All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you.
I think you'll find very interesting.
We always want to remind you you can find more about Veterans Radio at its Facebook site
or at the web.
VeteransRadio.org is our new URL, VeteransRadio.org.
Where we're on the web 24-7, you can find a lot of our podcasts there as well.
We post new ones every Tuesday, so you can get a new story, a new interview,
something you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
And before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.
First up, we want to thank National Veteran Business Development Council, NVBDC.org.
It was established to certify both service disabled and veteran-owned businesses.
You'll find out how they can help your business by going to NVBDC.org.
We want to thank Legal Help for Veterans.
Legal Help for Veterans fights for veterans disability rights all across the nation.
You can reach them at 800-693-4800 or on the web at LegalHelpForVeterans.com.
We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Jill L. Numark, an author, has written a fascinating book.
Jill, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk about my book, especially on VeteransRadio.
My father was in the service for a long time as well as a lot of his relatives.
Well, not a long time.
He spent 37 years in the United States Air Force and was a chief master sergeant.
So you come from that kind of upbringing and your book, Without Concealment, Without Compromise,
The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons, is really kind of unique.
I don't think we've ever talked about anything close to this on VeteransRadio,
which is why I said, oh, I got to talk to Jill.
This book apparently has its roots in some work that you were doing for the National Library of Medicine back in 2009.
And you stumbled on one of these stories and said, I wonder what's going on here.
But it was like a 15-year odyssey to put this together, wasn't it?
Yeah, from that time until the published book, obviously, it takes a little time.
And that exhibition just piqued my curiosity, as you mentioned.
And I was on my way.
And just like any kind of genealogist, when you're doing a biography,
you can keep going and going and going, and you keep trying to find these little pieces and trying to put them together.
So whether the story is ever really completely told, there's always new things to find.
But it was a journey of discovery and exploration.
And I hope that it will bring these stories to light on these accomplishments of these Black surgeons.
I think it really does, and I think it should be of interest to civil war buffs, to medical buffs,
medical history buffs, surgeons, to those interested in the civil rights issues,
and veterans in general, because I found some themes that kind of run down all the way today with all of these men.
And one of them was they all had an overwhelming desire to practice medicine, and nothing was going to stop them.
It wasn't easy, was it, for them to become doctors?
No, it wasn't easy.
At that time, becoming a doctor was a little bit different than today.
You could do an apprenticeship with a physician for five, six, seven years, and then go ahead and practice medicine.
It did not necessarily require a medical degree.
But for these Black men, in order for them to be seen and recognized as physicians,
they really did need to get medical degrees.
And it was because of the fact they had medical degrees that they were allowed to eventually serve during the civil war as surgeons
to the United States Colored Troops and to Black civilians.
And we have to put in some context to really understand the story that the Civil War was 1861 to 1865, April of those years.
For the first year or so, Blacks could not join into the military.
Finally, in 1862, you have the signing of the D.C. Emancipation Proclamation, and in January 1st of 1863,
Lincoln signs the Emancipation Declaration, and Blacks are more welcomed into fighting for the north, if you will.
And you mentioned the term that I think today would jar somebody's ear, but it was the term used at the time, which are the Colored Troops.
Yes. And I have to say that I don't know necessarily if they were so much that they were more welcome.
I think what happened is, as the war went on and they used all their resources, there were fewer white men to serve.
And that goes for the Confederacy also, but in the Union Army, and I think that they realized that they needed to recruit Black men
who were anxious to participate and wanted to participate, and they knew that they would not be successful in winning the war unless they recruited and used Black troops.
And at the time, when they started to, after the, in January 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was passed,
it really, a lot of people think it freed all the slaves. It did not. It freed all the slaves in the rebellion states.
And so, but as a result of that, they formed the United States Colored Troops when they realized that they really needed to recruit more soldiers.
I think there were almost 200,000 Black soldiers that served, which was about maybe 10% of the U.S. Army at that time.
And at some point, it also became obvious that they needed Black or Colored Surgeons to address the Colored Troops that were serving.
But I want to back up to the apprenticeship and the formal education, because one of the themes that kind of runs through this is the difficulty all of these men had in getting that formal education at schools,
both in the, primarily the problems within the U.S., but some of them went to Canada, some of them went to England.
Again, going back to, if you really want to do this, they found a way to get that formal education, but it was not without problems, was it?
