James Robbins Jewell is a professor of history at North Idaho College. He is the author of Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest during the Civil War (Nebraska, 2023) and the editor of On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War: Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment. Eugene S. Van Sickle is a professor of history at the University of North Georgia. Their newest edited collection, Waging War for Freedom with the 54th Massachusetts: The Civil War Memoir of John W. M. Appleton (Potomac Books, 2025) was published in April.

Late in 1862, amid the horrors of the U.S. Civil War, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, with President Lincoln’s approval, authorized the recruitment of Black soldiers for the Union cause. In January of 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was born. On February 7, 1863, Massachusetts governor John Andrew commissioned Boston-bred John W. M. Appleton the first of the white officers in the most famous Civil War regiment of Black soldiers. Appleton immediately began recruiting enlisted soldiers for the company he would command, Company A.

Waging War for Freedom with the 54th Massachusetts is a fresh look at the service of this famed regiment as told through Appleton’s memoir—the most complete first-person account available about the service of the men in the 54th Massachusetts regiment. Taking Appleton’s memoir as their foundation, the editors thoroughly contextualize the service of the 54th through its disbanding in 1865, providing a fresh perspective on the men and the regiment as they fought to abolish slavery in the United States.

Introduction

The Fallacy That the War Was Not Waged for Freedom

In the midst of a floundering attack on Ft. Wagner the night of July 18, 1863, Capt. John W. M. Appleton, Company A, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, observed that “all down the exterior slope, as well as on the top, lay the bodies of our men and behind us in the water of the moat, the poor fellows bodies lay like stepping stones.” Huddled against the sand walls, the remnants of several companies, roughly fifty men, clustered around him in the darkness, unable to take the fort yet unwilling to fall back. Hopelessly pinned in their position, the men “commenced firing at every rebel who showed himself,” until their weapons fouled with sand. Looking to his right, Appleton noticed that scattered members from other regiments had breached enemy defenses and were engaged in close-quarters combat. After cleaning his pistol, he led his motley crew of survivors forward; just as they reached a Confederate bastion, a fragment from an exploding shell slammed into the right side of his chest, leaving him briefly unconscious and bleeding. Fortunately for Appleton, the fragment did not penetrate his chest cavity, but as he probed the wound with his finger, he could feel the bones grating on one another—his ribs were broken. Though he could barely breathe, Appleton tried to remain at the head of the rapidly dwindling number of men, desperate to retain the hard-earned foothold on the bastion until reinforcements came up. When the group came under friendly fire from the rear, he decided to find these men and tell them they were firing on Union troops. As he struggled toward the rear, stumbling through the carnage, he recalled tripping on “the dead under my feet in the edge of the water” as he moved toward those firing into the 54th. Unable to fall back in the direction of the companies moving up to assault the fort, he shifted his track onto the open beach, but he remained under both enemy and friendly fire. It is unclear if he ever managed to inform superiors that they were firing on their own troops. By this time he was injured enough that he decided to head for the field hospital. Finally, after finding another officer, he was placed in an ambulance destined for a hospital transport ship already crowded with wounded, ending his participation in the July 18, 1863, attack on Fort Wagner.

As the ship headed southward toward Beaufort, South Carolina, Appleton noticed that “the seats around the sides of the cabin and the carpeted floor are covered with wounded officers,” while “outside the cabin the decks are covered with soldiers with every variety of wounds.” His injuries, while painful, were not immediately life-threatening, so he was given a dose of opiates and fell into a deep sleep, not waking until the next morning. Amid the wreckage of war, it is worth noting that Appleton never lost sight of how and, more importantly, why he lay among so many wounded men, several of whom would die during the voyage. Barely seven months earlier, he expressed his belief that there were two primary questions to be answered in connection with freeing enslaved peoples: Would they work for their own living after emancipation, and would they fight for liberty? Appleton was confident the answer to both was yes, and he intended to help them fight for their freedom. Enduring his own painful injuries, while he held his friend Willie Homans’s hand as doctors administered ether before removing a bullet, he knew the answer was undeniable; what motivated John W. M. Appleton to join the 54th had not changed. More importantly, through their courage and sacrifice at Fort Wagner, the African American soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts had shown the nation they would fight, and die, for freedom. Appleton never lost sight of this fact, even reminding his wife after he returned to duty, “Some must suffer for a very great cause—millions of freemen are not born without a pang.” John Appleton, like so many of the men in the 54th, was willing to pay the price.

Many credit the performance and courage of the 54th Massachusetts that July evening with paving the way for 180,000 African Americans serving in Union forces during the Civil War. There is ample evidence for this argument among those who served in the regiment. The postwar accounts of Luis Emilio and Joseph T. Wilson stand out as two testimonies of the valor of the 54th inspiring other African Americans to join Union forces. Moreover, because of long-standing stereotypes about how African Americans would perform as soldiers, whites closely scrutinized the conduct of the regiment. It was clear long before the 54th arrived in South Carolina that Massachusetts’s first Black regiment was a “test case,” and how well it performed in battle had immediate ramifications for their future. What those men did that night at Fort Wagner echoed for generations after 1863. Similarly, white Americans understood that serving as combat soldiers would inevitably lead to demands for citizenship and equality. Certainly, veterans of the 54th confirmed this assumption as they ran for, and won, political offices after the war. How John Appleton arrived at this moment, lying wounded in a hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, is a complicated question to answer. It requires an examination of the origins of the 54th Massachusetts as well as exploring his personal story.