When Relyea and the Planter’s other white officers violated their orders and left the ship one night to sleep ashore, Smalls saw his opportunity. The Planter set out at 3 a.m., with Confederate and South Carolina state flags snapping in the wind. As they steamed past a Confederate sentry, Smalls stood in the pilothouse in Reylea’s coat and trademark straw hat, and in the predawn light no one could detect anything unusual. Smalls then stopped to take on several women and children, including his own family. When the vessel approached the Confederate outpost at Castle Pinckney, Smalls gave the usual signal from the ship’s whistle and proceeded past other fortified positions just as on any other day. By the time Confederates realized the ship that had passed Fort Sumter, the third checkpoint, was steaming straight for the Union blockade, nothing could be done. As fast as possible, Smalls lowered the Confederate colors and raised a white flag. The USS Onward, a clipper built in 1852, received the Planter and joined in the rejoicing over the astonishing act of courage and the slaves’ freedom.
Contraband crossing the Rappahannock, by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, August 1862. Stereoscope, glass plate photograph. Library of Congress.
Smalls and the rest of his crew, following standard military procedure, received compensation for seizure of the Planter. Besides the ship and its armaments, the Union cause had gained an extremely valuable asset in Smalls, who was given command of the vessel—this time under the flag of the United States—and provided Union forces with his extensive knowledge of Confederate coastal defenses.
Equally important, Smalls scored a fabulous propaganda victory over the Confederates and provided newspapers across the North with the opportunity to lampoon slaveholders’ arrogance and the opponents of black freedom in the North. One Pennsylvania newspaper used the case to skewer congressmen who had refused to support freedom for the slaves who reached Union lines. What should we do, the paper asked: take the vessel that Smalls heroically seized from under the noses of the rebels and send “the patriot and hero” back to slavery? Other newspapers took the opportunity to use the “abduction” of the Planter as irrefutable evidence of black ability and a powerful argument against the South’s pro-slavery propaganda of black inferiority. “What a painful instance we have here of the Negro’s inability to take care of himself,” another newspaper mocked.12
AS THE WAR PROGRESSED AND FEDERAL TROOPS MOVED DEEPER INTO THE SOUTH, INCREASING NUMBERS OF SLAVES ABANDONED THE PLANTATIONS AND MADE THEIR WAY TO UNION LINES, often arriving in family groups composed of several generations. Many of the new refugees ended up in the growing contraband camps hastily erected by the Union army. By the summer of 1862, what had begun as a trickle of refugees had turned into a flood. The thousands of slaves who abandoned the plantations dramatically helped to transform the aim and meaning of the war. As military success remained elusive, Lincoln’s rhetoric about saving the Union broadened to address the pressing issue of slavery in explicit terms. As a generation of historians has asserted, black initiative forced the question of slavery upon a very reluctant administration and pushed President Lincoln down the road toward emancipation. The conduct of the war and the horrific casualty lists also forced the president to rethink the use of black troops, something that previously only black activists and their white allies had insisted upon.
When Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, its text threatened the South with the emancipation of the slaves if it did not lay down its arms. But it made no mention of arming black men—even though blacks had served in the Navy since the start of the war. If Lincoln was true to his word (and no one could be sure), the proclamation, Frederick Douglass believed, would sanctify the Union cause and make “justice, liberty, and humanity permanently possible in this country.” Yet if the slaves remained a powerful resource to aid the rebellion—and not the Union—then no victory was possible.13
The heroism of black men helped change Lincoln’s mind—and saved the Union cause. Although the War Department refused to arm black men—despite the fact that they had no trouble giving them picks and shovels—others took the initiative and organized black regiments without explicit federal authority. In August 1862, General James H. Lane, also a United States senator, organized the First Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment. Lane had been battling slave masters since the days of John Brown and bragged about his forays into Missouri to free slaves. He did not hesitate to include the liberated “property” in his regiment, which operated under state, rather than federal, authority. On August 4, 1862, he opened a recruitment office in Leavenworth, Kansas, despite a warning from the War Department that the unit would not be accepted into the regular Union army. Ignoring the administration, Lane recruited free and enslaved blacks, Native Americans, and mulattoes and mestizos into the unit. He even made William D. Matthews, a free black of Leavenworth, a first lieutenant—something that the Union army refused to permit until near the end of the war. By September 1862, when Lincoln issued that preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lane already was drilling about 600 “colored” recruits, with more coming in every day. The next month, on October 29, 1862, the unit fought its first engagement, at Island Mound, Missouri. Even the Confederates had to confess that the black soldiers “fought like tigers.”14
But there was more. After Union forces seized New Orleans early in 1862, General Benjamin F. Butler, the architect of the theory of treating fugitive slaves as contraband of war back at Virginia’s Fortress Monroe, now commanded the occupation forces there. Shorthanded and facing an enemy organizing to oust him, Butler accepted the offer by local free black men to form segregated units. On September 27, 1862, he organized the First Regiment Louisiana Native Guard, followed later by the Second and Third Guards. After January 1863, the army added additional units and referred to them as the Corps d’Afrique, in recognition of the proud French cultural heritage of the free community of color in New Orleans. Butler permitted the Guards to keep their own black officers, a move that the War Department later reversed. At first they performed mostly garrison duty, but at the Battle of Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, and again at Milliken’s Bend on June 7, 1863, the black soldiers of the Louisiana units performed with such valor and efficiency that their actions went far toward breaking down the army’s resistance to a general recruitment of black soldiers.
