Charles Trowbridge
*Charles Trowbridge was born on this date in 1800. He was a white-American soldier, abolitionist, and politician.
Charles Tyler Trowbridge was from Morristown, New Jersey, in an area known as Trowbridge Mountain. He was the third of seven children born to Elijah Freeman Trowbridge and Temperance Ludlow Muchmore. His family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1854. In 1857, he married Emeline Haviland Jackson at Freehold, New Jersey. They had one child, Ida Emeline Trowbridge, who died in 1858.
During the American Civil War, Trowbridge enlisted in the Union Army in December 1861; later that month, he married his second wife, Jane Pooler Martin. As a Sergeant under General David Hunter, Trowbridge was reassigned to the 1st South Carolina Volunteers in May 1862. At the time, Hunter declared martial law and freedom for all Blacks in Union-held territories.
President Lincoln rescinded Hunter's orders, disbanding the unit in August 1862. The Regiment was reorganized in November 1862, and Sergeant Trowbridge was commissioned as Captain. He assumed command of Company A and was promoted to Major. He was known to have daily devotion to the regiment and gave his men speeches on the equality of the races, telling them they should not allow themselves to be considered less than equal.
In her book A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs, Black author Susie King Taylor wrote, "His troops greatly admired him. No officer in the army was more beloved than our late Lieutenant-Colonel C.T. Trowbridge." Taylor also wrote of the General Orders to muster, "They were delighted to go home, but oh how they hated to part from their commanding chief, Colonel C.T. Trowbridge. He was the very first officer to take charge of black soldiers. We thought there was no one like him." After the war, he returned to New York and was a four-term alderman from the 10th Ward of Brooklyn.
In April 1882, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trowbridge visited his former soldiers on at least two occasions, in 1884 and 1890. On the latter visit, all his former soldiers in the area held a "campfire" for him. Trowbridge became the custodian of the old Minnesota capitol building until his death on Christmas Eve of 1907. The Governor of Minnesota ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff, and the capitol building closed on funeral day.
Cheryl Trowbridge-Miller,
A man is not dead until he's forgotten,
Trowbridge Family Research,
Nineteenth-Century Freedom Fighters,
by Bernie J. McRae, Curtis Miller,
ISBN 978 0-3875 2496-2,
Arcadia Publishing
