What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  As firmly as most white Union troops agreed on emancipation, they did not share a consensus as to the meaning of black freedom. John English approved of the Thirteenth Amendment because it made “the Negro…free forever in this country, as every other race and nation, and on an equality before the law,” but he was not so sure about equality “in a social point of view.” 61 Nor did white members of the Union rank and file agree about black suffrage, a question that many northern state electorates and legislatures considered in the final year of the war. By April 1865, many troops determined that long-awaited Union victory really was imminent this time, and complacency led soldiers like self-satisfied Illinois private George Hudson to decide that radical measures like black suffrage would not be necessary after all. “You must have a better oppinion of the Negro than I to leav our Government to their Protection,” he haughtily wrote to his family after receiving a letter from home that spoke approvingly of extending voting rights to blacks. 62 Uncertainty rather than certainty motivated Kentucky soldier Robert Winn, yet he shared Hudson’s opposition to black suffrage. “Talk of elevating them to the suffrage is folly,” Winn lectured his sister, which could only be indulged in by those who were guilty of “overrating the mental capacities and moral conditions of the poor emancipated (semi I should say) slaves.” Convinced “that more than one generation must pass away before the S. Darkey would be fit for Citizenship,” Winn deemed “it best not to complicate the question of their being raised from things to men” by tackling questions that he thought belonged “to a future generation.” 63

  While plenty of soldiers agreed with Winn, the experience of war and interactions with former slaves led many others to insist that the generation that fought the war could not just shift responsibility onto its descendants. Instead, after backsliding in the spring and summer of 1864, many soldiers returned to the ideas that had begun to take shape after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, when they had first suspected that white Northerners must adjust their own racial attitudes dramatically before all the suffering of the war would be made worthwhile, and before God would be satisfied and reward the Union with victory. In a newspaper column aimed at northern children, Pvt. Wilbur Fisk argued that white Americans owed black Americans more than an occasional “dollar for the Freedmen’s Aid Society.” They owed them respect and decency. Whites must abandon the distinctions they drew between themselves and African Americans and treat former slaves as they would treat Christ. Otherwise, God would frown on anyone who “shall unwittingly despise” blacks, and even if the Union defeated the Confederacy, Northerners would not have fulfilled their duty in the eyes of God. 64 Interacting with former slaves did the most to convince white troops—even those who had shown little prior sympathy for black Americans—that white Northerners needed to modify their attitudes. Impressed by slave women who “toiled along day after day, with their children bound on their backs: making the same hard marches that we did,” an Illinois sergeant urged “white mothers of the free North” to see that black women “endowed by the Creator with the same love of children and love of freedom that he has given to you” deserved the same respect and dignity that white women expected. 65 After praising black troops who fought at Fort Blakely, Alabama, one white soldier exclaimed, “blistered be the tongue” of the Northerner who would now harp, as he once had, on the dangers of “negro equality.” The sight of “5,000 colored…soldiers fighting equally…for our common country” proved that “the white man is NOT disgraced” by working alongside blacks as equals, and that “the colored man” should be “ELEVATED.” 66 In the waning days of the war, some Union troops, even ones who had been hostile to black rights before the war, seemed willing to re-embrace the more positive attitudes toward black equality and civil rights that many had begun to adopt in the summer of 1863. This pattern demonstrated the existence of a real impulse for racial progress, an impulse that would once have been regarded as intolerably radical among otherwise very ordinary white Union soldiers.

  Growing numbers of white troops called for tangible steps toward making the ideals of the American Revolution into lived realities for black as well as white Americans. The Soldier’s Letter of the Second Colorado Cavalry, for example, embraced black suffrage, desegregation of public facilities, and the news that a black lawyer had been accepted to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. 67 More than any other measure, education for former slaves stood out as the obligation that countless white soldiers felt the United States owed to black Americans, and many troops went beyond bland words of approval to involve themselves actively in the work of the schools. When Vermonter Rufus Kinsley was not helping to build schools in his off-duty hours, he was “teaching soldiers and contraband children.” Teaching in the South was not for the faint of heart, Kinsley observed, especially since white northern teachers were subject to kidnapping by Confederate guerrillas, but despite the dangers, he saw the future of his nation, not just a quaint social project, on the school benches of the South. “The schools are spreading, and are destined to save the Nation,” thanks to teachers who were “doing for their country a nobler and braver work than has been done on the bloody battle-fields of the war.” 68 Black education even gained support from unexpected quarters. When he first arrived in the South, Illinois sergeant William Bradbury viewed blacks with distaste and blamed them for causing the war, but now he enthusiastically solicited teaching materials from home for southern black pupils. 69

  In short, in the final months of the Civil War, a critical mass of white Union troops supported expanded rights for African Americans, and believed that the U.S. government had a duty to work toward equality for black citizens. After the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and especially in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the opinions of soldiers like Fisk, Kinsley, Bradbury, and others lost ground to the view that white Americans owed no obligation to blacks beyond abolition, much as the summer of 1863’s growing support for racial justice had ebbed in 1864. Yet that outcome was anything but inevitable in 1865, as blacks and whites worked together to change laws, build schools, and lay foundations for a more equitable society. Commitment to racial justice was not unanimous among the white rank and file, but neither was a desire for unabated white supremacy. The potential for a radically different United States existed in the waning days of the Civil War, even while consensus on that subject did not.

