are great, but, withal, they seem naturally to be an ingenious and tolerably industrious set. Almost every tent is a work-shop and they manufacture all sorts of pretty trinkets and curious toys which they sell to visitors. They’re a dirty set, both naturally and here, almost from necessity, and one of the most marked objects one sees is the large average of men who are always sitting in puris picking the vermin off their clothes. Some of those men have been here eighteen months — one man I captured myself more than a year since — and many of them came here wounded and still more chronically sick. In the hospital there are some 2800 patients, but I do not know what the average of mortality is. Heavy or not, with a view to encourage new corners, I presume, there is always kept piled up close to the main entrance some eighty or one hundred ready made coffins. So much for the prisoners and their pens, to guard whom we are here and furnish for that purpose a daily detail of some one hundred and sixty men.
Our camp is not on the Point where the pens are, but further up the shore and some mile or so from them. Here we look after our horses, build houses, dig wells and stagnate. I’m gradually getting to have very decided opinions on the negro question; they’re growing up in me as inborn convictions and are not the result of reflection. I note what you say of the African race and “the absence of all appearance of self-reliance in their own power” during this struggle. From this, greatly as it has disappointed me, I very unwillingly draw different conclusions from your own. The conviction is forcing itself upon me that African slavery, as it existed in our slave states, was indeed a patriarchal institution, under which the slaves were not, as a whole, unhappy, cruelly treated or overworked. I am forced to this conclusion. Mind, I do not because of it like slavery any the better. Its effects in this case are, no less than in the other, ruinous and demoralising to both races and because swine may be well fed and happy in their filth, I do not argue that it is good to be hog-reeve or hog. I base my opposition to slavery on a broader principle, that, happy or unhappy, it is not good for either that one man should be master and another slave; that such an arrangement is diametrically opposed to the spirit of modern progress and civilization. Meanwhile experience shows that no mortal people of any known race or color will long keep quiet under systematic cruel treatment. They will break out at last and always with a fierceness proportioned to the length and severity of previous ill-usage. The French peasants so broke out in the Jacquerie and ’89, the English in the same way under Jack Cade, the Sepoys in India, and finally the Africans themselves in Hayti and San Domingo, but never in this country. Here, after all sorts of efforts to stimulate them, after arms are thrust into their hands, as the last result of two hundred years of slavery, they are as supine as logs or animals. Thus I am forced to conclude either that our Africans have not the spirit, not of men but of the lowest order of known animals; and alone of all animated creation cannot be tortured into resistance to oppression. Or else that the two hundred years of slavery through which they have passed was of that patriarchal type which left the race as a whole, not overworked, well fed and contented —greedy animals! Commanding a colored regiment, and seeing the ugly characters in it, I adopt the latter as the true explanation of this wonderful supineness. I cannot attribute it, as you do, to “the enervation of the southern, atmosphere,” as that cause did not lead to similar results either in India or in the West Indies. How far now is this war and its tremendous external influences going to revolutionize this miserable, and the more miserable because contented, race of slaves? What I see leads me to believe that it is their only chance of salvation. The negro makes a good soldier, particularly in those branches of the service where a high order of intelligence is less required. Negro infantry, properly officered, would I believe be as effective as any in the world. In regard to their efficiency as cavalry I somewhat share your doubt. After all a negro is not the equal of the white man. He shows this in many unmistakable ways the moment you come in close contact with him. He has not the mental vigor and energy, he cannot stand up against adversity. A sick nigger, for instance, at once gives up and lies down to die, the personification of humanity reduced to a wet rag. He cannot fight for life like a white man. In this regiment if you degrade a negro who has once tried to do well, you had better shoot him at once, for he gives right up and never attempts to redeem himself. So his animal tendencies are greater than those of the whites. He must and will sleep; no danger from the enemy and no fear of punishment will keep him awake. In infantry, which acts in large masses, these things are of less consequence than in cavalry; but in the service which our cavalry does, where individual intelligence is everything, and single men in every exposed position have only themselves and their own nerve, intelligence and quickness to rely on, it is a very different thing. The blacks strike me as excellent soldiers in the aggregate, but individually unreliable.
The Army, however, is the proper school for the race. Here they learn to take care of themselves. They become, from necessity, conversant with every branch of industry. For instance, a day of thorough study of this camp would amaze you. You cannot realize the industry, versatility and ingenuity called forth. The building we do is enormous, and the only materials supplied us are axes and nails. We fell trees, split, cut lumber and shingles, and build stables and houses. Every blacksmith, every carpenter, every shoemaker, every tailor and every clerk is constantly busy, and those who can do nothing else dig and carry until they can do something better. I have even induced Colonel Russell to go out of the way to cultivate forms of industry simply as discipline, such as baking bricks and building to build well. These men make the pumps for our wells and the pumps are good ones. They build chimneys and make plaster and mortar from mud. The large, open fireplace in my quarters evinces no little ingenuity and skilled labor. Such, in little, is what I hope to see the Army become for the black race, a school of skilled labor and of self reliance, as well as an engine of war. As soon as quieter times for soldiers shall come I should hope to see Chaplains and schoolmasters attached to every regiment, and then to see every regiment forced to supply itself with every ordinary description of skilled industry, every soldier made a mechanic, and no ordinary one either, but one who knows that whatever he does he must do in soldier fashion, as exactly, as thoroughly and as well as his materials will admit of. My hope is that for years to come our army will be made up mainly of blacks and number many thousand. I would have at least a four years term of enlistment and yearly sent out from the Army from fifteen to twenty thousand black citizens, old soldiers and masters of some form of skilled labor. Such is my philanthropic plan for the race and I do not know that I can do better than to devote to it some few of the passing years of my life.
Of the men here my conclusions are decidedly favorable. They are docile and take readily to discipline and a large percentage of them, fully as large as of the whites, are decidedly soldierly in their bearing. As horsemen I think they are at least as good as the whites — better, if I might judge by the surprising manner in which our present lot of horses have improved in condition. We have now the best lot of horses, without exception, that I have ever seen in Virginia. Of the courage in action of these men, at any rate when acting in mass, there can no doubt exist; of their physical and mental and moral energy and stamina I entertain grave doubts. Retreat, defeat and exposure would tell on them more than on the whites. So far, as a whole, they more than fulfil every expectation which I entertained. Just now they are slovenly, it is true, that is, have very little idea of making a “neat job” of a thing, and always consider that if a thing will answer a shift, it is good enough for all time. This I try very hard to break up. . . .
