# 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (1863–1865) The **54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry** was the North's first Black regiment raised in a free state under formal federal authorization, and the one the Union deliberately made into a test case. It is remembered almost entirely for a defeat — the [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] on July 18, 1863 — but the regiment's more durable contribution to the KB's subject matter is what it did *off* the battlefield: an **eighteen-month refusal to accept discriminatory pay**, conducted in uniform, in the field, under fire, which is one of the earliest sustained civil-rights actions inside an American institution. ## Authorization and Recruitment Nine days after the [[Emancipation Proclamation]] authorized Black military service, **Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton instructed Governor John Albion Andrew, on January 26, 1863**, to raise a regiment of "persons of African descent." Andrew, an abolitionist governor with an abolitionist agenda for the war, understood exactly what he had been handed: a demonstration project whose failure would be used as proof and whose success would be difficult to explain away. Massachusetts did not have a Black population large enough to fill a regiment, so recruiting ran nationally through the abolitionist network. **[[Frederick Douglass]]** was among the principal recruiters — his "Men of Color, To Arms!" broadside was written for this campaign — alongside Martin Robison Delany, Wendell Phillips, Edward L. Pierce, and George E. Stephens; Andrew commissioned roughly a hundred recruiters in all. Douglass's own sons **Lewis and Charles Douglass** enlisted, which was not incidental: the movement's most prominent family put its children into the ranks it was asking others to fill. > [!info] Not a USCT regiment > The 54th is one of only **four** Black regiments that kept their state designations and were never renumbered into the [[United States Colored Troops]] sequence — the others being the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, and the 29th Connecticut Infantry. Reference works routinely file the 54th and its Medal of Honor recipient under "USCT" anyway. Use "Black Union soldiers" as the umbrella term. Andrew stipulated that the officers be white — a concession to War Department policy and Northern opinion that the regiment's own men would spend the war working against. - **Mustered in:** May 13, 1863, at Camp Meigs, Readville - **Departed Boston:** May 28, 1863, marching through cheering crowds down Beacon Street past the State House - **Strength:** roughly 1,000 men at departure ## Officers | Officer | Role | |---|---| | [[Robert Gould Shaw]] | Colonel; accepted command February 1863, killed at Fort Wagner July 18, 1863 | | Norwood Penrose "Pen" Hallowell | Lieutenant Colonel; later commanded the 55th Massachusetts | | Edward Needles Hallowell | Succeeded Shaw as Colonel; commanded through 1865 | | Stephen A. Swails | Sergeant, later commissioned — the first African American commissioned as an officer in a U.S. combat regiment, over sustained War Department resistance | ## Combat Record | Date | Engagement | Notes | |---|---|---| | July 16, 1863 | Grimball's Landing, James Island, SC | ~45 casualties; the regiment's first action, covering a white regiment's withdrawal | | July 18, 1863 | [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] | Led the assault; Shaw killed; roughly 270–281 casualties out of ~600–624 engaged | | February 20, 1864 | Olustee, FL | ~87 casualties; the 54th fought the rearguard covering a broken Union retreat | | November 30, 1864 | Honey Hill, SC | Failed assault on entrenched positions | | April 18, 1865 | Boykin's Mill, SC | Among the last engagements of the war | The regiment mustered out in **August 1865**. ## The Pay Strike This is the part of the record that gets lost behind Fort Wagner, and it is the part with the longest reach. The men of the 54th enlisted on the understanding that they would be paid as soldiers: **$13 per month**, the white private's rate, with no deduction for clothing. The War Department instead paid them under the **Militia Act of 1862**, which set compensation for Black men in federal service at **$10 per month with $3 withheld for clothing — a take-home of $7**, barely half the white rate, and structured to classify them as laborers rather than soldiers. The regiment's response was collective and total: **it refused all pay.