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Concord’s Black Soldiers in the Revolutionary & Civil Wars: What were they fighting for?
2021 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
with Joe Zellner, Concord-Carlisle High School Social Studies Teacher Emeritus, Civil War 54th Regiment Re-enactor, and The Robbins House Advisor & Interpreter
Wednesday, Sept. 22nd • 6-7:30 pm • Location TBA
Concord Carlisle Adult & Community Education • Register here, fee: $25
When Caesar Robbins marched to war in 1776, enslaved and free people of African descent had been fighting in New England’s armies for generations. In 1760, at age 15, Caesar Robbins served in the French and Indian War, likely in his enslaver, John Robbins’s place. Caesar was one of a handful of Black soldiers in the Revolutionary War. In 1863, George Washington Dugan joined the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He was Concord’s sole Black Civil War soldier. This course will pair the role of Concord’s Black antebellum volunteers with all Black US soldiers. What is the tie that binds this common action?
![Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? We have you covered with a little Robbins house trivia. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Peter’s Field. Peter’s Field most likely referenced Peter Hutchinson, who was the last African American owner of The Robbins House. Peter purchased the home in 1852 and lived with his wife, Nancy, and several of their children in the home until 1868. Emerson described Peter’s farm, and by extension the original area of farmland attached to The Robbins House out in the Great Field like this:
KNOWS he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?]
That field by spirits bad and good,
By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted.
[In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up,
I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
And nearer stoops the moon.
There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
Old gods forsook the skies.
Happy Reading!](https://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)