Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Extraordinary Life of The Sergeant with Dean Calbreath

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon welcomes journalist and author Dean Calbreath, who has spent nearly twenty years researching the life of Nicholas Said, a Civil War Sergeant whose life has become a forgotten history. Siad’s adventures begin in a thousand year-old African kingdom. He was a master of language, a collector of knowledge, a friend to kings and tsars… and he arrived in America as the country warred over enslavement. Thank you to our guest, Dean Calbreath. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Dean Calbreath Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. Always delighted that you're with me. And my goodness, have we got a story for you today. It is based on the life of a man named Nicholas Said, who lived such an extraordinary existence. I think you would be very hard pressed to come up with one other person on planet Earth who has a story like his. Today, we're chatting with author Dean Calbreth, whose new book, The Sergeant, details his story. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. And here's where it gets interesting.

Thank you for joining me today. I am always excited to chat with other people who love hidden history as much as I do. So thanks for being here. Absolutely. Okay. You have a new book out called The Sergeant. And I would, first of all, love to have you tell us, who is the sergeant? The sergeant is a soldier in the Civil War called Nicholas Saeed, although he was born as Muhammad Ali bin Saeed. He was born in a Muslim kingdom in the center of Africa, a thousand-year-old kingdom.

His father was a chief general of that kingdom, a guy who rode into battle wearing a coat of chain mail, wearing an iron helmet, clothes within his turban, fighting with swords and spears, kind of like he rode out of the Arabian Nights. I mean, this was a kind of a medieval kingdom in the early 1800s. So, Nicholas Said left Africa under circumstances we can talk about, went through Europe and arrived in the United States right on the eve of the Civil War. He tried joining the army at that time, just weeks after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. At that time, the army was for whites only. So he was barred from joining.

He ended up being a French teacher at a private African-American school in Detroit. But as soon as Abraham Lincoln opened the army up, then he went to Boston to join the army, became a sergeant, which is about as high as you could get as an African in the army at that time, and served in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. And then after the war, stayed in the South. First of all, this is kind of a mind-blowing story. If you set out to write a fiction book with this as a premise, your editor might be like, hard to suspend your disbelief that we're going from like a medieval kingdom with writing into battle with chain mail to I teach French in Detroit. And again, something that sounds like it comes from a fiction book

and you wouldn't believe it. You know, at the time that he was teaching French in Detroit, French and English were two of the nine languages that he spoke. He also spoke German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Mandara, and Kanuri. And when he stayed in the South, after the war, he stayed there to teach the freed slaves how to read and write English. to teach the freed slaves how to read and write English. So, you know, he was just bursting with knowledge. How did you come across this man's story? Because this person lived such an extraordinary life, and yet he's not taught about in the United States. To many historians, his story has been lost. And I would love to know how you came across it. It all started more than 20 years ago. I was assigned by my newspaper, the San Diego Union Tribune, to go down to the Middle East after 9-11 to report on how Muslims were feeling about the

United States at that time. I went to Egypt and Jordan and the Palestinian territories in Israel. And I was talking to students at Bethlehem University. Then they started asking me, how long have Muslims lived in America? What have their lives been like? How have they been treated? And, you know, some of those questions I was able to come up with answers to. Others I couldn't. When I got home, I started studying. I started searching through historical texts. I found Muslims all the way back almost to the Mayflower. There were Moroccans living in the city of New York within 15 years of the Mayflower landing. But when I was doing the searches, I was looking for the name Muhammad, and I found Muhammad Ali bin Saeed, Nicholas Saeed.

He had written an article for The Atlantic magazine in 1867, kind of written an autobiographical article, and then he turned it into a full-length autobiography about six years later. With that as a basis, that provided the framework for my book. How did you go about researching something of this nature? Because we know that so much of American history was written by the victors, right? It's written by people who hold the power, people who are largely Caucasian men. And very often, the histories of people of color, the histories of women have been either intentionally or unintentionally obscured from history and much more difficult to find those primary sources. So even though he has a biography, autobiography that's left behind,

So even though he has a biography, autobiography that's left behind, how did you undertake your research on a project of this magnitude? Well, at the time, during the Reconstruction, he was actually a celebrity. There were lots of newspaper articles about him. He gave speeches in various places. The Nation magazine suggested that he should even be appointed an ambassador, or they said maybe even a vice president someday, you know, before they could imagine an African-American president. But I looked at diaries of people who knew him. And also during that time, there were the government documents, his military records. I searched through his military records, which he didn't even mention in his autobiography. I needed

to fill that in. I also contacted archives in the various countries that he went to in Russia, England, Amsterdam, and Latvia. The subtitle of your book, The Sergeant, is The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said, son of an African general, slave of the Ottomans, free man with the Tsars, and hero of the Union Army. You mentioned that his father was an African general. Let's move on to the second part of your subtitle, which is Slave of the Ottomans. What happened there? How did that happen?

