A Brigadier Needs a Big Staff

Here they are: the staff of Union Brigadier General John P. Hatch, in front of John A. S. Ashe's Italianate mansion at 26 South Battery. Hatch is seated at the front — commander of the Northern District in Gillmore's Department of the South.

A few months earlier he had appointed seventeen officers to headquarters positions, and most of them are probably in this frame along with several more: aides-de-camp, inspectors general, quartermasters, engineers. This is what the administration of an occupied city looked like.

Two men can be named. Captain James W. Grace, chief ordnance officer, of the 54th Massachusetts, stands at the far left of the front row. Captain John Moore, Company G, 99th United States Colored Infantry, stands above and to the left of the table at the far right.

Several of these officers belonged to the 127th New York and the 21st United States Colored Troops, the regiments that made up the Federal garrison of Charleston as the war ended — the same units that had come ashore on February 18.

The photograph was made on May 1, 1865, which is also the date Jack Thomson assigned to the view of this house draped in mourning for Lincoln. The black cloth on the columns next door and this group portrait on the steps belong to the same day.