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

… Soldiers, be just and true!

Hail them as comrades tried;

Fight with them side by side;

Never in field or tent

Scorn the Black Regiment.13

The action at Port Hudson was followed the next month by the hand-to-hand defense of a post at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, by five Union regiments, four black and one white. Even the commander of the Confederates, Henry E. McCullough, was forced to concede that “this charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy’s force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.”14

The bloodiest laurels for black soldiers were won by the cream of the black volunteers, the 54th Massachusetts, with a blue-stocking Harvard-educated colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, at its head. On July 18, 1863, Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts spearheaded an infantry attack on Battery Wagner, one of the outlying fortifications covering the land approaches to the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. A full day’s worth of bombardment by Federal gunboats off shore had failed to silence the Confederate artillery in the fort, and when the 54th raced forward to the fort’s walls, their ranks were shredded by Confederate fire. Nevertheless, the 54th swept up over the walls and into the fort, with Shaw and one of his black color sergeants dying side by side on the parapet.

The regiment advanced at quick time, changed to double-quick when at some distance on. The intervening distance between the place where the line was formed and the Fort was run over in a few minutes. When within one or two hundred yards of the Fort, a terrific fire… was poured upon them along the entire line, and with deadly results. They rallied again, went through the ditch, in which were some three feet of water, and then up the parapet. They raised the flag on the parapet, where it remained for a few minutes. Here they melted away before the enemy’s fire, their bodies falling down the slope and into the ditch.15

The 54th gamely hung on to one corner of Battery Wagner, but they were finally pushed off after a stubborn resistance. Sergeant William H. Carney staggered back from the fort with wounds in his chest and right arm, but with the regiment’s Stars and Stripes securely in his grasp. “The old flag never touched the ground, boys,” Carney gasped as he collapsed at the first field hospital he could find.16

The valor of the black troops at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Battery Wagner sent waves of amazement over the North—bemused and often condescending amazement, but amazement all the same. Abraham Lincoln, who had been as dubious about the fighting qualities of the black soldiers as other whites, now agreed that “the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” Ulysses Grant concurred. In a letter to Lincoln one month after the assault on Battery Wagner, Grant noted that “by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion as they strengthen us.”17 The ordinary Union soldier felt the same way. “The colored troops are very highly valued here & there is no apparent difference in the way they are treated,” wrote one USCT officer in Virginia. “White troops and blacks mingle constantly together & I have seen no single Evidence of dislike on the part of the soldiers. The truth is they have fought their way into the respect of all the army.” It was time, now that black soldiers had proven themselves under fire, for white Northerners to begin thinking about what was owed to African Americans at home. “The American people, as a nation, knew not what they were fighting for till recently,” wrote Corporal Gooding, but now it was clear that “there is but two results possible, one is slavery and poverty and the other is liberty and prosperity.”18

The achievements of blacks as soldiers forced on Lincoln and the federal government the question how African Americans who fought to defend the Union could any longer be denied full political equality—the right to vote, to be elected to office, to serve on juries, to benefit from publicly funded schools—in that Union. “Once let a black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” said Frederick Douglass, “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 he has won the right to citizenship in the United States.” (For Douglass, that claim had a personal tinge: two of his sons, Claude and Lewis, were with the 54th Massachusetts, and a third, Frederick junior, worked as a recruiter for the black regiments among freed slaves in Mississippi). Lincoln, who in 1858 had only been willing to endorse the naturalequality of whites and blacks, could not reconcile asking blacks for the risk of their lives without also offering them the privileges of civil equality as well. “Negroes, like other people, act upon motives,” Lincoln argued in a public letter addressed to James Cook Conkling in the fall of 1863 and widely published across the North. “Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”19

The principal difficulty lay in determining where an experiment in black civil rights ought to take place. His authority as president ran only as far as the District of Columbia and the wartime zones of the army, and he had no way to unilaterally reverse state actions that denied free blacks the right to vote. That problem, however, was solved for Lincoln by the Federal navy when it seized New Orleans in April 1862 and opened most of southern Louisiana to Federal occupation by