So after his father died, his father died in battle. He went to a boarding school. He was in a very privileged family. His father had been the governor of six provinces in the country. His father owned 150 slaves. And then after he graduated that boarding school, he was probably about 13 or so at the time, he wanted to go off with a lot of his friends and go hunting up in the northern part of the country, right on the edge of the Sahara. You know, and his mother was warning him,

don't go to the Sahara, you'll be kidnapped, you'll be sold into slavery, which is exactly what happened. As they were hunting, this band of Tuaregs, you know, these nomads from the Sahara, Toregs, you know, these nomads from the Sahara, that of Toregs came down, swept through the area, and kidnapped him and his friends, took them several hundred miles to a slave market where they sold them as slaves. And from there, you know, he was purchased by a slave trader in the city of Marzouk, which is in central Libya. And to get to Marzouk, he walked barefoot, as did all the other slaves in the caravan, for 2,000 miles through the Sahara desert. What? Again, adding that to your list of, you know, like, this is my plot in my fiction book, barefoot 2000 miles of the Sahara. Nope, that would, your editor would be like, that is not real. Yeah, no, at one point

in time, they were going over this field of lava, very sharp stones. So at one point in time, their masters did make them sandals out of camel skin, but the stones were so sharp that they sliced right through the camel skin and everyone came off with bleeding feet. So, it didn't really matter, you know, barefoot or wearing these sandals. It was not a pleasant journey either way. What was life like for him as an enslaved person in the Ottoman Empire? Well, the Ottoman Empire had many different classes of slaves. That's the entire Muslim world. They had plenty of people, slaves like American slaves.

They had plenty of slaves who lived lives of drudgery and hard toil, hard labor. But they had very high-skilled slaves. And technically, his father, one of the richest men in the kingdom of Borno, technically his father and all the other generals of Borno, most of the other high-ranking bureaucratic officials, they were all slaves. They were slaves to the sheikh. They were slaves to the sheikh. They were slaves to the sultan. So this is a very different kind of slavery than we would have in America. You know, there were high-skilled slaves that often were given paths to freedom. They were given allowances that would allow them to purchase their own

freedom. And that's what happened with him. He was in the city of Merzouk for three weeks. He worked in the fields of Merzouk. It's in the middle of the Sahara Desert. But they have farms there because they have water deep underneath the ground. So his job was to pull up that water out of wells and to water the fields. Very hard labor. For three weeks he's doing this. He gets whipped every day by this other slave who is his overseer. And finally he goes to his master and he says, listen, you know, with this guy whipping me, with this terrible diet that I'm having, a couple turnips and a few dates. I really can't do this anymore. Now, if a slave had done that in the United States, they could have been whipped again. But under Islam, slaves had exactly that right. They had

the right to complain to their master. Their master didn't have to follow what they wanted, but they at least had the right to complain. And they even had the right to ask for a different master. His master said, you know, this is just hard work, right? You know, this is farm work. You know, what were you doing before? And he said, well, I was the son of Barcagana, this general. And the slave guy goes, Barcagana? I know Barcagana. You know, I used to, I went on a slave hunting mission with him once. So, you know, I'm very familiar with your dad. You don't belong in the fields.

What can I do for you? So, Nicholas Said says, I would like to be sold to a Turk. And the reason he would like to be sold to a Turk. And the reason he would like to be sold to a Turk is because Turks had a reputation for providing allowances to buy your way to freedom. And in the meantime, had a very good reputation for treating their slaves pretty well. So that's what happened. He got sold to a tobacco dealer in Tripoli, where he learned the art of serving tobacco, a very important thing in Ottoman culture. It's like serving tea in China or Japan. And from there, he was sold to the foreign minister of the Ottoman Empire, who was looking for a tobacco server because,

