James "Henry" Gooding, originally from Troy, New York, was a whaling ship crewman living in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when the Civil War broke out. He joined the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and became a non-commissioned officer in "C" Company. He was also a war correspondent for the New Bedford Mercury. Each week, they would publish his letter from the front lines in the prominent top-center position of the inside page. (Front pages were reserved for advertisements back then.) The letters reveal a poet and scholar of wide-ranging education in literature, history, and the classics. He was a hugely talented writer who, as much as he hated killing, forced himself to become a solider. You can still read his letters today in James Henry Gooding, On the Altar of Freedom, edited by Virginia Matzke Adams (Amherst: U. of Mass, 1991).

As seen in the movie Glory (Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman), people remember the 54th Massachusetts as a sort of archetypal Black unit. This is because more was written about it at the time than about any other Black unit.

Why was this regiment the darling of the 1863 northern press? It was not because they were the first. Louisiana's Creole Corps d'Afrique had already fought battles for the Union (they had been turned down when they volunteered to fight for the Confederacy). And other Black regiments had been formed at X Corps headquarters in Hilton Head, South Carolina, from volunteer "free men of color" and runaway slaves from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Those who saw Glory will remember that the 54th Mass. found Black soldiers already in action when they arrived in the South. (The locals were wearing regular blue Army jackets but with red trousers.) Also, it was not because the 54th was an elite unit at first. On the contrary, the hopeless assault on Battery Wagner makes military professionals wince. It was ineptly planned, badly led, and amateurishly executed. No, the 54th initially got great press because it was formed of upper-crust folk.

By 1790, the free biracial population of Massachusetts had nearly succeeded in becoming assimilated into White European culture and distancing themselves from the unfortunate slaves (rather like people in Latin America). The cities had growing populations of successful mixed-race schoolteachers, librarians, preachers, editors, lawyers, physicians, engineers. Until the turn of the nineteenth century, they saw themselves as joining the mainstream.

Then, starting around 1800, African-American New Englanders began to change course. They adopted a newfangled one-drop rule among themselves, called themselves "Black" (even the fair complexioned ones) and began to identify with their enslaved brothers (unlike in Latin America).

There may have been two causes of this social change. According to University of North Carolina Professor Joel Williamson in New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), the shift was caused by a rise in hostility from Whites. It was during these years that the Denmark Vesey wave of complexion-based segregation and consequent interracial hate enveloped America. On the other hand, this was also a time of rising hostility between the U.S. South and the rest of the Christendom (which had recently decided that slavery was not a good thing). So, New Englanders of part-African descent may have simply wanted to join the worldwide revulsion against slavery.

Whatever their motives to volunteer as Blacks, what interested the public was that, although the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment accepted recruits of every background, its core were the offspring of upper middle class professionals, such as Frederick Douglass's two fair-complexioned sons, neither of whom had ever seen a hard day's manual labor. (It is an irony of parenting that we try to protect our kids from the very bruises and knocks that toughened us.) The public was curious to see the fate of young men who were better at finding a book in a library than at cleaning a rifle.

In the end, they became one of the most spectacularly skillful infantry regiments in U.S. Army history. At the February 20, 1864, battle of Olustee, Florida, a Union army of 5,000 under Gen. Truman Seymour was badly beaten by a same-sized Confederate army under Gen. Joe Finegan. Seymour then decided to sacrifice the 54th Massachusetts in order to save the rest of his army. He ordered the 400-man 54th (along with a support company of 40 First New York Combat Engineers) to delay the victorious rebels until the Union army could retreat to Jacksonville.

The Massachusetts Blacks retreated by a technique we call today "bounding overwatch." Half held their ground and stopped the advancing enemy with withering rifle fire, while the rest ran back to covered positions in the rear. Then, when the second group signaled that they were ready, the two groups would swap roles, leap-frogging back another hundred meters or so. Mile after mile. The battle is little known to the public today, but it astonishes the military historian. The tactic they developed was forgotten by the Army and not re-invented until 1916. Instead of being sacrificed, the 54th marched into Jacksonville, heads held high, after inflicting paralyzing losses on ten times their number of Confederates, losing only thirteen men killed and eight captured. Henry Gooding was one of the eight captured.

Confederate General Joe Finegan deliberately disobeyed his orders from Confederate high command to murder outright or sell into slavery any Black prisoners. Instead, he ordered that Gooding and the seven other Black New Englanders be treated precisely the same as the White POWs. No one knows why. (Although one should point out that Ireland-born Finegan's lifelong best friend and business partner was swarthy Florida Senator David Levy, a man whose father was born in Africa and whom John Quincy Adams said, "has a dash of African blood in him.") Unfortunately, equal treatment simply meant that Gooding and the others were shipped to Andersonville, a prison camp about halfway between Macon and the present-day Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Andersonville was a death camp. In a ghastly preview of events a century in the future, camp commandant CSA Capt. Henry Wirz sorted arrivals into two groups. Most were sent into a 26 acre walled enclosure without food, clothing, water, or shelter, and deliberately starved to death. The others were fed just enough to make a daily round of loading hundreds of newly dead emaciated corpses into wagons and hauling them to mass graves.

When rumors of this horror reached Richmond, the South's Provost Marshall sent a Confederate JAG officer to investigate. The investigator filed a scathing report, warning that the entire chain of command could be held criminally liable since Wirz claimed he was "just following orders."

When rumors reached local Georgia farmers, they drove a convoy of wagons stacked high with food to the prison gate, demanding that the Yankee prisoners be fed. (Due to the war's destruction of the railroad network, their harvest was rotting in piles anyway.) Wirz drove the farmers away at gunpoint. He openly boasted that he killed more Yankees every week than General Lee killed in a month.

Between June and October 1864, Henry Wirz thus methodically murdered over 13,000 Union POWs in Andersonville. Henry Gooding was one of them.

At war's end, the first known war crimes trial in history was held. Both the Confederate JAG officer and the local Georgia farmers testified against Wirz. He was still insisting that he had been "just following orders" when he dropped through a trap door with a U.S. Army issue rope around his neck.

I said this was a tale of two writers turned soldier. Who was the second?

The judge who presided over Wirz's trial was also a writer. General Lew Wallace wrote a court decision that continues to affect international jurisprudence to this day. He ruled that "just following orders" is not a valid defense against criminal acts. His ruling was the precedent used at Nuremberg. It was incorporated into the present US Army field manual on military ethics, FM 27-10: The Law of Land Warfare, and is being used in trials against Yugoslav perpetrators of ethnic cleansing even as we speak. But his legal decision is not why Lew Wallace is known as a writer. It is because after the war, he wrote the novel Ben Hur.

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