Yet even while Union troops refused to retreat on the slavery question or on black enlistment, the ranks began to back away from the radical stances on racial equality that had begun to percolate through camps after the Gettysburg and Vicksburg victories. In contrast to the previous year, when the regimental band from one white New England regiment participated respectfully in a black soldier’s funeral procession, now when a black Union regiment cheered a Maine regiment marching by its camp in Louisiana, the white New Englanders refused to return the greetings. “The negros make a neat looking soldier and our Regt has come to the conclusion that they can and ought to fight as well as white folks,” one Maine soldier wrote, “but as for cheering them they cant do it.” 29 God’s apparent July 1863 intervention in the war had pushed many white Union troops to consider more thoughtfully their own obligations to overcome racial prejudice and promote at least some basic rights for black Americans, but new challenges in 1864 undid many of the previous year’s advances.
As battlefield news worsened, antiwar Democrats ratcheted up the intensity of racist rhetoric. While anti-emancipation diatribes got nowhere with most Union troops, antiblack themes met with more success among white Union soldiers who grew discouraged by the downturn in Union military fortunes and even more anxious for the war to end. Pamphlets with titles like Miscegenation, The Theory of the Blending of the Races and Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party were distributed by antiwar Democrats who passed the publications off as genuine Republican campaign literature. The leaflets underscored Copperhead claims that the Lincoln administration was prolonging the war to promote racial mixing and to advance black rights at the expense of whites. The message hit home for many white Union soldiers. Frustrated with the monotonous siege of Atlanta, Kansas private Andrew Harris reacted angrily when he learned of a Kansas state convention on black suffrage. The previous summer, black men’s fitness for soldiering had been a main topic in camp; now Harris focused on African Americans’ unfitness for suffrage. Here he was, cooped up in the Georgia mud while white men back at home considered devaluing the right to vote by sharing it with people whom Harris now portrayed as inferior. He hoped that every voter who approved the black suffrage measure would “turn to a niger as soon as he casts his vote.” 30 Meanwhile, Sgt. Charles Musser and other men in the Twenty-ninth Iowa who were stationed in Arkansas studiously avoided contact with local blacks. Musser had never evinced much enthusiasm for racial equality, but the plight of slaves had at least evoked his limited sympathy in 1863. Now, bored with a war that seemed to be getting nowhere, he emphasized his distaste. “We have nothing to do with him. We don’t like the nigger. We wish they were in Guinea,” Musser told his father. 31
The conscious decision to dismantle or at least reduce white Northerners’ own racial prejudices that had clearly surfaced among the Union rank and file in 1863 began to resubmerge for a number of reasons. Sometimes troops displayed no commitment to racial progress simply because they had never relinquished their own bigotry in the first place. Illinois sergeant Ondley Andrus resented any hint that Union duties extended to providing for the welfare of black people, whom he disliked. Why should he have to “pick up all the old crippled and helpless nigger women & children & get them off [white Southerners’] hands & on to our own to feed and raise a big howl over,” Andrus wanted to know. As far as he was concerned, providing freedpeople with “clothing & vegetable[s] to keep them from having the Scurvy” formed no part of what the Union needed to do to win the war, and certainly no part of how he wanted to spend his own time and energy. 32
Other soldiers shied away from support for racial advances because they would be difficult to achieve and were unlikely to meet with instant success. In the summer of 1863, when God seemed so clearly on the Union side and all things seemed possible, practical difficulties could be overlooked, but the drearier days one year later made pragmatic matters more difficult to ignore. “The system of Slavery may suffer material change, yet the negro will not be made practically free” without major social changes, Kentuckian Robert Winn predicted. “The possibility of such a result we push off by mere bravado, not by any good reasoning.” Winn’s resigned tone contrasted with the millennial conviction he had conveyed in 1863 when he boldly called for an immediate (rather than gradual) end to slavery and for measures to remedy slavery’s injustices, all of which he portrayed as part of the nation’s realization of God’s divine plan. 33 Eliminating slavery created a host of new problems for both blacks and whites, Stephen Fleharty realized when he met an elderly African American couple in Tennessee whose plight illustrated the dilemma that many former slaves faced. Approaching their eighties, equipped with no savings and few resources, the man and woman no longer had the youth or energy to try their luck in an unknown world. Still, the old woman’s “remarks showed plainly that her mind was imbued with that vague desire which impels these poor creatures to leave their compfortable homes in pursuit of a phantom.” Fleharty admired the woman’s longing for freedom, but saw tragedy in it as well, fearing that “the negro’s dream of liberty will never be realized in this country.” 34 New Yorker Morris Chalmers recognized that emancipation might also create new dilemmas that few white Northerners wished to face, especially if freedpeople turned into “the means of throwing the whites out of employment. The Irish population will not stand that,” he reasoned. 35
