by Noel Rae
In a letter written very soon after the battle, Captain Miller, company commander in the Ninth Louisiana (Colored) Regiment, described Milliken’s Bend as “a horrible fight, the worst I was ever engaged in—not even excepting Shiloh. We went into the fight with thirty-three men. I had sixteen killed, eleven badly wounded, and four slightly … I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw how my brave soldiers had been slaughtered—one with six wounds, all the rest with two or three, none less than two wounds. Two of my colored sergeants were killed; both brave, noble men, always prompt, vigilant, and ready for the fray. I never more wish to hear the expression, ‘The niggers won’t fight.’ Come with me, a hundred yards from where I sit, and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of sixteen as brave, loyal and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a rebel.”
The Union government was not alone in realizing that if it wanted to win the war it must recruit blacks.
“We must either employ the negroes ourselves, or the enemy will employ them against us,” ran an editorial in the Mississippian in September, 1863. “Let them be declared free, placed in the ranks, and told to fight for their homes and country.” Doing so “would show that although slavery is one of the principles that we started to fight for, yet it falls far short of being the chief one; that, for the sake of our liberty, we are capable of any personal sacrifice; that we regard the emancipation of slaves, and the consequent loss of property, as an evil infinitely less than the subjugation and enslavement of ourselves; that it is not a war exclusively for the privilege of holding negroes in bondage. It would prove to our soldiers, three-fourths of whom never owned a negro, that it is not ‘the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight,’ but a war for the most sacred of all principles, for the dearest of all rights—the right to govern ourselves.”
To be sure, from the very first, there had been a place for slaves in the C. S. A., most notably as faithful body-servants to young massa, and many were the tales of their selfless devotion. Such was “The Touching Story of Old Gabe, Who Saved his Wounded Master from Drowning, and Who Sleeps Beside Him in the Family Cemetery,” first published in 1897 in The Sunny South. The story took place at Clarksville, Tennessee, just before Grant’s assault on Fort Donelson. The narrator’s family lived close by, so when his father, Col. Mills, was badly wounded he was put on a litter to be carried to a riverboat for the short journey that would bring him home. But to reach the boat the orderlies had to paddle out into the river in a canoe, and “as he was being lifted from the canoe the frail craft tottered, and he dropped into the water among the blocks of floating ice. He was too badly wounded to make any effort to save or help himself, and sank immediately. But his faithful old body servant had never left him, and as soon as he saw what had happened he leaped into the water and fought his way amid the floating ice to where my father was sinking. He caught him with one strong arm, and with the other swam back to the boat, where he and my father were taken on board.” Col. Mills died soon after being brought home, but it was to Old Gabe’s “faithfulness and bravery that mother and I are indebted for the fact that my father is sleeping in the churchyard, rather than beneath the waters of the Cumberland.” After the war, “old Uncle Gabe never left us. He lived for several years after my father’s death and served us faithfully to the last, and when he died he was laid by his master’s side. A marble tombstone was placed at the head of his grave upon which we inscribed the simple words, ‘He was faithful to the end.’”
And then there was the story of Levi Miller, who had been a servant for Capt. McBride and Capt. Anderson (the narrator), of Company C, Fifth Texas Regiment. When Capt. McBride was wounded in the Battle of Manassas, Levi “nursed the captain until he recovered, and both rejoined the company in time for the Fredericksburg fight.” Later, during the Pennsylvania campaign, he “met several negroes whom he knew and who had run away from Virginia. They tried to get Levi to desert, but he would not.” In 1864, at the Battle of the Wilderness, Levi “brought to me a haversack of rations. In order to get to me in our little temporary ditch and breastworks he had to cross an open field of about 200 yards, and as he came across the field in full run the enemy’s sharpshooters clipped the dirt all around him. I told him he could not go back until night as those sharpshooters would get him,” but before then “I saw from the maneuvers of the enemy in our front that they were fixing to charge us.” Levi then “asked for a gun and ammunition. We had several extra guns in our ditch and the men gave him a gun and ammunition. About 4 p.m. the enemy made a rushing charge. Levi Miller stood by my side and man never fought harder and better than he did; and when the enemy tried to cross our little breastworks and we clubbed and bayoneted them off, no one used his bayonet with more skill and effect than Levi Miller. During the fight the shout of my men was ‘Give ’em hell, Lee!’ After the fight was over, one of the men made a motion that Levi Miller be enrolled as a full member of the company. I put the motion and of course it passed unanimously, and I immediately enrolled his name as a full member of the company.” To conclude: “No better servant was in General Lee’s army.”
For those slaves not fortunate enough to be officers’ servants, there was always service in labor battalions. As early as June, 1861, the Tennessee legislature had voted to enlist black males between the ages of fifteen and fifty, and soon after the Memphis Avalanche reported on “a procession of several hundred stout negro men” marching through that city “in military order, under command of Confederate officers.” Instead of weapons they carried “shovels, axes, blankets, &c … A merrier set were never seen. They were brimful of patriotism, shouting for Jeff Davis and singing war songs”—no doubt under the watchful eyes of their Confederate officers.
