IT MAY HAVE become a different kind of war, though only up to a point. That point was racism. Yet if racism was pervasive in the North, which it largely was, its racism differed markedly from that of the South, which, as Alexander Stephens had explained, amply justified slavery—even celebrated it—as the core of the Confederacy.
By freeing slaves in that same Confederacy, the Emancipation Proclamation was thus recognized as changing the aim, if not the tide, of war. General Henry W. Halleck, who had once prohibited blacks from joining the Union lines, wrote to General Grant in early 1863, “There is now no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels. The Union party in the South is virtually destroyed. There can be no peace but that which is forced by the sword.”
In the South, General Saxton had hosted a grand celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was to take effect on New Year’s Day 1863. It was not the proclamation of the previous September but a more radical version, one that allayed the abolitionists’ fear that Lincoln would renege on it: it authorized the recruitment of black soldiers, and even though for the present it exempted parts of Tennessee, of Louisiana and of Virginia, and the border states, it promised freedom to all once the Confederacy was crushed.
In Beaufort, South Carolina, in a grove of live oaks, black and white men and women congregated together, people arriving any way they could, on foot, in carriages, on horseback or mule back: cavalry officers, black women wearing brightly colored head scarves, teachers, superintendents, soldiers. William Henry Brisbane, a South Carolinian planter who earlier had freed his slaves, read from the proclamation, “On the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Men tossed their hats into the air, and women hugged one another. Spontaneously, an elderly man and two women, former slaves, burst into song, belting out “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
As numbers of white enlistments had dropped, black regiments had become more acceptable to their detractors; they were essential to winning the war. But none of it came easily, proclamations notwithstanding. The capture of the Confederate post of Port Hudson, Louisiana, by the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards and the 1st Louisiana Engineers, prompted one Union general to muster a backhanded compliment. “Our negro troops are splendid,” said he. “Who would not be a Niggadier General?”
In Massachusetts, Governor John A. Andrew, a stalwart antislavery man with a pudgy face, obtained authorization to recruit a black regiment from his state, and soon men such as the black activist Lewis Hayden and the white activist George Stearns were recruiting free blacks into the ranks of the much-publicized 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Frederick Douglass published a broadside, Men of Color, to Arms!, and two of Douglass’s sons, Charles and Lewis, enlisted. “In a struggle for freedom the race most directly interested in the achievement of freedom should be permitted to take a hand,” recalled Garth Wilkinson “Wilkie” James, one of the sons of Henry James, Sr., and a soldier at seventeen.
Required by the federal government to commission white men as officers, Governor Andrew appointed two young abolitionists to head the “Bostons,” as the 54th was nicknamed. One was Robert Gould Shaw, a fair-haired son of philanthropic Yankees and formerly a captain in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, a veteran of Cedar Mountain, and a survivor of Antietam. Second in command was the Philadelphia Quaker Norwood Penrose Hallowell. Hallowell would eventually lead the 55th Massachusetts, the regiment formed after recruitment efforts swelled the ranks of the 54th.
On May 18, 1863, the 54th received orders to report to General Hunter in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Ten days later, 3,000 men and women hailed the troops, 1,000 men strong, as they paraded through Boston. “At last the North consents to let the Negro fight for his freedom,” cheered Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And though Copperheads threw stones and scuffled with the police near Battery Wharf, the columns of young men were proudly reviewed by Governor Andrew, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass. Shaw, riding at the head of the regiment, looked up, saw them, and kissed his sword with a flourish. At that moment, his sister Ellen, as she later recalled, knew she would never see him again. The Bostons were marching toward a staggering death at Battery Wagner, just outside Charleston.
In South Carolina, the regimental leader of the 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers, another black regiment, was Colonel James Montgomery, who had not long before fought slave owners in Missouri. A tall, thin man with slightly stooped shoulders and a hard-bitten face, Montgomery was a practiced avenger in the mold of John Brown. He believed that praying, pillaging, and burning were the only way to win the war. And he assumed that black soldiers should do his bidding. In the spring of 1863, shortly after the Massachusetts 54th arrived, Montgomery ordered the men to sail to the mouth of the Alameda River and shell plantations along the way, regardless of who might still be living there, and once they arrived in the undefended town of Darien, Georgia, Montgomery further insisted that Shaw’s men load all furniture and movable goods onto their boats and burn the place to the ground. Montgomery himself set fire to the last buildings. “It was as abominable a job as I ever had a share in,” said Shaw.
Montgomery exploited black troops to conduct guerrilla warfare, complained Colonel Higginson to Charles Sumner: “This indiscriminate burning & pillaging is savage warfare in itself—demoralizes the soldiers—& must produce reaction against arming the negroes.” Montgomery persisted. Accusing a black man in his regiment of desertion, he asked if the man had anything to say in his own defense. The soldier answered “Nothing,” and Montgomery, with nonchalance, replied, “Then you die at half past nine.” “I accordingly shot and buried him at that hour,” he told Brigadier General George Crockett Strong.
