Chapter 14

To Arms! The Black Woods at War

White Adirondackers fought with valor for the Union in the Civil War, and Black Adirondackers did too. But white people fought for one thing; the men and boys of the Black Woods fought for another. There was overlap, but their Civil Wars were not the same.

Black men fought slavery. Its centrality in their lives ensured this. Some settlers on the Smith Land had been slaves in their youth, or were the children of ex-slaves, or had ex-slaves for ministers, grandparents, or spouses. Even when their families were decades out of slavery, reenslavement was ever thinkable. Upstate Black New Yorkers recalled how useless was Solomon Northup’s free status was when, in 1841, he was lured from upstate Saratoga Springs to Washington, DC, with the promise of a job, then drugged, jailed, and sold to a Louisiana planter—and Northup the son of an Adirondack farmer-voter. Especially after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act, enslavement menaced every free Black person in the North. And because Black Northerners felt slavery as an existential threat, they knew, as white people could not, why only war could smash it. A system as entrenched, confident, and profitable as the one that stole John Thomas’s first wife and snatched twelve years from the life of Solomon Northup—a system whose defenders would sooner leave the nation than cede the right to hold human beings as chattel—would yield only to force.

So Black Northerners felt no ambivalence about John Brown’s wild raid that pitched half the nation into a lashing paranoia and roused the other half to the grim defense of nationhood and law. The raid that hastened the long war that, alone, offered the hope of justice and relief for millions was a reckoning. Let it come. The man Herman Melville called “the Meteor of the War” changed the world.

And this meteor had been their friend! It was another thing that set the Black settlers’ Civil War apart. Long before his name was claimed by Union soldiers on the march, John Brown belonged to the Black Woods. His Black neighbors knew his wife and children, his facility with a surveyor’s transit, his fierce faith, his taste in hymns. Private Hasbrook’s father got lost in a snowstorm and was led to safety by John Brown. Private Carasaw’s wife, Eliza, mended clothes for Brown’s wife. Private Appo’s father sold Brown’s daughter a melodeon when she got married. If the men of the Black Woods fought for the slave, they also fought to honor the memory of their white ally and true friend.¹

For most of them, however, there would be no fighting until the war was halfway over. Until January 1864, Black men who lived within a wagon ride of John Brown’s grave were denied the right to bear arms for the Union—as were Black men all over the free North whose efforts to enlist were categorically rebuffed. In New York City, mobs broke up ad hoc Black militias; in Providence, Black-initiated drills were outlawed as “disorderly gatherings.” As Benjamin Quarles observes in The Negro in the Civil War, “There seemed to be a common sentiment that the only military command that Negroes should hear was, ‘As you were.’ ” But in the Black Woods, the rejection registered as more than legal. It took aim at the hope of justice and equality that drew Black families to this wilderness in the first place, and that had seemed to set this land apart.²

Avery Hazzard and his white neighbors in St. Armand were of one pioneering generation. They knew each other’s barns and crops, took the other’s side against the tax collector. Avery’s father, Levi, fought for three years with his Massachusetts regiment in the War of Independence. At the outbreak of the Civil War, three grandsons of this patriot—Charles Henry, Alexander, and George—hoped to fight as much as their white neighbors, who were so keen to enlist that they were making city headlines. (“In St. Armand, N.Y., [near] where John Brown lived and was buried, of the eighty voters in the town, seventy have enlisted,” the New York Times reported in 1862.) But when the war began, the pliable constraints of caste hardened into federal policy. So white Adirondackers marched to fife and drum, and Black men stood apart with women, children, and old men, cheering on white patriots even as they struggled to ignore this bitter insult here about the white man’s greater worthiness for battle.³

