What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  However justified the public optimism expressed by many black soldiers, in private many could not help but brood over some of the discouraging signs that lurked alongside promising developments. For one thing, soldiering presented unique dangers for African Americans. A disproportionate share of unhealthy fatigue duty, sometimes accompanied by lower-quality rations, contributed to excessive mortality rates among black soldiers. About one of every twelve white Union troops died of disease, while among black Union soldiers the rate approximated one out of five. 59 Meanwhile, the families of northern black troops lived closer to the economic margins than white families did, and therefore suffered economic hardship when a male family member was in the Army rather than at home helping to support the family. The loved ones of southern blacks who enlisted in the Union Army faced even starker dangers in the form of retaliation at the hands of southern whites. 60

  Confederate policy toward black prisoners of war made service especially risky. Few white prisoners in either army enjoyed gentle treatment at the hands of their captors, but by Confederate definition, a black man could not be a soldier; therefore, any black men captured from the Union ranks would be subject to harsher policies, which began taking shape in December 1862. On December 23, President Davis issued a proclamation declaring that captured black Union troops would be treated as runaway slaves. The proclamation applied to black soldiers seized in New Orleans in December 1862, but it set a precedent for the general practice of disqualifying black Union soldiers from wartime prisoner conventions. 61 Davis reiterated the policy in his January 1863 message to Congress, and Congress obligingly enacted a series of orders calling for the sale of black prisoners as slaves, or the trial of black prisoners on charges of insurrection, for which the punishment was death. 62 In practice, any black man captured in a Union uniform knew he faced the likelihood of slavery or death, either as punishment for insurrection or at the hands of Confederate captors who cut through the niceties of policy to murder black captives on the spot. The most famous such incidents included the massacre of black prisoners at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864 and at the Crater outside Petersburg, Virginia, at the end of July, but the danger was not confined to a few dramatic episodes. To take just one example of the danger that attended routine duty, Robert Fitzgerald of the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry wrote of how Confederate soldiers captured a black Union soldier on picket duty and “broke his skull with the butt of their muskets, his brains are scattered over his face and head.” 63 Constant danger wore away at black soldiers’ morale, especially when black troops doubted the U.S. government would stand up for them. As a black New Yorker warned Secretary of War Stanton, “no soldiers whom the government will not protect can be depended upon.” 64 Prisoner of war policy along with other disproportionate risks faced by black soldiers led to growing dissent among northern black civilians about the wisdom of enlisting in the Union Army. 65

  In light of the dangers black Union troops faced from the Confederate enemy, the scorn many of them encountered from white Americans on their own side proved all the more galling. In 1864, prejudice sat like a giant boulder, obstructing the path toward racial justice and causing some black troops to question whether their sacrifices were really worth the effort if the war did nothing more than “serve the comparatively light results of this present state of things.” 66 Black troops were not merely impatient for faster changes; they were saddened to see positive advances slip backward. The resurgence of Copperhead Democrats especially dismayed one member of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth because the whole point of the Copperheads seemed to be “to maintain a line of demarkation between the white and black race, and to deny to the black equal rights and justice as enjoyed by the white.” 67 Legal setbacks that spring compounded his gloom. “We cannot ride in the city passenger cars unless they legislate to that effect, we cannot even buy public lands, unless some act or order is promulgated, extending the privilege; we could not be employed upon the public works, unless some provisional law or order was appended to it,” he noted. 68 Even the high hopes raised by the Louisiana constitutional convention faded as the new state legislature, composed of southern unionists and northern transplants, rejected even limited black suffrage. 69 As one volunteer summed it up, “prejudice [is] the curse of the North as slavery is the curse of the South.” 70 While earlier signs had pointed to the lifting of that curse, progress now seemed to reverse itself.

  Inequality in the Army proved an especially bitter pill to black men who had fought determinedly for the right to defend the Union, only to be discriminated against once they joined the ranks. Members of one regiment grew so disillusioned by the treatment they encountered in the Army that one illiterate black soldier dictated a letter to President Lincoln. The men had enlisted “to face thous vile traitors and Rebeles.” Yet once encamped in Louisiana, rather than being treated as soldiers, black troops got stuck with unpleasant duties (such as digging in the “stinking” swamps of Louisiana) that whites eschewed, severely diminished rations, and such poor living conditions that they died in droves. The men knew that “the Country is in A hard struggle,” and they expected to make sacrifices, but the gap between the treatment of their regiment and nearby, well-fed white units resulted from prejudice, not the exigencies of war. Believing that in times of crisis it was especially important for the Union to live by its ideals of “Justice and Rights,” the soldier regretted the willingness of the nation to jettison basic justice and equality in times of difficulty or inconvenience. 71

