All freedom fighters biography samples

Major General David Hunter wanted to make Yankee soldiers of former slaves—but first he had to win a battle with the government.

Corporal Robert Sutton of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers had been an escaped slave when he last saw his old home in northern Florida.

It was now January 1863, and Sutton was a Union soldier. His white commander, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took special delight in re-introducing Corporal Sutton to the woman who once had owned him.

“I never saw a finer bit of unutterable indignation than came over the face of my hostess, as she slowly recognized him,” Higginson wrote.

“She drew herself up, and dropped out the monosyllables of her answer as if they were so many drops of nitric acid. ‘Ah,’ quoth my lady, ‘we called him Bob!’”

Sutton and Higginson served in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the offspring of a controversial effort to arm former slaves that was originally conceived by ambitious and hot-tempered Maj.

Gen. David Hunter, commander o