Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

the Emancipation Proclamation with one finger crossed behind his back, and it was clear that many Northerners (Lincoln included) believed that the next step for freedmen after emancipation was colonization to Central America or the American Southwest, or repatriation to Africa. “The African race here is a foreign and feeble element,” explained Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward—a view that was echoed by the secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, who reluctantly agreed that “the separation of the races” was unavoidable and that African Americans should seek “happier homes in other lands,” and by the Republican Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, who stated the problem of the free black with unbecoming precision: colonization was “the most beneficent yet projected for the amelioration of the African, and at the same time the relief of the people of the country from the evils of a black population in their midst.”4

This was decidedly not a view shared by free and newly freed black people, as well as being a horribly shortsighted concept of beneficence. But if numbers and influence meant anything, there did not seem at first to be much they could do about it. Out of a total population in the United States of 31,443,000 in 1860, African Americans numbered only about 4,441,000, or about 14 percent of the population, and of that number, less than 500,000 were free. Of those who were free, only a small number enjoyed anything like full participation in the political life of their communities or the republic as a whole. Still, it is one measure of the promise of liberal democracy in America that from the very beginning of the Civil War, African Americans consciously set out to make the conflict both a war against slavery and a struggle for full equality in the life of that democracy. To reach this goal meant that free blacks in the North and newly freed slaves in the South would be forced to make alliances, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, with the unreliable and halfhearted sympathies of Northern whites. William Wilson, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, wickedly asked whether whites were as trustworthy and “as good by nature as we are.” If there were moments of hesitation and second thought, though, they were exceedingly rare. By adding their numbers to the white volunteers, African Americans could lay claim to “a common cause” that whites and blacks shared equally. If blacks could fight and die alongside whites, they were certainly fit to vote and work alongside them, too. “No nation ever has or ever will be emancipated from slavery,” wrote a black schoolteacher in the pages of the newspaper Anglo-African in 1861, “but by the sword, wielded too by their own strong arms.”5

The actual conditions in which black volunteers found themselves turned out to be something less than ideal. Both the state-recruited “colored infantry” of New England and Louisiana and the new federal United States Colored Troops were to be segregated, all-black regiments—all black, that is, except for the officer grades, which were reserved for whites. When Massachusetts governor John Andrew tried to issue a state commission as a second lieutenant to Sergeant Stephen Swails of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the two “colored” infantry regiments raised by the Bay State, the Bureau of Colored Troops obstinately refused to issue Swails a discharge from his sergeant’s rank, and Swails’s promotion was held up until after the end of the war. “How can we hope for success to our arms or Gods blessing,” raged the white colonel of the 54th, Edward Hallowell, “while we as a people are so blind to Justice?”6

Black soldiers also had their patience tried to the point of mutiny by the War Department’s decision to pay them only $10 a month (the same pay as teamsters and cooks) instead of the $13 paid to white volunteers, and to issue some black regiments inferior equipment and weapons. Medical services for black soldiers were thinner on the ground than for white volunteers, and black soldiers died from camp diseases at three times the rate of their white counterparts. Black soldiers also suffered taunts and humiliation from the white civilians whose nation they were enlisting to save, and from white soldiers whom they were supposed to fight beside. In August 1862 a mob of immigrant workers, fearful of job competition from free blacks, attacked the Lorillard and Watson tobacco warehouses in Brooklyn (Watson’s employed only blacks, Lorillard’s employed a mix of black and white workers); the following March, an angry mob of whites burned down homes in a black neighborhood in Detroit. Other riots broke out in Troy and Buffalo, and in July 1863 savage anti-draft riots in New York City quickly turned into race riots that resulted in the murder and beatings of dozens of blacks. In November of that year, the 2nd USCT was mobbed in the streets of Philadelphia as it prepared to board a troop train for New York.7

The greatest danger posed to the black soldier, however, came from the Confederates, and not just the conventional dangers faced by all Union soldiers in combat. The Confederate government acted as early as August 1862 to frighten off any prospect of black recruitment by issuing a general order threatening that any “commissioned officer employed in drilling, organizing or instructing slaves with a view to their armed service in this war… as outlaws” would be “held in close confinement for execution as a felon”; on December 24, Jefferson Davis followed this with a proclamation warning that “all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong, to be dealt with according to the laws of said States.” What the “authorities of the respective States” had in mind was up to them, but South Carolina took the lead in proposing to put free blacks to work on “the Chesterfield coal pits” and sell any former slaves back into slavery. This required a cumbersome process of hearings and