Like Kirkwood, many Northern military officers saw plainly the advantages to be gained by enlisting freedmen and slaves into the conflict. Every slave enlisted for the Union was one less slave enlisted for the Confederacy, and, in more racist terms, every black man in harm’s way took the place of one white man. Union General Sherman was no friend to abolitionists, but he did see the utility of employing fugitive slaves behind the lines and worked to actively promote their service (albeit not in combat).
4
Lincoln did not have to wait long to see if slaves would enlist. The answer was yes, in droves. To Lincoln’s delight, the most striking candidates came from the border states. Forty-two thousand black men from the border states served in the army and 2,400 more in the navy. The historian Ira Berlin shows that black enlistees amounted to 25 percent of eligible black men in Delaware, 28 percent in Maryland, 39 percent in Missouri, and a whopping 57 percent in Kentucky.
5
In all, 180,000 to 200,000 black soldiers fought for the North, with killed and wounded totaling 68,178, or more than one-third of the total engaged.
6
Ever since the Militia Act of July 17, 1862, black enlistments had been officially sanctioned and enlisted slaves freed immediately. Despite this, they were denied appointments to officer’s rank and received less pay than white soldiers of comparable rank. Northern blacks were slower to enlist than their Southern counterparts, citing discrimination and the thinly veiled threats of Confederates to murder black prisoners of war or sell them into slavery.
Nevertheless, leading black figures urged their people to enlist in the cause of freedom for their race. When two of Frederick Douglass’s sons enlisted in New York (the first black recruits in that state), Douglass implored others to swallow their pride and fight:
Shall colored men enlist notwithstanding this unjust and ungenerous barrier raised against them? We answer yes. Go into the army and go with a will and a determination to blot out this and all other mean discriminations against us. To say we won’t be soldiers because we cannot be colonels is like saying we won’t go into the water till we have learned to swim. A half a loaf is better than no bread—and to go into the army is the speediest and best way to overcome the prejudice which has dictated unjust laws against us. To allow us in the army at all, is a great concession. Let us take this little the better to get more.
7
Northern antislavery officers saw the new enlistments in more idealistic terms than Sherman did. In November 1862, before the proclamation formally took effect, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was invited to take command of the first slave regiment. Higginson trained his regiment—known as the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers—and led it in raiding operations up the St. Marys and Edisto rivers. The soldiers, most of them freedmen, fought bravely.
In a letter written on November 24, Higginson described his troops to his old company:
Give my hearty love to the Company. Tell them I have hardly even a mulatto, that is not as black as printer’s ink, with the coats and red legs—but they have stood fire splendidly in two expeditions... their marching is very good for some reason. The first words I exchanged with them were good. I was introduced to one, wounded in two places in the late expedition—“Did you think that was more than you bargained for?” said I—“Datas just what I went for, masta” was the plucky response—a good beginning.
8
But when Northern free blacks inquired about volunteering, Higginson was cautious. In a letter to William Brown, a Worcester, Massachusetts, upholsterer, Higginson warned:
Dear Sir: If you would like to come and join me, I should be happy to have you. I can secure you a Sergeant’s place and pay ... or possibly a first sergeant. Or if you prefer, I might have you for my personal attendant in which case you need not enlist. Otherwise you enlist for 3 years. My greatest objection to your coming here is this.
If taken prisoner by the Rebels at any time, you would probably be sold as a slave.
This being the case, I do not think it your absolute duty to leave your family and come. But if you wish to come, and have made up your mind to do it, you can be very useful to us, as there are but few in our regiment who can read and write with ease. We have now 733. I advise you by all means, to come out as Lieut. Thomas Earle’s servant. It will spare you discomfort and annoyance on the way. I will send the news to him, which will bring you both on the boat from New York. Truly your friend, T.H. Higginson.
9
Apparently Brown took Higginson’s warning to heart for there is no record of him serving.
In Louisiana, the abolitionist writer and general John Wolcott Phelps organized four black regiments before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. By order of the Confederate government he was declared an “outlaw” for having “organized and armed Negro slaves for military service against their masters, citizens of the Confederacy.” Massachusetts abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw took command of the first black regiment from a Northern state to go to the war. Shaw’s Fifty-fourth Massachusetts realized heroic recognition at the ill-fated assault on Battery Wagner, Charleston Harbor, on July 18, 1863.
In 1864 Lincoln would announce that nearly 150,000 blacks were under Union arms. In separate actions, black regiments would fight in Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Virginia, at Port Hudson, at Olustee, and at Petersburg. By New Year’s 1864, African American soldiers had become an established presence in the Union armies and heroic in the eyes of abolitionists and fellow African American slaves and freedmen. At a New Year’s celebration of the first anniversary of emancipation, held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the cold weather could not stifle a wide turnout of freedmen proudly watching a “civic and military procession ... under the command of Col. T. W. Higginson, ist S.C. Vols.”
The address was delivered by the Reverend James Lynch, an “educated colored preacher of Baltimore, Missionary to the Freedmen on St. Helena.” Lynch made his principal subject the African American soldier at war for Union and freedom, who, like the white soldier, was fighting ultimately not only for America but for the world:
This stream of loyal blood which is flowing in mighty current—strong, pure and noble like the fount from which it bursts—shall bear this nation with all its inhabitants to a height of moral and political grandeur that shall be the standard for an advancing world—combining the excellencies of ancient civilization with all the desirable elements and characteristics of modern—throwing out the golden cord of assistance to every political element of the globe.
As for the black soldier, in particular, Lynch concluded, “Our race have no pledge to make but action. Put the nation’s uniform upon them—they will never disgrace it.”
