His is the voice of black soldiers

The journalistic career of Thomas Morris Chester started off with a bang — a really big bang. On Aug. 9, 1864, Chester stood about a mile from the James River wharves at City Point, Va., watching thick, acrid smoke and sheets of fire erupt into the noonday sky. Chester was there as a war correspondent; the only black correspondent accredited to a daily Northern newspaper to cover the campaigns of any Union army during the Civil War.

His vivid description of the earth-shattering explosion and the horrific devastation visited on the vast Union supply depot by a Confederate “torpedo” planted on an ammunition barge was the first of a series of insightful reports Chester sent back to his editors at the Philadelphia Press.

From August 1864 to June 1865, Chester, writing under the pen name “Rollin,” was “embedded” with the Army of the James. What he saw and wrote about for those 10 months provides a unique insight into the lives of black soldiers serving the Union in Virginia and opens a window into the personal beliefs of a very unusual man.

Chester wrote about the battlefield accomplishments and the daily routines of camp life experienced by the black soldiers serving in the Army of the James because it had more regiments of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) than any other Union army. He gathered his information by living the way the troops lived, witnessing firsthand the dangers and the boredom they faced every day.

Chester was born in Harrisburg, Pa., on May 11, 1834. His father owned a prosperous restaurant known for its good food and for being the city’s center of abolitionist sentiment. It was the only place in town selling William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator. At age 16, Chester left home to attend the Allegheny Institute, a new school near Pittsburgh set up by the philanthropist William Avery to provide “colored Americans” with the fundamentals of a college education.

An extremely intelligent young man, Chester was soon learning more outside the classroom than inside the lecture hall. He became deeply involved with the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to resettling blacks in Africa. He also became acquainted with an emerging nationalist emigrationist movement that urged blacks to establish a homeland outside the United States. This movement, led by Martin R. Delany, Pittsburgh’s most prominent black man, included a philosophy advocating citizenship for black people and promoting racial pride.

In April 1853, Chester decided to immigrate to Africa to attend school in Monrovia, Liberia. During the next 10 years, he traveled frequently between Africa and the United States, lived and worked in Liberia, returned to America to continue his education, and toured extensively throughout Europe. He became a polished orator, regularly giving speeches to raise money for a variety of organizations helping blacks emigrate from the United States to Africa. Chester returned to the United States in spring 1864, this time to stay.

The reasons why John Russell Young, editor and former war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press, offered the 30-year-old Chester a job are not clear. A biographer of Chester suggests that the symbolism of having the only black war correspondent would bring political benefits to the newspaper. Its publisher, John W. Forney, had supported the Democratic Party until his frustration with the policies of President James Buchanan led him to switch to the fledgling Republicans.

However, none of the Northern daily newspapers paid any attention to the growing importance of black troops in furthering the Union cause. Forney probably hoped to increase circulation of his paper at Camp William Penn. Located just outside Philadelphia, it was the largest camp for mustering and training black regiments in the North.

Many of these regiments eventually joined the Army of the James encamped near Williamsburg. Positive stories about black troops helping to win the war might spur recruitment for the Union forces increasingly depleted by the bloody campaign waged by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia.

That Chester briefly edited a newspaper in Liberia and knew shorthand also may have helped him secure the job. Whatever the reason, Chester’s dispatches from the Virginia front gave the Press an exclusive market among literate blacks and empathetic whites in Philadelphia and throughout the North.

Once he arrived in Virginia, Chester quickly adopted a style that differed from most of his white colleagues. He generally left the reporting of factual information about battles to his competitors. His keen eye for detail allowed Chester to look for a story behind the events and put a human face, a black face, on the dangers and routine occurrences that filled the lives of the soldiers entrenched around the Confederate defenses of Richmond and Petersburg.

Nor was Chester an unbiased observer. He regularly reassured his readers that the Union would inevitably win the war, an especially important point of view in the months preceding the November 1864 election. In almost every dispatch, he emphasized the accomplishments of black troopers and often included the names of those killed and wounded in the fighting. He praised white officers who respected and ably led black soldiers and chided those who didn’t.

