29th Colored Regiment Monument in New Haven

Of This Land

May 22, 2015

The Connecticut State Seal has three cultivated grape vines on it, each one holding a trio of juicy purple bunches.

“Why grape vines?” you ask, over all the native flora that might seem better suited for the honor. One answer goes like this: “Because that’s how it’s always been.” Before statehood in 1784, fruiting grape vines were on Connecticut’s colonial seal, made official in 1662, and before that they’d been on the unofficial version, introduced in 1644.

But if it’s meaning you’re after, and not just incident, things get a little stickier. The historical record doesn’t offer a clear answer as to what the grapes mean. The most plausible interpretations stem from the language that’s accompanied those vines since the beginning: “Qui transtulit sustinet,” meaning, “He who transplanted still sustains .”

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It’s a proclamation of piety—“He” refers to God—and optimism, declaring that the present holds the same future promise as the past did. But it also contains an essential core of humility, acknowledging that the largely English settlers would always have to earn, by their virtues and actions, whatever prosperities this new land afforded. By the grace of forces beyond themselves, they were strangers in a strange land—in it, but not of it.

Like those grape vines.

By the mid-19th century, it’s safe to say that that brand of humility, if it had ever been genuinely operative, was largely forgotten by white Americans, in deed if not in word. Most considered themselves of, not just in, the land they called home, and entitled to certain privileges over and above those deemed alien.

Like black people. Black Americans at the time—whether enslaved in the South, living as second-class citizens in the North or enjoying substantially freer lives in small progressive pockets of the country—were constantly reminded that they weren’t considered of this land. Wherever they lived, and whatever their official legal status, they would have known very well the ever-present demerits of being black in America—of having life, liberty and property never nearly as secured as those of their white neighbors. And whereas whites could trace their transplanting to acts of volition often cast as valorous, blacks were transplanted here by force of other men.

At first, even the Civil War wasn’t a legitimate cause to believe that the situation for blacks would improve. The South fought to preserve the institution of slavery against what was only a perceived threat to it from northern states, and the North, while abolitionism was by then a serious force in its political discourse, fought merely to retain the union, regardless of whether slavery continued. (Indeed, a handful of Union-aligned states, like Maryland and Delaware, still allowed slavery within their own borders.) But as Union soldiers advanced throughout Confederate territory, experiencing the peculiar horrors of southern slavery firsthand, and as the bloody war made ever clearer the need for drastic measures the public would’ve deemed too extreme not a few years earlier, political realities changed.

In July 1862, Congress passed and President Abraham Lincoln signed the Second Confiscation Act, which gave him the authority to “employ… persons of African descent… for the suppression of this rebellion” and “to extend to persons who may have participated in the existing rebellion… pardon and amnesty.” In other words, he could now call blacks to serve in the Union army, and he could grant amnesty to anyone in any rebel state—slaves included. Lincoln’s subsequent Emancipation Proclamation, which was in fact an executive order, did both, going into effect on January 1, 1863.

For black men in Connecticut, this proved a clarion call, even though the state government, charged with approving and organizing a formal muster, was stalled due to opposition among its ranks. Finally, in the latter half of 1863, the official call was issued for black volunteers to enlist in the “29th (colored) Regiment,” as it was often identified in the papers. In November, the 29th’s official camp formed in the southwestern part of Fair Haven—incidentally, nicknamed Grape Vine Point—attracting men from towns all over the state and beyond.

The Hartford Daily Courant, which occasionally reported enlistment numbers at the camp, counted 145 men there as of December 3, 1863. By March 12, 1864, as the regiment was preparing to embark for war, the Courant reported that 1,006 had gathered to join the 29th, with another 306 grouped into a second unit, dubbed the 30th Colored Regiment. According to an estimate by Civil War historian and reenactor Charles Benjamin Hawley, nearly 80% of eligible black men in Connecticut would enlist to fight for the Union.

And they did so despite daily indignities. Being relegated to units based on their skin color was one sort. Another was earning less than their white counterparts, and having to pay fees that whites didn’t. Blacks often received less desirable assignments, too, in camp or on the battlefield. Suspicions that some commanders deliberately used black soldiers as cannon fodder carry a ring of truth about them. Meanwhile, blacks could expect harsher treatment from Confederates if cornered or captured.

But members of the 29th also experienced moments of unmitigated glory—most of all when they were among the first wave of soldiers to enter Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, during its surrender in April 1865, heralding a victorious end to the Civil War.

As of 2008, some 140 years late, there’s a stunning memorial to the 29th Colored Regiment in present-day Criscuolo Park, on the grounds where the troops first mustered. In the center is a polished black monolith—granite, it looks like—surrounded by a semicircle of eight shorter stones, each emblazoned with the names and towns of the men who served. On the central pillar is a brief summary of the regiment’s formation, a list of some of the 29th’s battles and a plaque featuring rifle-slinging soldiers on the march, caps pulled low over determined faces. Two of them wave flags—in back, the stars and stripes of America, and in front, a stylized version of the Connecticut state flag, with grapes on the vine, and the words “Qui transtulit sustinet.”

These men gave far more to their state and country than they ever got back, and in the doing proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they were of this land, and not just in it.