Important as Gettysburg and Vicksburg were in inspiring white troops to consider northern complicity in the sin of slavery, the performances of black Union troops proved equally central in forcing white soldiers to confront their own racial attitudes. Some white troops remained opposed to black enlistment. William Lewis, who wanted both slavery and slaves to go away, also wished all talk of African American troops would cease. “For the sake of our Children Do not Enlist them in the survis of the United States,” he pleaded, because soldiering would “enable them to Come up and Clame the wright of citizenship.” 52 Others accepted black soldiers as long as enlistment did not bring social equality. Ohio private Arthur Van Horn was all for the use of black troops, but was disturbed by rumors that black soldiers might receive pay and bounties equal to those of white soldiers. 53 Nevertheless, a “great change” had been “wrought in the public mind,” according to a Pennsylvania recruiter who claimed that black enlistment was “the most popular war measure that the administration adopted,” rather than the inconceivable pipe dream of radical abolitionists that it had seemed in 1861. 54 For Henry Fike, who was anything but a radical abolitionist, contact with black troops in Tennessee brought increased, if imperfect, respect for African Americans serving the Union. Fike referred to slaves and black noncombatants as “niggers,” but he always called soldiers “negroes,” “soldiers of color,” or “citizens of African descent.” 55 Similar changes occurred in other theaters of the war. In South Carolina, a black sergeant admitted that his regiment had “suffered a great deal” early in its tour of duty, when it was “liable to be insulted by any of the white soldiers,” but within months he found white troops treating blacks “as men and soldiers, fighting for the same common cause.” 56
Above all, black soldiers’ obvious bravery and effectiveness in battle made an impression on white troops at every level of the Army from top to bottom. In his official report following the Battle of Honey Springs, Maj. Gen. James Blunt praised the “coolness and bravery” of black soldiers, which he had “never seen surpassed.” 57 Similarly, the reports of Gen. Edward Wild and Col. A. G. Draper praised the “courage and determination” of black troops in the face of deadly guerrilla warfare in North Carolina. 58 Similar impressions reverberated through the ranks. Every time African Americans came under fire, “the black man has shown…that he is worthy” of the title of United States soldier, argued the Rhode Islanders who created The Port Hudson Freemen. 59 After a former private in an Illinois regiment became a company officer in a regiment of black Louisiana soldiers, he and his men withstood an attack at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi River in which only one enlisted man in the whole regiment emerged unharmed. After the battle, the Illinoisan warned his aunt, “I never more wish to hear the expression, ‘the niggers won’t fight.’ Come with me 100 yards from where I sit, and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a Rebel.” The fight had been worse than Shiloh, he continued, yet “not one of them offered to leave his place until ordered to fall back…. They fought and died defending the cause that we revere.” 60
Black soldiers’ bravery at places like Milliken’s Bend and Fort Wagner in South Carolina, along with their skill in the day-to-day aspects of soldiering, persuaded some white troops that justice demanded equal treatment for black Americans within the republic they were helping to save. 61 Charles Berry admitted that the Army had adopted black enlistment to fight the war, not out of racial enlightenment. Yet regardless of initial white reluctance, the performance of black soldiers argued for changes in more than just tactics and logistics. The military aptitude of black troops admitted “no doubt now about the efficiency of this new material for fighting purposes,” Berry argued. “Mentally,” black slaves might be “children,” Berry allowed as a bow to the dominant racial prejudice of his readers, but once former slaves became Union soldiers, they achieved “manhood.” They learned complicated tactics quickly and drilled with determination. Black regiments in existence for only a matter of months already displayed the “precision of veteran corps.” In short, black soldiers had shown themselves to be “equal, on an average,” to “the Caucasian race.” 62 A just nation could do no less than recognize that equality.
Not every white Union soldier experienced a racial epiphany, but the willingness of a growing number of men who had evinced no interest in racial justice before the war to reexamine their own attitudes, to treat at least fellow soldiers as equals in a shared cause, and to champion increased rights for black Americans marked a fundamental shift in the history of the nation. In July 1863, the Forty-second Massachusetts regimental band provided the music for the funeral procession of Andrè Cailloux, a black soldier killed in the Port Hudson campaign. The white regimental band members took their place as equals in a procession that included black soldiers, members of Cailloux’s family, and representatives of New Orleans black voluntary societies. 63 The prospect of white men taking part in a ceremony honoring a black man as an equal compatriot in the cause they also served could hardly have been imagined before the war. Similarly, calls for racial equality would have been so revolutionary before the war that only a tiny number of radical abolitionists would have endorsed them. More than two years of grueling warfare, which many in the rank and file attributed to the work of a just but angry God, changed the minds of otherwise very ordinary white northern men. The events of the summer of 1863 urged many white members of the Union Army to look critically at themselves and their own society, and to act on the impression that they had not yet pleased God by calling for an expansion in the reach of founding ideals like equality beyond the racial limits that had once seemed fixed and intractable. In short, the uneasy belief that Northerners had not yet lived up to God’s expectations led growing numbers of white men in the Union ranks to envision a nation few could have imagined in 1861.