And this, of course, was the third thing that set their Civil War apart: they, not their white friends, had to deal with an army that held them stiffly at arm’s length—or, as historian Benjamin Quarles put it, to suffer a wartime government that “measured out … rights for Negroes … in homeopathic doses and administered with a long spoon.” The formation of Black regiments in New York would be delayed fully a year after federal policy gave Black men fighting rights (and delayed by the same governor, Horatio Seymour, who in 1868 made his campaign slogan for the presidency “This Is a White Man’s Country. Let White Men Rule”). Even after February 1864, when Black volunteers were finally, grudgingly, allowed to serve, given rifles, and dispatched to fight, the army stalled their progress. Black fighting men were paid less. They got worse gear. They got less medical attention than white soldiers, and suffered greater rates of injury and a death rate 35 percent higher than what white troops endured. In the South, these soldiers would be exposed to racialized atrocities and war crimes that white soldiers seldom faced. In effect, they fought three adversaries to the white man’s two. White enlistees went to beat a sectional rebellion, and those who were abolitionists (never a majority) battled slavery as well. Black soldiers fought the rebels, the slaveocracy, and (maybe worst of all) an enemy their white friends never knew: the rote presumption of Black inferiority.⁴

And this foe, unlike the enemy of white fighters, was unconcerned with legal treaties or military defeat. When General Lee raised the flag of truce at Appomattox, white Union men knew victory was theirs, and they were done. Black soldiers reveled in the defeat of the Confederacy too, but white racism did not surrender. It lost a uniform; it kept its guns.

That only eight men from the Black Woods joined the Union army suggests how much the Black community had dwindled since the giveaway’s debut. And while this meager list would double if I beefed it up with grantees or their sons who joined the army from elsewhere in the Adirondacks (Westport, Willsboro, Elizabethtown), or who enlisted after they were well out of the region (like Willis Hodges, who scouted for the Union in Virginia, or the fighting sons of Samuel and Thomas Jefferson), or if I stretched it with the names of emancipated African Americans who discovered Franklin and St. Armand when the war was over, this would only obscure the view. If the point is to track what the Adirondacks signified for African Americans who were living in the Smith Lands when they enlisted, and to consider how the war years shaped their prospects and their expectations on their return, the focus has to stay with those for whom the Black Woods was the starting point. And so we have these eight, and offer here, in the rough order of their enlistments, a bit of what we know about the war years of North Elba’s William Appo Jr., Silas Frazier, William Carasaw, and Josiah Hasbrook; St. Armand’s Charles Henry Hazzard; and Franklin’s Warren Morehouse, James Brady, and Samuel Brady.⁵

William Appo Jr., first in this list to answer President Lincoln’s call for volunteers, signed up in North Elba in early 1861. He was nineteen and had been living in North Elba for perhaps a year with his father, William Sr. Why did he not enlist from his parents’ year-round home in Burlington, New Jersey? Maybe he tried and was rebuffed, and that’s why he was here. He was mixed-race. Nonwhites were not welcome in the army. But Appo Sr.’s 1848 purchase of a good-sized lot in North Elba was a significant investment that pioneers, both Black and white, probably appreciated. And when the light-skinned Appo Jr. (both of his parents were listed as “mulatto” in the census) volunteered to serve his country, some North Elbans, eager for volunteers, may have recalled his father’s first show of faith and thought to return the favor. Whatever the reason for this exception, young Appo made the cut. From North Elba, he registered in the all-white US Army and was directed to the Thirtieth Regiment, New York Infantry, Company I, in Troy in 1861. He was the first man from the Black Woods to join a white regiment in defiance of the color law. Surely his father, an army man himself when he was a youth in Haiti, saluted his resolve.⁶

Appo’s officers would flag their confidence in this volunteer early on. Only five months after he mustered in, Appo was made corporal. His regiment engaged in twenty-six skirmishes and thirty battles. With the Army of the Potomac, it fought in the First Battle of Bull Run (also called Manassas) and other battles, and it returned to this old killing field with the Army of Virginia in late August 1862. The Second Battle of Bull Run was distinguished by a day of legendarily horrific carnage in an abandoned railroad cut corralled with weedy culverts, digs, and embankments, which gave Confederate general Thomas W. “Stonewall” Jackson all the breastworks and protection his men would need to seize the day. Sixty-two thousand Union troops fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run. A fifth of them, some fourteen thousand men, died in one day. In the Deep Cut, Corporal Appo joined his comrades in a mass grave. His remains were not recovered.⁷