No, it was not. First of all, most of these men came from families that had some affluence, so they were, that allowed them to be able to travel to places,
gave them a little bit more freedom to do that. They were all born free. But it was difficult. Alexander Augusta, who was the first African American commissioned as a medical officer in the U.S. Army,
he wanted to go to medical school and had gone, he was from Norfolk, Virginia. He went to Pennsylvania, where his brother lived, and he wanted to go to school there,
but he could not get into medical school there. He had a mentor that worked with him, who was a professor at University of Pennsylvania,
but he was blocked completely, and that was a little earlier than some of the others, but he ended up going to Canada, because that's where he was able to get a medical education.
It's also interesting that some of, it's also, Jill, interesting that some of them have sort of a career in front of getting either the apprenticeship or the formal medical education,
whether it be a dentist or a barber. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yes, I think there's a few of them did have some other roles. So for black men, being a barber was a fairly good job, because they could make some money.
And I think that for Alexander Augusta, his brother was a barber, and I think he became a barber, maybe a surgeon barber, and surgeon barbers did other things like pull teeth and leech treatments, where they put leeches on to draw blood.
So I think that, you know, they did do that, and I think for Augusta, this was a way to get enough money to get a tutor to teach him about medicine and also to go to medical school.
John H. Rapier Jr., who was, I think, maybe 10 years younger, he did some traveling before he went to medical school, and he went to the Caribbean, to Haiti and Jamaica,
looking really for a place where blacks could have a better life. And while he was there, he apprenticed with a dentist.
So that was his way of learning about dentistry, and he was going to be a dentist, and then he decided that he felt that being a doctor would be more prestigious and would give him more money in order to help support his father and his brothers and sisters.
And so he did an apprenticeship with that, with another doctor in the Caribbean, and from that he was able to go to medical school in the U.S.
But his story is a little bit more interesting in terms of his acceptance into a medical program.
Yeah, he was rejected by the University of Michigan after he was accepted and then rejected because all the other white medical students got in an upper-line.
Well, actually what actually happened was that there were two black medical students there at the time, and when John H. Rapier Jr. was accepted as a student there,
they always want to know where you're from. And what he did is, he said that he was from Jamaica.
So they looked upon him as a foreign man of color. There was another man named Alpheus W. Tucker, who was from Detroit, who also got accepted to the medical school there.
And he's actually the one that got yelled at when he attended the class by the way he got kicked out.
And I think the difference was, they saw him as a black man from Detroit and they looked at Rapier as a black man from Jamaica and therefore he was a foreigner.
And their attitude was a little bit different about that.
But when they applied and they got into medical schools, it didn't mean they were accepted as students.
You can get in and you've applied and they've accepted you as a medical student, but you're not always accepted by the medical students.
Yeah, absolutely. Again, one of the themes throughout all of these gentlemen's stories is the express and subtle ways in which prejudice creeps into their life,
whether it's in trying to get their education or practicing their profession.
But one of the things that also rings true through this is a theme is sort of the status that being an officer provided them, the uniform provided them in certain circumstances.
But I was surprised that this difference between being a contract officer and a commission officer. Can you explain that?
Yes. The difference was that at the time with surgeons, you were either commissioned into the military,
Alexander T. Augusta and John Vance Erli de Grasse, there were 14 black surgeons, only two of them were actually commissioned officers in the Union Army.
The others were hired on contract by the Army as acting assistant surgeons.
They were given a rank and they were given uniforms, but they were not formally in the military.
So they were just considered on contract with the Army.
And I believe that they did that. It gave the US Army and the US government a way of easily getting rid of them if they needed to.
Because if you're on contract, you can nullify the contract and out you go. If you're a commissioned officer, it takes a little bit more to remove you from your position.
And again, that's one of those subtle forms of discrimination bias that they had to overcome to ply their trade.
And certainly this was a high profession as it is today, being a doctor, being a surgeon.
At that time, they were at, as black surgeons in the military, a contract or commission, they were sort of at the top of the social pyramid in their communities.
Yes, they were. And also, within the Army, because they were getting paid, I think, $100 a month and $100 a month in 1863, 64 with a lot of money.
And so, it was a question of, I believe that because of some of the difficulties that Augusta faced at the beginning and the way that the white surgeons complained,
I think the US Army decided that they were not going to commission any more officers and they were just going to get them on contract.
And that didn't stop them. A lot of times it was subtle, but in a lot of times it was not subtle at all.
One of the other things, yeah, this is the prejudice I'm talking about, part of it is in their assignments.
Talk to us a little bit about the type of assignments these various surgeons received as compared to maybe what others did.
Yeah, sure. When you go through the federal records, all the assignments of these black surgeons, except for one, were all at black-only hospitals that served only black patients,
both from the United States Colored Troops soldiers, as well as black civilians.
