Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  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 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 u
pon 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 they meant the word.

  … 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 the end of the year. In the summer of 1863 Lincoln approved a plan for electing a Unionist state legislature in Louisiana that would rescind the
state secession ordinance and adopt a new state constitution. In March 1864, Lincoln urged the new Unionist governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, to make some limited provision in the new state constitution for black voting rights. “I barely suggest for your private consideration,” Lincoln proposed softly (since he had no more authority as president to require things of a civilian Unionist government than he had of the old slave-state government), “whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.”20

  In the event, Hahn’s constitutional convention abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude” and prohibited the legislature from making any law “recognizing the right of property in man.” It balked at granting full voting rights to blacks, however, and would only concede that in the future the legislature might consider “extending suffrage to such other persons, citizens of the United States, as by military service, by taxation to support the government, or by intellectual fitness, may be deemed entitled thereto.” But the camel’s nose was in the tent, and Lincoln had signaled that the federal government would back up any steps taken toward political equality, even if granted grudgingly and of necessity. When Lincoln sent one of his White House staffers, William O. Stoddard, to Arkansas as a federal marshal in 1864 to assist in the organization of a Unionist state government there, he enjoined Stoddard to “do all you can, in any and every way you can, to get the ballot into the hands of the freedmen!”21