Nineteenth Century Freedom Fighters: The 1st South Carolina Volunteers

By Bennie J. McRae Jr., Curtis M. Miller and Cheryl Trowbridge-Miller
Illustrated, bibliography, softcover, 128 pp., 2006. Arcadia Publishing, 420 Wando Park Blvd., Mount Pleasant, SC 29464, $19.99 plus shipping.

Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington
C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard.

Review:
Nineteenth Century Freedom Fighters: The 1st South Carolina Volunteers combines a highly abbreviated regimental history with a collection of mostly unrelated Civil War-era photographs and a thumbnail biography of the regiment's white lieutenant colonel, Charles Trowbridge, augmented by Trowbridge's memoir of the regiment's postwar service in South Carolina in support of the Freedman's Bureau.

The result is a disjointed little book that, in the opinion of this reviewer, sheds little new light on either the narrative or the photographic history of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first African-American regiment in the Union Army.

Perhaps the high point of this book is the authors' account of Maj. Gen. David Hunter's formation of the regiment in the spring of 1862, in open defiance of Union army prohibitions on the regular enlistment of African Americans.

(Too impatient to wait for volunteers to fill up the regiment, Hunter resorted to impressing into the ranks many reluctant ex-slaves living in Union-occupied coastal South Carolina, a fact not mentioned in Nineteenth Century Freedom Fighters.)

Not amused by Hunter's provocative initiative, Washington ordered the regiment disbanded within a few months of its formation. A short while later, the War Department did an about-face, permitting the regiment to be re-formed, this time under the direct command of Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Early in 1864, the regiment was redesignated as the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops. Apart from a single battle in South Carolina late in the war, Nineteenth Century Freedom Fighters provides only the sketchiest account of the service record of the regiment, and, apart from Trowbridge, the officers and men who made up the regiment go largely unmentioned.

The book features more than 30 period photographs, but only two depict men who actually served in the 1st South Carolina. The captions of several of these photographs are inapt.

For instance, Sherman's army is credited with destroying the railroad depot in Charleston when, in fact, Sherman bypassed that city in his march through the Carolinas and the deed resulted from an accidental ignition of a powder magazine by children at play.

To sum up, readers interested in the history of the Union's initial black regiment or the broader topic of African-American military service in the Civil War will find Nineteenth Century Freedom Fighters wanting on both accounts.