So, either they were at hospitals that were for black patients only, or they were also assigned to recruiting stations examining black recruits when they were joining the United States Colored Troops.
The only one that was served in the field was John Van Surly de Grasse, and his experience was very difficult.
He faced lots of blatant discrimination and eventually they brought him up on what I consider dubious charges of drunkenness and insubordination,
and they cashiered him out, so he was court-martialed out because of that.
And if you do read all the court-martial transcripts, which are at the National Archives in Washington, it's pretty clear that they really didn't have much of a case,
but this was the way they could get him out.
Now, the other Alexander T. Augusta was assigned, now you have to keep in mind John Van Surly de Grasse was an assistant surgeon, so I think he was a lieutenant.
But when Augusta, who was the first, he was given the rank of major because he was a full surgeon.
And when he, eventually, he was assigned as the regimental surgeon to the seventh regiment of the United States Colored Troops,
and when his troops mustered in, they rusted in with three other regiments of the Colored Troops, all of whom had white assistant surgeons.
And so Augusta was the ranking senior surgeon when he arrived there.
They wrote a letter to President Lincoln complaining about being in a position, being subordinate to a black man, which they felt was unacceptable,
although they expressed their support for the advancement of the Colored people in the U.S.,
but they couldn't stand for having him as the ranking medical officer.
And although we don't know if Lincoln ever responded, Augusta was removed from that location and sent to examine black recruits in Baltimore.
The difference is that he was never removed as the regimental surgeon, so he remained that. They never replaced him with the regiment.
Your book does a great job of talking about degrassies' charges on really what sound like made up drunkenness charges.
And as one of those, okay, this is how we get rid of somebody we don't like.
Yes, and it was clear. Yeah, it was very clear because there were a few people that had written letters saying that they weren't going to join up again
if this was the case and he should be removed. And it's very interesting because one of the instances that they claim that he was drunk was at the Battle of Alesti.
And the Lieutenant Colonel, who was the commanding officer at the time, was wounded at the battle and the surgeon was treating him.
But what he did is he transferred the care of this commanding officer to degrass
in order to accompany him to Jacksonville to get him on a ship to bring him north to like a hospital in South Carolina.
And it seems inconceivable that the surgeon in charge would have transferred the commanding officer's care to a doctor that was drunk.
But this is what they claim. Absolutely. And if he did, he should have been court-martialed.
But again, it's some of that subtle discrimination that comes out of this. It's interesting. And even today, you know, there are service members of every race and color and creed
who say, I got picked on by my superiors and this is one of the, you know, they gave me an article 15 or something. This is one of the things they did to me.
And again, these kind of themes run through here. One of the gentlemen, Dr. Powell, Jr., fought for 25 years trying to get his invalid pension and died before he was ever given.
And I can tell you as a lawyer working with veterans of disability, none of them want to go 25 years trying to get their disability payment or pension.
And when I read that, I got, oh my goodness, we still do some of the same goofy stuff today. Tell us about Dr. Powell, Jr.
Yeah, he was had a, his father was an African American and his mother was a Native American. They were from New Bedford, Massachusetts.
And his father was a staunch abolitionist and very well known and ran a boarding house for black sailors and part of the Underground Railroad, both in New Bedford and in New York City.
And so Powell grew up with abolitionists and with all of this discussion in his home. And I think his father and both his father and mother were people that he looked up to and followed kind of in their footsteps.
So he was determined to get a pension. You know, it's questionable.
Because it was the right thing to do. And he had had that core belief instilled in him from childhood that if this is the right thing to do, you keep fighting forever on it.
And he, as I said, he did for 25 years, killed his death in 1960.
Exactly. And he, you know, what he would do is he would get rejected and then the rules would change.
And then, you know, because at first it was you had to be injured, you know, during the war to be able to get a pension.
And then it changed to old age as pensionable. So he would do this and he would get medical examinations and he would get depositions.
But you also have to keep in mind that a lot of the depositions came from other black physicians and or black people.
And at the time, people did not take depositions. They questioned the credibility of black witnesses.
So that was that was something that came along. But it wasn't as if other contract surgeons, there were some contract surgeons that were white, that got pensions.
But there was definitely some discrimination going on there. And, you know, he was he was determined.
He felt that he had served his country. And this is what was due him.
And he needed the pension.
We're talking to Jill L. Newmark, who wrote without concealment, without compromise, the courageous lives of black civil war surgeons.
And we won't have enough time to talk about all these gentlemen. I want folks to read this. You're going to read about Dr. Anderson Abbott, who went to the White House reception with A. Ben-Mary Lincoln.
