![]() Officers freely mingled with teachers, including Charlotte Forten at the Penn School, who noted in her journal that the officers of the 54 th attended the Jcelebration at Brick Baptist Church.Ī few weeks after their arrival, the regiment moved to St. The regiment paraded through the streets of Beaufort, where onlookers included soldiers in the 1 st and 2 nd South Carolina Volunteers, two all-Black regiments organized in the Sea Islands the previous year. Captured in the Fall of 1861, the Sea Islands around Beaufort had become not only a military hub for the Department of the South, but the site of an growing experiement at post-slavery, known as the Port Royal Experiment. In early June of 1863, the 54 th Massachusetts arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina. According to the Boston Evening Transcript, "no single regiment has attracted larger crowds into the streets than the 54th." 1 With the band playing "John Brown's Body," the 54 th marched down State Street to the waterfront "passing over ground moistened by the blood of Crispus Attucks, and over which Anthony Burns and Thomas Sims had been carried back to bondage." 2 The 54th Arrives in South Carolina Thousands turned out to watch their farewell parade. On May 28, 1863, the 54 th departed for the war front, marching through Boston, and loaded onto the transport DeMolay for their voyage south. Shaw and other officers trained the men of the 54 th at Camp Meigs in Readville, just outside of Boston, until late May 1863. The son of prominent abolitionists, Shaw had already seen combat and been wounded at the Battle of Antietam. Governor Andrew chose Robert Gould Shaw of the 2 nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment to lead the 54 th. Recruitment met with such success that enough men enlisted to form not only the 54 th Regiment but also a second Black infantry regiment, the 55 th Massachusetts. Local leaders such as Lewis Hayden as well as national spokesmen including Frederick Douglass helped recruit soldiers for the regiment. Recruiting offices opened throughout the United States and even in Canada as Massachusetts did not have a sufficiently large free Black population to fill the regiment. Andrew of Massachusetts, an abolitionist, eagerly organized the creation of the regiment once securing the permission to do so. Through their heroic, yet tragic, assault on Battery Wagner, South Carolina in July 1863, the 54 th helped inspire the enlistment of more than 180,000 Black soldiers…a boost in morale and manpower that Lincoln recognized as essential to the victory of the United States and the destruction of slavery throughout the country. Black men from across the city, state, country, and even other nations, traveled to Boston to join this historic regiment. ![]() Massachusetts Governor John Andrew quickly answered Lincoln's call and began forming the 54 th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the first Black regiments to serve in the U.S. Following the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln called for the raising of Black regiments.
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