Throughout the country the behavior of the black men under fire was watched with the most intense interest.  More and more in the baptism of blood they justified the faith for which their friends had fought for years.  At Port Hudson, Fort Wagner, Fort Pillow, and Petersburg their courage was most distinguished.  Said the New York Times of the battle at Port Hudson (1863):  “General Dwight, at least, must have had the idea not only that they (the Negro troops) were men, but something more than men, from the terrific test to which he put their valor....  Their colors are torn to pieces by shot, and literally bespattered by blood and brains.”  This was the occasion on which Color-Sergeant Anselmas Planciancois said before a shell blew off his head, “Colonel, I will bring back these colors to you on honor, or report to God the reason why.”  On June 6 the Negroes again distinguished themselves and won friends by their bravery at Milliken’s Bend.  The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, commanded by Robert Gould Shaw, was conspicuous in the attempt to take Fort Wagner, on Morris Island near Charleston, July 18, 1863.  The regiment had marched two days and two nights through swamps and drenching rains in order to be in time for the assault.  In the engagement nearly all the officers of the regiment were killed, among them Colonel Shaw.  The picturesque deed was that of Sergeant William H. Carney, who seized the regiment’s colors from the hands of a falling comrade, planted the flag on the works, and said when borne bleeding and mangled from the field, “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground.”  Fort Pillow, a position on the Mississippi, about fifty miles above Memphis, was garrisoned by 557 men, 262 of whom were Negroes, when it was attacked April 13, 1864.  The fort was finally taken by the Confederates, but the feature of the engagement was the stubborn resistance offered by the Union troops in the face of great odds.  In the Mississippi Valley, and in the Department of the South, the Negro had now done excellent work as a soldier.  In the spring of 1864 he made his appearance in the Army of the Potomac.  In July there was around Richmond and Petersburg considerable skirmishing between the Federal and the Confederate forces.  Burnside, commanding a corps composed partly of Negroes, dug under a Confederate fort a trench a hundred and fifty yards long.  This was filled with explosives, and on July 30 the match was applied and the famous crater formed.  Just before the explosion the Negroes had figured in a gallant charge on the Confederates.  The plan was to follow the eruption by a still more formidable assault, in which Burnside wanted to give his Negro troops the lead.  A dispute about this and a settlement by lot resulted in the awarding of precedence to a New Hampshire regiment.  Said General Grant later of the whole unfortunate episode:  “General Burnside wanted to put his colored division in front; I believe if he had done so it would have been a success.”  After the men of a Negro regiment had charged and taken a battery at Decatur, Ala., in October, 1864, and shown exceptional gallantry under fire, they received an ovation from their white comrades “who by thousands sprang upon the parapets and cheered the regiment as it reentered the lines."[1]