“For equal rights with the rest of mankind”
Black Union troops saw God’s hand at work in the war even more clearly than white soldiers did. One black orderly sergeant wrote from South Carolina that the war was “a medium through which God is helping us.” 64 In fact, some black soldiers expressed outright gratitude to God for sending the war. “We thank God for it,” one African American in Tennessee wrote, while another, miles away in South Carolina, echoed with a simple “thank God.” 65 Specifically, black troops believed that God would use the war and their participation in it to achieve four main goals: the salvation of the Union and the realization of the legacy of the American Revolution, the destruction of slavery, the attainment of equal rights and justice for black Americans, and the establishment of what black soldiers called the “manhood of the race,” by which they meant recognition of both the masculinity of black adult males and the full humanity of all African Americans.
The belief that God was using the war to achieve divine purposes caused black soldiers less anxiety than the same recognition brought to their white counterparts. White Union men struggled to face their own complicity in the wrongs of American slavery and racial prejudice, but black Union men who had suffered rather than inflicted those wrongs could see the war less as punishment than as reason for hope. As a member of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth put it, the Almighty “cannot take sides with the oppressor,” and since black Americans qualified as oppressed more than oppressors, they had nothing to fear from the war’s outcome. 66 Because the “God of battles who knows the justice of our cause” was at work in the war, Cpl. Henry Harmon of the Third U.S. Colored Troops could feel assured that the war meant blessings rather than penance for “our brothers in bondage, and the prospects of our race in general.” 67
Much as white soldiers argued that the Union must survive to show the world that a government based on ideals like liberty and equality could work, many black troops insisted that the purpose of the Union and its army was to “carry out this bold idea…Liberty.” 68 It might seem ironic, admitted Cpl. James Gooding, that black men’s “b
lood is now being spilled to maintain” a nation that had “ground them to dust” for all the years of its existence, but the irony did not stop “Decendants of Africs Clime” from “dye[ing] the ground with blood, in defense of Union, and Democracy.” 69 An African American man who enlisted as a soldier and then worked as a recruiter in Tennessee knew from experience that former slaves and free blacks “entered the field for ‘Liberty,’ and are holding the starry emblem, dear to our hearts as a precious jewel, never to trail in the dust.” Like white Union soldiers, black soldiers defined liberty as an intangible and broadly applicable ideal, not a privilege or possession restricted to a few. It had little to do with the personal fortunes or material aspirations that Confederate troops saw as central to liberty. Instead, liberty was the “spirit” that made the “occupant” of “the palace or the hovel…happy” regardless of all else. 70
Black troops, especially northern free blacks, also associated liberty with the American Revolution. As Henry Harmon explained, blacks fought to “preserve that glorious Union which our fore fathers had preserved for us,” and which guaranteed “our country’s rights; our rights, [and] our people’s rights.” 71 Yet Harmon and black troops did more than defend the memory of 1776 as whites interpreted it; they also sought to make the American Revolution live up to its promises. When men like Sgt. Isaiah Welch evoked the Revolution with the slogan “Give me liberty or give me death,” they insisted that African Americans be included within the Revolution’s legacy. 72 In arguing for abolition, antebellum northern black leaders had developed the rhetorical technique of appealing to the memory of the Revolution and challenging white Americans to live up to its ideals. 73 Numerous northern black soldiers adopted that device during the war. One member of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts wrote a poem entitled “Dedicated to the Mass 54th Vols” in which he claimed:
At last at last each bright star
On this beautiful field of blue
Cover this proud nation shining afar
Burns to the greatest promise true 74
For him, the war offered the United States a chance to realize the Revolution’s full potential.
