Been in the Storm So Long Read online

  Early conceptions of the Civil War as “a white man’s war” with limited objectives were not the only deterrent to raising a black army. Even if black enlistments should be deemed desirable, few whites believed that black men possessed the necessary technical skills, intelligence, and courage to become effective soldiers. “If we were to arm them,” President Lincoln conceded in September 1862, “I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.” No less threatening to many whites was the possibility that they were wrong and that the black man might actually prove himself in combat. “If you make him the instrument by which your battles are fought, the means by which your victories are won,” an Ohio congressman warned, “you must treat him as a victor is entitled to be treated, with all decent and becoming respect.” The use of black troops also threatened to undermine the morale of white Union soldiers, many of whom recoiled at the thought of serving alongside black comrades. “[I]t Will raise a rebelion in the army that all the abolisionist this Side of hell Could not Stop,” one Union soldier predicted. “[T]he Southern Peopel are rebels to the government but they are White and God never intended a nigger to put white people Down.”7

  The exclusion of blacks from the armed forces, like President Lincoln’s reluctance to make emancipation a war objective, worked only so long as the government and northern whites remained confident of their ability to win the war. In the aftermath of Fort Sumter, with patriotic whites rallying to the flag, there seemed little reason to doubt that the rebellion would be easily and speedily crushed. Eighteen months later, the expected quick victory had not materialized, the war still raged with no end in sight, and a weary, frustrated North was forced to think about a different kind of war. Mounting casualties, the return home of the maimed and wounded, the alarming increase in desertions (more than 100,000 away without leave at the end of 1862), and the growing difficulty in obtaining enlistments encouraged a reassessment of the military value of emancipation and black recruitment. “If a bob-tail dog can stick a bayonet on his tail, and back up against a rebel and kill him, I will take the dog and sleep with him,” a Union officer declared, “and if a nigger will do the same, I’ll do the same by him. I’ll sleep with any thing that will kill a rebel.” Although this may have been a curious kind of recognition, the argument gained increasing acceptance with every casualty list. To enlist blacks was to preserve the more valuable lives of white men. The best men of the North were dying in the swamps of the South, an officer observed, and this was a loss the nation could ill afford. “[Y]ou can’t replace these men, but if a nigger dies, all you have to do is send out and get another one.”8

  The same Administration that had summarily rejected black volunteers at the outset of the war began in mid-1862 to consider the employment of blacks in the armed forces. The initial proposals contemplated using such troops primarily for menial labor and for garrison duty in areas deemed unfit for white men, such as the malarial regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. The advantages of deploying blacks in these ways were obvious. “The blacks,” said the New York Times, “thoroughly acclimated, will be saved from the risks of the climate, while in the well-defined limit of fortifications they will be restrained from the commission of those revengeful excesses which are the bug-aboos of the Southern people.” In a series of articles on “Colored Troops,” a columnist for the Christian Recorder, the voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, seemed to share the prevailing belief that blacks were “especially adapted to service in the South” because they were less susceptible to diseases which easily felled white men. When Vicksburg surrendered, the black columnist noted, the hospitals were filled with southern white soldiers suffering from malarial diseases and fevers “from which colored men are almost exempt.” Citing the many advantages of black troops, he welcomed the proposal to use them to guard prisoners of war and to protect garrisons in the occupied areas. Such duty, he thought, would be especially “pleasant” to the emancipated slaves, enabling them “to stand guard over those who have so long abused the power they held over them.”9

  To resolve the doubts which persisted about the military capabilities of black men, some suggested that they first be tested in battle against the Indians. If the experiment proved successful, black troops could then be deployed for combat duty in the South. Nothing came of this proposal, and it won little favor among blacks themselves. “I am very doubtful whether the negro could display his bravery as well against his co-sufferer, as he could against his enemy,” wrote Henry M. Turner, the black clergyman. “Like us,” the Indian has been “scattered and peeled.” How could blacks, of all people, share in a deliberate policy of racial extermination? The Indians, Turner observed, “cherished no special hatred against my race,” and the “scalping knife and tomahawk were not shaped nor moulded to injure us.” Rather than wage war on the Indians, Turner suggested that black people might well learn to emulate their bravery. “If we had one half of the Indian spunk, to-day slavery would have been among the things of the past.” Whatever the merits of Turner’s argument, blacks had been used to fight Indians in the past, and they would do so again in the postwar Indian wars, but to have employed them for this purpose in 1863 must have struck some blacks as a perversion of priorities.10

