He did not, but God found other agents in the camp. “By this time hundreds of the boys had gathered about them with lowering brows. Nothing was more evident than that the elements of resistance were stirring.” The boys were indeed not of the highest circles of New York. “Most -- nearly all of our rank and file -- and the officers almost without exception, hailed from that political party which in the last election had supported the traitor Breckinridge,” the Democrat who ran against Lincoln. “...They are men who in words affirm the right of property in colored men and who have been accustomed to mob abolitionists with hearty zeal -- who maintain the inferiority of Africans in every point of view.”
But things had changed now as the mounted slaveowners and their hired hunters paused mid-camp, unsure how to proceed. It was clear no one was going to make things easy for them.
“ Party vanished,” wrote Twichell. “Politics sank into the ground or vanished in the air, consistency was scorned -- voting was out -- acting was in -- Conscience divine and truthful -- a heaven-granted Sense of Right -- the Man in the image and likeness of God shone out, scattering all vapors of ignorance and habit to the winds. It was grand, glorious, and I thanked God for the revelation of it.”
The external sign of this revelation, as he set it down in 1880, was as follows: “It took the Seventy-first, though unprepared for such an emergency, but a single moment to find its tongue. Such a storm of winged uncelestial speech -- of epithets hot from Tartarus mixed with long valleys of execration and derision -- as then burst forth from it was wonderful to hear.”
This divine cussing caught the attention of General Sickles, who happened to be riding through the camp at that moment -- Sickles the Democrat, who in Congress, before the war, had voted for the admission of Kansas as a slave state.
“Seeing the commotion he stopped and asked me, who happened to stand near, what was the occasion. ‘They are slave-hunters, sir,’ said I. Sickles examined Gen. Hooker’s order, heard they had fired at a man, “and in a tone by no means trifling exclaimed ‘Order them out of the lines at once!’
“Then followed a scene that for excitement and ludicrousness cannot be described properly. The lads heard what the Gen. said, and without waiting for the forms of law, -- with one consent, groaning, shouting, cheering, started for the obnoxious party...Whatever missiles were at hand were eagerly snatched and projected in many cases with great precision at the amazed equestrians. Clods of earth, sticks and in some cases loaves of bread leaped from strong hands on their errand of indignation.”
The riders did not remain
long. “Their horses began
to plunge and rear,-- the crowd pressed closer with no joke in their faces
and in less than a minute
these chivalrous gentlemen, the blooded nobility of the land, took to confused
and ungraceful flight followed so long as the last horsetail was in sight
by the vociferous execrations of an insulted throng.”
After dark, the ex-slaves returned to camp. “They tried to make light of it and laughed, but I fancied a look on many of their faces that told a different tale -- a look that lay under their laughter as the sea lies under waves,” the young chaplain wrote in 1862 “An ill-mannered regiment was that Seventy-first, and no mistake” the 45-year-old Twichell wrote in 1880. “But when the black men returned to camp, as after an hour or two they began to do, they welcomed them in a ceremony of cheers and hand-shaking, in which they appeared to a much better advantage than they could have done in their late ungentle conduct toward their injured proprietors.
“How General Sickles settled his part in the affair with General Hooker never transpired; but he explained to the writer, upon the spot, that though when previously acting in his capacity as national legislator in Congress, he had been obliged to consider slaves as chattels, he now, in the altered condition of affairs, had leave to consult his feelings in reference to them -- anyhow, he had done it in the present case.”
Twichell applied an ingenious title to his article as he submitted it to the ladies of the Union for Home Work: “A Jewel of Inconsistency.”
Steve Courtney has been a writer and editor for The Hartford Courant since 1986. For the past several years he has been at work on a biography of the Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell (1838-1918), Asylum Hill Congregational Church’s first pastor. Steve can be reached at sdcourtney@hotmail.com..