Reminiscences of two years with the colored troops Personal Narratives of events in the War of the Rebellion, being papers read before the Rhode Island Soldiers and — Inside the Classic

Camp Life and the Turtle-Backed Crown

Dutch Island, where the regiment camped before deployment, is described as a “turtle-backed crown” exposed to “fierce storms and the howling winds that swept with keen edge over the waters of the Narragansett.” The image is precise and physical, setting a tone of exposure and endurance. The regiment remained there until January 20, 1864, when the transport Daniel Webster appeared. Addeman notes that the sutler’s arrangements delayed departure until the next morning—a small logistical hitch that typifies his attention to the mundane machinery of military movement. The voyage itself is dismissed with a wry aside about army transports “long since seen its better days,” where men were “packed like sheep in the hold.”

Discipline and Louisiana Rum

Once stationed in Louisiana, Addeman’s account turns to the daily struggle for order. He singles out “Louisiana rum” as a particularly demoralizing stimulant, “fiery fluid” that “would arouse all the furies in a man when it had him under its control.” Gambling was another persistent vice. After taps, men would gather in darkened shanties built from confiscated houses, whispering over cards. Addeman describes raiding these games: on one occasion, he burst in and scooped up cards and stakes, prompting a soldier to quip, “it was no use to play against the Captain, for he got high, low, jack and the game.” The anecdote reveals both the captain’s authority and the men’s sardonic humor.

The Reluctant Signatory

A striking episode involves a soldier who could write but refused to sign his name on the company rolls. Addeman pressed him, but the man explained that “in consequence of some trouble he had in former years, got into by the use of the pen, he had made a vow never to write again.” The captain speculates—with a touch of dry humor—that the trouble might have been forgery, or perhaps the man was “an unfortunate indorser.” The passage is notable for what it leaves unresolved: Addeman does not claim to have broken the man’s resolve, and the soldier’s past remains opaque. The vignette offers a rare glimpse of individual resistance within the regiment’s collective discipline.

Flood, Reconnaissance, and the Absent Battle

The memoir’s most extended set piece is a trip through flooded country after the spring of 1865, when the river broke through neglected levees and inundated the region west of the regiment’s post. Ordered to report to Brigadier-General R.A. Cameron at Brashear City, Addeman traveled by steamer to New Orleans, then by train to Terrebonne, where “steam travel came to a sudden stop.” He switched to a hand-car, then to a boat rowed by colored soldiers, covering twelve miles to Tigerville on the Alligator bayou. The route lay over the bed of the washed-out railroad. The flood, he notes, likely prevented a rebel raid that “would have given us sharp work.” The passage is the closest the narrative comes to action, yet it remains a story of movement through waterlogged terrain, not combat.

Addeman’s reminiscence is less a war story than a garrison story—a record of how a regiment was organized, transported, housed, disciplined, and occasionally diverted by flood or rumor. Readers expecting battlefield drama will find instead the texture of camp life: the taste of Louisiana rum, the creak of a hand-car, the whispered card game interrupted by a captain’s lantern. The memoir’s value lies in these small, specific moments, which together build a portrait of the war as experienced by men who spent their service not in famous charges but in the daily work of occupation.

Reading about those heavy artillerymen in the Louisiana mud, I kept thinking about the quiet weight of just staying put. All that discipline and waiting, punctuated by sudden floods. It made me oddly nostalgic for duty’s slow ache, like finding a friend in In Mesopotamia — Reading Notes, where distance itself becomes the story, told without fuss. Just one soldier’s steadfast remembrance.