Civil War

The Emancipation Proclamation did more than free the slaves in those states that were in rebellion. After encouraging freed slaves to refrain from violence (except in self-defense) and to work for wages, Lincoln continued: "And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service." This did not mark the beginning of black military service in the United States, or even in the Civil War. Despite official bans on black service, African American men had been welcomed into the ranks during wartime (though they were not so welcome during peace) since the Revolution.

The Right to Fight

Kansas, South Carolina, and Louisiana had already formed unofficial all-black regiments, many of whom had seen combat by the time Lincoln's proclamation was issued. Still, the numbers had been small, and the very idea was controversial. "We want you damn niggers to keep out of this," one Cincinnati man wrote. "This is a white man's war" (McPherson 1965, p. 29). Many blacks disagreed. After listing the freedoms available in the North, the New York newspaper the Anglo-African asked: "Are these rights worth the having? If they are then they are worth defending with all our might and at any cost. It is illogical, unpatriotic, nay mean and unmanly in us to shrink from the defense of these rights and privileges" (McPherson 1965, p. 34). Former slave Frederick Douglass agreed: "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pockets, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States" (Litwack 1979, p. 72).

The Emancipation Proclamation opened the way for African American military service on a large scale. Douglass and other prominent African Americans, such as William Wells Brown and Sojourner Truth, served as recruiters. Two of Douglass's sons served in the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment. By the end of the war, around 180,000 blacks would serve in the U.S. Army, with another 19,000 in the Navy; only 1 percent of the North's population, they comprised 10 percent of the Union Army (Cullen 1992, p. 81).

The officers in the USCT (United States Colored Troops) were white. Many had volunteered for this particular service, often having been active in abolitionist movements before the war. Blacks who had been serving as officers in preexisting regiments were pressured into stepping down. The troops themselves were not homogenous; some had escaped from slavery only days or weeks before, others had been born into freedom. Despite the antislavery sentiments of the white officers, even the most well-meaning of them could at times be condescending and paternalistic. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a New England abolitionist and colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, referred to his troops as "Sambo." He also noted that "they are simple, docile, and affectionate almost to the point of absurdity. The same men who stood fire in the open field with perfect coolness, on the late expedition, have come to me blubbering in the most irresistibly ludicrous manner on being transferred from one company in the regiment to another" (Higginson 1870, p. 10). He was likely unable to make the connection between the impact of transfer and the impact of the auction block, which had separated so many black families. Higginson did note, however, that his men responded much better to mildness than to severity as a result of their previous experiences, and that they had "a great deal of pride as soldiers." One of the regiment's sergeants, Prince Rivers, later described their first parade march thus: "And when dat band wheel in before us, and march on,—my God! I quit dis world altogeder" (Higginson 1870, pp 43-44). Higginson also noted the religious nature of his troops, calling them a "Gospel army" and claiming that the white camps seemed "rough and secular" in comparison (1870, p. 59). Perhaps the recollections of Corporal Adam Allston best illustrate Higginson's remarks: "When I heard de bombshell a-screamin' troo de woods like de Judgment Day, I said to myself, 'if my head was took off tonight, dey couldn't put my soul in de torments, perceps [except] God was my enemy!' And when de rifle-bullets came whizzin' across de deck, I cried aloud, 'God help my congregation! Boys, load and fire!" (Higginson 1870, p. 93).

Prejudice in the Military

Blacks had won the privilege of service, but before they came under literal fire from Confederates they would first face racism from their own military. The lack of black officers was only the beginning. Black troops were compelled to perform a disproportionate amount of "fatigue duty"—digging ditches, building forts, cleaning latrines—and as a result the number of deaths due to sickness was much higher for black than for white troops. Despite promises that pay rates would be equal, blacks were paid $10 monthly from which $3 was deducted for clothing expenses, whereas white troops were paid $13 with no deductions. When black soldiers angrily protested, some were shot or jailed. Jim Cullen quotes from a regimental commander's letter to the Massachusetts governor: "They enlisted because men were called for. They would rather work and fight until they are mustered out of the Service, without any pay than accept from the Government less than it gives to other soldiers … and by so accepting acknowledge that because they have African blood in their veins, they are less men, than those who have saxon" (Cullen 1992, pp. 84-85). As one of Higginson's South Carolina troops put it. "We'se gib our sogerin' to de Guv'mint, Cunnel, but we won't 'spise ourself so much for take de seben dollar" (Higginson 1870, p. 252). Congress finally rectified the situation, restoring equal pay and provisions in July 1864.

Before the Emancipation Proclamation, a small number of black volunteers had been involved in skirmishes. In 1863, however, African Americans, many of whom had begun to fear they would spend the entire war in fatigue duty, saw large-scale combat. In that summer's Vicksburg campaign, black troops fought—and gained a measure of respect—at the battles of Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. It was in South Carolina a month later, in July 1863, that Union colored troops gained their most lasting national distinction. The Union assault on Fort Wagner, off the coast of Charleston, was a military failure but captured the imagination of the Northern public. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the son of prominent New England abolitionists, suffered heavy losses; Gould himself was killed. Confederates stripped the dead, officers included, and buried them in a common grave. Newspapers and poets lionized both the regiment and its commander for their courage. Following as it did on the heels of the New York City Draft Riots, in which blacks were victimized by rioters, the battle at Fort Wagner inspired public acclaim for black soldiers who were willing to fight and die for the Union while white rioters were not. Indeed, Sergeant Robert Simmons of the Fifty-Fourth died at Fort Wagner three days after his nephew was murdered in New York by rioters. As Lincoln wrote a month later, addressing Democrats opposed to emancipation: "You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you…." (McPherson 1996, p. 105).

