Part 2: 'Forgotten hero' Octavius Catto pushed equality in Union army, society

War was on the horizon in Pennsylvania in June 1863. After a stunning victory at Chancellorsville, Gen. Robert E. Lee finally had found the opportune moment to put the Union army on the defensive.

In Philadelphia, and across the state, a call to arms was sounded. Volunteers for the militia were needed as gray legions marched toward the fields of southern Pennsylvania and an eventual fateful turn to Gettysburg.

“MEN OF COLOR. To Arms! Arms! NOW OR NEVER” read a large banner posted in downtown Philadelphia.

Fifty-five individuals placed their names at the bottom, among them O.V. Catto.

Just 24, Octavius Valentine Catto was a graduate and instructor at the Institute for Colored Youth. He had founded the Banneker Literacy Institute and was inducted into the Franklin Institute, a scientific organization. His many accomplishments included a stint as a professional baseball player.

The intellectual turned his attention to politics and public service. Catto, born in South Carolina to a Presbyterian minister, was determined to wage war on discrimination.

During that summer of 1863, Catto helped form a company of nearly 100 African-Americans.

“Answering the urgent call for volunteers as announced by the governor, they reported to the city arsenal for duty,” according to Andy Waskie, a Temple University professor who has written and lectured on Catto’s life and legacy. “They were uniformed and equipped and sent by train to Harrisburg to join the army. But the authorities there under General Couch ingloriously rejected the unit with the excuse that black troops were not authorized.”

Catto returned to Philadelphia and spent the next two years raising 11 African-American regiments for the Union cause. The units were organized at Camp William Penn, trained, equipped and sent to the front.

In 1864, Catto helped organize the Equal Rights League.

African-Americans at that time were not guaranteed the vote, and they did not have full access to the city’s street cars. Catto would devote the last few of his 32 short years to remedying those problems.

In 1870, an approved state amendment provided for African-American men to vote. Catto, a Republican supporter, actively campaigned for equality at the polls.

On Oct. 10, 1871, “voting transpired with acts of violence and intimidation,” Waskie told the Picket. “The police were in support of this. They were pushing black men out of line.”

An unarmed Catto was shot to death that tumultuous day, as he tried to stop the violence. Six years later, Frank Kelly, a white Democratic Party operative, was acquitted of the murder.

Catto became a martyr to the cause of equality -- only to slip into relative obscurity. A marker on his grave reads, “Forgotten Hero.”

Catto’s life story is finally drawing more recognition. The city is helping fund a statue in his honor and two ceremonies this weekend will recognize his sacrifice and service to the community. • (Related Picket article)

“Octavius Catto was not exceptional,” his great-great-nephew, Leonard Smith, told the Picket this week. “There were thousands of Octavius Cattos.”

Still, Smith feels pride in what his ancestor accomplished.

Smith, 68, said he principally learned from his grandmother about Catto and Catto’s father, William, whom Smith finds to be even more admirable.

“Civil rights has been a struggle in this country since the first landing and the first slave,” said Smith, a Williamsburg, Va., resident. “It did not start in the 1960s.”

The retired hospital administrator has done extensive research on his family, including those who helped in the Underground Railroad. Smith spoke with the authors of 2010’s "Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America.”

Service, Smith said, runs deep in his family.

“There is pride and a feeling you must have education and help others,” Smith told the Picket. “There are certain things that are ingrained.”

Storyteller Bob Branch, 58, is a historical re-enactor in Philadelphia who portrays Catto around town.

Two summers ago, he began working for Historic Philadelphia, an organization that interprets history and makes it relevant at several venues in the city.

“In school, the overwhelming (percentage of) black and white Philadelphians never heard of who he was,” said Branch, who grew up there.

“Each presentation I tailor to the audience. I will go the first person and dress as he would dress. I will intersperse direct quotes from Catto,” said Branch, who also makes appearances for other Philadelphia groups and churches.

Branch, an engineer, said he has a personal identification for the struggle for equality. His father, he said, was not allowed to play baseball for his school. Branch’s physics teacher in high school singled him out for “wasting time.” And a college professor did not think he was cut out for his eventual profession.

“I was free, but I wasn’t equal,” said Branch.

Younger people, especially, want to know why Catto was murdered.

