by Philip Dray
Curiously, the militarization of blacks was originally a Southern strategy; Negro regiments were formed in Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana in the early months of the war. The Confederacy's battlefield successes in 1861 and 1862, however, convinced its leaders that there was no need to use black troops; the practice was repugnant to most Southerners anyway, and so the men were largely sent home. (Some, like Josiah T. Walls, later a black congressman from Florida, eventually crossed over to the Union forces, becoming one of the few Americans to fight on both sides in the war.) The South did not revisit the idea until early 1865 when, in desperate straits, the Congress of the Confederate States agreed to let General Lee seek the enlistment of black troops; within weeks, however, the rebel cause was lost.
Union policies were ultimately pushed toward resolution by the slaves themselves, for the eagerness of black refugees to flee their masters was evident wherever federal troops advanced. "War has not been waged against slavery," Secretary of State William H. Seward wrote, "yet the army acts ... as an emancipating crusade." In May 1861 a weak compromise on the issue was reached in Virginia, where the Union general Benjamin F. Butler, commander of Union forces at Fortress Monroe, was confronted with three runaway slaves seeking his protection. One, George Scott, told Butler that the Confederates had put him and other slaves to work building gun emplacements and ramparts. At Butler's behest, Scott guided a Union scouting mission to the enemy's lines to verify this claim. When, soon after, a Confederate officer came to Butler's headquarters under a flag of truce to claim Scott and the other two runaways, Butler refused to release them. In moving his army through Maryland, he had promised state officials he would not act to incite slaves to insurrection. Now, however, he couldn't help but wonder why he should return slaves known to be assisting the Confederate war effort. At the suggestion of one of his aides, Butler resolved the situation by declaring Scott and the others "contraband of war."
The designation was much discussed in Washington. The term "contraband" implied ownership and conveniently did not call into question the legal basis of slavery. It fit nicely within the strictures of the First Confiscation Act, passed in August 1861, which allowed federal troops to take command of any property being used to abet or promote the Southern rebellion, including slaves laboring for the Confederate military effort. Officially the concept of confiscation was to go no further. When the Union general John C. Fremont declared martial law in Missouri in late summer 1861 and pronounced the local slaves free, Lincoln immediately rescinded the order. But even though the president had canceled Fremont's action, and members of his cabinet continued to parse the meaning of Butler's "contraband," the significance for black people still in bondage was clear: they would not be returned to their owners once they reached federal lines.
The pressure on Washington increased in spring 1862 when the Union general David Hunter, relieving General William T. Sherman as commander of the Sea Islands, announced his decision to turn the numerous contrabands in his charge into soldiers. Hunter, upon taking over Sherman's command, had wasted little time in seizing Fort Pulaski, a strategic post at the sea approach to Savannah, and he was eager for additional conquests. He had written to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton of his special desire to retake Fort Sumter for the Union cause. With such ambitions, it was natural that he saw the thousands of ex-slaves gathering at Port Royal as potential troops and hoped that an earlier order from the former secretary of war, Simon Cameron, authorizing Sherman to employ "loyal persons," might effectively cover the action he contemplated. "Please let me have my own way on the subject of slavery," he asked of Stanton as early as January. "The administration will not be responsible. I alone will bear the blame; you can censure me, arrest me, dismiss me, hang me if you will, but permit me to make my mark in such a way as to be remembered by friend and foe."
There were doubts in Washington as to the battle-worthiness of men so recently slaves, but Hunter's bold approach had the support of many who believed black men would fight, and fight hard, for freedom. "Nothing would please me more, and bring the race into favor," wrote the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, "than to see Southern chivalry well whipped by an equal number of black men. It would indeed be refreshing." Black Americans, slave and free, had a proud martial heritage extending from Bunker Hill to the Plain of Chalmette—a tradition of loyalty and courage under fire that was often conveniently forgotten by whites. As Douglass later recalled, "I reproached the North that they fought the rebels with only one hand, when they might strike effectively with two—that they fought with their soft white hand, while they kept their black iron hand chained and helpless behind them."
General Hunter acted in stages to bring in blacks as soldiers. On April 4 he wrote to Stanton to request fifty thousand muskets and fifty thousand pairs of scarlet pantaloons, the latter to distinguish contraband troops on the battlefield; on April 13 he declared that some of the contrabands in his district were henceforth to be considered free; and soon after, he announced his intention to organize blacks into military regiments. Recruitment, however, did not go as smoothly as Hunter wished. Many former slaves were eager to join the ranks, but others resisted the idea of returning so soon to any form of white authority. Some fled to the woods at the approach of federal recruiters, fearful because of rumors, spread by Southerners, that the Yankees would ship them to Cuba to be reenslaved or harness them to wagons and use them as horses. To help urge enlistment, Hunter declared all the slaves of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina free, and on May 9, a few days before Robert Smalls's theft of the Planter, which Hunter's actions likely encouraged, he ordered all able-bodied male blacks, ages eighteen to forty-five, to report to Hilton Head for possible induction.