  Many African American soldiers also objected to the Army’s prohibition against black officers. Black men who had initially served as officers in the Louisiana Native Guards resented a questionable ruse used by the Union Army to trick them into surrendering their commissions, while other soldiers objected to the steps taken to prevent them from ever becoming officers in the first place. 72 When a highly qualified black officer candidate, William Dupree, was denied a commission, Sgt. James Trotter mourned the fact that the Union Army intended to “deny a poor oppressed people the means of liberating themselves.” Even a despot like Napoleon promoted deserving candidates regardless of physical characteristics, which made it all the more “maddening” that in the United States “no such rule is to be adopted because the soldiers are so blameable as to have their skins dark.” 73 A mass recruiting meeting among Philadelphia’s African American community highlighted many blacks’ dilemma. At the meeting, black recruits passed a series of resolutions that declared “there could be no neutral ground in this great struggle…. All are alike bound…to exert every influence within their reach on the side of liberty and justice.” Yet calls to liberty and justice sounded hollow to men “surrounded with heinous prejudice” and forced to listen to the “insulting endorsement of the old dogma of negro inferiority” which barred blacks from earning officers’ commissions. 74

  Black soldiers’ relationships with their white officers sometimes soured, especially when the war went badly for the Union. Some troops enjoyed mutually respectful relationships with their white leaders, but others were not so fortunate. 75 One private complained that his officers deprived the men of decent food and medical care, and openly claimed, “it would be no difference if all the niggers got killed.” Such attitudes contributed to disproportionate death rates among black troops, and also eroded men’s confidence in the idea that their country regarded them as equal citizens. 76 John Cajay noticed that hard times often led to deteriorating relations between white officers and their subordinates. In training camp in Rhode Island, officers had scrupulously addressed the troops with the same terms they would use to address white troops, including “boys,” “lads,” or “men.” After exposure to hard duty in the South, officers stooped to insulting phrases like “Come here, d——d nigger, or something worse.” 77 The point was not simply that racism faded too slowly to suit black soldiers, but rather that real advances eroded when the going got tough.

  No issue better illustrated the gap between black hopes an
d wartime backsliding than the equal pay issue. White privates received thirteen dollars per month plus clothing and rations. In 1862, Secretary of War Stanton had authorized equal pay and rations for regiments of South Carolina blacks, and in 1863 Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts raised black regiments with the promise of equal pay, but the South Carolina and Massachusetts precedents did not necessarily apply to all black regiments. Recruitment campaigns, especially those aimed at free blacks of the North, often assumed or implied equal pay, but the only law directly addressing black military personnel was the Militia Act of July 17, 1862. The Militia Act enabled the president to receive blacks into service for whatever purpose he found them competent, but did not mention equal pay. 78 A general order issued June 4, 1863, finally set black pay at ten dollars per month, minus three dollars for clothing. 79

  It took time for the reality of unequal pay to filter back into black soldiers’ encampments, but once the news sank in, many soldiers in the South Carolina and Massachusetts regiments, who had been promised equal compensation, were stunned and outraged at the cold, hard proof that the U.S. government literally valued them less than white troops. 80 When the Third South Carolina Volunteers learned of the seven-dollar policy, its members promptly stacked arms, disgusted that “a government that had declared ‘freedom to all’ as one of the cardinal points of its policy” would exhibit such hypocrisy. 81 Loudon Langley, a black farmer from Hinesburg, Vermont, resented the “injustice” of federal policy. “Let the sin rests where it belongs, on the U.S. government,” Langley fumed, for instituting unequal pay measures so “ungodly and cruel,” that they nullified any claims to justice. 82

  When the state of Massachusetts offered to make up the difference between white and black federal pay, black men in the Massachusetts ranks objected, explaining that the principle of the American government’s commitment to its own ideals, not a few dollars a month, rested at the heart of the issue. 83 A member of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts thanked the people of the Bay State for their generosity, but urged them to see that no black soldier should renege on “our principle, the one that we came to fight for,” which was exactly what would occur as soon as African Americans acquiesced in discrimination. 84 If black soldiers fighting for an American Union dedicated to liberty and equality agreed to fight for a reduced sum, they would admit that the worth of blacks was less than that of whites, which was the very Confederate doctrine responsible for starting the war in the first place. To accept lower pay from the federal government would “acknowledge ourselves the inferiors of our white comrades in arms, and thus by our own actions, destroy the very fabric we originally intended to erect,” maintained a member of the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth. 85 Lower pay compromised black soldiers’ concerns for the manhood of the black race and the entire Union cause of equality, justice, and republicanism. It also dampened the hopes for racial justice that had seemed so promising just a few months earlier.

  The equal pay issue stirred up fury and disappointment among many black troops, but it did not create unanimity. In fact, in contrast to the early harmony that seemed to reign among black troops, the pay question created the first significant dissent in the ranks of black Union soldiers. Some men opposed the focus on monthly wages because they feared creating the public perception that black soldiers only cared about money. Instead, “people of African descent” should present a “union of sentiment” in favor of helping the Union “become triumphant over slavery for the foundation of our liberty.” 86 As long as black troops displayed a united front and served well, one black volunteer advised, white Americans would have to “credit” that “truly we have sacrificed much for our country.” 87