“The question is, ‘How come we haven’t heard of him before?’ My answer is that history is quite often selective,” said Branch.

Despite gains made during and since Catto’s time, Branch said he remains concerned about equal access to education. And Smith cited economic inequities.

Saturday, Catto will be remembered in an annual wreath-laying ceremony and at the Union League, where the Pennsylvania National Guard will reissue a medal in his honor, to two Guard members who have exemplified remarkable public service.

Murray Dubin, co-author of “Tasting Freedom,” said Catto and others helped lead America’s first civil rights movement.

"I'd love to tell you that Martin Luther King knew about Catto and that's why he did what he did, but I can't prove that," Dubin told NPR in 2010. But it was the shoulders of Catto and dozens of other men and women "that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Ralph Abernathy ... stood on top of."

Photo of Robert Branch as Octavius Catto, J. Holder for Historic Philadelphia, Inc. Wreath photo courtesy of Gen. George Meade Society

Hari Jones at Cyclorama lecture

Civil War expert and curator Hari Jones is taking part in a lecture, "From Civil War to Civil Rights," Thursday night (Aug. 18) at the Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum.

The free program, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., also features Gordon L. Jones, senior military historian and curator at the Atlanta History Center, and Alexis Scott, publisher of the Atlanta Daily World.

Jones is curator of the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum, which reopened in a new space last month in Washington, D.C. An exhibit, "The Glorious March to Liberty," spans the Civil War to the civil rights era.

"This story is one of the best-kept secrets in American history," Jones recently told the Washington Examiner. "Well-educated Americans will often find the true story unbelievable. We're taught that African-Americans did little or nothing to free themselves."

Jones' lectures have included U.S. Colored Troops and African-American spies.

Using documents and research, the panelists will discuss how the Civil War helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement.

The lecture is sponsored by the city's Office of Cultural Affairs. The Cyclorama is at 800 Cherokee Avenue SE.

A more inclusive look at the war

My whirlwind trip to Charleston, S.C., concluded around 11 a.m. yesterday in Marion Square, where young college students sunbathed, rode bikes and sipped coffee.

Above, them South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, at the top of a tall statue, looked grimly toward the South.

The man who called slavery a "positive good" and defended states rights seemed a bit lost in time.

Musical programs and lectures I attended Monday and Tuesday showed me this was a very different Charleston that celebrated the war's centennial in 1961.

The buzz word for 2011 is "commemoration."

Speakers reiterated that secessionists really did think the war was about slavery and race. The states rights argument, they said, was built in support of slavery. I realize all of this can be argued -- and will be -- through 2015 and beyond.

In 1961, programs no doubt failed to mention the service of U.S. Colored Troops in the Union army and the toll of slavery on generations of African-Americans.

Monday night, a concert included several period tunes, including "Dixie" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Jay Ungar and his band performed "Ashokan Farewell," the haunting violin song that was the theme song for Ken Burns' Civil War TV series.

African-American Union re-enactors and men in Confederate gray stood together in front of the outdoor audience on a beautiful spring evening. It was a moment of real unity.

To the east across the park in the Battery, Fort Sumter glowed in red and blue.

Today, as then, the city also remembers the destruction it suffered during the war and its loss of young men to a cause in which they believed.

I was only a few years old at the time, but I can't imagine Charleston was this introspective during the centennial.

For all this, I noticed very few African-Americans at the events, parks and bombardment re-enactments I attended around Charleston this week.

It was a reminder, that although many civil rights gains were made only a few short years after the 1961 centennial, there appears to still be a racial divide in commemorating the Civil War. It would be an understatement to point out the pain that slavery and subsequent segregation brought to the African-American community.

Going forward, I hope events over the next four years will capture at least some of Charleston's spirit of reconciliation.

Part 1 of African-Americans and the Civil War: "Tell Our Story and We Will Come"

Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park is, in many ways, metro Atlanta’s largest playground.

Every year, about 1.5 million visitors throng to the 2,900-acre park in Cobb County, taking advantage of its trails, picturesque views and grassy meadows.

Of course, there’s also history there.

A frontal assault by Union Gen. William T. Sherman failed in June 1864, producing 4,000 additional casualties in the bloody, but eventually successful, campaign to take Atlanta.