you know, he needed that for his diplomatic negotiations. There was a Russian ambassador who was trying to negotiate on the eve of the Crimean War. The Russian ambassador saw him and apparently was very impressed. He's a guy who could speak a few languages. He was obviously very intelligent. And the Russians actually had a habit of buying very intelligent slaves and taking them up to Russia, where slavery was illegal. They would take them to Russia, and they would free them. They would set them free. And they would say, you know, hey, if you stay with us for a while, if you work for us for a while, we'll give you enough money to get back to Africa and you go home and everything. Their hope was that they would show these guys such a great time

that they would stay in Russia. Why did they want them to stay? If you were in an aristocratic family, then having an African servant was kind of a status symbol. was kind of a status symbol. You know, if you had a very intelligent African servant working for you, that was kind of exotic. It goes back to Peter the Great, who actually had a similar situation, a person very much like Nicholas Said, who became the third highest ranking officer. who became the third highest ranking officer, they recognized if a person showed their good skills, intelligence, you know, they recognized them and compensated them for that. And Nicholas Said became a, what's called a valet de chambre, which is sort of the top, top rank of being in the servant class. But it was more than a servant. It was more like a personal assistant, even a personal manager. A gentleman's gentleman

is what they used to call it. And it was like he was a gentleman. It was like he was, you know, one of the nobility. And he accompanied a Russian prince throughout Europe, meeting kings and queens and everything. Finally, after five or six years, decided he wanted to go back to Africa. His employer was very upset, but said, OK, you know, gave him a lot of money. But from out of nowhere, this Dutch count appears. He says, I'm going to bury this English woman. appears, he says, I'm going to bury this English woman. I'm going to take an extended honeymoon throughout the Americas. We're going to take a year and we're going to go to the Caribbean,

the United States and Canada. And Nicholas Sight was by this time was just very curious about the outside world. You know, I mean, he had just spent five or six years in Europe, and he wanted to see more. You know, he really had this appetite for exploring the world around him. And so he decided, okay, well, for one year, I can put off my trip to Africa. I'll go to the United States. And that's how he ended up here. What made him think, well, I'm new here, but let me go ahead and fight in this war? You know, you mentioned that he tried to immediately join the war and was denied because Abraham Lincoln had not permitted African Americans to join or even Africans from joining

the Union Army until later. But what was his motivation of like, I'm new here, but I want to fight in your war? I think there were a couple of motivations. For one thing, he encountered American racism, which he hadn't really encountered in Europe. In Europe, it was much more a matter of class. And as a gentleman's gentleman, he had, you know, he had a very superior position to most working class Europeans, and he was not treated like an inferior. But the day that he got off of the boat in New York, or the day after, it was Sunday, and he went to church with his employer that was run by an abolitionist, a very vocal abolitionist, but he was asked to sit in the, in the quote, Negro pews, the segregated area in the balcony of the church.

And so from that very moment, you know, and going on, going on to experience a race riot in Detroit. He began to experience American racism. And I think that was one motivating factor. Another motivating factor was he knew that Europeans were encroaching into Africa and getting closer and closer to Borna, to his homeland. This is something that he wrote about in his biography, that he felt very sorry for his people. I cried for my people because they had no idea about what Western military tactics were like. So, I think one reason he joined the army was because he wanted to learn lessons that he could bring back to Africa, you know, in the future. So it was a combination of wanting to free the African slaves in the South, but also wanting to bring back messages that his people could use

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Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned that he ends up in Detroit. He's teaching French. He gets the message somehow that he is eligible to join the Union Army, and he travels to Boston to sign up. What were his experiences fighting an American war? Well, the experiences of all the African American troops was that they wanted to feed the slaves, but they were also facing intense prejudice from the Northern High Command, from the Union High Command in the North. So they were really fighting a war on two fronts, against the Confederacy and against the High command, which was really trying to restrain them, trying to underpay them. And there were many protests throughout the war about this. There were many near mutinies in his regiment. So there was this fight against, you know, this treatment that they were getting. Once they had signed up, the federal government introduced a rule which Massachusetts firmly opposed, saying that no