So they're weaved into this are all kinds of interesting stories about going to Richard Green, the only doctor in this group who's not not in the army.
He's with the Navy, had a Yale education and then on to Dartmouth Medical School.
Very, very every one of these guys, one's a preacher who became a physician, have very interesting individual stories. But when you put them all together, as I say, these themes run through.
I want to talk about Benjamin Boseman for a moment, because I think he highlights post service transition and success, which a number of these doctors had.
But again, kind of relates to people who get out of the service today, go on and do really successful things.
Tell us about Dr. Boseman.
Yes, he was actually from New York, from Troy, New York, but he joined when he, you know, he went to medical school and he had a short term in the service in South Carolina, where he treated wounded soldiers and sick soldiers from the 21st Regiment of the USET.
But after the war, he stayed in South Carolina and he wanted, he was interested in improving himself, in moving himself up the ladder, social ladder, and gaining some financial success and looked at different opportunities.
And one of those was that he became a member of the South Carolina legislature, which, you know, after reconstruction, there was the right to vote for black men and they, you know, there was a lot of black men that wanted to become politically active.
And he served there. He maintained a medical practice. But then he went on to become the first black postmaster of Charleston.
Appointed by President Ulysses Grant.
Yes, yes.
Really interesting stories how they, again, they kind of continue to rise up. Unfortunately, many of these men died very young and I think you could, you could take it back to their exposure in the war to various things, tuberculosis in particular, but different fevers that were, you know, called at that time.
So the other thing I want to comment.
Well, I just want to say you also have to keep in mind that, you know, their whole existence was very stressful. If you're constantly being, you know, threatened physically and verbally through your life and you have to struggle, you know, that is, that can weigh you down and make you a little bit more susceptible, I think, to, you know, being run down and being tired.
Absolutely.
And he served during the war. I think one of the things about John Rapier Jr., who died very young, he died a couple years after the war. You know, he, they talk about his, he talks about his work and how hard it was.
So I think they worked very hard and did the best that they could at providing medical care to members of their community.
The photographs that you've uncovered are a whole other story, but they really also make the book and bring it alive to who these men were.
Jill Newmark, if people want to know more about the book or where they can find it or where they can find stories in your websites, give us, give us some of that information.
Well, I have a website about my, about the book, which is blackcivilwarsurgence.com. There's links to lots of my talks, links to, you know, all the different bookstores you can buy the book.
There's additional things. Then there's also the emerging civil war website. I don't have their actual address, but there's additional information that's available there that I didn't have space for in the book.
Some other stories and additional images that were not in the book. So those are two, two things that can, can get you to my book. If you Google my name, it usually comes up as well.
And that's why I keep throwing in the L, Jill, L Newmark. Jill, thanks for spending some time with Veterans Radio today.
Yeah. I just want to say one more thing if that's okay.
Absolutely.
I want to, one of the things that I think it was kind of thrilling for me, and I think it is a very important is that right before the book was published, the book was published at the end of May.
And I found out that there's an army, an army base called Fort Belvoir, which is in Virginia, and they have something, they have a medical facility there called the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital.
Well, in May of this year, they renamed that hospital the Alexander T. Augusta Military Medical Center.
And 160 years after his service. And it was quite an amazing experience to be there because when you're, when you're writing a book and spending all these years researching and writing about these guys, you become kind of, they become part of your family.
And for me, that's one of the greatest honors that they could have given him for all the inroads that he made and all the firsts because he was the first African American, as I said, a medical officer commissioned.
He's the first to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was the first African American on a faculty of a medical school and the first African American to direct the hospital in the United States.
So I just want to bring that up because that's an important recognition of the service that these black surgeons gave to the US during the Civil War.
Absolutely. And it's a great way to keep history alive because people will forever say, well, who was this guy? And then they're going to go look him up and be amazed.
So Jill, thanks again for spending time with Veterans Radio today.
Okay. And thanks for giving me the opportunity.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today. I am Jim Fawcone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host. I'm a Veterans Disability lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at 800-6934800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio shows by visiting us at veteransradio.org. That's veteransradio.org.
And until next time, you are dismissed.
We again want to thank our national sponsors, the National Veterans Business Development Council, NVBDC.org, VA Ann Arbor Health Care System, the Vietnam Veterans of America, Charles S. Kettles Chapter, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
VFW, Graf O'Hara Post 423 in Ann Arbor, and the American Legion Press Corn Post 46 also in Ann Arbor. We appreciate all your support. You can go to veteransradio.net, click on the sponsor level, and continue to support keeping Veterans Radio on the air.
And until next time, you are dismissed.
ChumbaCasino.com.