About 20 percent of the visitors come to learn about the Civil War, and they find plenty to delve into – from the film and visitors center to signs and monuments in combat zones such as Cheatham Hill, Kolb Farm and Pigeon Hill. Interpretive programs and living histories help tell the story.

International visitors, including a recent surge of people from Asia, find the war fascinating.

But one segment of American society feels the story is incomplete.

African-Americans have a complex connection to the Civil War, one that includes celebration of liberty and pride over their ancestors’ contributions, but also the lingering sting of slavery, the states rights argument and segregation.

African-Americans, as slaves, helped build the massive Confederate defenses at Kennesaw. They served as cooks and teamsters for the Union army. Thousands served in battles across the South, wearing blue as U.S. Colored Troops.

Stanley C. Bond, superintendent at Kennesaw, says many may not feel the Civil War is part of their story. They may not find enough pertinent information or interpretation during a visit, he said.

“The Civil War in our community is not a conversation we are happy to talk about,” says Deane Bonner (photo above), president of the Cobb County branch of the NAACP.

That attitude, she says, has begun to soften recently with an effort by Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park to expand its interpretation of the Civil War “to an inclusive model that is more culturally and ethnically diverse.”

The park, in a cooperative agreement with the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University, recently produced a report on African-American attitudes toward the Civil War.

Entitled, “The War of Jubilee: Tell Our Story and We will Come,” the effort stems from focus groups held last year with nearly 60 members of organizations that have primarily African-American membership.

It is being shared with other National Park Service sites and non-government institutions and museums.

The biggest challenge from Kennesaw and other National Park Service sites that are working under the theme, “From Civil War to Civil Rights”: Making programs and museum exhibits relevant to African-Americans, thereby increasing their attendance at such locations.

Some observations by focus group members:

-- “I learned in school that the North came to the rescue of the blacks in the south. I did not have a good understanding of what the Civil War was about ... because I did not know where blacks stood.”
-- “African American history is not a part of that park.”
-- “The Civil War is part of the South’s DNA.”
-- “We need a way to overcome the shame or embarrassment of slavery - to see humanity. [We] need a picture to see humanity.”
-- “There has to be a desire to see the human aspect of the Civil War ... including stories of African Americans in the war and afterwards.”
-- “Kennesaw was critical to the taking of Atlanta during the Civil War battles.”
-- "One thing I will give the Confederate advocates is that they really know how to get their point across. They know how to get it across to their children, their grandchildren, etc. It is keeping the memory alive. They are going off of their emotions, so facts are not always present. You will hear about the glory, locations, and you hear about who won and who lost and names. You won’t hear about concepts leading to what happened afterwards."
-- “Looking at the Civil War, it was a battle for cheap labor – low wage labor. In the south, the Blacks were working for free with a gun to their heads. In the North, you had the low wage Irish immigrants who came in and worked in the factories. After the war, the blacks still worked for low wages, cheap labor.”

The Kennesaw visitor center does tell some of the African-American story. There are displays on slavery, labor performed by African-Americans and their service in the military.

The park has oral interpretive programs, such as one scheduled for this Saturday (Feb. 12) on African-American soldiers interred in nearby Marietta National Cemetery (photo, right).

But Bonner and members of the focus group argue there could be more on the history of African-Americans in Cobb County, their role as civilians and soldiers and a fuller dialogue on slavery and its implications. They’d like more information on emancipation, post-emancipation and Reconstruction years.

“We fought too,” Bonner says.

The report says participants are willing to engage in a “tough dialogue” on the war and its legacy. On slavery, "The expectation is that it would convey a dynamic message of what is was like," says Hermina Glass-Avery, associate director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University.

“There needs to be a true accounting that it [the war] was about slavery,’’ says Bonner, who had never visited the park until a November reception given for those who took part in focus groups.

Although they weren’t part of Sherman’s combat troops during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, U.S. Colored Troops fought in Dalton, Ga., and helped occupy Kennesaw after the battle. A few were likely killed in skirmishes at Kennesaw after the battle, according to Bond.

Historian and park volunteer Brad Quinlin said two U.S. Colored Troops regiments served as guards over vital bridges and railroads in the Atlanta Campaign and two former slaves were wounded at Kennesaw near Pigeon Hill while serving as military stretcher bearers.

