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

determinations, so impatient Confederates soon found shorter ways of dealing with the problem. Edmund Kirby Smith, who had overall command of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, simply advised General Richard Taylor to skip the niceties and execute black soldiers and white officers on the spot. “I hope… that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers. In this way we may be relieved from a disagreeable dilemma.”8

That attitude, combined with the explosive power of racial hatred and the blood heat of battle, could produce singularly ugly results. On April 12, 1864, the onetime slave trader and now Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest overran the small Union garrison of Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River. Fort Pillow was defended by only 600 Union soldiers, a little more than a third of them black soldiers from the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, and after three assaults, the Confederates forced the little outpost to surrender. What happened afterward became the subject of fiercely tangled controversy, but it seems clear in retrospect that at the very least Forrest lost control of his men, who proceeded to massacre 231 Union soldiers, most of them black, after they had surrendered. A white soldier of the 13th West Tennessee (Federal) Cavalry left a graphic description of the rampage:

We all threw down our arms and gave tokens of surrender, asking for quarter… but no quarter was given. Voices were heard upon all sides, crying, “Give them no quarter; kill them; kill them; it is General Forrest’s orders.” I saw 4 white men and at least 25 negroes shot while begging for mercy, and I saw 1 negro dragged from a hollow log within 10 feet of where I lay, and as 1 rebel held him by the foot another shot him. These were all soldiers. There were also 2 negro women and 3 little children standing within 25 steps from me, when a rebel stepped up to them and said, “Yes, God damn you, you thought you were free, did you?” and shot them all. They all fell but 1 child, when he knocked it in the head with the breech of his gun.9

This was, as the commandant of the United States Colored Troops units in Tennessee remarked in a letter to his congressman, a “game… at which two can play.” In Kansas, an indignant white Federal officer in Jim Lane’s Kansas brigade learned that “one of the colored prisoners” from his unit who had been captured by Confederates in your camp “was murdered by your Soldiers.” He wanted “the body of the man who committed the dastardly act” or else “I shall hang one of the men who are prisoners in my camp.” Ultimately, Lincoln himself took a hand in the matter by promising in July 1863 that “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works.” In the face of this threat, the Confederates backed down from their plans for execution and reenslavement. Still, they refused to exchange black Federal prisoners for white Confederate ones, and so the entire prisoner exchange cartel that had been established in 1862 broke down, choking prisoner-of-war camps (which had been designed to be mere transit points before exchange) into overcrowded death swamps.10

Still, the chance to lend their own hands to the process of freedom made up in some measure for the inequities and harassment visited on African American volunteers. “It really makes one’s heart pulsate with pride as he looks upon those stout and brawny men, fully equipped with Uncle Sam’s accoutrements upon them,” wrote James Henry Gooding, a black corporal in the 54th Massachusetts, “to feel that these noble men are practically refuting the base assertions reiterated by copperheads and traitors that the black race are incapable of patriotism, valor, or ambition.”11 It also helped that the white officers of the USCT regiments were, on the whole, better-trained and better-motivated than their counterparts among the white volunteers. Since the USCT were mustered directly into federal rather than state service, officers’ commissions came through the War Department rather than through politicians in the state capitals, and the Bureau of Colored Troops quickly instituted a rigorous application and examination process to screen whites who wanted to become USCT officers. As a result, officers’ commissions in the USCT frequently went to experienced former sergeants and officers from white volunteer regiments, many of whom were ardent abolitionists who saw the USCT as the troops themselves saw it, as a lever for self-improvement.12

The ultimate proof of their faith would be in combat—although that depended on whether Union generals could actually be persuaded to let the USCT fight, instead of merely doing occupation duty or manual labor. “Can we not fight our own battles, without calling on these humble hewers of wood and drawers of water,” complained one of George Meade’s staffers. “We do not dare trust them in the line of battle.” Nathaniel Banks, however, was one of the rare abolitionists in the Union high command (although a better abolitionist than a general, as it turned out), and in May 1863 he hazarded his three all-black Louisiana Native Guard regiments on a series of attacks on Confederate fortifications at Port Hudson, Louisiana. “They answered every expectation,” Banks reported afterward, “In many respects their conduct was heroic. … 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.” The Philadelphia poet George Henry Boker exulted in how

Bayonet and sabre stroke

Vainly opposed their rush

Through the wild battle’s crush.

With but one thought aflush,

Driving their lords like chaff.

… All their eyes forward bent,

Rushed the Black Regiment.

“Freedom!” their battle cry,

“Freedom! or leave to die!”

Ah! and