LEWIS H. DOUGLASS TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Morris Island, [S.C.] 22 August 1864.

DEAR FATHER:

Yours of the 8th¹This letter has not survived. I found on my return here from Hilton Head.²Although discharged from the military the previous May, Lewis H. Douglass appears to have traveled via the large Union army transportation center at Hilton Head, South Carolina, to visit his old regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, a part of the forces attempting the capture of Charleston. Greene, , 87-88. I heard
from you indirectly at Toledo Ohio³Douglass spoke in Toledo, Ohio, in early summer 1864. He criticized Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction as being more generous toward Southern whites than to the freed slaves. , ser. 1, 4:12-13; Stauffer, , 282. from one of our men who received a
letter from that place. I am glad to learn that Charley is at Point Lookout⁴Point Lookout, at the confluence of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, was the site of a Union army garrison and prisoner-of-war camp for captured Confederates. The prison facilities became greatly overcrowded after the suspension of exchanges by Ulysses S. Grant, and mortality rates among detainees rose. After serving in the campaign in Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, the African American Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment was stationed at Point Lookout from June 1864 to March 1865. , 6:492.
and likely to remain there. I hope that his fever is not serious. There is
nothing new here. We still keep banging away at Sumter.⁵Beginning in April 1863, the Union army and navy attempted numerous times to capture Fort Sumter and the strategically and symbolically important city of Charleston, South Carolina. Beginning in August 1863 after the capture of Morris Island, the fort in Charleston harbor was subjected to a steady bombardment by Union artillery that eventually reduced it to a rubble pile, which the Confederates defiantly continued to occupy. In July 1864, shortly before Lewis’s letter, a series of amphibious Union attacks on Confederate defenses near Charleston failed. The Confederates held the city until February 1865, when Sherman’s advance northward from Georgia forced the Confederates to abandon the city. Long and Long, , 335-36, 382-83, 387, 396-406, 97. Gen. Foster⁶Charles W. Foster.
has prohibited any letter writing giving account of what is going on here,
as though something very important is to be done. There is one business
very [Illegible] thriving here just at present; and that is recruiting for Massachusetts’
sy quota.⁷Regimental histories list only one South Carolinian, Marshall Lamb of Newbury, serving in the ranks of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. Just nineteen, Lamb died in the July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner. Emilio, , 341. If Rochester or the State of New York would give me
an appointment to recruit for them I could get a great many men providing
the bounty is large enough. Massachusetts is paying $450,00.⁸The Massachusetts state government began offering a $100 bounty to enlistees in September 1862. Some counties and cities later offered additional compensation. The highest total bounty rate recorded in the state was $350 to a recruit. Cady Alpert and Kyle D. Kaufman, “The Economics of the Union Draft: Institutional Failure and Government Manipulation of the Labor Market during the Civil War,” Essays in Business and Economic History, 17:101-02 (1999). I see that
the Express in noticing Fred’s. going to Vicksburgh⁹This issue of the Rochester Evening Express has not been located. Douglass’s second son, Frederick Jr., apparently accepted the recruiter position, which had been previously offered to his father, to recruit troops under the command of General Lorenzo Thomas in Mississippi. Eggleston, , 7-8, 105, 126-28; , 1:422-23. calls the attention
of the people to Massachusetts’ example.

I have had two offers of partnership as Sutlers since I have been down
here O one of them was a first rate. The Sutler off of a capital of $500, has
made in a year $3000. De Mortie¹⁰A free black born in Norfolk, Virginia, Mark René DeMortie (1829-1914) relocated to Boston in 1851 and founded a shoe store and several other retail businesses. DeMortie worked with Lewis Hayden on the Underground Railroad and was a close friend of the Reverend Leonard Grimes of Boston. He married the daughter of the wealthy African American George T. Downing of Rhode Island. Governor John A. Andrew appointed him sutler to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in 1863. In need of cash to fulfill his provisioning responsibilities, DeMortie entered a partnership with Joseph Paul Whitfield. When the soldiers of the regiment refused to accept a lower pay rate than that given white troops, DeMortie extended each recruit two dollars a month in credit until that discrimination ended. After the war, he briefly operated a tailoring business in Boston before moving to Chicago to become a partner in a real estate business. A Republican candidate for Congress in Virginia who claimed his defeat was a product of electoral fraud, DeMortie was compensated by a lucrative appointment as a revenue collector in the Treasury Department. He returned to Boston in the late 1880s and resumed his tailoring business. DeMortie was a leading member of the Colored National League, which campaigned for new federal civil rights legislation and helped organize the centennial celebration of the birth of William Lloyd Garrison in 1905. New Era Magazine, 1:31, 35-39 (February 1916); Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 14, 17-18, 21-22; Yacovone, Freedom’s Journey, 142-43. don’t wish me to leave him. He intends
as soon as the regiment is paid, to dissolve partnership with Whittier¹¹Born in New Hampshire to a runaway slave father and a free black mother, Joseph Paul Whitfield (c.1814-?) and his younger brother James Monroe Whitfield moved to Buffalo, New York, shortly after his father’s death in 1832. James became a successful barber and advocate for emigration schemes, and Joseph prospered modestly in real estate and signed petitions for both black civil rights as well as the emigrationist cause. After his partnership with Mark R. DeMortie as sutlers for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, Joseph returned to Buffalo, where he died in the 1870s. Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson, eds., The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011), 8-9, 12, 25, 27; Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis, Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, a Biography of the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, N.J., 2012), 49-51; Sherman, “James Monroe Whitfield,” 169-76 and Jones,¹²The firm of Jones and Whitfield was listed as the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment’s sutlers during the unit’s participation in the Florida Campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Olustee in early 1864. Emilio, , 177. and leave his business in my hands while he goes home on a visit.