Standing near the camp’s white commander, Louis Wagner, Douglass replied to white pessimism about the black troops. His African brethren were ready and willing to fight and die for their emancipation, he insisted. But Douglass also said that the black recruits should not defy government authority. Addressing the black troops, he told them, ‘It is for you to justify that reply, which I certainly believe you will do, but in order to [do] this you will have to prove that you cannot only parade and drill, but equal the white soldiers in deportment, in neatness of person, in the brightness of your arms, in orderly deportment, and scrupulous obedience to orders.’

It was not that he did not understand the soldiers’ problems. Douglass had a special respect for the men standing before him, many scarred and mangled for life by years of slavery. He had shared their agonizing past and knew their pain. Underneath his garments, on his back, he wore a stark reminder: horrible scars caused by the flesh-slicing whip of a Maryland slave overseer.

It was not long before the black men standing at arms before Douglass would prove themselves quite worthy of carrying the U.S. flag into battle. But they still had to face trouble at home first. In fact, before leaving the Philadelphia area on September 18, 1863, the 3rd Regiment would endure further humiliation. Because of continuing racism, the regiment was not allowed to parade in the city. The August 8, 1863, edition of the Christian Recorder, a black newspaper published in Philadelphia by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, explained the situation: ‘At the latter part of last week several of our daily papers published the gratifying intelligence that the Third Regiment of Philadelphia Colored troops would come into the city from Camp William Penn, to go through the evolutions of a street parade. The day came, but with it also came the postponement of the promised treat indefinitely. This has been a source of grievous disappointment to a great many, both colored and white.’

The Christian Recorder noted the 3rd Regiment’s great anger about not being able to parade shortly before it departed. ‘[N]ot only were the friends of the regiment disappointed, but when the intelligence reached the encampment it caused a great commotion amongst the men, amounting, as we have been told, almost to a state of mutiny, which had been the consequences of so frequently disappointing the men on this account,’ the Recorder report said. ‘What right any man has to interfere with colored, more than with white troops, we cannot conceive. Does the government want to get them up in some dark corner, and prepare them to do just what white men are prepared to do in the dark? It should be remembered, that these men are human beings, and have their five senses, and feel just as well as the whites do. They are not ignorant of the manner in which they are treated; and of course they know what they are, and the kind of treatment they deserve. And the men who would interfere with, or molest them in any way, deserve the severest punishment. We, therefore, hope that both the Government and Philadelphia will redeem themselves from last week’s doings.’ The disappointed 3rd Regiment, under Colonel Benjamin C. Tilghman, eventually marched off to war, participating in the siege of South Carolina’s Fort Wagner and in several important Florida battles.

One black soldier, upset with unfair treatment in the Philadelphia region and especially at Camp William Penn, wrote a moving letter to President Abraham Lincoln complaining about his treatment. His white officers, the soldier explained, would not let him vote and would not let him go home when he was sick. ‘We had boys her that died and wood gout [would have gotten] well if thy could go home,’ the soldier said. ‘[They] can come back as well as a white man.’ The camp’s white officers and recruits elsewhere were allowed to go home to recover when they were severely ill, he complained, but not the black recruits.

Another camp recruit also complained of his unsympathetic officers. ‘My left leg is very badley afected from an old cut and the surgent here have bin giving me…Leinament to rub it with and it is well mixt with turpentine,’ he wrote. ‘I hav bin useing it until I have almost lost the use of my leg.

I have tole him often that it was getting worse, but he will driv me off like a dog and say that he can’t do anything for me.’

Although soldiers sometimes complained about receiving harsh treatment, some members of the local community recognized that Camp William Penn symbolized an important advancement for the African-American community. For instance, Lucretia Mott wrote about the camp in a letter to her sister in 1863. ‘The neighboring camp seems the absorbing interest just now,’ Mott wrote, although she was a staunch pacifist who claimed to support the necessity of combating pro-slavery forces via preaching and advocacy but not by resorting to physical violence. ‘Is not this change in feeling and conduct towards this oppressed class beyond all that we could have anticipated, and marvelous in our eyes?’

Camp commander Wagner supported his black troops, despite frequent public pressure. Local newspapers wrote several accounts of a black soldier guarding the post who shot a belligerent white man intent on entering the camp without permission. Although the white community became enraged and demanded the black soldier be brought to trial in nearby Norristown, the Montgomery County seat, Wagner refused to hand him over.

Wagner also insisted that his black soldiers ignore segregationist policies and ride beside him on local trains. Braving opposition, he also paraded the next regiment to leave the camp for battle, the 6th USCT, right down Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare, Broad Street, and past the Union League’s front steps filled with dignitaries and top military brass.

‘There was an immense crowd of white and colored [who] followed them through the streets,’ the Christian Recorder reported. ‘We were somewhat amused while standing on the corner of Third and Walnut to hear some person remark, ‘Here comes the flag of distress.’ Some white men were in the crowd, and one well-dressed heavy-set gentleman, whom we took to be a German, although he spoke good English, exclaimed, ‘What did you say, sir? I’ll let you know, sir, that it is the American flag, and it is time you had learned enough to that effect, and if you don’t know it, I can quickly teach you.’ The poor fellow looked bad and hung his head when he saw those who stood around him look upon him with contempt; but the gentleman who addressed himself to him looked with as much indignation as to say if the poor ignorant fellow would have said so again he would have felled him to the ground.’

Another eyewitness gave an account of the 6th Regiment’s parade: ‘Walnut, Pine and Broad Streets listened to the measured tread of the dusky soldiers and the staccato of a full drum corps. The Union blue, the white gloves and the glint of fixed bayonets contrasted sharply with the dark faces perspiring under the rays of a warm October sun.

‘As the regiment passed the Continental Hotel, a city tough ran out from the crowd and snatched the color away from the sergeant, who knocked the intruder down, rescued his flag, and resumed his place in the ranks, to the cheers of many of the spectators.’

The unit’s regimental flag, designed by the famed black artist David Bustill Bowser and depicting the Goddess of Liberty holding a flag while exhorting a freedman dressed as a soldier to do his duty, would soon face other such tests during the heat of battle.

Almost a year after marching down Philadelphia’s Broad Street and then sailing south by boat, Nathan H. Edgerton was among more than 350 soldiers in the 6th Regiment to run into a deadly hail of Confederate bullets at the Battle of New Market Heights (Chaffin’s Farm) in Virginia on the chilly and foggy morning of September 29, 1864. More than 60 percent of the regiment’s men, trained at Camp William Penn, would die in that battle.

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