Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  Although emancipation did not directly affect northern blacks, they were urged to act upon the sympathy they had long expressed for their enslaved southern brethren. Participation in the war, moreover, could not help but improve their own precarious place in American society and break down the barriers white Northerners had erected against them. “There never was, nor there never will be, a better opportunity for colored men to get what they want, than now,” the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Christian Recorder wrote in June 1863. “Suppose,” he asked, “500,000 colored men were under arms, would not the nation really be under our arms, too? Would the nation refuse us our rights in such a condition? Would it refuse us our vote? Would it deny us any thing when its salvation was hanging upon us? No! never!” Whether in the North or in the South, then, the prospects for black Americans seemed inseparable from their military exploits—the way to the ballot box, into the classroom, and onto the streetcar was through the battlegrounds of the Confederacy. The rifle and the bayonet, Douglass insisted, would speak more forcefully for civil rights than any “parchment guarantees.”

  Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.

  To learn the use of arms, moreover, was “to become familiar with the means of securing, protecting and defending your own liberty.… When it is once found that black men can give blows as well as take them, men will find more congenial employment than pounding them.”20

  Once an advocate of nonresistance and only recently a major critic of President Lincoln for refusing to endorse emancipation, Frederick Douglass agreed in early 1863 to become a recruiting agent for the United States Army. “There is something ennobling in the possession of arms,” he told a meeting in Philadelphia, “and we of all other people in the world stand in need of their ennobling influence.” Having undertaken the mission of enlisting blacks in the newly formed 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Douglass toured western New York seeking volunteers. “In Rochester,” he wrote in April 1863, “I have thirteen names, my son heading the list.”21

  3

  THE CIVIL WAR provided Americans with various opportunities to exploit the nation’s military needs for personal profit and advantage. That white men should have used the recruitment of black regiments for such purposes is not altogether surprising. With the end of racial restrictions on enlistments, state and local bounties and military conscription instantly made black men valuable and marketable commodities. Capitalizing on the law which permitted a draftee to send a person in his place, the “substitute broker” viewed the black man as a likely candidate; his lowly economic position often made him easier and cheaper to purchase, some were intimidated into enlisting, and the broker’s commission for finding a “substitute” justified whatever method he needed to employ. The practice became so widespread, in fact, that the War Department finally interceded and ruled that Negroes could substitute only for other Negroes. That decision not only forced brokers to look elsewhere but depressed the price which some blacks had been asking (and obtaining) for a substitute enlistment.22

  Mixing patriotism and personal profit in varying degrees, more than a thousand “state agents” combed the cities and countryside, particularly in the occupied South, for prospective black soldiers. The incentive was a new congressional law, enacted on July 4, 1864, which provided that blacks recruited in the Confederate states could be credited to the draft quotas of the loyal states. Acting sometimes as emissaries of northern governors and authorized to offer handsome bounties, the “state agents” used every conceivable method to obtain recruits and often defrauded them of the promised bonus. The number of military officers who accepted bribes to turn over slave refugees “to particular agents” will never be known. But one court-martial trial revealed how a Massachusetts white man had formed a thriving business by purchasing blacks in New Bern, North Carolina, from a Union officer, inducting them into the Army, and then crediting them to the quotas of various Massachusetts towns in proportion to the amount of money the townspeople had contributed for bounty payments. The agent in this case testified that his share of the profits had amounted to $10,000. Stories such as these prompted one Massachusetts officer to express his revulsion at “this traffic of New England towns in the bodies of wretched negroes, bidding against each other for these miserable beings who are deluded, and if some of the affidavits I have in my office are true, tortured into military service.”23

  Employing both persuasion and strong-arm methods, the Army sought most of its black recruits in the occupied South. With “soul-stirring music and floating banners,” a correspondent reported from Maryland, recruiting parties would march through a neighborhood and “sweep it clean of its black warriors.” Wherever the Union Army was in control, recruitment offices were opened and specially designated agents (or raiding parties made up of a dozen men and a noncommissioned officer) were dispatched to the countryside to round up potential recruits. The usual procedure was for the agent to enter a town, address a hastily convened meeting of local blacks, tell them what the President had done for the colored people, display the attractive recruitment poster, and promise anyone who joined both financial and moral compensation. Appointed to recruit black troops in northern Alabama, James T. Ayers found himself frequently forced to adopt direct personal pleading. “I want your man,” he told a black woman who had urged her husband not to enlist. “You ought to be a slave as long as you live and him too if he is so mean as not to help get his Liberty.” Far more effective, in some instances, was the use of black soldiers to obtain additional recruits. Not only were black troops frequently dispatched with instructions to enlist any able-bodied slaves they could locate but they might be necessary to protect the recruits from white retaliation. The black soldier also often appeared as the featured speaker at meetings of his people, and invariably he would appeal to the race pride and manhood of his audience. “Don’t you remember how afraid they used to be that we would rise?” Jerry Sullivan asked a Nashville gathering in 1863.

