The 7th and 8th regiments of infantry and two companies of light artillery were raised early in 1862, and were assigned to service in the Gulf States, in the department commanded by General Butler. Arrived at Ship Island, much to their gratification, they were placed under the immediate command of their own general, Phelps. Faithful to the spirit of his State and his own convictions of justice, he had issued[114] a proclamation to the loyal citizens of the Southwest, declaring that slavery was incompatible with free government, and the aim of the government to be its overthrow. Fugitive slaves found a safe refuge in his camp here, as in Virginia, and in May, 1862, he began drilling and organizing three regiments of blacks. But upon his requisition for muskets to arm them, he was peremptorily ordered by General Butler to desist from organizing colored troops, and he resigned his commission. "The government," says Benedict in "Vermont in the Civil War," "which before the war closed had 175,000 colored men under arms, thus lost the services of as brave, faithful, and patriotic an officer as it had in its army, one whose only fault as a soldier was that he was a little in advance of his superiors in willingness to accept the aid of all loyal citizens, white or black, in the overthrow of rebellion." In July, 1862, the 9th regiment, commanded by Colonel Stannard, went to the front, being the first under the recent call for three hundred thousand men. Its initial service was at Harper's Ferry, where it presently suffered the humiliation of surrender with the rest of Miles's force. In the little fighting that occurred, the raw regiment bore itself bravely. Colonel Stannard begged Miles to let him storm London Heights with his command alone, and then to cut his way out of the beleaguered post, but both requests were refused. The 9th passed several months under parole at Chicago, was exchanged, and at length took its place in the Army of the Potomac. A portion of this regiment was the first of the Union infantry to carry the national flag into the rebel capital. The 10th and 11th regiments were speedily forwarded in the fall of 1862. The former joined the army in Virginia. The latter, recruited as heavy artillery, spent two years in garrison duty in the defenses of Washington. When Grant began the campaign of the Wilderness, it joined the First Vermont Brigade as an infantry regiment, and its fifteen hundred men outnumbered the five other thinned regiments of the brigade that had so often been winnowed in the blasts of war, which soon swept its own ranks with deadly effect.