For a long time there was no question of enlisting blacks as soldiers in the C .S. A. But as the war went on and on, the South kept having to extend the range of enlistment. In April, 1862, it ran from eighteen to thirty-five; five months later it went from eighteen to forty-five; in February, 1864, it went from seventeen to fifty; and finally from sixteen to sixty. Among those who faced the obvious fact that this shortage of manpower could lead to defeat was Patrick Cleburne, an Irish immigrant who had enlisted as a private and risen to the rank of major general. Early in 1864, he drew up a plan which he addressed to his commander, General Joseph Johnston:
“We have now been fighting for nearly three years, have spilled much of our best blood, and lost, consumed or thrown to the flames a vast amount of property,” wrote Cleburne; and yet “the fruits of our struggle and sacrifices have invariably slipped away from us and left us nothing but long lists of dead and mangled … Our soldiers can see no end to this state of affairs except in our own exhaustion; hence, instead of rising to the occasion, they are sinking into a fatal apathy.” Desertion was growing, “our supplies failing, our finances in ruin. If this state of things continues much longer we must be subjugated.”
Another hard fact:
“Slavery, from being one of the chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.” Slaves absconded to join the Union army and were “an omnipresent spy system, revealing our positions, purposes and resources.” As a consequence, the choice was “between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery. We assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—give up the negro slave rather than be a slave himself.” Emancipation would also induce England and France to end their neutrality and provide “both moral support and material aid.” It would “leave the enemy’s negro army no motive to fight for,” and would “probably cause much of it to desert over to us.”
Perhaps because he had not been raised in the South, Cleburne next uttered the heretical opinion that rather than being happy in his lot, the Negro longed for freedom—“the paradise of his hopes. To attain it he will tempt dangers and difficulties not exceeded by the bravest in the field … When we make soldiers of them we must make freemen of them beyo
nd all question, and thus enlist their sympathies also. We can do this more effectually than the North can now do, for we can give the negro not only his own freedom, but that of his wife and child, and secure it to him in his old home.”
Finally, “Will the slaves fight?” Of course they would. “The negro slaves of St. Domingo, fighting for freedom, defeated their white masters and the French troops sent against them.” And more recently “half-trained negroes have fought as bravely as many other half-trained Yankees.”
Thirteen other field officers signed on to Cleburne’s proposal, which was then sent to General Joseph Johnston, who refused to forward it to the Confederate War Department on the grounds that it was “more political than military.” A copy did, however, reach Jefferson Davis, who deemed “it inexpedient, at this time, to give publicity to this paper, and request that it be suppressed.”
Nevertheless, the plan somehow became known and stirred strong opinions, especially among other generals. “A monstrous proposition,” wrote General Patton Anderson, “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor.” General Beauregard deplored the idea of enlisting “a merciless servile race as soldiers.” “The most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began,” wrote General Howell Cobb. “You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers … If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
Many civilians felt the same. A letter writer to the Richmond Whig, after reminding his readers of “the opinion held by the whole South… that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave,” concluded that “if the slave must fight, he should fight for the blessings he enjoys as a slave, and not for the miseries that would attend him if freed.” “Q” in the Macon Telegraph, January, 1865, asserted that “every life that has been lost in this struggle was an offering upon the altar of African Slavery,” and that to arm and emancipate slaves “would be a foul wrong to our departed heroes who have fallen in its defense.” Representative Henry Chambers of Mississippi declared that “victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves.” “Independence without slavery would be valueless,” wrote a Texan. And an editorial in the Richmond Dispatch insisted that “we have no occasion to resort to any such extreme measure. Our affairs are in a better condition, and our prospects brighter, than they ever have been since the commencement of the war.” (This was published on November 9, 1864, the day after Lincoln’s re-election and just as General Sherman, having destroyed Atlanta, was setting off on his devastating March to the Sea.)
But the opinion that really mattered was that of Robert E. Lee. In January, 1865, he wrote “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies, and the slaves used against us, or use them ourselves … My own opinion is that we should employ them without delay.” In February, Jefferson Davis declared that “it is now becoming daily more evident to all reflecting persons that we are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for us or against us.” In March the Confederate Congress voted that the President is “hereby authorized to ask for, and accept from the owners of slaves, the services of such numbers of able-bodied negro men as he may deem expedient for and during the war to perform military service. The enlistment will be for the war”—which ended on April 9, less than three weeks later, with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
While the South debated whether to enlist slaves, the armies of the North were setting them free. Here are some accounts of how that happened, drawn from the Slave Narrative interviews conducted many years later. First, Katie Rowe, of Arkansas, who grew up on a plantation owned by Dr. Isaac Jones, who lived in a nearby town.