Sometimes the support that white soldiers had voiced for racial justice and equality faded because whites found it easy and comforting to resent blacks when the war went badly. For example, many white enlisted men in the Army of the Potomac who had not previously fought with African American troops scapegoated black soldiers for the battle of the Crater, a failed attempt to breach Confederate lines around Petersburg by tunneling below them and exploding a mine. Pvt. Alonzo Rich blamed the fiasco and the malicious treatment of white Union prisoners on black volunteers who had participated in the battle. “If it hadn’t been for them we should have occupied Petersburg yesterday,” he complained. Further, black troops so angered Confederates that the enemy “didn’t show white men any mercy at all they even bayoneted & shot our wounded.” Rich remained perfectly “willing the niggers should fight,” as long as they did so far away from him. After the disaster at the Crater, he vowed, “they never will catch me in a fight with the niggers.” 36
Other white Union soldiers soured on the idea of racial progress out of a mistaken belief that blacks received better treatment than white troops did. “It seames that every bill that is handed in in favor of the privet soldier is put down but any thing that is a benefit to the oficer and negro is past the negro troops is treeted beter than what we ar in every respect and that dont soot me a bit,” complained Ohio soldier Arthur Van Horn, though he could provide no specific examples of special treatment. 37 Several white troops at Benton Barracks, Missouri, agreed with Van Horn. When the colonel of a black regiment led his men into the barracks chapel for a prayer service, many white troops stormed out, disgusted that a white man had “marched a whole colm of the wolleyheads into the chaple and seated them when at the same time there was not room hardly for all of the white soldiers.” Among the protestors was a white amputee, who sat on the chapel step and refused to budge, despite the insistence of the chaplain “that the niggar was good as he.” 38 Chastising white Southerners for their treatment of black slaves was all well and good, but when white Northerners found their own racial privileges, such as preferential seating in the chapel, questioned, especially during a bleak spot in the war, many turned hostile.
Finally, prisoner exchange policy and the personal suffering it brought to many captured white Union soldiers contributed to the notable regression in Union troops’ attitudes toward black rights in the spring and summer of 1864. Infested by lice and grown so thin he could make a ring around the widest part of his arm with his thumb and forefinger, Vermont sergeant William Stevens blamed his extended stay in Confederate prisons on black soldiers, because the Lincoln administration
had put a stop to prisoner exchanges until Confederate authorities agreed to exchange black Union soldiers on equal terms with white soldiers. Stevens freely admitted that the “abolition principles” he harbored before his imprisonment did not stand a chance when he knew “that the only reason our Government has for leaving us in such a condition was a miserable quibble, about the ‘exchange’ Negroes.” In fact, he announced he “would not willingly endure this again” for the benefit of “every Negro in the Confederacy.” 39
In short, white Union troops remained (for the most part) convinced that ending the war required ending slavery, and even enlisting black soldiers; yet when changes in northern racial attitudes (which had been apparent among the ranks in the summer of 1863) began to seem irrelevant to the Union cause or detrimental to white soldiers’ well-being, some abandoned ideals of racial equality and turned away from black rights. Gettysburg- and Vicksburg-inspired calls for white Northerners to erase their own “prejudice against color” so that the “nation will be purified” and “God will accomplish his vast designs” found few echoes in the aftermath of the military setbacks that plagued the Union Army in the spring and summer of 1864. 40 Robert Winn, who in 1863 had seen concrete advances for black Americans as necessary to help the nation fulfill God’s plan, now captured the prevailing mood when he observed, “I am for liberty—but not for equality—nor fraternity—except in the limited sense.” 41 His remark helps show that change in white soldiers’ attitudes toward racial equality could go backward, and it also helps illuminate how a war that soldiers knew was about slavery could glimpse, but fail to achieve, racial justice.
“Reconstruction is not progressing as fast as we would wish”
As black Union troops surveyed the social and political landscape created by the war in 1864, they noted encouraging possibilities for a postwar United States marked by equality and heightened justice, but they also noticed whites’ flagging commitment to, or even rejection of, those very possibilities. Meanwhile, disagreement grew among black soldiers themselves over how best to respond to injustice and work for equal rights. Faced with turmoil, black Union soldiers in 1864 clung to gains already made even as they coped with disappointment and dissent, all while continuing to push toward the goals of putting down the rebellion, destroying slavery, and eliminating racial prejudice.
