Edward Wild
Featured Character – Divided Allegiances
Edward
Wild
Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress
Born on November 25, 1865 to a homeopathic doctor, Edward
Augustus Wild graduated from Harvard in 1844. Two years later, he
received his medical degree from Jefferson
Medical
College.
During the Crimean War, Wild, under the name Kholorissy Bey, served as a
surgeon in the Ottoman Army. At the start of the Civil War, Wild raised a
company of volunteers. Commissioned as a captain, Wild served in the 1st
Massachusetts Infantry. He received a severe wound in the hand at Fair
Oaks, Virginia,
and then lost his left arm at the Battle of South Mountain, Maryland. A
devout abolitionist, Wild returned to Massachusetts
to help recruit two new black regiments, the 54th and 55th
Massachusetts Infantry. Promoted to brigadier-general, he assumed command
of “Wild’s African Brigade,” which consisted of the 55th
Massachusetts Infantry, the 2nd North Carolina Colored Volunteers,
and the 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteers. After forays into
southeastern Virginia,
Wild launched a major raid of northeastern North Carolina
during the winter of 1863. Designed to root out Confederate guerrillas
and deprive southern sympathizers of their slave labor, Wild brought the “heavy
hand of war” to coastal North
Carolina. He freed over
two-thousand five-hundred slaves, destroyed rebel camps, and executed
Confederate guerrilla Daniel Bright. Although Confederate newspapers and
officials labeled Wild as a “terror,” the Union
rewarded him with overall command of the Department of Norfolk on January 18,
1864. In that capacity, Wild directed troops during the Battle of
Wilson’s Wharf, Virginia
and the Petersburg Campaign. Although relieved from duty for refusing to
dismiss his brigade quartermaster, a court-martial found Wild not guilty.
Resuming command, Wild’s black troops triumphantly marched into Richmond
after the Confederate evacuation. He later oversaw the Freedmen’s Bureau
in Georgia.
Mustered out of service on January 16, 1866, Wild became a mining engineer,
working in Nevada
and California.
While surveying the route of a new railroad, Edward Augustus Wild died on
August 28, 1891 in Medellin, Columbia.