“He get boiling mad when the Yankees have that big battle at Pea Ridge and scatter the ’Federates all down through our country, all bleeding and tied up and hungry, and he just mount on his hoss and ride out to the plantation where we all hoeing corn. He ride up and tell old man Saunders—that the overseer—to bunch us all up round the lead row man—that my own uncle, Sandy—and then he tell us the law: ‘You niggers been seeing the ’Federate soldiers coming by here looking pretty raggedy and hurt and wore out,’ he say, ‘but that no sign they licked! Them Yankees ain’t gwine get this far, but iffen they do, you all ain’t gwine get free by ’em, ’cause I gwine free you before that. When they get here they gwine find you already free, ’cause I gwine line you up on the bank of Bois d’Arc Creek and free you with my shotgun! Anybody miss just one lick with the hoe, or one step in the line, or one clap of that bell, or one toot of the horn, and he gwine be free and talking to the Devil long before he ever see a pair of blue britches!’ That the way he talk to us, and that the way he act with us all the time.”
But not for much longer, for just as the rural South was losing to the industrially advanced North, so Dr. Jones was to fall victim to a piece of modern technology—a steam-powered threshing machine, known as “the gin.”
“Next fall, after he ride out and tell us he gwine shoot us before he let us free, he come out to see how his steam gin doing. The gin box was a little old thing, ’bout as big as a bedstead, with a long belt running through the side of the gin house out to the engine and boiler in the yard. The boiler burn cord wood, and it have a little crack in it where the nigger ginner been trying to fix it.
“Old Master come out, hopping mad ’cause the gin shut down, and asked the ginner, Old Brown, what the matter. Old Brown say the boiler weak and it liable to bust, but Old Master jump down offen his hoss and go round to the boiler and say, ’Cuss fire to your black heart! That boiler all right! Throw on some cord wood, cuss fire to your heart!’
“Old Brown start to the wood pile grumbling to hisself, and Old Master stoop down to look at the boiler again, and it blow right up, and him standing right there! Old Master was blowed all to pieces, and they just find little bitsy chunks of his clothes and parts of him to bury. The woodpile blow down, and Old Brown land way off in the woods, but he wasn’t killed. Two wagons of cotton blowed over, and the mules ran away, and all the niggers was scared nearly to death ’cause we knowed the overseer gwine be a lot worse now that Old Master was gone.
“Old Man Saunders was the hardest overseer of anybody. He would get mad and give a whipping some time, and the slave wouldn’t even know what it was about. Later on, in the War, the Yankees come in all around us and camp, and the overseer get sweet as honey in the comb. Nobody get a whipping all the time the Yankees there.
“I never forget the day we was set free. That morning we all go to the cotton field early, and then a house nigger come out from Old Mistress on a hoss and say she want the overseer to come into town, and he leave and go in. After while, the old horn blow up at the overseer’s house, and we all stop and listen, ’cause it the wrong time of day for the horn.
“We start chopping again, and there go the horn again. The lead row nigger holler, ‘Hold up!’ And we all stop again. ‘We better go in. That our horn.’ When we get to the quarters we see all the old ones and the children up in the overseer’s yard, so we go on up there.
“Sitting on the gallery in a hide-bottom chair was a man we never see before. He had on a big broad black hat like the Yankees wore, but it didn’t have no yellow string on it like most the Yankees had, and he was in store clothes that wasn’t homespun or jeans, and they was black. His hair was plumb gray and so was his beard, and it come way down here on his chest.
“The man say, ‘You darkies know what day this is?’ He talk kind, and smile.
“We all don’t know, of course, and we just stand there and grin. Pretty soon he ask again and the head man say, ‘No, we don’t know.’
“‘Well, this the fourth day of June, and this is 1865, and I want you all to ‘member this date, ’cause you always going ‘member the day. Today you is free, just like I is, and Mr. Saunders, and your mistress and all us white people. I come to tell you, and I wants you to be sure you all understand, ’cause you don’t have to get up and go by the horn no
more. You is your own bosses now, and you don’t have to have no passes to go and come.’ We never did have no passes, nohow, but we knowed lots of other niggers on other plantations got ’em. ‘I wants to bless you and hope you always is happy, and tell you you got all the right that any white people got,’ the man say, and then he get up on his hoss and ride off.
“Old Mistress never get well after she lose all her niggers, and one day the white boss tell us she just drop over dead sitting in her chair, and we know her heart just broke. Next year the chillun sell off most the place and we scatter off, and I and Mammy go into Little Rock and do work in the town.
“Lots of old people like me say that they was happy in slavery, and that they had the worst tribulations after freedom, but I knows they didn’t have no white master and overseer like we all had on our place. They both dead now, and they no use talking about the dead, but I know I been long gone by now iffen that white man Saunders didn’t lose his hold on me.