  And you know we would, too, if we could. (Cries of “that’s so.”) I ran away two years ago.… Come, boys, let’s get some guns from Uncle Sam, and go coon hunting; shooting those gray back coons that go poking about the country now a days. (Laughter.) … Don’t ask your wife, for if she is a wife worth having she will call you a coward for asking her. (Applause, and waving of handkerchiefs by the ladies.)24

  The job of a recruiting agent in the South was beset with difficulties, frustrations, and personal danger. The whites regarded him as an incendiary (he proposed, after all, to arm black men), and slaveholders were naturally incensed by anyone who threatened to make soldiers of their laborers. Unless accompanied by a detachment of troops, both the agent and his prospective recruits might find it difficult to return to the nearest Union camp. In Kentucky, the provost marshal enumerated cases in which slaves had been whipped, mutilated, and murdered for trying to enlist and recruiting agents had been “caught, stripped, tied to a tree and cowhided” before being driven out of town. What made the work of the agent all the more exasperating was his frequent lack of success in obtaining many enlistments. The reports of white violence no doubt discouraged prospective volunteers but this may not adequately explain the disturbing report of a Federal official that in nearly four months of recruitment work, more than a thousand men had been employed to enlist a total of 2,831 blacks. More likely, many blacks simply shared with their white countrymen an aversion to the hardships and risks of military service. “The negroes re-indicate their claim to humanity,” an officer wrote from South Carolina, “by shirking the draft in every possible way; acting exactly like white men under similar circumstances.” He conceded, however, that the black conscript was less likely to desert than his white counterpart. Some recruiting agents came away disgusted with the refusal of blacks to yield
to their appeals. Initially enthusiastic about his recruiting mission in northern Alabama, James T. Ayers, who had been an antislavery Methodist preacher in Illinois, urged blacks to accept the responsibility for liberating their brethren from bondage. But his best efforts did not produce the results he had expected, and less than a year after his appointment Ayers was a thoroughly disillusioned man. “I feel now much inclined to go to Nashville and throw up my papers and Resign, as I am hartily sick of Coaxing niggers to be Soaldiers Any more. They are so trifleing and mean they dont Deserve to be free.”25

  After making their way to the Union camps, many slave refugees eagerly volunteered for military service, believing that this act would confirm their freedom. The more reluctant blacks might be inducted anyway. “It seems that pretty nearly all the refugees join the army,” a Federal official wrote from South Carolina. “You wish to know whether the refugees are kept in the guard house until they are willing to volunteer. I do not know whether they are kept confined till they do volunteer but I know that they always let them out when they do volunteer.” Increasingly, the Army resorted to forcible impressment, though in some regions they would try to balance the demand for recruits with the need to maintain plantation labor. The effectiveness of the recruitment campaign in the lower Mississippi Valley rested partly on the insistence that slaves who had left their masters should be forced to serve either as soldiers or as military laborers; the methods employed by officers in this region were often questionable but they achieved spectacular results. “The plan for ‘persuading’ recruits,” one officer wrote from Memphis, “while it could hardly be called the shot-gun policy was equally as convincing, and never failed to get the ‘recruit.’ ” The commissioner entrusted with raising black troops in Maryland simply conceded that “no recruits can be had unless I send detachments to particular localities and compel them to volunteer.”26

  Despite assurances to South Carolina blacks of voluntary enlistment, freedmen in the Sea Islands region stood in perpetual fear of raiding parties—often composed of black soldiers—which descended upon communities and plantations in the dead of night to carry them away to nearby military camps. “Not a man sleeps at night in the houses,” a missionary teacher wrote, “except those too old to be taken. They have made a camp somewhere and mean never to be caught.” Prospective recruits here and elsewhere often hid out in the woods or swamps for considerable periods of time rather than be inducted into the Army. Having already experienced forced separations from their loved ones, black women did not necessarily look with favor upon similar disruptions undertaken by their professed liberators; in South Carolina, women field workers attacked a black impressment party with their hoes, shouting that white men were too frightened to fight and only wanted blacks to do their dirty work for them. “The womens all hold back der husbands,” a black sergeant complained, “didn’t want them to go sogering, ’cause they get killed. Women worse than the men, and some hide the men in the woods.… I feel ’shamed for our women.”27

  Impressment of Sea Islands freedmen not only alarmed the intended victims and forced many of them into hiding but provoked some furious protests from the white teachers and missionaries who had come there from the North to ease their transition to freedom. The coercive recruitment practices reminded them, they said, of what they had only recently criticized in their indictments of slavery. What was impressment, after all, if not the forcible enslavement of blacks, albeit under different auspices? After Union troops had carried away still another black man during the night, one missionary observed that only recently Confederate soldiers had shot and killed black men for refusing to go along with them. How were the freedmen, she asked, to know the difference? “It strikes me as very important,” a high-ranking Federal official wrote to a Union officer, “to avoid all things likely to impair the self respect of the emancipees. Fresh from slavery, if they enlist freely they must feel themselves very different persons from what they would regard themselves if forced into the ranks.”28

