Camp William Penn’s Black Soldiers In Blue - November ‘99 America’s Civil War Feature

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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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