By Sept. 1, Chester reported himself “very pleasantly situated on the north bank of the James, about 10 miles from Richmond.” From there, he witnessed the fifth and last offensive mounted by Gen. Grant against the Confederate capital. The offensive, conducted by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s Army of the James on Sept. 29, relied heavily on regiments of USCT to storm the Confederate defenses at New Market Heights.

New Market Heights is recognized as a watershed for the use of black soldiers in combat on the Virginia front. Even though the tactics of the battle were terribly flawed, the two brigades of black troops commanded by Cols. Samuel Duncan and Alonzo Draper fought valiantly and suffered grievously before gaining their assigned objective.

White correspondents on the scene generally praised the bravery shown by the black troops. It was left to Chester, however, to conclude that the victory at New Market Heights “wiped out effectively the imputation against the fighting qualities of colored troops.” A week later, he reiterated, “Let us be thankful that we have colored troops that will fight, and white officers, and colored ones, too, who can successfully command them to deeds of daring.”

Not all of Chester’s dispatches were about battles. Much of Army life consisted of routine daily tasks. This was especially true during the winter months, when campaigning was usually reduced to a minimum. But editors at the Press expected copy from their correspondent even if the army wasn’t doing any fighting. So Chester wrote about the monotony of camp life with words that sang of quiet determination and stoic strength of the men in the trenches.

On Feb. 9, 1865, he wrote: “Days pass into night, and nights into mornings, with nothing more exciting than the unvarying monotony of military routine. … But all is as quiet as if the angel of peace had paralyzed the confronting armies.”

When Union forces rolled into Richmond on April 3, Chester went with them. He reminded his readers of the irony in having black regiments be the first to march into the Confederate capital. There was fierce competition among Union regiments in the Army of the James to be the first into Richmond.

Chester’s dispatch, written on April 4 while he sat in the speaker’s chair in the Confederate Congress, emphatically stated, “Brevet Brigadier General Draper’s brigade of colored troops, Brevet Major General Kautz’s division, were the first infantry to enter Richmond. The gallant 36th U.S. Colored Troops, under Lieutenant Colonel B.F. Pratt, has the honor of being the first regiment.”

Occupied Richmond presented Chester with a case study for how a city with a large black population might prosper and grow once freed from its bonds of slavery. As a black man imbued with racial pride, Chester joyfully discovered that Richmond’s black community retained a vibrant self-image and social cohesiveness and, in spite of its legacy of bondage, “they all declare that they are abundantly able to take care of themselves.”

Throughout the spring of 1865, Chester regaled his readers with stories about rebuilding the city after its devastating fire, feeding thousands of hungry poor people, reviving business activities, and opening schools for black children. He observed the quietly dignified return of Gen. Robert E. Lee to his Richmond home and the profound sadness that came over blacks and many whites at the news of Lincoln’s assassination.

Chester truly believed that the frequently strained relationships among Union occupiers, white secessionists and suddenly emancipated blacks that prevailed in early April was growing, albeit slowly, into an uneasy, but mostly respectful, civil society.

Unfortunately, things weren’t as cordial as Chester intimated. The necessities of administering a city and rebuilding its infrastructure forced the Union occupying forces to turn to former Confederate civil servants and businessmen who continued to harbor secessionist sympathies, even though they had taken the Oath of Allegiance.

The early stages of Reconstruction in Richmond mirrored the problems that would confront the Union Army and civilian administrators across the South. While Chester hailed the appointment of Francis H. Pierpont as governor, he saw the reappointment of Joseph Mayo as Richmond’s mayor as “very little less than a crime.”

A town meeting of Richmond’s blacks organized a committee of 10, including Chester, to take a list of grievances to Washington. In June 1865, they met with Gen. Oliver O. Howard, who was in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He promised to look into the situation in Richmond.

After the meetings in Washington, Chester decided to go to Harrisburg rather than return to Richmond. The reasons behind this abrupt decision are lost to history, but Thomas Morris Chester never returned to Richmond. His brief career as a chronicler of the critical contributions made by black soldiers in Virginia in bringing victory to the Union was also at an end.

Gordon Berg is president of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia.