By D. Kent Fonner
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in November 2024.
Much has been written about the history of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, and the brave men of that regiment were celebrated in the movie Glory. There were, however, thousands of more Black soldiers in Mr. Lincoln’s army, most serving in a segregated branch of the U.S. Army designated as the United States Colored Troops (USCT).
Emanuel Patterson, a mulatto child from southwestern Pennsylvania, was nine years old when the census was taken in Wayne Township, Greene County, Pennsylvania, in 1850. At that time, the boy lived with his parents, Joseph and Mary Patterson, his younger brother, Taylor, and a 76 year old woman named Nancy Perrill. It is not clear who Nancy was, but in 1858 Emanual married an Elizabeth Perrill. The young couple had one child, Nancy Patterson, born five years later, June 3, 1863. That same summer, Emanuel Patterson was drafted into the army and reported to New Brighton, Pennsylvania, to be mustered into service. The U.S. Provost Marshal for the 24th District of the state, Captain John Cuthbertson, performed the formalities. Patterson then became a soldier, about six weeks after his daughter’s birth, on July 16, 1863. He was enlisted for service in Company D, 6th USCT and sent to Camp William Penn near Philadelphia to join the regiment for organization and training.
At Camp William Penn, the newly minted Private Patterson met his captain, John McMurray, a White officer formerly a member of the 135th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. As the men became acquainted with each other in Company D that summer, no one could predict that the infantrymen in the unit would see hard service in 1864 and, one day in late September that year, suffer 87% casualties.
The 6th USCT was transferred to Fort Monroe, Virginia, in the fall of 1863. That winter they participated in raids into northeastern Norh Carolina. As spring arrived, the 6th USCT served on raids into eastern Virginia, gathering supplies and freeing slaves along the march. As part of General Ben Butler’s Army of the James, the regiment helped capture City Point, Virginia. As part of General Edward Hink’s Black infantry division, Patterson and the 6th USCT faced a most difficult task, June 15, 1864, as part of the first assault against Petersburg, Virginia. The division suffered heavy casualties while capturing five forts and several artillery pieces at Baylor’s farm and along the Dimmick Line. Patterson made the assaults that day with his company and apparently escaped unharmed.
In August and most of September, Patterson and the 6th USCT were on labor duty building General Butler’s Dutch Gap Canal to try to bypass Confederate gun emplacements. On September 28, 1864, the regiment received orders to join an expedition against Confederate defensive works along New Market Road, just north of the Union-occupied Deep Bottom Landing on the James River. Captain McMurray, commanding Company D, remembered that on September 29, the regiment was on the march before sunrise headed for New Market Heights, Virginia.
In his memoir of the battle, Captain McMurray remembered that on September 28, 1864, while the men were still at Dutch Gap, Patterson told him he was sick and asked to be relieved from duty. The next day, Patterson again approached McMurray and complained of illness. However, when Captain McMurray took Patterson to the regimental surgeon to have him excused from duty, the surgeon declared him fit. Patterson joined the ranks and marched toward the Confederate works. McMurray next saw Patterson in the thick of the fighting at New Market Heights.
Fifty years later, Captain McMurray vividly remembered that as he was passing through the slashing of the entrenchments, he saw Patterson. He had been shot in the abdomen, and his bowels were all gushing out, “forming a mass larger than my hat.” The poor wounded man was clasping at his intestines, trying to keep them from spilling on the ground at his feet. “Then and a hundred times since,” wrote McMurray, “I wish I had taken the responsibility of saying to him that he could remain in the rear.”
The assault was eventually successful, forcing the Confederates to abandon their earthworks. Dead and wounded Black soldiers, though, littered the field. The 6th USCT was decimated. Of 30 men who made the assault in Company D, Captain McMurray only counted himself and three other men as the only ones not killed, wounded, or missing. The company, in less than three hours, had suffered an 87% casualty rate. Eleven men, including Emanual Patterson, were dead, representing a third of Company D’s strength at the beginning of the assault.
Emanual Patterson and his little family seemingly disappeared from the records after the war. Elizabeth Patterson remarried, but a few years later her daughter, Nancy, was collecting a war orphan’s pension while residing with a different family. Nancy also then disappeared from the records. When Veterans Day arrives and the nation’s veterans are remembered and honored, please take a few minutes to think about Emanual Patterson, Company D, 6th USCT, and the countless others like him who gave their lives for the United States of America, but have no known descendants to remember them.
References (Click on the book titles on this page to purchase from Amazon. Part of the proceeds from any book purchased from Amazon through the CCWRT website is returned to the CCWRT to support its education and preservation programs.)
D. Kent Fonner, Intimidating the Disaffected: Resisting Rebels, Deserters, and Copperheads in Greene County, Pennsylvania, 1861-1865 (Independently Published: Westlake, OH 2022), pp. 9-12.
Tim Talbott, Fallen but Not Forgotten: Pvt. Emanuel Patterson, Co. D, 6th United States Colored Infantry, Emerging Civil War website.
Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865 (Castle Books: Edison, NJ 2002), pp. 284-294.