Glass-Avery (left) organized the focus groups and prepared the report.

“They were genuinely interested in the Civil War,” she says of the participants, who she believes are interested in “racial uplift.”

She believes some of the hesitation to visit Civil War battlefields may stem from perceptions following the war that African-Americans might not feel welcome at battlefieds. Blacks still remember that the Ku Klux Klan once lit fiery crosses on nearby Stone Mountain, she says.

“The [1961] centennial,” she writes in the report, “was built on a racially exclusive interpretation of the Civil War.”

“Back then we couldn’t speak up,” echoes Bonner, adding she is not overly optimistic that the 150th commemoration beginning this year will adequately tell the African-American story.

The report’s findings indicate some optimism among focus group participants, who feel the Park Service is interested in incorporating some of their opinions.

“They expressed overall elation to tell the story,” says Glass-Avery.

But there also was a sense of pessimism.

“How will other groups perceive not so much of a reinterpretation, but the addition of the African-American experience?” Glass-Avery asks.

Other findings include:

-- While the different groups demonstrated a strong desire to know more about the African American experience during the Civil War, there were strong feelings among the participants that the history of African Americans and the Civil War will continue to be misinterpreted in the South.
-- However, many individuals also expressed hope that a more accurate view of history could emerge if historians would move beyond traditional viewpoints and methodologies to capture stories told within African American families, churches and social organizations.
-- Still others used the focus groups as a forum to relate significant African American Civil War efforts. As the participants shared family memories and accounts of war activity, each of them reinforced the belief that their history exists and that it needs to be gathered piecemeal from their families and kinship networks.

In the strictest terms, what mostly occurred at Kennesaw was a ferocious battle. But as the Park Service’s key Civil War site in metro Atlanta, the staff is charged with telling more than what happened there in a few days in June 1864.

“We have a very diverse staff,” says Bond, indicating it has several African-Americans, including two interpretive rangers and one law enforcement ranger.

Bond believes the park can do a better job of reaching out to more visitors from all backgrounds. “We have to be relevant to all Americans,” the longtime National Park Service employee from Beaufort, S.C., says.

“It was a very complex time in history, and there were many voices,” he says. “People fought here for things they believed in.”

His hope?

“I want to see us a single, united nation. We went through a terrible split to come to that.”

Louis Walker, 67, a retired Cobb educator and member of Zion Baptist Church in Marietta, did not participate in the focus groups, but has been to Kennesaw and knows the story of U.S. Colored Troops.

Referring to the Civil War, he repeats a refrain heard on other subjects:

“You need to know where you come from as a group and where you are going.”

NEXT WEEK IN PICKET: Focus group recommendations for Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park and what’s currently being done or considered.

• More information on the Kennesaw battlefield

Mobile museum to roll through country

The Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission is developing the “Civil War 150 HistoryMobile”— a 53-foot single-expandable tractor trailer that houses a complete museum. The HistoryMobile will travel throughout Virginia and the nation for four years, debuting at Manassas. • Article

Remembering Atlanta's formidable defenses

Engineer Lemuel P. Grant had quite a chore ahead of him beginning in the summer of 1863. The possibility of Union forces one day besieging Atlanta was becoming a reality.

With seed money of $5,000 to buy property and equipment, Grant, a native of Maine, and Col. Moses Wright began erecting the South’s fiercest defenses.

“They told him put to a fort on somebody’s pasture,” said living historian Robert Mitchell of Loganville, Ga. “It doesn’t matter whose.”

Grant (photo below) began buying private property and placating homeowners who had to move out of the way.

The 12-mile circle around the city had 25 forts/redoubts when it was completed using civilian and slave labor by the summer of 1864. The photo by George Barnard above was taken near the current Georgia Tech campus.

Using old maps and photos, Mitchell (bottom photo) gave visitors at the recent B*ATL an overview of just how dug in the city had become.

The defenses roughly track the boundaries of modern downtown Atlanta. You have to remember this was a pretty small city, although it had become the industrial and transportation center of the Deep South.

Union Gen. William T. Sherman knew a frontal assault on Fort Peachtree and Fort Hood, for example, would be costly.

His chief engineer found the fortifications “too strong to assault and too extensive to invest.”

