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Updated: May 25, 2025
We had an excellent, good-natured instructor, Color-Sergeant Summers, who had served in the Crimea. He used to say to the squad, while at bayonet drill, when our thrusts did not please him, "You could not make a hole in a lump of butter, much less in a man." He would also insist that our heads be held up as high as was practicable without breaking our necks.
When O'Neill was shot, his troop, who were devoted to him, were for the moment at a loss whom to follow. One of their number, Henry Bardshar, a huge Arizona miner, immediately attached himself to me as my orderly, and from that moment he was closer to me, not only in the fight, but throughout the rest of the campaign, than any other man, not even excepting the color-sergeant, Wright.
The blood of the color-sergeant is there, black now with age. But where are the tears of the sad women who stitched the red and the white and the blue together? The regiments marched through the streets and aboard the boats, and pushed off before a levee of waving handkerchiefs and nags. Then heart-breaking suspense.
I turned regretfully round to the color-sergeant, winked solemnly and officially, and seeing an answering but respectful quiver in his left eyelid, said: "Color-sergeant." "Sir?" "Which do you think is the best way of setting alight to a farm?" "Well, sir, some prefer the large bedstead and straw, but I think the 'armonium and a little kerosene in one corner is as neat as anything."
The blood of the color-sergeant is there, black now with age. But where are the tears of the sad women who stitched the red and the white and the blue together? The regiments marched through the streets and aboard the boats, and pushed off before a levee of waving handkerchiefs and nags. Then heart-breaking suspense.
By the time every shot in the cartridge-boxes had been fired at them they had forced their way half-up the slope. "Attention, 200th Indiana," shouted Capt. McGillicuddy. "Dress on the colors. Fix bayonets." "They'uns 's Injiannians," shouted the rebel Color-Sergeant, waving his flag defiantly. "Come on, you Hoosiers. We'uns 's Mississippians. Remember Buny Visty. Injiannians 's cowards."
The story of Fort Wagner is one that needs no such emphasis, it is too thoroughly known; that of the Color-Sergeant, whose proper name is W.H. Carney, is taken from a letter written by General M.S. Littlefield to Colonel A.G. Browne, Secretary to Governor Andrew.
As the men were clambering up the parapet their color-sergeant was shot dead, the colors trailing stained and wet in the dust beside him. Ercildoune, who was just behind, sprang forward, seized the staff from his dying hand, and mounted with it upward. A ball struck his right arm, yet ere it could fall shattered by his side, his left hand caught the flag and carried it onward.
A gun-boat of the Mosquito fleet came out to greet us and to inform us that peace negotiations had begun. Next morning we were marched on shore. Many of the men were very sick indeed. Of the three or four who had been closest to me among the enlisted men, Color-Sergeant Wright was the only one in good health. Henry Bardshar was a wreck, literally at death's door.
And as to actual discipline, it is doing no injustice to the line-officers of the regiment to say that none of them received from the men more implicit obedience than Color-Sergeant Rivers.
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