  While the President refused to alter his position on emancipation and black enlistments, the Union Navy was using “contraband” slaves as apprentice seamen and the Army began to employ them extensively as laborers and officers’ servants. Limited and unauthorized attempts, moreover, had been undertaken in Kansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina to arm, drill, and use black soldiers. After General Benjamin Butler overcame his initial reluctance to enlist blacks, three regiments made up of free colored militiamen (previously organized by Confederate authorities) and even larger numbers of freed slaves were organized in Louisiana. With unconcealed enthusiasm, General David Hunter sought to mobilize blacks in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, explaining to the War Department that he had recruited no “fugitive slaves” but “a fine regiment of loyal persons whose late masters are fugitive rebels.” The Hunter project proved short-lived, largely because the government refused to recognize or assist it in any way, and aggressive recruitment tactics had antagonized both the freedmen and many of the northern white missionaries and teachers stationed there.11

  Responding to new military reverses and stalemates, the War Department in August 1862 authorized the recruitment of a slave regiment in the Union Army—the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. In compliance with the proviso that white men serve as officers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was appointed to command the regiment. Appropriately, this New England intellectual was also a fervid abolitionist and an old friend of John Brown. He eagerly accepted the commission, considering it a challenge that might well influence the entire course of the war and the destiny of black people in the United States. “I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well,” he later wrote, “not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.”12

  The 1st South Carolina Volunteers drew its recruits largely from the Sea Islands freedmen. Higginson insisted that his white officers treat the soldiers with respect, refer to them by their full names and never as “nigger,” and eschew any “degrading punishments.” After assuming command in November 1862, his first impressions were favorable, though heavily overladen with a condescending paternalism that characterized his New England contemporaries’ views of black people. He marveled at the religious devotions, songs, and “strange antics” that emanated from “this mysterious race of grown-up children.” He admired their inexhaustible “love of the spelling book.” He was impressed by their aptitude for drill and discipline and their capacity for imitativeness. To Higginson, they were always “a simple and lovable people, whose graces seem to come by nature, and whose vices by training.” He came to love them both as a military commander and as a father figure. “I think it is partly from my own n
otorious love of children that I like these people so well.” The immediate task at hand, as he interpreted his mission, was to educate these “perpetual children, docile, gay, and lovable,” to manhood and to mobilize them into an effective fighting force. He was fully confident of success.13

  Against a background of military setbacks, mounting casualty lists, and unfilled recruitment quotas, President Lincoln issued in September 1862 a Preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation which stipulated that on January 1, 1863, in those states or portions of states still engaged in rebellion, the slaves would be “forever free.” Not only were Tennessee and the loyal border slave states thereby excluded but also the slaves in designated portions of Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. Limited though it was and justified only as “a fit and necessary war measure,” the Proclamation marked a strategic shift in the President’s thinking about the military uses of black men. Henceforth, he decreed, they would be accepted into the armed forces for garrison duty and to man naval vessels. This fell far short of a commitment to a black army, but the wording was sufficiently vague to invite a variety of interpretations and proposals. “The best thing in the proclamation,” wrote a northern lawyer, “is the annunciation that the southern garrisons are to be Negros. We ought to have our standing army (after the rebellion) composed exclusively of Negros—a regular Janissary Corps, who propagate & recruit themselves.” The news was greeted with far less enthusiasm in the Union Army camps in the South, where white troops needed to weigh the advantages of combat replacements and labor relief against deeply entrenched racial attitudes. “The truth is,” one army private wrote, “none of our soldiers seem to like the idea of arming the Negros. Our boys say this [is] a white mans war and the Negro has no business in it.”14

  After the Administration committed itself to the military employment of blacks as soldiers, the changes came so rapidly that Frederick Douglass could only describe them as “vast and startling.” Less than three weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers marched through the streets of Beaufort, with a white regimental band leading the way. “And when dat band wheel in before us, and march on,” a black sergeant remarked afterwards, “my God! I quit dis world altogeder.” The astonishment of the native whites at this awesome spectacle was matched only by the obvious pride manifested in the eyes of the black soldiers, their faces set rigidly to the front. “We didn’t look to de right nor to de leff,” one of them recalled. “I didn’t see notin’ in Beaufort. Eb’ry step was worth a half a dollar.” Several weeks later, they made their initial contact with the enemy, and Colonel Higginson was deeply impressed. “Nobody knows anything about these men who has not seen them in battle. I find that I myself knew nothing. There is a fierce energy about them beyond anything of which I have ever read, unless it be the French Zouaves. It requires the strictest discipline to hold them in hand.” There could no longer be any doubt in Higginson’s mind that “the key to the successful prosecution of this war” lay in the unlimited use of black troops.