Hunter's decisions confounded official Washington, for the previous fall President Lincoln had ordered General Sherman not to mobilize blacks for regular military service. When Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, urged the president to allow Hunter's declaration to stand, assuring him that his supporters would rally around the idea, Lincoln testily warned Chase, "No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me." Lincoln forced Hunter to immediately retract his declarations. Hunter did as he was told but did not relinquish his vision; when the House of Representatives formally inquired by what authority he had sought to arm "fugitive slaves," Hunter assured its members that
no regiment of "fugitive slaves" has been or is organized in this department. There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are "fugitive rebels," men who everywhere fly before the appearance of the national flag, leaving their servants behind them to shift as best they can for themselves ... It is the masters who have, in every instance, been the "fugitives," running away from loyal slaves as well as loyal soldiers, and whom we have only partially been able to see ... their heads over ramparts, or, rifle in hand, dodging behind trees in the extreme distance.
Hunter's letter, read aloud in the House, amused the inquiring congressmen and may have helped win a reprieve for his campaign. He followed up by dispatching Robert Smalls as part of a South Carolina delegation to convince President Lincoln of the potential of blacks as loyal fighting men. Smalls was, for the moment, one of the few military heroes the North had; the story of how he turned the tables on his Confederate masters was widely reported, and Smalls himself had quickly developed a knack for self-promotion, cheekily having himself photographed wearing Captain Relyea's uniform.
On August 16, 1862, Smalls and the Reverend Mansfield French, a Methodist minister from Ohio who had helped found Wilberforce University and now worked for the American Missionary Association at Port Royal, arrived in Washington to meet with Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton. The two also met with other cabinet members, including Treasury Secretary Chase. French and Smalls were well received, their firsthand knowledge of conditions on the ground in coastal South Carolina informing the discussions; but, as Hunter had likely anticipated, what everyone most wanted to hear was
Robert Smalls's thrilling story of taking the Planter. There simply was no better argument for making contrabands into soldiers.
Powerful support arrived that same week from Horace Greeley, the influential publisher of the New York Tribune and a confidant of Chase. In an August 19 editorial titled "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," Greeley called on Lincoln to reconfigure the nation's war policy to acknowledge the root cause of the conflict and alleviate it by freeing the slaves. "On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President," Greeley wrote, "there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that ... the Rebellion, if crushed out tomorrow, would be renewed within a year if slavery were left in full vigor; that army officers who remain to this day devoted to slavery can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union; and that every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union." The article was much-reprinted and quoted, and it bolstered the case for allowing contrabands an active part in the war effort. As James T. Ayers, later a recruiter of black troops in the conquered areas of the South, remarked, "As they waged war on us about the nigger, why, in God's name give them the nigger ... A wise and good administration, handled by Sambo, at the Britch of a good musket, surely is a plaster good enough for traitors." Through the efforts of men like Ayers, more than half the black soldiers to serve the Union cause would be recruited in the states belonging to the Confederacy.
Lincoln, although advised by many, including Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, of the efficacy of turning slaves into fighting men, still preferred, publicly at least, not to make any sweeping gestures. The president worried that "the organization, equipment, and arming of negroes would be productive of more evil than good," but, according to Chase, "he was not unwilling that commanders should, at their discretion, arm for purely defensive purposes, slaves coming within their lines." Stanton had learned from the Frémont and Hunter episodes that Lincoln did not like bold steps regarding the volatile issue of arming blacks, although he believed Lincoln would accept judicious moves in this direction by responsible officers. The Second Confiscation Act, which Congress passed in July 1862, allowed the president to use confiscated slaves "as he may judge best for the public welfare," implying possible military service. That summer, Lincoln had also begun discussing with his cabinet the idea of using his war powers as president to free all slaves held in Confederate lands. When he shared with them his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in late July, he also issued an order that black men, slave or free, could be recruited as noncombat soldiers. In late August, when Smalls and French returned to the South, Stanton gave Smalls a letter to take back to General Rufus Saxton, quartermaster at Port Royal, authorizing him to enlist and arm five thousand blacks for guard duty—to keep watch over conquered Sea Island plantations and protect black settlements from possible rebel attacks. The letter further decreed that all black volunteers in this effort, and their immediate families, were to be "forever free."
BLACK TROOPS MUSTERING
To take command of the First South Carolina, the first Union force comprised exclusively of freed slaves, General Saxton invited the New England abolitionist minister and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Port Royal. Saxton's choice was largely a public relations move, for Higginson had been a colleague of the abolitionist martyr John Brown. "I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well," Higginson wrote, "not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be." In the 1840s Higginson had lost his pulpit in Newburyport, Massachusetts, because he advocated the use of violence to overthrow slavery, and he achieved lasting notoriety in Boston in 1854 when he led, and was wounded in, a failed effort to rescue the captured fugitive slave Anthony Burns. He would write a series of influential articles for the Atlantic Monthly about his experiences leading black fighting men.