Years later, Higginson angrily remembered that if Montgomery “had done it to white soldiers, he would have been court martialed himself.” The army was filled with Montgomerys, whether proslavery or antislavery men. “Do not think this rapid organization of colored regiments is to be an unmixed good to the negroes,” he confided to a friend in the early summer of 1863. “There will be much & terrible tyranny under military forms, for it is no easy thing to make their officers deal justly by them.”
The soldier whom Montgomery shot had deserted because he had not been paid; the 1st South Carolina Volunteers had not received their wage of $13 a month. In fact, their salary had been cut to $10 per soldier a month. Higginson barraged the New-York Tribune and The New York Times with letters. “We presume too much on the supposed ignorance of those men,” he fumed. “I have never yet found a man in my regiment so stupid as not to know when he was cheated.” Higginson was also livid when, later, he learned that retroactive pay would be given only to “free colored regiments” and not those composed of fugitive slaves that had been “earlier in the field,” namely the 1st South Carolina.
Moreover, the soldiers were aware that in the army or navy they were assigned the most menial jobs: digging ditches, cleaning latrines, hauling cargo. And, wasted by pleurisy, smallpox, and pneumonia, black troops had not received sufficient medical attention. The physician serving the 1st South Carolina Volunteers tried to prevent scurvy without vegetables, amputate limbs without knives, and was begrudgingly equipped with weapons. Higginson’s and Montgomery’s regiments were told, at one point, that their firearms would be replaced with pikes.
But they’d fight. Fully grasping the symbolic importance of the 54th, for instance, Colonel Shaw understood that to every commander of a black regiment was entrusted a chance to undo the racial prejudices that permitted slavery in the first place. So, eager to test the mettle of his black soldiers, who hadn’t been tried in battle, Shaw pushed them forward into the front lines when he had the chance. For Brigadier General Quincy Adams Gillmore, Hunter’s replacement, would call on the Massachusetts 54th, now in General Strong’s brigade, in his
attempt to advance slowly toward Charleston. “Well I guess we will let Strong put those d—d negroes from Massachusetts in the advance, we may as well get rid of them, one time as another,” scoffed Brigadier General Truman Seymour. Seymour had opposed the enlistment of black troops; General Strong was a Democrat.
On the morning of July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts landed on Morris Island to lead the column against an impregnable Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor. Prepared for hand-to-hand combat, the men stole on foot across a narrow bar of sand until they were within musket-range of the daunting fort. The hour was late, about 7:45, and the skies were streaked with purple rays from a fading sun. Just as the 54th was about to rush across the ditch surrounding the fort, a sheet of fire from small arms lit the coming darkness. Men lurched across the ditch, staggered, and fell. Wilkie James was struck in the side. Reeling, he was hit again. Shaw scaled the ramparts and was shot through the heart. The sword sheath of Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s son, was blown away. General Strong went down. Hand grenades thrown from the parapet burst over them as the men scaled the face of the fort and, for a fleeting moment, one of them, Sergeant R. J. Simmons, planted their flag at its top. More than 1,500 Union men were killed.
Shaw’s body, which had fallen inside the fort, was subsequently stripped naked and placed on display before being thrown into the bottom of a large pit, the corpses of his troops tossed on top of him. “Buried with his niggers,” the victorious General Johnson Hagood had presumably said; but a Confederate officer, Lieutenant Iredell Jones, said the Negroes had fought valiantly. Shaw’s father instructed General Gillmore not to remove his son’s body, which should remain buried with his men, the black soldiers with whom he had fought. And there he remains.
(11)
THIS THING NOW NEVER SEEMS TO STOP
When you meet people, sad and sorrowful is the greeting;” Mary Chesnut observed in the spring of 1862, “they press your hand, tears stand in their eyes or roll down their cheeks, as they happen to have more or less self-control. They have brothers, fathers, or sons—as the case may be—in the battle. And this thing now never seems to stop.”
It did not stop and would not stop, not for three more long years. Despite desertions, despite bickering in the government, despite the odds, the Confederates continued to fight. And they fought for different reasons than those that inspired Northerners or those that were exploited to inspire them. The Confederacy was territory invaded and beleaguered even though, at Sumter, Governor Pickens had fired the first shot. And as a country beset and besieged, the Confederacy pledged to safeguard its way of life, its grace, its privilege and those gallant generals who did not fight in order to protect their men, as the vacillating McClellan had, but who fought hard to protect their homes and homeland against enemy invasion.
That was what the stalwart Robert E. Lee chose to do; that was the reasoning of the man later beloved by the South for his determination, moral rectitude, and sheer brilliance as a soldier. Lee didn’t like slavery, and he didn’t much like secession. He cared little for the so-called unity of Southern interests, and at first he believed that the Union might be disassembled amicably. But to that ramrod-straight, courteous Southern gentleman, the state of Virginia was home; it was family. He would not fail it.
On Lincoln’s behalf, Francis Blair had asked Lee to command the U.S. Army with the rank of major general. “I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States,” Lee courteously declined. Six days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army, and two days later he was bound for Richmond. His thin lips were set, his disciplined purpose unswerving, although, it was later alleged, he knew the South was weak, the road long, the outcome dubious at best. No matter; he was a professional soldier, a West Pointer, committed to doing what he had to do. “He moves his agencies like a god,” it would be said of him, “—secret, complicated, vast, resistless, complete.”