Some years after the war, his father had a stone with his son’s name on it placed near his own marker in the Lake Placid cemetery, and much later, in the late twentieth century, a World War II veteran and retired schoolteacher in Lake Placid, Charles Thomas, honored this slain soldier’s marker with a Grand Army of the Republic star and a flag. But the flag and star would be removed in 2001 at the insistence of the town historian. Only graves or markers with bodies in the ground were entitled to these honors, she declared, and Appo’s body wasn’t buried. Never mind that there was no body. None that might have been identified had ever been recovered. Mary MacKenzie was unswayed.⁸

Not so Greg Furness, an Adirondack friend I shared this story with when I learned about it in the summer of 2022. Greg, his old job in state historic preservation well behind him, has spent a lot of time in his retirement in old Adirondack cemeteries, cleaning and repairing old graves, making sure Civil War veterans get their due. On Veterans Day 2022, a message with a picture showed up in my inbox. A small flag rising from its holder in a new-ordered GAR Civil War marker in back of William Appo’s stone looked right at home.⁹

Franklin’s Warren Morehouse was also keen to take up arms. And when New York’s Negrophobic governor, Horatio Seymour, failed to reward the interest of New York’s prospective Black volunteers, Morehouse, with 223 other Black New Yorkers, thought of Massachusetts, whose antislavery governor, John Andrew, put out a call for Black enlistees after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. A few months later, Lincoln signed the federal Enrollment Act, directing every congressional district in the Union to meet a soldiers’ quota, either by a draft or by voluntary enlistment. Compulsory conscription was never popular, North or South, and Union states hastened to expedite enlistment with bonuses and bounties. These were meaningful and timely boosts for poor men who could not leave dependents for three years unsupported. That six of the eight volunteers from the Black Woods enlisted after the passage of the Enrollment Act indicates they took their domestic obligations seriously. Now that their families were assured of some relief, they could leave them in good conscience. Morehouse headed east.¹⁰

At the railway depot in Boston that September in 1863, this Adirondacker, not a knuckle over five feet tall, told the recruiter for the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Colored Infantry that he was twenty-one. He was actually more like seventeen, but fudging birthdates was a venerable military tradition. Did the gray Atlantic, with its tang of brine and wheeling gulls, bedazzle him? Not half so much, I imagine, as the sight of Black enlistees rolling into Boston from as many as twenty-four states. Black men and boys from all over the East! In his Blackness, Morehouse now had company. Blackness, in his regiment, was for once not outside of things (not the young Black axman in William Sidney Mount’s painting, lingering outside a barn to eavesdrop on the white fiddlers sawing out a tune inside). Blackness was his world now. It had his back; it gave him standing, friends, and mentors. It made a home.¹¹

Morehouse’s years with the Fifty-Fourth also stretched his understanding of the hundred ways the enemies of Blackness schemed to break his body, soul, and heart. He expected a rough time from the rebels—but from his own side too? Not only did Black volunteers receive less pay than white soldiers (and had to buy their uniforms, as whites did not), but they could expect less expert medical attention, their hospitals were undermanned and insufficiently supplied, and they endured significantly higher rates of injury and death. They hoped for glory in the battlefield; instead they dug encampments and trenches for amputated limbs, tended horses, emptied latrines, heaved coal, cooked for their white officers, and brewed their tea. (The Ninety-Sixth New York Infantry, a northern New York regiment that organized in Plattsburgh, signed up seven “colored cooks”; Malone’s Ninety-Eighth Regiment Infantry had thirteen.)¹²

Also new for this backwoods youth: his first encounter with Black men from New York City, many of them still reeling from the draft riots that shocked Manhattan in mid-July. This four-day rampage, ostensibly a protest against President Lincoln’s call for compulsory conscription, left as many as 150 Black people dead. “Satan has been let loose in this city upon the poor negro,” a reporter wrote Gerrit Smith about this American pogrom. Rev. Henry Highland Garnet recalled rioters hacking Black bodies to bits and peddling “Nigger meat.” McCune Smith’s Colored Orphan Asylum was put to the torch, and he took his family and medical practice from Manhattan. Elder Ray shut his church down, and when the riot was subdued, he returned to the old neighborhoods to solace traumatized survivors with food and medicine. “None know excepting those who have witnessed it the extent of the suffering among them,” the minister despaired. Some of the New York recruits Morehouse met at the Camp Meigs training ground south of Boston were here as much to get out of Manhattan as to join the army. And what an irony that the first refugees Morehouse encountered in the service would not be contrabands down South but free Black men in flight from white rage in the North.¹³