When officials in Massachusetts announced plans to enlist a black regiment, the first one from a free state, Frederick Douglass threw himself into recruitment. "Action! Action!" he enthused. "There is no time for delay. The tide is at its flood that leads on to fortune. From East to West, North to South, the sky is written all over, 'Now, or never.'" He urged black men to join at once. "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!"
From its unsure beginnings at Port Royal, General Hunter's dream of armed black men in Union blue set to punish the Confederacy became a substantial reality; by war's end almost 180,000 black Americans had worn Union army uniforms, while 24,000 served in the navy; a total of 37,000 sacrificed their lives. The famous assault on Fort Wagner by the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers on July 18, 1863, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, is the best-known tale of blacks' Civil War heroism, although Higginson's men skirmished with rebels as early as the winter of 1862–63 along South Carolina's coastal rivers, and ex-slaves showed tremendous valor that spring on the lower Mississippi below Vicksburg, where, on May 23, 1863, black Louisiana regiments advanced against Confederate shellfire at the Battle of Port Hudson.
Two weeks later Confederate forces attacked the federal encampment at Milliken's Bend in an effort to break the supply line supporting General Grant's siege of Vicksburg. The bloody fight became a grudge match between newly minted black soldiers and their former masters. "The planters had boasted," reported the black writer William Wells Brown, "that, should they meet their former slaves, a single look from them would cause the negroes to throw down their weapons, and run." But when the two sides converged, the black troops, although outnumbered, countercharged the advancing enemy. "It was a genuine bayonet charge, a hand-to-hand fight, a contest between enraged men: on the one side, from hatred of a race; and on the other, desire for self-preservation, revenge for past grievances, and the inhuman murder of their comrades." That the fight was fierce and unrelenting was seen clearly in its aftermath. "White and black men were lying side by side, pierced by bayonets, and in some instances transfixed to the earth. In one instance, two men—one white and the other black—were found dead, side by side, each having the other's bayonet through his body."
Of the thousand or so black soldiers engaged in the battle, 652 were reported killed, wounded, or missing, several times the loss of 160 white Union troops. But an enduring statement had been made. A federal captain on the scene, after walking among the dead and dying on the stillsmoldering battlefield, told a Northern newspaperman, "I never more wish to hear the expression,' The nigger won't fight"'
For all the freedmen who served under arms, the near-overnight conversion from chattel to soldier, "from the shame of degradation to the glory of military exaltation," had been overwhelming. For Robert Smalls, whose theft of the Planter had brought him acclaim and even influence with the authorities in Washington, the effect was hundredfold: national magazines sang his praises, a fort near Pittsburgh was named for him, while back home in the Sea Islands his childhood was re-counted by many with special pride and remembered for its early indications of his heroic character.
THE BATTLE OF PORT HUDSON
No one, however, could accuse him of resting on his laurels, as he went on to participate in seventeen deadly encounters with the enemy. The most dramatic came on April 7, 1863, when Smalls piloted the double-turret ironclad Keokuk in a fleet of six Union ironclads attempting to retake Charleston. The rebels, having thoroughly mined the waters around Fort Sumter and carefully rehearsed how to concentrate their shore-based artillery in case of assault, pounded the invading federal boats. Two small Confederate ironclads, the Chicora and the Palmetto State, also engaged the Yankee intruders. The lead Union vessel, the Weehawken, got caught in a defensive net while another, the New Ironsides, stalled and blocked the ships following in its wake. Smalls's wheelman, standing directly beside him, was killed by a blast to the face, and the Keokuk, struck nearly a hundred times by blistering cannon fire from Fort S
umter, was disabled and eventually sank. Smalls was one of the few survivors.
The South thrilled to the victory. A year before at Hampton Roads, in March 1862, the fabled shooting match between the federal ironclad Monitor and its Southern counterpart, the Merrimac, had ended in a draw, but the repulsion of Union ironclads at Charleston demonstrated that the newfangled boats could be defeated by shore defenses and that the city could withstand an attack from the sea.
Later that year, Smalls was caught in another bloody scrape in the mouth of the Stono River at Folly Island Creek, this time piloting the Planter. Whenever Union vessels crept into the watery interior of coastal South Carolina, they risked a loss of maneuverability and the threat of taking close bombardment or sniper fire from shore. The Confederates, trapping Smalls's ship in a narrow part of the river and recognizing it as a stolen prize, resolved to recapture or destroy it, hemming the Planter in with an artillery crossfire that shredded the upper part of the wooden boat. When the captain, in the heat of battle, ordered Smalls to ground the vessel and surrender, Smalls emphatically declined. "Not by a damned sight will I beach this boat for you!" he shouted, warning that as far as the rebels were concerned, he and the crewmen were all runaway slaves, and that "No quarter will be shown us!" At that point, according to a later congressional report, "Captain Nickerson became demoralized, and left the pilot-house and secured himself in the coal-bunker." Smalls took control, somehow managing to steer the Planter out of range of the Southern guns. Nickerson was dishonorably discharged for his performance, and Smalls, cited for his coolness and bravery under fire, was made the boat's captain.