  Differences of opinion over the equal pay issue were part of a broader pattern of differences emerging among black troops over how best to achieve justice and equality for members of their race. In order to defuse white fears that increased rights for blacks would lead to social upheaval, some black soldiers advocated conciliation. For example, because many whites dreaded the prospect of racial mixing, some black soldiers hastened to reassure white Americans that black Americans who desired “the exercise of our political, free, civil and public rights” did not intend “that the black man’s son should marry the white man’s daughter.” 88 In contrast, other black troops believed that because equality had been so long and brutally denied, it could now only be achieved through violence fierce enough to uproot white Americans’ most deeply held attitudes and customs. One black regiment, camped in an area where many in the ranks had formerly been slaves, captured a local slave owner who had once owned Pvt. William Harris as well as several black women currently in the camp. After tying the former owner to a tree, Private Harris and the women took turns flogging the man who had once given them “most unmerciful whipping[s].” To the men of the First U.S. Colored Troops who learned of the incident, such a powerful reversal provided a necessary “mirror,” reflecting hard truths back to all whites who “looked upon [African Americans] as an inferior race.” It would take force, they suspected, not gentleness, to root out entrenched racist beliefs. 89

  Yet despite strategic differences, black troops agreed that persistent prejudice and, even worse, backsliding in matters of racial justice, mattered because they compromised northern claims to moral authority, and therefore lessened the likelihood that God would reward the Union with victory. Not until the nation had repented of “the enormity of its crimes” of bias and discrimination should it look to “enjoy that peace which the nation has so long lost, and will never again have until made to know that God’s image, of whatever hue, is worthy of respect, liberty, and equality.” 90 Another soldier warned, “if our merits will not warrant our acknowledgment as men, veterans and soldiers, the hand of God may send forth His destroying angel and slay our enemies,” whether those enemies were Confederates or northern whites who perpetuated the crime of racial bias. 91 In short, until the demon of prejudice was as dead as the monster of slavery, Northerners could expect warfare to persist.

  By the end of summer 1864, currents of progress and disappointment, vindication and betrayal, agreement and dissension circulated among African American troops, and soldiers like Sgt. Richard White struggled to come to grips with the storm of emotions. Sadness over the unwillingness of the “government and religion of this country” to treat blacks as “men and soldiers” mingled with the hope that as long as blacks remained “true to the cause of justice and liberty,” they could expect “better times in this country.” White regretted that “the work of reconstruction is not progressing as fast as we would wish,” but he also recognized that emancipation, black enlistment, and the expansion of some black civil rights constituted enormous, if limited, steps forward, and therefore he remained hopeful in the face of setbacks. 92 For White and for black soldiers everywhere, the war clearly revealed the power to dash expectations and sow dissent, even as that very same war continued to create great potential for a postwar United States vastly different from the nation that had entered the conflict in 1861.

  “Everlasting war in preference to a union with a people who condescend to equalize themselves with the…negro”

  While 1864 brought battlefield setbacks to the Union, things seemed to look up for Confederates, at least militarily and politically. Union failures to take Atlanta or Richmond amounted to successes for the Confederacy. After turning back yet another federal advance on Atlanta, one soldier reported, “our Army is in splendid condition,” and looked forward to “an onward march into Tenn. & Ky.” 93 By the end of the summer, with the Army of the Potomac stymied around Petersburg, Virginia, Henry Patrick told his wife that “our prospects are brightening,” because the supposed “greatest army on the planet” had accomplished nothing in its push for Richmond other than the loss of “100,000 of their best troops.” 94 Confederates also recognized northern Democrats’ efforts to outline a platform and select a candidate for the presidential election of 1864 as reasons for hope. The Confederacy could win the war
after all, as long as it could hold on long enough to convince Union voters in November to choose a new president willing to negotiate for peace. Camped not far from Richmond, Pvt. Thomas Kelley was pleased to learn that “the Chicago convention met yesterday,” and “anxiously await[ed] to hear the result of its proceedings,” which he felt sure would result in the nomination of a presidential candidate “greatly to our advantage.” 95 Marking time outside Atlanta, Douglas Cater also welcomed news of the Chicago convention. “My hopes of peace now rest on a revolution among the people of the North,” he confided to his cousin Fannie, “or else the election of a peace candidate for the [Union] Presidency.” 96

  Yet even with the military success and promising Union political developments, the world seemed to be falling apart for many Confederates. For one thing, the Confederate government, which was supposed to serve white Southerners’ needs and aspirations better than the Union government, continued to appear dismissive of the real hardships that the war and the Confederacy imposed on soldiers’ loved ones. When Pvt. Peter Cross “stood up to my Country like a man and defended her rights like a soldier,” he never dreamed that the authorities would leave his family to starve, but by March 1864 his wife was so desperate that Cross had to ask his parents to plead with the North Carolina state government for money to buy a little salt and grain. As Cross saw it, no white man should have to beg, least of all for basic necessities from a government that should have promoted white families’ best interests. 97 To the men of the Forty-sixth Mississippi, the Confederacy seemed willing to sacrifice rather than protect their families’ safety. The regiment had been stationed in its own home state, until suddenly it was ordered to Mobile, Alabama, just as Union forces under Gen. William Sherman began campaigning through Mississippi. Filled with “indignation at the entire abandonment of my own state,” privates like William Chambers could not help but “distrust” a Confederacy “that gave up their homes to the torch and their families to the tender mercies of the foe.” 98