Black troop, no Black soldier, sergeant, corporal, whatever, could make more than $7 a month, compared to $13 a month for the lowliest white private. They were very angry about this. They refused to take that pay. So for a year and a half, for two years, they were working without pay, going into the battlefields, digging trenches. Massachusetts offered to pay them, offered to make up. The federal government says, okay, $7 a month. Massachusetts offered to pay them, offered to make up. The federal government says, OK, $7 a month. Massachusetts offered to give them the extra $6 so they could be paid the same as white soldiers. And they said no, because they would still be accepting the federal idea that they weren't worth as much as a white soldier. They wanted to show that they were

worth that much. And in battle, they did. They often accomplished things in battle that white troops didn't. There was a big battle that Nicholas Sight was almost involved in, but in the Battle of Olaste in Florida, the 54th Massachusetts basically prevented the Confederates. There had been a terrible defeat for the Union. The Confederates were raging through the field, and the 54th Massachusetts stood up against them as, you know, all of the other soldiers, the white soldiers were retreating, were, you know, yelling at the 54th that they were kind of stupid for going up and facing what would be sure death. But the 54th, with the battle cry, three cheers for Massachusetts and $7 a month, they got there and they actually held the Confederates off through their own skill and bravery and even protected themselves from being slaughtered by a little trickery that they did against the Confederates. So it was acknowledged by soldiers, even by the Union High Command, that these were valuable, valuable soldiers. And yet

still, there was a feeling that they shouldn't be paid the same as white soldiers. So they basically say, draw a line in the sand, you're going to pay us what we're worth, or nothing at all. And was the intention then to try to fight for equal pay after the war ended? Were they ever successful in getting the back pay that they were owed? They were actually successful. It took them more than a year, got full pay retroactively. So they got it from the time they had served, they joined the army, but it was through protests. It was through petitions to Abraham Lincoln and to people in the War Department. It was sometimes through acts of mutiny, technically even refusing to take your pay as an act of mutiny, which they could have been technically sentenced to death for.

So, you know, they were really taking their own lives in their hands and doing this. were really taking their own lives in their hands and doing this. One of Nicholas Said's own soldiers, you know, and he was apparently active in this movement for equal pay. There was a committee that he served on, a committee of the sergeants of the 55th that was related to the equal pay movement. related to the equal pay movement. So he was active in this role. And one of his privates and also his corporal ended up being sentenced to jail for some protest activity. One of his privates was executed. One of the few people who were executed, including Wallace Baker, who was under Saeed at the

time. including Wallace Baker, who was under Said at the time. So, you know, it was a dicey situation, but they prevailed. After the war ended, what made him stay in the United States, especially in the Reconstruction-era South? What made him stay instead of returning home? I think during the war, I think that he felt that just seeing the situation of the slaves around him, because slaves were always coming into the Union camps. They were escaping from slavery that they had on plantations just a few miles away. So he knew how terrible the situation was for slaves here.

And I think that he wanted to improve that. He felt through education that they would be able to make higher living through higher living, that they were able to gain respect and civil rights. It was a fairly conservative message at the time. You know, some people like Frederick Douglass were pressing for more immediate civil rights. But on the other hand, given where he came from, given that that's the way it seemed to him to operate in Europe, it's kind of understandable that he felt that way, you know, and he was not alone. People like Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama felt exactly the same way, kind of a naive point of view. But it was, you

know, it's easy to say it was naive even retrospect, but, you know, they were sort of counting on human kindnesses that didn't end up coming. If there was one thing that you wish you could tell people about this story or about his life or about this time period, what takeaway would you like for them to have? I think one thing I would like them to have is that, you know, this was a very unique story. Going to Istanbul, going to St. Petersburg, being baptized into the Orthodox Church. These were very unique events. You know, it would be hard to replicate.

But there were plenty of other people like that. Not like that in the circumstances, but there were plenty of other African Americans, some of were mainly free-born. Some of them had been free for generations. And they felt this duty to go down the South and help other people get free. So, it was, you know, some of them came from, had been free men in Canada. They came from Canada. They came from the West Indies. So, it was a very unique story in one way and not so unique in others because there was this power that we don't really fully acknowledge in our history books that, you know, African Americans played a crucial role in ending slavery. Without their help, the Union could have lost the war. They represented a significant part of the Union drive to finish the war. So a lot of the book focuses not only on him, a lot of the Civil War portion of the book, but also the soldiers around him because they're all facing the same struggle. Fascinating. Thank you so much for your time today. And it is, you know, as you mentioned, such a unique story in history.

But in that he was a hero of the Civil War, he was not alone. I love that. Thank you for being here. Sure. Thank you for having me. There are so many more details on the fascinating life of Nicholas Said. So check out Dean Calberth's book, The Sergeant, and you can follow him on Facebook if you want more information. I'll see you again soon.

Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.