** Not reduced pay under protest — no pay at all, for **eighteen months**, on the position that accepting the differential would ratify the classification. The Massachusetts legislature offered to make up the difference from state funds; the regiment refused that too, because a state supplement would have left the federal government's classification intact. The point was never the money. The cost was borne by families. Soldiers' wives and children went without support for a year and a half while the men held the line on a principle. The risk was not theoretical: **Sergeant William Walker of the 3rd South Carolina Volunteers was convicted of mutiny on January 9, 1864 and executed by firing squad that February** for leading his company to stack arms over the same grievance, having declared he "would not do duty any longer for seven dollars per month." He was one of nineteen Union soldiers executed for mutiny during the war, fourteen of them Black. **Congress equalized pay in the summer of 1864**, retroactive to enlistment — but only for soldiers who had been free before **April 19, 1861**, a clause that would have excluded formerly enslaved men from the settlement. Colonel Edward Hallowell answered it with what became known as the **"Quaker oath,"** a reworded attestation that a man owed no service to any man on that date — technically true of anyone whose claimed owner had no lawful claim, and constructed precisely so the regiment could swear it as a body. Back pay followed that autumn. > [!note] Dates to handle carefully > Sources disagree on the specifics. The equalizing provision is usually cited to the Army Appropriations Act of **June 16, 1864**; the Commonwealth of Massachusetts's own exhibit dates the legislation to **July 1864**. Payment of the 54th is given as **September 28, 1864** in some accounts and **October 1864** in others. The eighteen-month span of the boycott is not in dispute. The pay strike is the regiment's clearest through-line into the KB's core material. It is a claim to **equal citizenship advanced through the strongest available lever** — you cannot easily call a man a laborer while he is holding a rifle for you — and it prefigures the argument structure of the [[Reconstruction Amendments]]: rights are not petitioned for on moral grounds alone, they are extracted at the point where the state's dependence is greatest. The subsequent nullification of those amendments, catalogued in [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]], is the other half of the pattern. ## Why It Matters for the KB **It documents Black agency in the war in a form the Lost Cause cannot metabolize.** [[The Lost Cause]] depends on Black Americans appearing in the war as objects — freed by others, loyal to former enslavers, absent from the fighting. A regiment that had to lobby for the right to enlist, then fought, then struck over pay, then won, is a different kind of historical actor entirely. The "Black Confederate" claim promoted through neo-Confederate heritage organizations is best read as an attempt to manufacture a counterweight to exactly this record. **It is the origin of the Black-veteran-as-threat dynamic.** The Black soldier who returns from war expecting the citizenship his service should have purchased is a recurring figure in American reactionary politics — and a recurring target. The line runs from the 54th through the Reconstruction-era militias, to the Red Summer of 1919 and the lynching of returning Black veterans in uniform, to the Black WWII veterans who seeded the [[Civil Rights Movement]]. The reaction is consistent because the claim is: a man who has fought for the state has an argument the state finds hard to answer. **It shows the demonstration-project trap.** The 54th was raised to prove something, which meant it was assigned missions selected partly for their visibility rather than their soundness — Fort Wagner most obviously. Being made to carry the burden of proof for an entire class of people is itself a form of discrimination, and it recurs throughout the KB's material on tokenized "firsts." ## See Also - [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] — The assault of July 18, 1863 - [[Robert Gould Shaw]] — The regiment's first colonel - [[William Harvey Carney]] — Sergeant, color bearer, Medal of Honor - [[Frederick Douglass]] — Principal recruiter; two sons served in the ranks - [[Fort Pillow Massacre]] — What the Confederacy did to captured Black soldiers - [[Abolition Movement]] — The political network that raised the regiment - [[Reconstruction Amendments]] — The constitutional claim the pay strike prefigured - [[United States Colored Troops]] — The federal force the 54th was deliberately not folded into - [[Shaw Memorial]] — The 1897 bronze on Boston Common - [[Glory (film)]] — The 1989 film that made this regiment nationally known