Morehouse also learned from his new comrades about the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Colored’s harsh defeat that summer at Fort Wagner. Frederick Douglass’s eldest son, Sergeant Major Lewis H. Douglass, survived that battle (but later injuries would kill his military prospects). Outside Charleston, the Fifty-Fourth had led a charge of many regiments to retake Fort Wagner’s earthworks, but without cover or sufficient numbers, and immobilized by crossfire, the Black troops, Douglass reported, were simply “cut to pieces.” One witness saw the bodies of Black soldiers heaped so high a man could walk fifty yards across them and never touch the ground. Yet—here was the thing—no other regiment did so much damage to the rebels’ fortifications, or made such a lasting name for guts. Garlanded by Union editors and churchmen, the martyrs of the Fifty-Fourth Colored inspired thousands of Black hopefuls to enlist in the Black regiments. So, while devastating to the Fifty-Fourth, this regiment’s good work that day also signified a victory, a vindication of Frederick Douglass’s promise: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship.”¹⁴

Colonel Robert Shaw, the abolitionist Bostonian who headed up the Fifty-Fourth Colored, was killed and buried in a mass grave with his men. To Confederates who judged this a deserved insult, Shaw’s family would say their slain son would count an integrated grave the highest honor. And Morehouse may have deemed it an honor to join a regiment so renowned for its abolition leadership. He had been hearing about slavery and abolitionists—such as Gerrit Smith, his family’s benefactor, and Troy’s Garnet, who made his father one of his “Pick’d Men.” At dusk at the Readville parade ground, Boston’s abolitionists gathered on the sidelines, there to “take the greatest pleasure in watching the development of the negroes as soldiers,” join them at their evening prayer, and salute the new band’s “steady and daily improvement” in its one martial tune. So recalled the writer Henry Bowditch, whose family lived close by.¹⁵

But the more lasting memories would be what Morehouse witnessed in the South, and as he marched with his company into the South Carolina backcountry, the dry dust swimming up around his boots, the young private saw all he needed to know why he was here. Old men and children in feed sacks and string belts, shoeless, straggling out to greet him; cotton fields hazed with smoke; slave quarters the size of corn cribs next to fine pillared homes; and sometimes (recalled the regimental memoirist) the only sound “the tinkle, tinkle of pans and cups, striking the bayonets for music.” Most Black people here were welcoming, of course, but some, of course, still registered their incredulity. Black men in blue, eyes front, bearing arms. What cold new trickery was this?¹⁶

Private Morehouse’s war was long, and in the course of it some of Black America’s best allies would lose patience with the abolition course. In stumping for the Union, Gerrit Smith, the Black Woods’ benefactor and the bondsman’s long and faithful friend, now repeatedly declared the Union cause a greater passion, or at least priority, than his devotion to Black freedom. Well, the old man could speechify away. Morehouse fought for the slave—and, according to the regimental history, fought nervily and well. In Olustee, Florida, the Adirondacker, “chaf[ing]” for “aggressive action,” “crept out” to take aim at the enemy. At Boykin’s Mill (the last skirmish in South Carolina), Morehouse, walking point, spied “Johnnies” in a barn, intelligence that led his captain to change the plan of attack (and to note this private’s contribution in his memoir). Morehouse would be tapped to serve in his regimental hospital, a repeat assignment that spanned months. At notoriously short-staffed, undersupplied Colored Regimental Hospitals, the work was ceaseless, urgent, and demoralizing. Morehouse was unfazed. Before the war and after, Adirondack inns had hired him as a camp cook, waiter, and hunter; versatility was his gift. Toward the end of his service, the army made him a regimental marker. Quickness, confidence, precision—troops in formation relied on the “RM” as an orchestra looks to the conductor. Morehouse kept the lines straight, then turned them on a dime. When he mustered out in August 1865, he looked forward to a hundred-dollar bounty and, like his mates, had plans for every cent.¹⁷

