07/27/2026
Thanks to Salem History Exchange and Tom Lundergan. Name drops for Charlotte Forten, Frederick Douglass, Patrick Gilmore, and Robert Gould Shaw.
I was glad to see that Salem 400 recognized Luis Emilio among its notable Salemites and he was profiled in the “Salem’s Centuries” book. But he was only one of the Salem residents connected to the African-American 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment.
Over 3,000 Salem men served in the Union forces in the Civil War. (In a town of 22,252 people, that’s at least half the males who weren’t children or old men.) A couple of things distinguish Emilio.
On July 18, 1863, during the 54th’s famous assault on Battery Wagner, Emilio found himself commanding what was left of the regiment. He was 18 years old.
Emilio also wrote the regimental history, “A Brave Black Regiment,” which includes many of the incidents that formed the basis of the movie “Glory.”
The son of a Spanish immigrant, Emilio was a 16-year-old Salem student when the Civil War began. He lied about his age and enlisted in the 23rd Massachusetts Infantry regiment. (Its memorial is near Salem Common.) He fought in five battles in North Carolina in 1862 and was promoted to sergeant, as Brian Valimont describes in “Salem’s Centuries.”
Early in the war, Black men were not allowed to serve in the Army (although the Navy had Black sailors). After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, however, the federal government allowed states to organize Black regiments. Officers had to be white, though. Massachusetts Governor John Andrew immediately decided to form some African-American regiments. Emilio volunteered to join one.
Andrew appointed Emilio as a lieutenant in the 54th, and he was quickly promoted to captain of Company E. By accepting the appointment, Emilio was volunteering for especially hazardous duty. The Confederates passed a law that said captured Union officers who led Black troops would be put to death for “inciting servile insurrection.” Never mind that, as Emilio wrote, “only a small proportion” of the recruits “had been slaves.” Leading free Northern Black men who had never been servile would have been enough to qualify for the death penalty.
Willard Phillips of Salem was among 10 “persons of prominence’ the governor appointed to a committee to raise recruits for the regiment. I assume he was the same Willard Phillips the census listed as a merchant, and who became a state representative and senator.
Most of these men had spent many years advocating for abolition, Emilio wrote. They raised funds from many prominent Massachusetts residents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Frederick Douglass, who had lived in Lynn for several years before moving to Rochester, NY, worked to recruit soldiers through speaking engagements and articles in his newspaper. Two of his sons joined the regiment. His son Lewis was its original sergeant-major.
Major Lincoln Ripley Stone, a physician practicing in Salem, signed on as the 54th’s regimental surgeon. He belonged to the Salem Light Infantry before the war. As an assistant surgeon in the 2nd Massachusetts, he was captured while treating wounded soldiers in May 1862. He was released in a prisoner exchange in time to treat soldiers wounded in the battle of Antietam in September 1862.
Salem’s Francis Fletcher was “a key figure in enlisting volunteers” for the regiment, according to Robert McMicken in “Salem’s Centuries.” Fletcher enlisted himself and became a sergeant and a clerk in Company A.
Black men like Fletcher who volunteered to join the regiment took even more risks than the average soldier in this very deadly war. Prisoners of war often were treated poorly, but these men faced even worse mistreatment and the threat of enslavement if they were captured. (Many of those captured at Battery Wagner died in POW camps.)
Emilio’s father, a music instructor, must have known Irish famine survivor Patrick Gilmore, who became nationally famous while leading the Salem Band at performances including presidential conventions and inaugurations in the 1850s. (Gilmore left Salem in 1858, perhaps feeling unwelcome in a city where the populist, anti-Irish-immigrant Know Nothing Party’s candidate for mayor won 70% of the vote in 1854.) Gilmore is credited with popularizing the abolitionist song “John Brown’s Body.” He later wrote “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
Gilmore served as the band leader of the 24th Massachusetts regiment and was a stretcher bearer during the 1862 battle of New Bern, North Carolina. (Emilio fought in that battle.) Gov. Andrew appointed Gilmore to train Massachusetts military bands, including the 54th’s. He would have frequently appeared at the regiment’s training camp in Readville, part of Hyde Park in Boston.
