Heading: (African American, 1861)
Author: Taylor, W. R.
Title: List of Commissary Stores and Rations on board the USS Roanoke 1861
Place Published: Annapolis, Maryland
Publisher:
Date Published: 1861
Description: Document signed. Single sheet with few words of docketing on verso. 12x7½". To Capt. M.R. Morgan, U.S. Army Commissioner of Subsistence. October 19, 1861.The listed goods aboard the Roanoke, which would also carry 700 New York troops, included 1000 barrels of dried apples, bacon, bread, coffee, flour, pickles and pork, and 380 barrels and boxes of beans, bread, coffee, flour, pork, potatoes, rice, salt, sugar and vinegar, for troop rations, (plus 63 boxes of soap, supplied by the Colgate company). Two weeks after this document was written, the Roanoke was one of 16 steamships of the Naval expedition that carried 15,000 Union troops south from Annapolis to capture Port Royal Sound, South Carolina.Port Royal Sound was the first large amphibious operation of the Civil War. a significant victory that gave the Union a strategic Southern harbor between Savannah and Charleston. When occupation troops landed after the Naval battle, Southern planters in the vicinity fled, leaving behind thousands of their Black slaves now freed from enslavement, and joined, after the Emancipation Proclamation, by thousands of other escaped slaves from points South. This became the nucleus of the first community of self-governing freedmen in America.

Very good.