From St. Armand, the farmer Charles Henry Hazzard enlisted with the Adirondack Regiment, the NY 118th, likely delighting the enlistment officer since Hazzard’s signature could help this village meet its quota. But higher-ups would catch the breach of army policy, and within a week this volunteer was redirected to the NY Twenty-Sixth US Colored. Just after Christmas in 1863, Hazzard mustered in at Rikers Island. His younger brother, Alexander, also hoped to serve, but left no military record and may have joined a home militia.¹⁸

Also headed for the Colored Twenty-Sixth: North Elba’s grantee-farmer William Carasaw and his younger neighbor Josiah Hasbrook, who, like Hazzard, was a grantee’s son. These two went to Clinton County to enlist, accompanied that day by the farmer Leonard Worts, long a Hasbrook family friend. Josiah’s older brother, Simeon, already living in Manhattan, had enlisted too. In the US Navy was no lower rank than landsman, but the pay was regular and the job was sure. Simeon served on a half-dozen navy vessels and a whaling bark before he quit the sea in 1870.¹⁹

From Plattsburgh, Black enlistees in the Twenty-Sixth Colored took the train to New York City to collect their guns and uniforms and start training at Rikers Island. Still in his civvies, a stony-faced Carasaw got his picture taken at the Cady Photo Gallery on Canal Street, close to the Union League Club. This powerful fraternity, staunchly pro-Lincoln and the Union cause, oversaw the recruitment, training, and provisioning of three Black New York regiments representing 4,125 men in 1863 and 1864. Gerrit Smith gave $3,000 to these regiments (to the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth he gave $500), and he and the philanthropist George H. Stearns bankrolled the whistle-stop recruiting tours of Douglass and the Albany reformer Stephen Myers for Black regiments in Boston and New York. Also working for the new regiments were some of Smith’s old land agents for the Black Woods. At Rikers Island, Reverend Garnet ministered to Black recruits (Gerrit Smith gave money for their medicine and nursing). Rev. Jermain Loguen lined up Black enlistees in central New York (a Binghamton militia, “Loguen’s Guards,” joined Black regiments as they were formed).²⁰

The Twenty-Sixth USCT never suffered the frontline casualties of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. In South Carolina, where Hasbrook’s Company B was engaged, the long humid days were occupied with the isolating work of manning forts and batteries (in Hasbrook’s case, near Hilton Head Island in the Port Royal Sound). The regiment was also charged with busting up Confederate-held rail lines, sallies that never came to much but let these soldiers test their guns at Honey Hill, Tullifinny Station (Devaux’s Neck), and McKay’s Point. Here, in the Carolina low country, disease would be the soldiers’ most malicious foe. Private Carasaw caught the “Southern fever,” which saddled him with asthma, bouts of fever, and a weak heart all his life. Prolonged exposure and malaria left Private Hazzard with recurring fevers, a bad kidney, and bouts of bloody urine. Chronic chills and disabling fevers, along with deafness from the measles, were the war-made, enduring lot of Private Hasbrook. Rheumatism plagued them all.²¹

Still, some interludes were joyful. In Beaufort, South Carolina, Hazzard wooed Julia Smith, an emancipated slave and the laundress of a Union officer. They were married by the regimental chaplain, Benjamin F. Randolph, in May 1865. Witnessing their vows were Julia’s daughter Clara, and Private Hasbrook from North Elba. Hazzard, Carasaw, and Hasbrook belonged to different companies, but in Beaufort they sought and found each other, and the home ties were a life saver. When Hasbrook was laid up with the measles, his old friends got him medicine, and when Carasaw, the oldest of the three, seemed too weak to muster out, his comrades saw to it that he got home alive.²²

Private Hazzard and his bride may have thought of staying south. Ex-slaves were starting up small farms on appropriated rebel land. The ex-slave Private Jeremiah Miles, a new friend of the Adirondackers, worked for hire on these reclaimed lots. In 1866, this army teamster raised cotton for a government “collector” at the Gabriel Capers plantation on St. Helena Island. At the outset, it looked promising. Yankee speculators and the Federals talked a good game about the collaborative role of wage labor in the postbellum plantation economy. But Black hands were often paid late and sometimes not paid at all, and those who farmed for themselves were learning how easily Yankee contractors could seize their land. Private Hazzard, used to running his own show, would have grasped what Black freed people were fighting in this postwar economy. Not only was the pay inequitable and the labor contracts ironclad, but the race hate of the old guard was as strong as ever. Some bosses working for the Yankees were the same overseers who had terrorized Black families under slavery. Many vanquished whites bridled at any bid for Black economic autonomy, and Black veterans from the North were particularly despised. Hazzard, Julia, his new stepdaughters Clara and Genevia, and the ex-slave Jeremiah Miles were wise to push on north. Forced evictions would eventually displace tens of thousands of Black homesteaders all over the South, forever shattering the emancipated slaves’ long dream of forty acres and a mule.²³