  Despite a flurry of protests, army commanders defended their conduct not only on the grounds of military necessity but as in the best interests of the blacks. That recruitment had been progressing more slowly than expected was only one reason why General Hunter wanted to impress all blacks not regularly employed as officers’ servants or military laborers. Military discipline, Hunter insisted, was the best way to lift these people to “our higher civilization.” The slaves, moreover, could never adequately appreciate freedom until they realized “the sacrifices which are its price.” And finally, he noted, the recruitment of black men made a servile insurrection less likely. In defending the conduct of impressment parties in Washington, D.C., a black resident singled out the contemptuous way in which some of his people responded to recruitment appeals. When asked to enlist, they would “make light” of the proposal and demand to know “what am I going to fight for? this is a white man’s war,” and accompany their response with verbal abuse. “Well, now,” the observer added, “the colored soldiers think this is too much; they suffer enough at the hands of the white race, without being buffeted by their own race, whose sympathies should be in their behalf.”29

  Less coercive methods were employed in the North, where state governors and patriotic citizens’ committees were initially responsible for mounting recruitment campaigns. To mobilize support among northern blacks, mass meetings were called, broadsides were circulated (the most popular of which was written by Frederick Douglass), and the few black newspapers sought to inculcate their readers with the obligations of black men in a war of liberation. Although the Christian Recorder had initially disapproved of the war and the resort to violence, it now urged black men to take up arms for their country and race. “Shame on him who would hang back at the call of his country,” the newspaper declared, in supporting the efforts to raise a black regiment in Philadelphia. “Go with the view that you will return freemen. And if you should never return, you will die with the satisfaction of knowing that you have struck a blow for freedom, and assisted in giving liberty to our race in the land of our birth.”30

  Critical to the raising of a black army in the North were, in fact, the black recruitment agents. When Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts was authorized in January 1863 to organize a Negro regiment, he immediately recognized the far-reaching implications of his new responsibility. Since this would be the first black regiment raised in the North, he thought the success or failure of the effort would “go far to elevate or to depress the estimation in which the character of the Colored Americans will be held throughout the World.” Although two companies were quickly formed in Boston and New Bedford (including black men whom the governor had been forced to reject at the outset of the war), there were insufficient numbers of blacks in Massachusetts to make up an entire regiment. The governor thereupon secured the support of a wealthy abolitionist who agreed to help finance the enlistment of blacks throughout the North, largely by employing as recruitment agents such leading black spokesmen as Martin R. Delany, John Mercer Langston, John S. Rock, William Wells Brown, Charles Lenox Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass. These were all familiar names in black abolitionism, most of them had worked actively to eradicate racial discrimination in the North, and several of them had only recently endorsed emigration to Haiti or Central America before being dissuaded by the reality of an antislavery war. “Action! Action! not criticism, is the plain duty of this hour,” Douglass declared, in a broadside intended to attract blacks to the Massachusetts regiment. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers and sisters shall march out into liberty.”31

  The recruitment drive was highly successful. By May 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the most celebrated of the northern black regiments, was ready to leave Boston for Hilton Head, South Carolina, where it had been ordered to report to General David Hunter. With some 20,000 cheering Bostonians lining the streets,
and the regimental band playing the John Brown anthem, the troops made their way to the Battery Wharf. “Glory enough for one day; aye, indeed for a lifetime,” remarked William C. Nell, a veteran black abolitionist. Frederick Douglass was there, not only to view the results of his recruitment activities but to see off his two sons, Lewis and Charles, who had been the first New York blacks to enlist in the regiment. Martin R. Delany’s eighteen-year-old son, Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany, had left his school in Canada to join the regiment. And on the balcony of Wendell Phillips’ house, overlooking the parade, stood none other than William Lloyd Garrison, who was observed resting his hand on a bust of John Brown.32

  Two months later, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment made its famous assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold situated at the entrance to Charleston harbor. The attack was repulsed, with considerable loss of life (Robert Shaw, the white regimental commander, was among those killed), but black troops had fought valiantly. And that was what mattered. “It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race,” proclaimed a New York newspaper, “as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees.” Even the enormous expenditure of black lives could be viewed as a necessary sacrificial offering. “Do you not rejoice & exult in all that praise that is lavished upon our brave colored troops even by Pro-slavery papers?” abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld asked Gerrit Smith. “I have no tears to shed over their graves, because I see that their heroism is working a great change in public opinion, forcing all men to see the sin & shame of enslaving such men.” Two days after the battle, Lewis Douglass informed Amelia Loguen, his future wife, that he had not been wounded. “Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here.… Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war.”33