To some extent, black and white Union troops shared a vision of the war: soldiers of both races believed that the Union must be saved for the good of all humanity, and slavery must be crushed in order to save the Union. Despite the fact that there had never been a moment in the existence of the United States when its government had not overseen and sanctioned the enslavement of African Americans, Pvt. Robert Fitzgerald, a descendant of slaves, still believed that the Union must survive “for the wellfare of a good government & to establish a noble principle.” 42The Black Warrior, a regimental newspaper written by black artillerists, made the connection between emancipation and preserving the American Republic clear in an article that sounded a lot like Republican campaign literature. In the 1850s, “the tree of slavery had extended her roots, and towering in her deformity, threw her baleful shadow over the whole land, from Maine to Texas.” Violence in Kansas proved that “no compromise” would contain slavery or save the Union. Only the destruction of the institution could stem the insurrection that was bound to occur as long as slavery existed. 43
Like white troops who were beginning to recognize emancipation’s limitations, black soldiers also acknowledged that “if every slave in the United States were emancipated at once, they would not be free yet.” Yet unlike white soldiers, black soldiers did not see the limits or difficulties as reasons to give up on racial progress. On the contrary, black troops described emancipation as “prepatory…for equality.” 44 Equality meant many different things to individual black soldiers. To some, it involved “the right to vote, and the chance to buy small farms.” 45 Others focused on equal treatment before the law, including “legitimate trial[s] under the civil or military law.” Dismayed to learn that some black soldiers had been punished by hanging rather than shooting, as would have been the case for whites, a member of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth did not question that his compatriots should have been punished, but he did “not think a black man should be hung for a crime if a white man is not treated with the same punishment for a like crime.” 46 Still other soldiers placed priority on the right to speak out against obvious disparity. When men of the Seventh Corps D’Afrique suspected that their rations were short, two of them lodged a complaint with the commanding general, and the subsequent inquiry revealed negligence in the commissary department. Although the guilty party reportedly deemed it “a great outrage for those who had been slaves to complain…and talk about their rights,” fuller rations resulted, and former slaves demonstrated that regulations could be enlisted to protect them as well as white troops. 47
For many black soldiers, equality also meant full citizenship within the Union they helped to save. One sergeant explained that he warred against the notion that “we have no rights in the country in which we live.” 48 Another soldier agreed that as “heroes and supporters of the Government,” black troops had earned the right “to share alike [the] rights and privileges” guaranteed to citizens of the United States. 49 If blacks fought in the names of “Washington, Madison, Jefferson” to “maintain a Republican Government,” vowed yet another, then they deserved “Republican privileges,” and they ought to be “recognized as citizens.” 50
As black troops everywhere knew, African Americans had real victories to celebrate in 1864. Most obviously, the United States, a country that had built its treasure and might on the backs of slaves and behaved as a slaveholding nation in both its foreign and domestic policies for its entire existence, had fundamentally reversed its course, and now set itself in direct opposition to the institution of chattel bondage. As long as the Union won the war, in the words of one enlisted man, “slavery is dead, its rotten, bloated carcass floats on the dead sea of the past.” 51 Whatever its limitations, emancipation’s value should not be understated, as he and countless others insisted. Wherever emancipation could be enforced, marriages could no longer be smashed by arbitrary sale, children could no longer be torn from parents to serve the whims or wallets of masters, and owners no longer enjoyed the legal right to beat, disfigure, or sexually exploit human beings whom they owned as chattel property. A Union victory would make that revolutionary state of affairs both permanent and nationwide.
Some African Americans celebrated intangible advances that accompanied the downfall of slavery. On one June day in New Orleans, black soldiers and civilians gathered to celebrate emancipation with music, a parade, speeches, and a review of colored troops, all in Congo Square, a public space described by one participant as “one of the aristocratic parks of New Orleans,” formerly reserved for whites. “Only think of it,” the same man continued, “colored people marching through the streets of New Orleans on their own holiday with fire-arms.” Few could have imagined such a celebration before the war, when rights such as bearing arms or enjoying public facilities like parks were severely restricted for free blacks and forbidden to slaves except with their masters’ permission. 52 Another soldier serving in New Orleans noted that he now “walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of this southern city…without being required to take off his cap at every step,” and that small victory meant nearly as much as anything that took place on a battlefield. 53 For the first time in history, a Connecticut soldier serving in South Carolina felt, “the time will soon come when every citizen of this great nation without distinction of color shall enjoy” the liberty and equality on which a secure Union must rest, and which “the Almighty has decreed every man should have.” 54
Other soldiers welcomed practical advances. As word of the integration of New York streetcars reached his camp in Florida, one black soldier described the news as “proof that our cause is making progress.” 55 When transplanted Northerners an
d homegrown Louisiana unionists convened to write a new Louisiana state constitution, spirited debate led to breakthroughs that went beyond emancipation to include public education for white and black children, black access to courts, and black enrollment in the militia. The new state constitution even empowered the future state legislature to enact limited black suffrage. 56 Meanwhile, black soldiers like George Delavan and Andrew Johnson seized the opportunity to learn to read and write, skills that they identified as central to the advancement of their race. 57 Elsewhere, a black sergeant remarked, “more than half the men [of the Third U.S. Colored Troops] desire to learn and endeavor to improve their leisure hours” by taking advantage of reading and spelling lessons offered in camps. Like military service, education would place “us on the platform of equality,” he confidently predicted. 58
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 21