  “Rising step by step to the summit of liberty and equal rights”

  Black Union soldiers knew with perfect clarity that breaking slavery’s chain meant inaugurating a freedom defined by basic human rights and full citizenship for black as well as white Americans. First of all, freedom meant the right to family relationships, over which slaves had enjoyed little control in the days of bondage because husbands and wives knew that their union could be sundered at the whim of an owner. Now, black men like the Kentucky slave William Jones risked death in order to enlist, in the belief that enlistment would secure the freedom of their wives. 70 Throughout the South, black men and women flocked to have their marriages consecrated. The chaplain of a black regiment in Arkansas conducted more than twenty-five weddings in the single month of February 1865. 71

  Genuine freedom, in the view of many black soldiers, also required full citizenship, which meant, among other things, equal treatment in the public sphere. One member of the Third U.S. Colored Troops confidently promised African American readers that they could expect to “be admitted into public conveyances in every section of your town” by the time the war ended. 72 Elsewhere, a black soldier welcomed news of the desegregation of Philadelphia streetcars as “another progressive stride” against “the injustice which [whites] have long practiced upon the negro.” 73 Recognizing the links that many white Americans saw between property ownership and membership within the body politic, Sgt. George Massey emphasized the importance of new laws designed to allow black Americans to “become owners of homes and property.” 74

  Other black troops defined citizenship as rec
ognition of black people’s contributions to the past, present, and future of the American Republic. In June 1864, Congress had legislated equal pay for black and white soldiers, and in late 1864 and 1865, black soldiers finally began to receive their equal wages. Shortly after the paymaster arrived at the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts’s encampment in South Carolina for the first payday since the enactment of equal pay legislation, the men of the regiment, “anxious to take advantage of this and every opportunity of giving expression to our loyalty,” and to exercise “the rights of citizenship,” passed a set of resolutions. The resolutions explained, “even as the founders of our Republic resisted the British tax on tea, on the ground of principle, so did we claim equal pay with other volunteers because we believed our military and civil equality its issue.” In drawing parallels between the American Revolution and their own experiences in the Civil War, the black soldiers of the Fifty-fifth wrote themselves into the nation’s past and into its future as citizens of a regenerated American Republic. 75

  Finally, full citizenship for black Americans also meant the right to participate in government. Zack Burden even wrote to the president to explain that freedom and citizenship should mean equal treatment on very basic levels, such as comparable rations for black and white troops, equitable policies for granting furloughs to sick soldiers regardless of race, and government assistance for the dependents of black soldiers, but they should also mean the right to participate in the government that black troops fought to defend. A man who would “fite” should be allowed to “vote,” Private Burden succinctly told Lincoln. 76

  Fighting for the same cause and in the same way as white soldiers provided black men with a solid claim to full citizenship; after all, as one black artillerist pointed out, men who “fought and bled for their country” had clearly earned the rights of citizenship within it. 77 At the battle of Nashville in December 1864, “the blood of black and white men flowed freely together for the one common cause, for a country’s freedom and independence,” reflected a black veteran of the fight. “As the result, wherever the flag of our love goes, our hopes may advance, and we may as a people, with propriety claim political equality with our white fellow-soldier and citizen; and every man that makes his home in our country may, whatever be his complexion or progeny, with propriety, exclaim to the world, ‘I am an American citizen!’” 78