Perhaps nothing helped change Northern views on the use of black troops more than the First South Carolina Volunteers, under the command of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Although Higginson was better known for his career as a Unitarian minister and, after the war, as one of the country’s most important literary figures, he was an unapologetic champion of John Brown and an uncompromising abolitionist. General David Hunter, the Union commander of the Department of the South, began forming the unit in the occupied South Carolina Sea Islands in the spring of 1862. The War Department rejected his request for official permission to muster the unit, and the House of Representatives even investigated his actions. House members demanded to know if he, in fact, had organized a unit of former slaves in violation of federal law. On June 23, Hunter replied to the inquiry stating that “no regiment of ‘fugitive slaves’ has been or is being organized in this department. There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are ‘fugitive rebels.’” Hunter’s reply ignited howls of laughter from Republicans, while conservatives growled in disgust. Hunter praised the unit and advised the Congress that by the end of the next fall he could have as many as 50,000 men ready to fight the rebellion.
Hunter was relieved of command, but his replacement, General Rufus Saxton, continued to build the unit with the War Department’s grudging consent and mustered in the First South Carolina Volunteers on November 7, 1862. Within six days, Colonel Higginson took the unit into action. Commanded by white officers, but with black noncommissioned officers and comprised entirely of former slaves from the region, the unit performed with exceptional efficiency and daring against the soldiers’ former owners. Higginson
made sure that the North was well acquainted with the achievements of his unit and wrote a steady stream of letters to newspapers back home describing their conduct under fire. He knew that what his men did and what he said about them would determine the future of black recruitment—and the course of the war. On February 11, 1863, in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller, for instance, Higginson assured Northern readers that his black troops had indeed faced enemy cavalry, infantry, and cannon. In “every instance,” he proudly explained, they came “off not only with unblemished honor, but with undisputed triumph.”15
Benjamin F. Butler, by Matthew Brady studio, 1860–1865. Glass plate photograph. Library of Congress.
Emancipation, by Thomas Nast. Engraved by King & Baird and published by S. Bott, Philadelphia, 1865. Library of Congress. Nast depicts the rise of African Americans from the cruelties of slavery—aided by the Freedmen’s Bank and public education—to middle-class respectability. The image emphasizes the important role of Abraham Lincoln in establishing black freedom without acknowledging black service in the Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, actually freed only a relatively small number of slaves—perhaps 500,000 out of a total of 3.9 million—but its significance far transcended its legal impact. Written by a lawyer to address a specific legal problem—the limits of the president’s war powers—the final Emancipation Proclamation wrought a revolution in the aims of the war with all the poetry and eloquence of a real estate transaction. Yet because of it, a war to preserve the Union had become one that aimed to destroy slavery, the central conflict of the war, or as Lincoln’s generation phrased it, “the bone of contention.” A moral bombshell, the proclamation also helped prevent European powers from recognizing the South as an independent nation. While limited in scope, having no impact on slavery in the border states or in several areas already occupied by Union forces, it did one additional important thing, without which the South could not have been defeated: It provided for the full-scale recruitment of African American soldiers, a significant fact often overlooked.
By the end of the war, 178,975 black men served in the Army and approximately 20,000 more filled the ranks of the Navy. About 85 percent of African Americans who served in the war were former slaves, but the free black men of the North volunteered for military duty in far higher percentages than whites. For them, service in the war was an extension of the anti-slavery movement, the final act in a drama that stretched back to the Haitian Revolution, back to the slave petitions during and after the American Revolution, and back even to the slaves who fled from Charleston and Savannah to freedom in Spanish Fort Mose.