In the early years of the war, though, it was Stonewall Jackson, not Lee, who captured the imagination of men and women in the South as well as the North. Mary Chesnut called him the “Confederate hero par excellence,” the man who did not hesitate to shoot deserters, arrest officers, or kill as many men, including his own, as possible. His dazzling campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 with its aggressive, lethal strikes against the enemy and his messianic commitment to winning the war won the hearts of his soldiers. “I always thought we ought to meet the Federal invaders on the outer verge of just right and defense,” Jackson had said, “and raise at once the black flag, viz., ‘No quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides!’ ”
As fanatical in his way as John Brown, Stonewall Jackson had long been looking for a religious cause, and he’d found one for which he could fight with all his discipline, zealotry, and ecstatic might. The Confederate States of America had been established to elude tyranny, assert the right of the individual state, and to safeguard that state’s right to govern as it saw fit, to live free and protect itself against subjugation, despotism, and the moral condescension of the Northern industrial states. Its Constitution guaranteed the protection of its sovereign members, it ensured justice and the liberty of each state and each of its (white) citizens, and it defined citizens by refusing to sidestep such incendiary terms as “slave,” as the earlier U.S. Constitution had done. It declared—without fear of reprisal—that it honored the “right of property in negro slaves,” and the document repeated the phrase “the right of that property” three insistent times.
Non-slaveholders in the South—such as Stonewall Jackson—vehemently supported the Confederacy. So did those who had doubted the economic wisdom of slavery (such as Hilton Helper) or those who had doubted or even despaired of its (and their own) humanity, such as Lee. Why were all those people willing to fight? Why would they be willing to soak the land in blood, as Virginia governor John Letcher, a moderate Democrat, had glumly predicted? The putative answer: the righteous shaking off the yoke of the North, a foreign invader that intended to upturn homes and appropriate lands, to desecrate institutions and destroy tradition, to plunder and then profit from the theft. Foreigners, outsiders, call them what you would, had come to invade and ultimately to deracinate the white Southerner by accepting, perhaps even encouraging, the mingling of races. If they didn’t fight to protect or to extend slavery, they did fight for what they considered purity, which at bottom amounted to fighting to preserve slavery.
In March 1862 Jefferson Davis told his Congress that he needed more men, more artillery, more small arms, and more ironclads along the lines of the Virginia (known in the North as the Merrimack), which had battered the Union’s presumably invincible ironclad, the Monitor. But since the South was an agrarian economy and had depended on the North for its manufactured goods, little was forthcoming—not blankets, not shoes, not small arms, not ammunition. One historian said that in 1862 “otherwise rational men proposed arming Southern soldiers with pikes.”
Morale too wavered. From the Sea Islands, Edward Pierce reported that when the Federal soldiers had taken over the plantations near Port Royal, South Carolina, they had found books denouncing slavery. “These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to see the infinite wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely sincere in their passionate defense of it,” Pierce observed. “Their very violence, when the moral basis of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who distrusts the rightfulness of his daily conduct, has resolved to persist in it, and therefore hates most of all the prophet who comes to confront him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them to mankind.” Whether Southerners considered the invading Yankees to be prophets is debatable, but ambivalence about their peculiar institution doubtless increased Confederate ferocity. Mary Chesnut had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and more recently James Redpath’s hagiographic biography of John Brown, and though she detested what she considered Stowe’s and Redpath’s fanaticism and thoroughly believed black people to b
e lazy, she also acknowledged that “we forget there is any wrong in slavery at all.”
The war dragged on, bloodier and bloodier. And with low morale, scarce supplies, and ghastly death tolls came infighting. With Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee lost in early 1862; with the beautiful and rich New Orleans occupied by Union forces in the spring of 1862; with control of the valuable Mississippi River no longer certain; with much of eastern North Carolina under Union control; and with the hero of First Manassas, Albert Sidney Johnston, mortally wounded at Shiloh, where the casualties were staggering, Confederate politicians wondered if Jefferson Davis and his advisers were up to the job. Disgruntled about food shortages to his troops, General Beauregard breached military etiquette and publicly mocked Davis, his commander in chief. Vice President Alexander Stephens was disheartened as well, and Robert Toombs was carping about Davis’s “lamentable incapacity.” The interim secretary of war, Judah Benjamin, bore much of the brunt of their criticism—after all, he was a quarrelsome fellow and a Jew. (Mary Chesnut said “the mob” called him “Mr. Davis’ ‘pet Jew,’ ” but the unperturbed Davis placed him in the State Department when Robert M. T. Hunter left the cabinet.) In his paper, the Charleston Mercury, an angry Robert Barnwell Rhett called Davis an egomaniac, and the Richmond Examiner retracted its effervescent support: the president of the Confederate States of America was an autocrat. Like that gorilla Abe Lincoln, Jeff Davis had suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Though the Confederate Congress allowed Davis to declare martial law should he need to do so, in a new country fighting for self-determination, states’ rights, and the sacrosanct white individual, those acts, real or potential, were no different from those of the tyrannical invader.
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