Stanton arrived on January 11 and began asking questions. “Stanton inquired particularly about General Jeff. C. Davis, who he said was a Democrat and hostile to the negro,” Sherman later wrote. Stanton showed Sherman a newspaper account of the affair and demanded an explanation. Sherman urged the secretary not to jump to conclusions and, in his postwar memoirs, reported that he “explained the matter to [Stanton's] entire satisfaction.” He went on to say that Stanton had come to Savannah mainly because of pressure from abolitionist Radical Republicans. “We all felt sympathy…for those poor negroes…,” Sherman wrote, “but a sympathy of a different sort from that of Mr. Stanton, which was not of pure humanity but of politics.”

Sherman’s attitude toward black people is perhaps best illustrated in his own words, in a private letter he wrote to his wife, Ellen, shortly before he left Savannah to continue his march up the coast. “Mr. Stanton has been here and is cured of that negro nonsense,” he wrote. “[Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.] Chase and others have written to me to modify my opinions, but you know I cannot, for if I attempt the part of a hypocrite it would break out in every sentence. I want soldiers made of the best bone and muscle in the land, and won’t attempt military feats with doubtful materials.” As he admitted in his memoirs, “In our army we had no negro soldiers and, as a rule, we preferred white soldiers.”

“The negro question was beginning to loom up…and many foresaw that not only would the slaves secure their freedom, but that they would also have votes,” his memoirs further reveal. “I did not dream of such a result then, but knew that slavery, as such, was dead forever; [yet I] did not suppose that the former slaves would be suddenly, without preparation, manufactured into voters–equal to all others, politically and socially.”

In course, when considering Sherman and his actions, it’s important to remember that his ideas about black people, though shocking today, were hardly unique in his time. The majority of Union volunteers, and of Northerners in general, were at most ambivalent about emancipation and were vehemently opposed to black suffrage.

Given the prevailing beliefs of the time, it might be no surprise that Union authorities justified the incident at Ebenezer Creek as a “military necessity.” None of the officers involved was even officially reprimanded. Most of them advanced in their military and, later, civilian careers.

Davis’s commander, Howard, who had been described as “the most Christian gentleman in the Union army,” went on to found Howard University, a black college in Washington, D.C. He also became the first director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which the Federal government set up to help the recently freed slaves make the transition from slave to citizen.

Wheeler’s cavalry was roundly condemned for its part in the affair, but the reputation of its young commander was evidently not harmed. Wheeler went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1885 to 1900 and as a major general of volunteers in the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Davis handled the Ebenezer Creek commotion with the same coolness that had taken him back to battlefield command so soon after the Nelson shooting. Again he was never punished or even reprimanded. In fact, he was later made a brevet major general.

Then there is William T. Sherman, the field commander ultimately responsible for Davis’s actions. Sherman was rewarded with the Thanks of Congress for the revolutionary “total war” he waged during his March to the Sea. At the May 1865 Grand Review of the Armies, the huge parade through Washington, D.C., to celebrate Union victory, Sherman was hailed as a war hero. A few years later, newly elected President Ulysses S. Grant made Sherman a full general and general-in-chief of the U.S. Army.

Sometime during those postwar years, Sherman offered a rosy recollection of the reception he and his men had received as they marched through Georgia. “…the Negroes were simply frantic with joy,” he said. “Whenever they heard my name, they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style, which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone.” Apparently, though, it did not move Sherman deeply enough to make him seek justice for the soon-forgotten victims of the Ebenezer Creek incident.

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Edward M. Churchill of Newtown, Pennsylvania, is a retired civil engineer and college professor who teaches classes on the diverse subjects of the Battle of Gettysburg, the life of George A. Custer, Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and calculus.

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