10
In moral terms, the most significant battles were not always the biggest. Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner were all relatively small battles but carried huge symbolic significance for the North and the South. Confederate slaveholders and Northern Democratic white supremacists assumed that blacks could not or would not fight under “the black flag” as the equals of whites. The African American’s manliness and honor were denied in the classroom and at voting polls, just as his humanity was denied on the battlefields. Black leaders such as Douglass recognized that only action would dispel such racist myths.
Colonel Higginson’s regiment fought well in isolated skirmishes but had not participated in battles significant enough to win the attention of skeptics. In contrast, the brave but unsuccessful assault on Port Hudson in May and June 1863 (later won by siege) received widespread publicity and praise. Faced with the imposing riflepits and heavy guns of Port Hudson on the lower Mississippi, black soldiers from New Orleans had fought bravely, if unsuccessfully. In crossing open ground under murderous fire, they had continued until sheer futility called their charge to a halt. One participant observed:
No matter how gallantly the men behaved, no matter how bravely they were led, it was not in the course of things that this gallant brigade should take these works by charge. Yet charge after charge was ordered and carried out under all these disasters with Spartan firmness. Six charges in all were made.... The self-forgetfulness, the undaunted heroism, and the great endurance of the negro, as exhibited that day, created a new chapter in American history for the colored man.
In his official report, a previously skeptical General Nathaniel P. Banks concurred, noting that “the severe test to which they were subjected, and the determined manner in which they encountered the enemy, leaves upon my mind no doubt of their ultimate success.”
11
On June 7, 1863, at Milliken’s Bend north of Vicksburg, black soldiers evidenced the same tenacity and courage. Although the black soldiers were armed with antiquated weapons, their bravery caught the attention of the North. The hatred on both sides led to a relatively rare (at the time) hand-to-hand engagement with bayonets in place and rebel cries of “no quarter” to the black soldiers.
Later reports described the murder of captured blacks. In a letter to his aunt, Captain M. Miller of the Ninth Regiment of Louisiana Volunteers of African Descent described the heroism displayed that day:
We were attacked here on June 7, about 3 o’clock in the morning, by a brigade of Texas troops about 2,500 in number. We had about 600 men to withstand them—500 of them negroes.... Our regiment had about 300 men in the fight.... We had about 50 men killed in the regiment and 80 wounded; so you can judge of what part of the fight my company sustained. I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw how my brave soldiers had been slaughtered. 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.
12
Fort Wagner proved to be the most important battle for black soldiers in the Civil War. As Gettysburg and Vicksburg raged in the momentous month of July 1863, yet another major battle erupted in which African American volunteers played the leading role. For some time soldiers and commentators alike had praised the use of black soldiers in the field. One writer for the religious press observed that black soldiers from the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts were as fit for service as any white men: “They accept discipline; they make great proficiency in soldierly attainments; they submit to all the recognized restraints of civilized warfare. And what is more they fight, and fight bravely too.”
13
The reference to “recognized restraints of civilized warfare” represented an important commentary on African Americans and just conduct. Racist white America perceived them as “bestial,” so that their conduct became as important an issue as their bravery. By lining up the black soldiers on the side of “civilized warfare,” commentators established their common humanity and their common Christianity. This was precisely the identification most feared in the Confederacy and the Democratic Party, where stereotypes of black “cannibalism” would serve as a rationale for the mass butchery of black troops and their white commanders whenever they were defeated.
In May the Fifty-fourth was transported to Beaufort, South Carolina, and from there fought their way to Fort Wagner near Charleston. By July 18 they were at the gates of Wagner. But standing between them and victory were formidable defenses, including heavy fortifications, an intervening ditch filled with four feet of water, and a steep sloping parapet.
An undeterred Shaw requested and received permission to lead the charge. He and his men met the full fury of concentrated fire from the Charleston Battalion and the Fifty-first North Carolina. Predictably, the charging soldiers fell in droves; Shaw himself died with a bullet to the heart. The failure of reinforcements to arrive forced the brave soldiers to retreat, but not before suffering 50 percent casualties. In a final insult, the Confederate commanders refused to give Shaw a traditional officer’s burial space and threw him in “the common ditch with the Negroes that fell with him.”
14
One black participant from New Bedford, Massachusetts, Corporal James Henry Gooding, described the bravery of his fellow soldiers under fire:
At the first charge the 54th rushed to within twenty yards of the ditches, and as might be expected of raw recruits, wavered—but at the second advance they gained the parapet. The color bearer of the State colors was killed on the parapet. Col. Shaw seized the staff when the standard bearer fell, and in less than a minute after, the Colonel fell himself. When the men saw their gallant leader fall, they made a desperate effort to get him out, but they were either shot down, or reeled in the ditch below. One man succeeded in getting hold of the State color staff, but the color was completely torn to pieces.
15
Later, Gooding further commended them: “The men of the 54th behaved gallantly on the occasion—so the Generals say. It is not for us to blow our horn; but when a regiment of white men gave us three cheers as we were passing them, it shows that we did our duty as men should.”
16
Later still, an aggrieved Gooding wrote “his Excellency,” President Lincoln, to protest unequal wages. Despite bravery under fire and the fact that “all we lack is a paler hue and a better acquaintance with the Alphabet,” wages are unequal: “We have done a Soldier’s Duty. Why Can’t we have a Soldier’s pay?”
17
Gooding survived the fight but would later perish as a prisoner of war in Andersonville. The man who seized the flag, Sergeant William Carney, though severely wounded, planted the flag on the fort’s parapet and remained there flattened against the wall for half an hour. Later, he brought the flag to the rear with the words, “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground.” For his bravery Sergeant Carney became the first African American soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor.
18
African American soldiers no less than their white comrades rallied to the American civil religion. For them, however, its sacredness came from freedom and emancipation first, and Union second.