Many black soldiers also took their interpretations of the war a step further than white soldiers where slavery was concerned. Many white troops insisted that salvation of the Union demanded the destruction of slavery, but black soldiers regarded abolition with even more urgency. When Aaron Mitchell and two other enslaved men from Missouri ran away from their owners to enlist in the Union Army, one of the men was shot and killed while the other two were beaten. 75 To enlistees who ran such dramatic risks in order to volunteer, slavery was no mere abstraction. As a regiment of black Union troops from Virginia sailed down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans, “thousands [of former slaves] who have been made free by the President’s Proclamation [came] from all parts of the cotton and sugar fields to the river banks…cheering us loudly,” Sgt. James Taylor reported. Watching the former slaves and responding to their greetings, Taylor and his fellow black troops did not see policy problems. Instead, they saw peers recently released from the same bonds that had enchained themselves or their loved ones. 76 The end of slavery meant more than the solution to an intellectual contradiction to Sgt. Richard White. It meant that when people who looked like him worked, they would “see the fruits of their labor,” and parents who looked like him could realistically envision a day when “no mother weeps for her babe forever doomed to slavery’s hell.” 77
Even more emphatically than their white counterparts, many black soldiers insisted that slavery must be destroyed not just out of convenience, but because the evils of slavery soiled the republic and offended God. “Man has bought and sold, beaten, killed, and enslaved his fellow man,” reflected one soldier. These sins of slavery had poisoned the nation, making it easy prey for the cancer of war, which consumed the “Republic from centre to circumference,” and “carried suffering, want, devastation, death and ruin throughout a once peaceful, prosperous, and happy country.” 78 The litany of “suffering, want, devastation, death and ruin” sounded like a series of plagues, and the resemblance was no accident. Both free northern blacks and many southern slaves had long used the biblical story of Exodus to make sense of the experiences of slavery and racial oppression. The Israelites had suffered in Egyptian bondage, just as African Americans suffered in slavery. 79 The war as God’s way of freeing slaves fit naturally into the Exodus narrative. At the same time, the conflict gave the Union a choice between joining the liberation or acting the part of Pharaoh and risking God’s wrath. A member of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts cast President Lincoln as Moses: with the Emancipation Proclamation he “lifted his hands up” just as Moses “raised up his hand” to lead the Israelites to Canaan. 80 Other black troops warned that the Union could not escape the fate of Pharaoh and the Egyptians as long as it cooperated in oppression. By turning a blind eye to the plight of black Americans, the free North was guilty of “forgetting” God, which was why “defeat followed defeat,” and nothing would change until the Union purged itself of the evils of slavery. 81
By serving as soldiers, black men could help dispel one of the most pernicious of those evils, racial inequality. If some white Union soldiers hesitated to link black enlistment and black equality, black troops celebrated that very connection. Joseph Williams fought “for equal rights with the rest of mankind.” Just as God sustained “Joshua, when he commanded the sun to stand still until Joshua had won the victory,” so too would the Almighty stand with black men in their struggle for equality. 82 In fact, in 1863 black troops could celebrate clear steps in the direction of equal citizenship, ranging from the outlawing of segregation on public streetcars in Washington, D.C., to the holding of a black suffrage convention in Kansas. 83
Meanwhile, as military governor George Shepley and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks oversaw steps toward the establishment of a unionist state government in Louisiana, African Americans had reason to hope that a former slave state would enfranchise at least some of its black residents. In November 1863, free men of color petitioned Governor Shepley for black suffrage, while an interracial political rally in New Orleans debated the prospect of extending voting rights to black Louisianans. 84 The following month, hopes for equal citizenship in Louisiana received a boost when President Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, designed to bring Louisiana back into the Union as soon as 10 percent of the number of citizens who had voted in the 1860 election proved willing to swear allegiance to the United States. While Lincoln intended the proclamation chiefly as a war measure designed to heighten internal Confederate dissent and hasten the downfall of the Confederacy, advocates of equal rights saw it as an opportunity. 85 On December 15, a unionist group called the Friends of Freedom held an integrated convention that addressed a wide range of concerns, from the progress of antislavery sentiment in Kentucky to suffrage for free blacks and black soldiers. At the convention, state attorney general and meeting chair Thomas Durant praised the gathering as “the first deliberative body in Louisiana that will have proclaimed the freedom of all men. No matter with how dark a hue their skins may be embrowned, beneath the surface there is the soul of a man, and therein we recognize the great principle of equality and fraternity.” 86 In light of such developments, it was no wonder that black soldiers such as artilleryman Richard Black could expect serving as “a U.S. soldier, without regard to color,” to “vindicate the cause of freedom and equality.” 87
Black soldiers also articulated another, distinctive, goal: the “manhood of the race.” While Confederates identified slavery as necessary to their own identities as white adult males, African Americans knew that slavery robbed black men of many of the nineteenth century’s hallmarks of manhood, including independence, courage, the right to bear arms, moral agency, liberty of conscience, and the ability to protect and care for one’s family. Fighting in the Civil War offered African Americans the opportunity to display those very attributes and reclaim their iden
tities as black men in direct defiance of proslavery ideology’s insistence that blacks were children or savages rather than real men. 88
For one thing, the very act of fighting required black men to bear arms and display courage. Although initially relegated to laboring rather than fighting duties, black soldiers succeeded in procuring combat assignments in the summer of 1863. While operating the artillery gun known as the Swamp Angel in Charleston Harbor, one black farmer from Pennsylvania explained that he “saw men fall around me like hail stones,” but that he and his company “stood fast,” even as “the enemy fired shell and grape into us like hot cakes.” 89 In verse, a black Louisianan memorialized the experience of combat at Port Hudson, in which black soldiers advanced “through ravines of fire…to batteries belching forth a hell.” Black soldiers’ bold charges into “the cannon’s mouth” carried the day, and the ground “strewn with hundreds slain” provided eloquent testimony to the men’s bravery. The flowing blood of black “martyr-heroes” not only “unlocked” the Mississippi River, it created a national wellspring from which “Freedom [will] arise and bloom,” refreshed by black soldiers’ courage, the poet-soldier concluded. 90
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