"They completely encircled the city," Capt. O.M. Poe reported, "at a distance of about one and a half miles from the center and consisted of a system of batteries, open to the rear and connected by infantry parapets, with complete abatis, in some places in three or four rows, with rows of pointed stakes, and long lines of chevaux-de-frise.

"In many places rows of palisading were planted along the foot of the exterior slope of the infantry parapet with sufficient openings be¬tween the timbers to permit the infantry fire, if carefully delivered, to pass freely through it, but not sufficient to permit a person to pass through, and having a height of twelve to fourteen feet. The ground in front of these palisades was always completely swept by fire from the adjacent batteries, which enabled a very small force to hold them."

In the end, attacking the defenses wasn’t necessary. After three key battles outside the defenses, Sherman won the vital railroads he wanted. Gen. John Bell Hood and his forces had to evacuate Atlanta on Sept. 1, 1864.

Today, practically nothing from the fortifications survives.

Kennesaw battlefield conducting focus groups with African-Americans

Hoping to widen the scope of its exhibits, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park is talking with African-Americans about their attitudes on the Civil War.

The park wants to know what would draw more African-Americans and what kind of exhibits or themes might better tell the black narrative on the conflict.

“The African-American side of the Civil War has been left out” at most sites, said Kennesaw Mountain (KEMO) Superintendent Stanley C. Bond.

The park, working with the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at nearby Kennesaw State University, will be hosting five focus groups this spring. Each group will have 8-10 participants. The groups will include officials and members of several organizations, such as the NAACP Cobb County branch.

KEMO’s recommendations and actions following the study will be shared with other federal Civil War sites later this summer. National Park Service sites are charged with discussing the causes and consequences of the war, Bond says. It’s part of the “From the Civil War to Civil Rights” initiative.

Bond says the popular suburban Atlanta battlefield does have some mention of the homefront and the African-American story during the Civil War, but needs to do more.

“We would like to see more people here for historical purposes,” says Bond, who contends about 80 percent of park visitors come for recreational purposes, such as hiking, walking and horseback riding.

Conducting the focus groups is Hermina Glass-Avery (above), associate director of the KSU center.

Glass-Avery contends that slavery, race and emancipation got short shrift during the nation’s 1961 observation of the Civil War centennial. She hopes that changes during the sesquicentennial commemoration starting in 2011.

A controversy this week has rekindled the issue of perspective.

Virginia Gov. Bob McConnell apologized Wednesday for failing to include slavery in his proclamation declaring April as Confederate History Month. He said he wanted the month to mark the valor of Confederate soldiers, but critics said he should have first acknowledged the ties between slavery and the war.

Bond and Glass-Avery cite the following as examples of little-known aspects of blacks in Georgia:

-- Some 250 African-Americans from the era, many federal soldiers, are buried at the National Cemetery in Marietta. One African-American, “Ten Cent” Bill Yopp, served with Confederate forces and is buried with them at the Confederate Cemetery in Marietta.

-- African-Americans, like their white owners and neighbors, suffered late in the war. “When Sherman went on the March to the Sea he took everything,” Bond said.

-- Large numbers of black women died in contraband camps because they were left without support when freed men joined the federal army.

-- Plantations symbolize the antebellum South. “You don’t hear from the silent hands that made them operate,” said Glass-Avery.

-- African-American soldiers “were present and agents of change for their freedom.” At least 200,000 served.

Glass-Avery and Bond hope their focus group findings may bring about new interpretive approaches and exhibits that could increase the number of black visitors.

“Their [African-Americans’] story is not held with the same respect as other narratives,” said Glass-Avery, who contends the election of President Barack Obama has made the time right to discuss the war, race and civil rights. She says the Compromise of 1850, Jim Crow laws, the Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Civil War all shaped the push for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.

KEMO recently participated in the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era’s recent symposium, “Alternative Realities: African-Americans and the American Civil War: Freedom, Memory and Identity.”

Glass-Avery says the “Lost Cause” touted by many Southerners after the war and at the 1961 centennial has given way to the discussion of many other issues and beliefs related to the Civil War.

In the end, Glass-Avery hopes that Americans will be open to different views of history.

“It is ethical for us to be respectful of one another.”