That morning, the 6th USCT had rushed toward a line of Rebel fortifications manned by the hardened veterans of Colonel Frederick M. Bass’ Texas brigade. Dozens of Edgerton’s comrades had been hit and had fallen, including most members of the color guard, when Lieutenant Frederick Meyer of Company B seized the colors and a bullet slammed through his heart and killed him. Meyer, however, maintained a death grip on the staff.

‘I took it from him and pushed forward to bring up the colors to their proper place,’ Edgerton later recalled. ‘All at once I went down, but jumped up immediately and tried to raise the flag, for I thought I had fallen over the dewberry vines which grew thickly there, but finding it did not come, I looked down, after trying again, to see why I could not lift it, and found my hand covered with blood, and perfectly powerless, and the flag-staff lying in two pieces. I sheathed my sword, took the flag with its broken staff and reached the abatis.’

When Edgerton began to reel and stumble due to the loss of blood, Sergeant Alex-ander Kelly of Company F grabbed the flag and carried it from the field. Edgerton mi-raculously survived his wound. Under similar conditions that day, Sgt. Maj. Thomas Hawkins of Company C also retrieved the flag. All three eventually received the Medal of Honor for their bravery.

Major General Benjamin F. Butler was thoroughly impressed with the black troops’ bravery at New Market Heights. ‘Better men were never better led, better officers never led better men,’ Butler said. ‘A few more such charges and to command colored troops will be the post of honor in the American armies.’

The 6th Regiment was not the only Camp William Penn regiment to fight courageously in bloody campaigns. The 22nd and 8th USCT regiments also lost many men during the New Market Heights fray.

Six months earlier, on February 20, 1864, the 8th had lost a huge share of its men in an engagement at Olustee, Fla. At the time, the regiment had little battlefield experience, being barely a month out of Camp William Penn. At Olustee the 8th, commanded by Colonel Charles W. Fribley, suffered terrible casualties, including 343 killed, wounded or missing in action. A letter written by 1st Lt. Oliver Willcox Norton detailed what happened when troops of his Company K marched near a strategic railroad line. ‘The skirmishing increased as we marched, but we paid little attention to it,’ Norton wrote. ‘Pretty soon the boom of a gun startled us a little, but not much as we knew our flying artillery was ahead, but they boomed again and again and it began to look like a brush. An aide came dashing through the woods to us and the order was ‘double quick, march!’ We turned into the woods and ran in the direction of the firing for half a mile, when the head of the column reached our batteries.

‘Military men say it takes veteran troops to maneuver under fire, but our regiment with knapsacks on and unloaded pieces, after a run of half a mile, formed a line under the most destructive fire I ever knew. We were not more than two hundred yards from the enemy, concealed in pits and behind trees, and what did the regiment do? At first they were stunned, bewildered and knew not what to do. They curled to the ground, and as men fell around them they seemed terribly scared, but gradually they recovered their senses and commenced firing. And here was the great trouble–they could not use their arms to advantage. We have had very little practice in firing, and, though they could stand and be killed, they could not kill a concealed enemy fast enough to satisfy my feelings.

‘After seeing his men murdered as long as flesh and blood could endure it, Colonel Fribley ordered the regiment to fall back slowly, firing as they went. As the men fell back they gathered in groups like frightened sheep, and it was almost impossible to keep them from doing so. Into these groups the rebels poured the deadliest fire, almost every bullet hitting some one.’

Colonel Fribley was shot and killed after his order to retreat. ‘We were without a commander,’ wrote Norton, ‘and every officer was doing his best to do something, he knew not exactly. There was no leader.’

Norton later noticed that he had five holes in his hat, which he claimed were caused by a single bullet. ‘My hat was cocked up on one side so that it went through in that way and just drew the blood on my scalp,’ he wrote. ‘Of course a quarter of an inch lower would have broken my skull, but it was too high.’

Norton noted that ‘Company K went into the fight with fifty-five enlisted men and two officers. It came out with twenty-three and one officer. Of these but two men were not marked. That speaks volumes for the bravery of Negroes. Several of these twenty-three were quite badly cut, but they are present with the company. Ten were killed, four reported missing, though there is little doubt they are killed, too.’

Confederate soldiers hated commanders of black regiments such as Wagner and Fribley. If such Union leaders were captured during battle, they were often slaughtered along with their black troops instead of being taken prisoner. When Confederate Brig. Gen. William Gardner decided to send some of Fribley’s personal belongings to his widow, he noted, ‘That I may not be misunderstood, it is due to myself to state that no sympathy with the fate of any officer commanding negro troops, but compassion for a widow in grief, had induced these efforts to recover for her relics which she must naturally value.’

Less than a month after the September 29 engagement at New Market Heights, future Medal of Honor recipient Nathan H. Edgerton lay recovering in the Chesapeake Hospital near Fort Monroe. In a letter sent on his behalf to the surgeon general’s office, Edgerton asked to be transferred to one of the hospitals in Philadelphia, because his ‘parents reside in Philadelphia, and are very anxious to have him near them.’

The correspondence also stated that Edgerton ‘was wounded severely in the right hand…while carrying the colors of his regiment, and acting as adjutant. He has been recommended for promotion for gallantry in the field, and will shortly receive his commission as 1st Lieutenant.’ The order to send Edgerton back to Philadelphia came just two days later, on October 23. He was quickly promoted, and he later served as adjutant.

As the Civil War drew to a close, a charismatic black woman strode in front of hundreds of black soldiers at Camp William Penn and delivered a stirring speech. She was the well-known ex-slave and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, who had come to inspire the black soldiers of the 24th Regiment, the last of Louis Wagner’s regiments to leave the camp for war.

Tubman was a wanted woman by Confederate authorities. She had made many trips into the Deep South and escorted hundreds of runaway slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad that extended through Chelten Hills, Pa. There was a $40,000 reward on her head.

Like Douglass and many of Camp William Penn’s soldiers, Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave with the scars of slavery on her body. Although she spoke a slave dialect and not standard English, she greatly inspired the men that day, according to a Christian Recorder article. The camp, said the newspaper, ‘had a very entertaining homespun lecture from a colored woman known as Harriet Tubman. It was the first time we had the pleasure of hearing her. She seems to be very well known by the community at large, as the great Underground Rail Road woman, and has done a good part to many of her fellow creatures, in that direction.

‘During her lecture, which she gave in her own language, she elicited considerable applause from the soldiers of the 24th Regiment…now at the camp. She gave a thrilling account of her trials in the South, during the past 3 years, among the contrabands and colored soldiers, and how she had administered to thousands of them, and cared for their numerous necessities.’

Around the time that Tubman spoke to the 24th Regiment, the camp’s 43rd USCT joined the pursuit of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, after participating in the capture of Petersburg, Va. The 43rd, along with other black regiments trained at Camp William Penn, finally caught up with Lee and were present during his April 9, 1865, surrender at Appomattox Court House. Meanwhile, the 22nd USCT, which also hailed from Camp William Penn, helped to corner President Lincoln’s assassins along the eastern shore of Maryland and the lower Potomac after a lengthy pursuit from April 15 through the first part of May 1865.

The war was finally over. After the great conflict, Benjamin F. Butler, who had pushed from the start for black men to fight with Union forces, spoke for many when he said the African-American soldiers had ‘with the bayonet…unlocked the iron-barred gates of prejudice, and opened new fields of freedom, liberty, and equality of right.’

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This article was written by Donald Scott and originally published in America’s Civil War Magazine in November 1999.

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