  Their superiority lies simply in the fact that they know the country, which White troops do not; and, moreover, that they have peculiarities of temperament, position, and motive, which belong to them alone. Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for their homes and families; and they show the resolution and sagacity which a personal purpose gives. It would have been madness to attempt with the bravest White troops what I have successfully accomplished with Black ones.15

  The “vast and startling” changes manifested themselves throughout the occupied South. While black troops marched in Beaufort, a regiment recruited largely from fugitive slaves out of Arkansas and Missouri went into combat as the Kansas 1st Colored Volunteers Infantry. “I believe the Negro may just as well become food for powder as my son,” the commander of this regiment had previously declared. In the lower Mississippi Valley, meanwhile, the thousands of slaves crowding the Union camps were being mobilized into military units, and in Louisiana the previously organized free colored and slave regiments were augmented despite bitter objections from native whites. “When we enlisted,” one black soldier wrote, “we were hooted at in the streets of New Orleans as a rabble of armed plebeians & cowards.” On May 27, 1863, two of the Louisiana black regiments joined in the assault on Port Hudson, a major Confederate stronghold on the lower Mississippi River. That morning, Henry T. Johns, a white private, wrote: “I am glad to know that on our right and on our left are massed negro regiments, who, this day, are to show if the inspiration of Freedom will lift the serf to the level of the man. Whoever else may flinch, I trust they will stand firm and baptize their hopes in the mingled blood of master and slave. Then we will give them a share in our nationality, if God has no separate nationality in store for them.” Although the attack was repulsed with heavy losses, the blacks had proven themselves in battle, and a Union officer confessed that his “prejudices” in regard to black troops had been dispelled in a single day. Private Johns thought, too, that the question of black troops had been firmly settled, “and many a proud master found in death that freedom had made his slave his superior.” To many observers, in fact, Port Hudson was the turning point in white recognition of the Negro as a combat soldier. And when two regiments made up of freedmen successfully resisted a Confederate assault on Milliken’s Bend the following month, even the Confederate officer commanding the attack was duly impressed. “This charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy’s force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.”16

  Six months after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than thirty black regiments had been organized, camps had been established to receive and train them, recruiting was taking place almost everywhere, and several units had already participated in combat action. That was only the beginning. By December 1863 over 50,000 blacks had been enrolled in the Union Army, and the President was assured that this number would rapidly increase as Federal troops moved deeper into the Confederacy. Before the end of the war, more than 186,000 would be enlisted, including 24,000 in Louisiana, 17,800 in Mississippi, and 20,000 in Tennessee. The President even overcame his initial reluctance to organizing black regiments in the loyal border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. Although he tried to restrict enlistments in those states to the slaves of disloyal masters, army recruiters made little or no effort to enforce such discrimination, and the promise of freedom to enlistees and their families went far, in fact, to undermine the entire institution of slavery in those regions excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation. “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” President Lincoln wrote to a Kentucky newspaper. “Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party or any man devised, or expected.” Christopher A. Fleetwood, a Baltimore free black who had enlisted in the Union Army, voiced almost the same sentiments when he noted in his diary at the end of 1863: “This year has brought about many changes that at the beginning were or would have been thought impossible. The close of the year finds me a soldier for the cause of my race.”17

  The transformation of public sentiment on the enlistment of blacks pointed up the extent to which military necessity managed to surmount prevailing racial attitudes. The passage of the Draft Act in March 1863, reflecting as it did the desperate need for more troops, broke down still further the remaining objections to blacks as soldiers. For many war-weary Northerners, especially those who were now subject to military conscription, the arming of the black man suddenly took on a new meaning. The immediate and widespread popularity of a song ascribed to Irish Americans testified not so much to its melodic quality as to its persuasive logic:

  Some tell us ’tis a burnin shame

  To make the naygers fight;

  An’ that the thrade of bein’ kilt

  Belongs but to the white;

  But as for me, u
pon my soul!

  So liberal are we here,

  I’ll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself

  On every day in the year.18

  Capitalizing on the apparent changes in public sentiment, black spokesmen and newspapers in the North insisted that the very nature of the Civil War had been fundamentally altered. “The strife now waging is not between North and South,” a black meeting declared in mid-1863, but between “barbarism and freedom—civilization and slavery.” For the North to lose this war would “rivet our chains still firmer” and seal “our perpetual disfranchisement.” The most effective remedy for what ailed blacks, the meeting resolved, was “warm lead and cold steel, duly administered by two hundred thousand black doctors.” Now that the Civil War promised to liberate the slaves, the necessity for defeating the Confederacy was coupled with the urgency of black people helping to strike the decisive blow and setting themselves free. “Liberty won by white men,” Douglass maintained, “would lose half its luster.” But by breaking the chains themselves, he told prospective black volunteers, “you will stand more erect, walk more assured, feel more at ease, and be less liable to insult than you ever were before.” Few welcomed this opportunity more readily than did many of those who had only recently been slaves. “A year ago, where was we?” asked a soldier with the 7th Regiment Corps d’Afrique. “We was down in de dark land of Slavery. And now where are we? We are free men, and soldiers of de United States. And what have we to do? We have to fight de rebels so dat we never more be slaves.”19