As for the chaplain who heard Charles and Julia’s vows, Benjamin Randolph remained in the South, working for the Freedmen’s Bureau, writing for a Black reform newspaper, and pushing for integrated public transportation. He was a delegate to a South Carolina Constitutional Convention. In Orangeburg County he ran for state senator and won; an “electioneering tour” followed. It was while on tour in Abbeville County, changing trains, that this Northern reformer was accosted by three white men brandishing pistols. Witnesses to the group assassination were many. Local rumor credited an ex-Confederate colonel with the idea. No arrests were made.²⁴

The same Christmas of 1863 that Charles Hazzard got to Rikers for his training, his North Elba neighbor, Silas Frazier, forty-three, enlisted in a white regiment, the Second New York Volunteer Cavalry then seeking Essex County volunteers. Not one of Smith’s “pick’d men” but a fellow traveler who bought thirty acres in the Black Woods from a grantee, then settled on another lot he liked better, this discriminating homesteader and his wife, Jane, came to North Elba from Newburgh on the Hudson. Childless and undistracted, they built their farm up fast. They kept pigs, sheep, cows, and oxen, raised hay, wheat, and rye, made butter for the market, and tapped enough maple sap to sell. Known in Westport as a “strong, healthy, able-bodied” fellow, Frazier also hired out. In Keene, onlookers at a turkey shoot recalled the day this “fighting man” of “mixed blood” took on “Riley Blood, a staunch Democrat and a hotelkeeper. Blood had no use for colored persons,” recalled John Brown’s son Salmon. Frazier knocked him flat. Army mates in the Second New York Cavalry described Frazier as “one of the strongest and most robust men in his Company,” the “perfect picture of health.”²⁵

That picture cracked for good a year after Frazier donned his blues. On a Louisiana wintry day in 1864, his company was canvassing the territory around Union-occupied Morganza, checking for rebel vigilantes at surrounding farms. When the horse ahead of Frazier’s stumbled and went down, Frazier swung off his horse and rushed to his army mate now pinned under his mount. Kicking wildly, the injured horse caught Frazier in the gut. The damage never healed. He quit the cavalry—he had to—and he never rode again. But he owed the Union two more years, and he was counting on that government pay. Frazier found work as a galley cook on a navy steamer, the Augusta Dinsmore, and then he picked up dysentery. This new blow disabled him completely, and he finally mustered out. Back in the Adirondacks, Private Frazier and his wife settled on a twenty-acre farm lot in Westport, which put him within reach of a physician and the kind of “choring around” he could manage. But the life of a frontiersman was a memory. Until his death in 1874, this veteran contended with unremitting pain.²⁶

The last of the eight from the Black Woods to take up arms for the Union were James and Samuel Brady. Neither were grantees. They found the Black Woods from New Jersey in the mid-1850s. All the gift lots were parceled out by the time they got to Franklin, and in any case, as out-of-staters, they did not qualify for Smith’s largesse. They didn’t care. What tugged them north was the bright thread of a rumor. Here was country, wild, still unmade, where Black people could homestead and white people would leave them be—an important asset here, since, as circumstantial evidence suggests, the Marylanders James Brady; his wife, Louisa; her son, Samuel, by a previous marriage; Louisa’s father, Josiah Bunion; and a young friend or relative of this family, Mary Elizabeth Bailey from Delaware, were fugitives.²⁷