Many more black men and women served as laborers, scouts, spies, and stevedores, allowing the Union army to resupply, move, and receive intelligence on rebel troop movements and strength. While Union commanders often relied upon the slaves’ knowledge of local terrain, the Lincoln administration actually had a pipeline right into the office of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Mary E. Bowser (1839?–?), a slave, worked in the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, became a Union spy, and worked as part of the espionage ring run by Elizabeth “Bet” Van Lew. Bowser, married to a free black from Philadelphia, took on the identity of “Ellen Bond,” a seemingly dull-witted but reliable servant who won the attention of the president’s wife, Varina Davis, and became the Davis family’s full-time servant until near the end of the war. She saw everything on the president’s desk and, with a photographic memory, could repeat every document she saw. How can one overestimate such a contribution?16
When considering the importance of the black role in the Civil War, Colin Powell, our nation’s highest-ranking African American army general and statesman, often repeats Frederick Douglass’s inspiring words, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.” and let him “get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket … there is no power on the earth … which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” For several months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed—in fact, until July 18, 1863—the recruitment of black troops was considered by the North to be something of an experiment. Despite the heroism of black men under arms in the first years of the war and their documented contribution to the nation’s previous wars right back to the American Revolution, many white people, including key members of the Lincoln administration, lacked confidence that black men could be effective soldiers. But most doubts dispersed after the heroic action of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, a unit of free Northern black men led by white officers, on a hot July night along a sandy beach at the outer edge of Charleston Harbor. Their attack on Fort Wagner, although failing to carry the rebel works, did change Northern public opinion, ending the debate over the advisability of arming African Americans. Their heroism and the death of their sainted commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, proved black worth to a skeptical Northern public and, as Douglass asserted, laid the basis for the postwar black claims for full citizenship.17
Fort Wagner and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, by Currier & Ives, New York, circa 1863. Lithograph. Library of Congress. This print focuses on the death of the regiment’s commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Much historical attention has focused on the legacy of the Massachusetts regiment, especially because of the magnificent memorial erected to Shaw and his unit in 1897 on Boston Common, several books, and a 1989 Hollywood film. But the Saint-Gaudens memorial, perhaps the finest example of the art form in the United States, and the iconic attack on Fort Wagner have overshadowed the state’s other two black regiments and the equally impressive heroism of the 178,000 men of the United States Colored Troops.
Former slaves wanted the opportunity to fight for their liberation, and Northern blacks wanted to show their patriotism as a basis for their postwar claims to full citizenship. Both groups wanted to destroy slavery, and both were treated shabbily by the Lincoln administration. None could be field officers—and those who possessed an officer’s rank as a member of the medical corps or as recruiters were either beaten by whites or subjected to withering discrimination. Just as destructive, the highest ranking black officer received less pay than a white private; and black officers had to pay for their own uniforms. (All black troops, in fact, had to pay for their uniforms. They received $10 a month as pay, minus $3 for clothing.) They endured crippling disrespect and insultingly low pay from their own government, and faced an enemy that generally refused to grant them any quarter in combat. Although a few black troops were taken prisoner during the war—and some ended up at the horrid facility at Andersonville in Georgia—most expected to be killed if captured.
The fearsome massacre at Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, where 64 percent of blacks were killed while only 33 percent of the white Union troops died, tells the story. The battle at the fort, situated about 40 miles north of Memphis on the Mississippi River, was followed by the systematic execution of black soldiers—and black civilians—even after the surrender of the garrison. So loathsome was the incident that Congress investigated the massacre and black soldiers stitched the phrase “Remember Fort Pillow” on their uniforms.
While the war became increasingly savage for all participants with each passing month, for black troops the stakes could not have been higher from the very first. Fighting a war on two fronts—against racism among one’s allies at home and against the racism of slavery being defended to the death by a merciless enemy—black soldiers’ achievements are all the more astonishing.
IN AN ATTEMPT TO PENETRATE CONFEDERATE LINES SOUTH OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, AND BREAK THE LONG SIEGE OF THE REBEL CAPITAL, General Benjamin F. Butler moved his Army of the James north from Deep Bottom in late September 1864. Butler, who commanded many black troops, believed that if they carried a position that whites had previously failed to seize, it would end any lingering prejudice against them in his army. As he confessed in his memoirs, Butler “deliberatel
y expose[d] my men to the loss of greater numbers than I really believed the capture of the redoubt was worth.” Despite Fort Wagner, Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and the success of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the white troops of Butler’s army lacked confidence in the ability of black soldiers. Thus, Butler concluded that the sacrifice of so many men would prove necessary to create a more effective overall fighting force. After the battle, Butler honored his men with medals and felt duty bound to stand by them after the war because of the great sacrifices they had made to convince their white comrades to trust them in battle.18
Thus, soldiers in Butler’s command from the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 22nd, 36th, 37th, and 38th United States Colored Troops (USCT) attacked an entrenched position at New Market Heights, Virginia, on September 29, 1864. Waking at 3 a.m. and marching into position, the men received a visit from General Butler an hour later. Facing an enemy on high ground in trenches protected by ditches, felled trees, and a host of other obstacles, the men stared at what must have seemed like an impossible challenge and certain death. Butler fired their spirits and encouraged them to strike fear in their enemies by crying out “Remember Fort Pillow” as they charged the entrenchments. With the sun just breaking over the horizon and fog shrouding the battlefield, the Fourth and Sixth USCT began the assault under orders to use only the bayonet, a standard tactic designed to ensure that attacking troops continued to rush forward.
The African Americans Page 17