ROBERT SMALLS

On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a handful of fellow slaves took control of a Confederate gunboat, the Planter, while the boat's three white officers were ashore. Smalls guided the vessel out of a harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, past five Confederate forts, and—after picking up several family members—raised a white flag and sailed boldly into the Union fleet. Smalls would serve as a navy captain and later a congressman from South Carolina. Below is his statement to the press he wrote on August 27, 1862, from his new home of Washington, D.C.:

Mr. Editor: In your paper of yesterday it is stated that an application had been made for me … for a passage to Central America. I wish it understood that I have made no such application; but, at the same time, I would express my cordial approval of every kind and wise effort for the liberation and elevation of my oppressed race.

After waiting, apparently in vain, for many years for our deliverance, a party consisting of nine men, myself included, of the city of Charleston, conferred freedom on ourselves, five women and three children; and to the Government of the United States we gave the Planter, a gunboat which cost nearly thirty thousand dollars, together with six large guns, from a 24-pounder howitzer to a 100-pounder Parrott rifle.

We are all now in the service of the navy, under the command of our true friend, Rear Admiral Dupont, where we wish to serve until the rebellion and slavery are alike crushed out forever.

                   Very respectfully, Robert Smalls

SOURCE: Lowell Daily Citizen and News (Lowell, MA), September 1, 1862.

Black soldiers, and sometimes the white officers who served with them, faced further danger if captured after battles. Reports of a Confederate threat to summarily execute all captured blacks led Lincoln to insist that captured black soldiers be treated as prisoners of war, no matter their status before the war, and vowed reprisals for executions. This ended the prisoner-exchange system that had been in place throughout the conflict. Confederate authorities issued no explicit order to execute blacks, but there were many instances of brutality and massacres nonetheless. In Virginia witnesses testified that, in the aftermath of the Battle of Saltville, the notorious Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson was seen coldly executing several black prisoners and some whites found in their company (Smith 2001, p. 46). The most widely reported incident occurred at Fort Pillow, in Tennessee. Almost 300 Union troops, most of them black, were killed after the battle; Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, future founder of the Ku Klux Klan, allegedly allowed the carnage and later claimed that the prisoners were firing their weapons at his soldiers. Black troops throughout the Union Army repeated the rallying cry "Remember Fort Pillow!" and fought more fiercely than ever.

Recognition for Valor in Battle

Fort Wagner was followed by several other prominent examples of black troops earning recognition from the press and high-ranking officers. The war's two largest engagements of black troops were the Battle of Nashville—in which they prevented Confederate commander John Bell Hood from reinforcing his weakened left flank, thus contributing greatly to the victory and eliciting praise from Union General George H. Thomas—and the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia. That siege culminated in the Battle of the Crater: Confederate defenses were breached by an explosive charge planted underneath them, after which Union forces surged through the resultant depression. Black troops had originally been slated to lead the charge, but Union leaders feared that the press would accuse them of deliberately using blacks as cannon fodder. The white troops who were sent in their stead got bogged down, and the ensuing confusion caused the black soldiers sent in behind them to be trapped and exposed, leading to heavy casualties. As James Lee McDonough (2004) notes, it was not victory but rather the African American troops' courage under fire, as at Fort Wagner a year earlier, that won them recognition.

The theme of manliness runs through many historical novels and films about black Union soldiers' experiences in the Civil War, which have stressed that these soldiers were not submissive victims but rather in command of their own fate. In the 1989 film Glory, about Shaw's all-black volunteer company and the Battle of Fort Wagner, Morgan Freeman's character tells his comrades, "The time's comin' when we're goin' to have to ante up and kick in like men. Like men!" Bound for the Promise-land, a modern fictionalized account of the Battle of the Crater by Troy D. Smith, portrays a black soldier waving his injured arm at white Union soldiers. "'We men!' he screamed at the top of his lungs. 'You hear me! We men!'… he half-choked as he repeated softly, to us, 'We men'" (Smith 2000, p. 174). There is no denying that blacks and whites alike equated black manhood with participation in combat. "Now we sogers are men—for the first time in our lives," a South Carolina sergeant told an audience in Philadelphia. "Now we can look our old masters in de face. They used to sell us and whip us, and we did not dare say one word. Now we ain't afraid, if they meet us, to run the bayonet through them" (Cullen 1992, p. 85). Yet W. E. B. Du Bois condemned this attitude: "How extraordinary and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded, he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man" (Cullen 1992, p. 110).

For white Southerners, it must have seemed that the world had been turned upside down. Black men, many of them former slaves, stood guard over captured Confederate officers and patrolled occupied Southern towns. And they did this displaying a newfound confidence and pride. In the words of one such soldier, noticing his own former master among a group of prisoners: "Hello, massa; bottom rail top dis time!" (Litwack 1979, 102.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowlands, eds. The Black Military Experience. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Cullen, Jim. "'I's a Man Now'": Gender and African American Men." In Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935. (Repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.)

Glatthaur, Joseph. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance between Black Soldiers and White Officers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Glory. TriStar Pictures. 1989.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870.

Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf, 1979.

McDonough, James Lee. Nashville: The Western Confederacy's Final Gamble. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004.

McPherson, James M. The Negro's Civil War: How Americans Felt and Acted during the War for the Union. New York: Pantheon, 1965. (Repr., New York: Vintage, 2003.)

McPherson, James M. "The Glory Story." In Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Smith, Troy D. Bound for the Promise-land. Lincoln: Writers Club Press, 2000.

Smith, Troy D. "Champ Ferguson: Don't You Beg and Don't You Dodge." Civil War Times Illustrated 40, no. 6 (2001): pp. 40-46, 72-73.

                                          Troy D. Smith