Were the Black Woods what they hoped for? So many Black families had given up. But from those who’d stayed and their white neighbors they found work and a welcome. By 1860, James and Louisa Brady and Mary Bailey occupied a cabin near the home of the grantee Wesley Murray and his young family. Samuel Brady, Louisa’s teenage son, was a hired hand living in the home of a white family nearby. Old Josiah Bunion bunked with George Holland, a young grantee from Westchester. John Thomas, originally from Maryland, and his wife and two daughters were farming in this neighborhood (a hard year for this family, marking the death of Richard, just sixteen). Fifteen Black people lived in this small rurality in 1860. And of the nine who hailed from the South (and likely formerly enslaved), four were farming land they called their own.²⁸

James Brady joined the 118th Regiment, NY Infantry, Company C, in June 1862, fourteen months after the war began. Not so his young stepson Samuel, whose mother, Louisa, needed help on the farm. As the army beefed up incentives to enlist, however, Samuel reconsidered. From 1863 to 1864, the Franklin County budget shot up 500 percent (a reflection of this county’s determination to offer bounties that might stave off the need to launch a dreaded draft). If Samuel joined the 118th and collected every available bounty from town, county, and state, he might make as much as $800, a sum that in 1863 held a present-day value of $27,000. The Brady patch was not the meanest farm around (in 1860, the farm was worth $450, which to the newly arrived Quebecois and out-of-steerage Irish may have seemed a fortune), but like all poor farmers, the Bradys needed cash. This war dividend could keep Samuel’s mother on the farm while he and James were in the service, and if Samuel went for the 118th, he and his stepfather might even reunite.²⁹

Samuel gave his bounty to a trusted neighbor to make sure his mother’s needs were met, and headed to the 118th’s training camp in Elmira. A few weeks after, he made his report (spelling and punctuation corrected): “Dear Mother, I now [seat] myself to inform you—that I am well and hope that my few lines will find you the same. Well, Mother, I begin to know what a soldier life is. It is no play. But there is one thing I can say and tell the truth. That is this. That I aint drink anything stronger than [soda] since I left Platt[sburgh], nor none of the boys.” She kept this letter all her life.³⁰

Two months after he enlisted, “per order” of the War Department, Private Brady was “unassigned” from the white regiment and redirected to the Twentieth Regiment, US Colored Troops, Company A. And he might have counted it a blessing if he’d never set foot in Elmira, so bitter was the difference between the white camp and what Rikers Island held in store. At the training camp in New York Harbor, Black soldiers dealt with shortages of tents, camp stoves, bedding, and winter clothes. Dysentery, frostbite, and pneumonia were epidemic. One recruit’s legs froze solid; a surgeon sawed them off. That at least there was a surgeon and a place for him to operate was probably the doing of Reverend Garnet’s volunteer parishioners, who built a camp kitchen and a makeshift hospital at Rikers when the army failed to bother.³¹

Bounty fraud, another pestilence, also stalked the Black trainees. Illiteracy made hundreds of enlistees vulnerable to the fast talk and practiced hustle of city swindlers. And here, as everywhere, a rising grievance for the Black enlistees was the absence of commissioned officers of color. With few exceptions (Hazzard’s chaplain, Benjamin Randolph, was one), officers in the Colored Troops were white, and not all of them were concerned with equal rights and the antislavery cause. Many, in fact, resented the assignment and trained their men indifferently, subjected them to heavy discipline, and court-martialed Black recruits when they pushed for equal pay. But in early March 1864, when Brady and the newly formed Twentieth USCT marched from Rikers Island to Manhattan and down Fifth Avenue, these injuries were not yet felt. If two years earlier, the city’s mayor said he hoped New York would leave the Union, and nine months earlier, the worst race riot in the nation’s history lashed Manhattan like a whip, this day belonged to President Lincoln. Onlookers packed the balconies and treetops. A cloud of waving handkerchiefs made the spring air jump. On the long avenue below the lushly garlanded Union League Club, Private Brady stood stock-still in his white dress gloves and woolly blues while the president of Columbia College assured him that “when you put on the uniform and swear allegiance to the standard of the Union, you stand emancipated, regenerated, and disenthralled; the peer of the proudest soldier in the land.” All the way to the Hudson River piers, the 1,300 men of the Twentieth were buoyed by the “cheers and tears of those who felt the significance of the spectacle.” “Everywhere,” exulted Harper’s Weekly, “the soldiers were greeted as a great city ought to greet its defenders, and as it has saluted every departing regiment since the Seventh marched on the 19th of April, three years ago.”³²