When the 54th paraded through Boston on May 28, 1863, to board ships to take it south, it was “preceded by Gilmore’s band,” Emilio wrote, and it “played the stirring music of John Brown’s hymn” as the regiment marched down State Street.
Emilio’s “Brave Black Regiment” recounts many of the regiment’s struggles later depicted in “Glory.” The federal government really did refuse to give the Black soldiers equal pay, and when Massachusetts offered to make up the difference, the soldiers turned down the offer on principle. They refused to accept their pay until the federal government issued them the same pay it gave white soldiers. After being sent South, the regiment served under a very racist brigade commander. Emilio’s book does not mention him shooting a soldier for striking a white woman, as the movie depicts, but he did shoot a soldier in another Black regiment for desertion without giving him a court martial to defend himself, and he made horribly racist remarks about and to Black soldiers.
Charlotte Forten does not appear in Emilio’s book, but she recorded encounters with the regiment in her journal. Salem State’s first African-American graduate volunteered to teach newly freed men and women on South Carolina’s Sea Islands. She visited the 54th when it camped nearby in late June, 1863. There she met Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, Major Edward Hallowell, and “my old friend James Walton” from Philadelphia, who was a lieutenant in the regiment. Of Shaw, she wrote, “he seems to me in every way one of the most delightful persons I have ever met.”
Shaw might have been familiar with Forten’s abolitionist talks and writing, and his abolitionist parents probably met prominent Salem abolitionists Charles Lenox Remond and his sister Sarah Parker Remond. For.a time, Forten had boarded with Charles, his wife Amy, and Sarah.
Forten described accompanying Shaw “to the Praise House to see the shout” and promised to send him copies of some of the hymns they heard there. A few days later, she wrote, the regiment was gone.
Ships took the 54th to mainland South Carolina, where, as the movie shows, it took part in some raids, then a larger battle on James Island near Charleston before the famous assault on Battery Wagner, a well-defended fort preventing the Union from capturing the city.
In the assault, 270 of the 600 soldiers of the 54th were killed, wounded or captured. — a casualty rate over 40%. Emilio, the unit’s ninth most senior officer, found himself in temporary command after everyone who ranked higher was killed or wounded.
Other Union regiments suffered heavily, too. The Union lost about 1,500 of the 5,000 soldiers it committed to the battle, including its commanding general. Union commanders had greatly underestimated how many Confederates remained in the fort.
After the battle, many of the wounded were taken to hospitals on the Sea Islands. Charlotte Forten volunteered at a hospital, writing letters home for the soldiers and doing what she could to help them. She learned that, before he died, Colonel Shaw had asked that if he didn’t return, one of his horses should be given to Charlotte to use until it could be sent home to his wife, whom Shaw had only married in May. Shaw was 25 when he died.
The wounded whose legs Major Stone had to amputate may have gotten prosthetic replacements made by the Salem Leg Company, headed by Dr. Edward Brooks Peirson, which was located at 22 High St. It was still making wooden legs for disabled veterans in 1870.
The 54th’s heroic assault drew national headlines and rebutted racist claims that Black men wouldn’t make good soldiers. Some 190,000 Black soldiers eventually served in the Union Army, making a huge contribution to its victory. The 54th finally won equal pay. And before the war ended, at least one of its Black enlisted men would be promoted to be a commissioned officer.
The 54th would fight lesser known battles in Florida and the Carolinas in the war’s last two years, eventually linking up with Sherman’s army as it finished its march to the sea. It finally captured Charleston..
Emilio served with the regiment until his term of enlistment expired shortly before the war ended. The captain was still too young to vote. Emilio worked in real estate in California and New York after the war. He compiled information gathered with other veterans and turned it into “A Brave Black Regiment” in 1890. He died in 1918.
Major Lincoln Ripley Stone served with the 54th from May to December 1863, when he was “discharged for promotion.” By war’s end, he was a brevet colonel in a regular U.S. Army regiment. He moved to Newton and lived until 1930.
Sergeant Frank Fletcher served with the 54th until the war ended, returned to Salem, and worked as a house painter. He died, still young, in 1872.
All three are buried in Harmony Grove Cemetery.