  In addition, black soldiers fortified their claims to citizenship through collective action on local and national levels. The Twenty-ninth Connecticut, for example, formed the “Douglass and Garnet Young Men’s Literary Society,” named for two prominent African American figures. One member described the “object” of the “association” to be “the elevation of our race and the advancement and perpetuation of universal liberty, political and social equality, and…the establishment of the great principle that all men were created free and equal.” 79 The group elected officers, enacted a constitution and bylaws, and instituted a series of regular meetings dedicated to discussing “the great questions of the hour.” In addition to providing black soldiers with experience in creating institutions and participating in self-government, the society allowed them to engage issues such as “social equality and the result of the war” and “the future of America and of our race as American citizens.” Society meetings relieved monotony while sending a message to “the enemies of our noble country and our race,” whether those enemies were Confederate soldiers entrenched a mile away, or northern civilians who were just as firmly entrenched in tired doctrines of black inferiority that looked silly in light of the society’s sophisticated activities. 80 From Nashville, black Ohio sergeant major Dudley Asbury hailed the work of local “churches and societies which are fast forming a basis for our elevation.” 81 Asbury also praised the National Equal Rights League, a new association organized at the National Convention of Colored Citizens of the United States (also known as the National Convention of Colored Men) in Syracuse, New York, in October 1864. Elected delegates from eleven free states and seven slave states established the league and adopted resolutions, framed by Frederick Douglass, which called for full citizenship for African Americans, including “general suffrage…personal liberty, the right to testify in courts of law, [and] the right to hold, buy and sell property.” In short, the convention demanded an end to “prejudice,” the elimination of “all enactments discriminating in favor of or against any class of its people,” and the institution of “one law for the white and colored people alike.” 82 One soldier, primed for the upcoming national convention by news of a Philadelphia gathering conducted for similar purposes, looked forward to the Syracuse meeting as an opportunity for blacks to “agitate the question of equality before the law and demand by the law the rights that citizens enjoy.” 83 Months after the convention, Moses Foskey still praised the ability of such gatherings “to elevate the race” by using the national stage and the political process to fight for the “honor and equality” of African Americans. 84

  No Pollyannas, black soldiers in 1864 and 1865 recognized that no matter how diligently they might work to secure their own equality, enfranchised whites possessed a power to change laws that disenfranchised blacks did not, and the persistence of bigotry among many of those whites often curbed black hopes. Pvt. T. Pennington of the Twentieth U.S. Colored Infantry did not doubt “the good intentions of the law-makers at Washington,” but he was discouraged by the ways in which racist individuals subverted equal policies. The federal government explicitly dictated equal rations for black and white troops, yet a Union major general stationed in Louisiana still ordered vegetables three times a week for white troops, and an unrelieved diet of cornmeal and molasses for black troops. Such unequal treatment of the “energetic, valiant, and faithful” ranks who fought at “Port Hudson, Vicksburg, Olustee, and other places” insulted the very notion of justice, the frustrated Pennington fumed. 85 Small, constant snubs for no greater crime than “be[ing] made black when you should have known that it is an unpopular color” so embittered one black soldier that he believed that it would take God’s direct intervention to bring about “equal right and justice to all men in the United States.” 86 In addition, the continued bar against black officers made it hard for black soldiers like James Trotter to trust that white Americans really intended to apply the “great principle of equal rights” to black Americans. 87

  Yet for all the disappointments, and despite the continued resistance of some whites, astounding changes had taken place on the nation’s racial landscape since 1861. For one thing, black soldiers knew better than to underestimate the death of slavery, an institution that predated the foundation of the United States, defined every aspect of society in the South, affected politics and society in the North, and had until recently been rendered inviolate by no less a document than the U.S. Constitution. James Lewis knew the sting of racism. A New Orleans gentleman of color, Lewis had been forced to resign his captaincy of the First Louisiana Native Guards because of the Union’s prohibition against black officers, and so he sympathized with a friend who encountered “prejudice” in his new home of New York, but he also counseled against cynicism. “We prefer a disturbed liberty to a quiet slavery,” Lewis emphasized, and no matter how many setbacks blacks faced in freedom, slavery was destroyed as long as the Union won the war, because the Thirteenth Amendment would apply nationwide. 88 On New Year’s Day, black regiments in Beaufort, South Carolina, staged ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which reminded one chaplain of “Meriam, Moses’ sister, and the women of Israel, dancing on the shores of the Red Sea” to celebrate the entrance of the Israelites into the promised land. “What a change in Beaufort,” he exclaimed. “Here only a few years ago slavery held undisputed sway.” 89 From near Richmond, a black sergeant meditated, “surely this is a mighty and progressive age in which we live. The hydra-headed monster slavery which, a few short years ago, stalked over the land with proud and gigantic strides, we now behold drooping and dying under the scourging l
ash of Universal Freedom.” 90

  Even soldiers impatient with the pace of change acknowledged the dramatic revolution that abolition constituted, and reminded themselves that the United States’ transition from a slave nation to a nation committed to emancipation proved that justice willed by God would come to pass eventually. Irritated by northern foot-dragging on racial equality, Henry Hoyle consoled himself by recollecting, “He has struck the chains of bondage from nearly half a million of our race and given new strength and vigor to the doctrine of Universal Freedom and Equal Rights.” The barricade of white prejudice might temporarily impede blacks’ advancement toward equality, but “God in his own good time will batter down this barrier…and open the hearts of the people to the justness of our claim.” 91 In the late months of the war, black troops believed that a God who used the Union government to destroy slavery could also eliminate racial prejudice.