That proud send-off for the Twentieth would be a cherished memory for the recruits. New Orleans, where they were headed, was an ordeal. They did not fight (they were never favored with a chance), but the fronts of this long war assumed unexpected guises. “More lethal than Confederate bullets or shells,” observes the war historian William Seraile, was the sodden air that sang with malarial mosquitoes: of the 1,325 men in the Twentieth’s regimental descriptive book, one died of war wounds and 263 (one in six) succumbed to illness. And darkening this buggy fug was the toxic Negrophobia. A train ride in New Orleans put Regimental Chaplain George LeVere in mind “of going through an Irish ward in New York; you can see the serpents looking through the window blinds, hissing like the adder, and their young ones along the street hallooing, ‘nigger, nigger.’ ” Nor were the soldiers’ spirits helped by late wages and thin rations, the latter sometimes as little as a scoop of corn mush and molasses. Diarrhea felled them, and for this, there was no help. Dysentery was the most rapacious killer of them all.³³

Fortune did not favor the young soldier from Vermontville. Black soldiers dispatched to segregated army hospitals faced a one-in-three chance of dying. Not a year into his term, Samuel Brady, “farmer,” died of dysentery near New Orleans in the for-Blacks-only Corps d’Afrique military hospital 1,500 miles from his Adirondack home. Over half of the twelve thousand Civil War troops in Chalmette National Cemetery outside New Orleans are unidentified, their headstones marked by numbers. At least Private Brady’s bears his name.³⁴

Very different was the Civil War of Sam Brady’s stepfather. Inspired, maybe, by the ease of his assimilation in his all-white Adirondack 118th, James Brady rejiggered his biography from stem to stern. During the war, he did not keep up with Samuel’s mother or send her money, as an appeal from a worried neighbor suggests. “Please accept these few lines from a friend,” Franklin’s Sara Muzzie urged in February 1865. Herself the mother of a prisoner of war in Richmond, Mrs. Muzzie gave news of Brady’s wife: “Her health is very poor & everything is in a very bad condition. She is not able to sit up more than one-half of the time.” Could James not get a furlough? The snow was very deep that winter, and “your wife has no-one to do her chores for her… . She said she would soon be out of wood.” There was no more to say. “Come home if you can.”³⁵

Private Brady kept this letter; it was in his last effects. But it wouldn’t bring him home. He had been admitted to a very privileged fraternity. Could he hope for preferential treatment afterward? Claim the perquisites of whiteness back in Franklin with his Black wife? To leverage his provisional enrollment in a white world into full-bore acceptance, Brady chose to leave the Black Woods entirely. The chance to reinvent himself would not come again; the rupture had to be complete. So he did not seek a furlough, and when he was discharged in Plattsburgh in June 1865, he headed to Malone, the Franklin County seat. There he met a war widow, Adeline Spinner, white, Catholic, and very young. Brady, too, became a Catholic and joined Adeline’s Notre Dame Church. They married, raised a family, and worked a modest farm outside Malone. It seems James’s first marriage to Louisa, the older wife, posed no impediment (if they were enslaved when they met, their marriage may not have been legalized). James and Adeline’s descendants, all white in the census, were raised unaware of Brady’s Black identity, his Black family, or his link to the Smith Lands.³⁶

In the 1990s, a Brady family genealogist happened on James Brady’s service record in the Civil War. “I never could get [my parents] to talk much about my great-grandfather, James Brady,” Susann Hoskins wrote me from Binghamton, New York. “The more I asked, the more I knew something was out of sorts.” James Brady of family legend was Irish, but when she got hold of his pension papers, she learned her ancestor was biracial. (“Bingo!”) Census records led Hoskins to Brady’s first wife, Louisa (unmentioned in his 1890 appeal for a pension), and to his antebellum farming years in Vermontville. Hoskins was intrigued to learn that her Maryland forebear may have been a fugitive, but the revelation of his first marriage, the Black partner he jilted for the new bride in Malone, and the sad death of his unremembered stepson, Samuel, was unsettling. This ancestor, she mused, was one “wily kind of guy.”³⁷