After Slavery

Although President Abraham Lincoln’s government at Washington was slow and inconsistent in aligning its military policy with the goal of uprooting slavery, among the slaves themselves there seemed from the very outset of hostilities a clear sense that the war would not end without upending the system that held them in bondage. “When war began between the North and South,” Booker T. Washington recounted in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, “every slave on our plantation knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was slavery. Even the most ignorant members of my race on the most remote plantations felt in their hearts, with a certainty that admitted of no doubt, that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great result of the war if the Northern armies conquered.”

The escaped slave Frederick Douglass was a leading abolitionist and a powerful advocate of black military enlistment

Antislavery advocates in the north, including many free blacks and escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass, also sensed that the war would provide an opportunity for black men to prove themselves the equals of white men on the battlefield, and that through their military service in the cause of emancipation blacks could, after the war, stake their claim as citizens. Although individual northern commanders enacted piecemeal measures that compelled the Lincoln administration to reconsider its policy on black enlistment, fundamental change would have to await a wider shift in its attitude to emancipation. A major change of direction occurred in the late summer of 1862, when Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and was consummated in the final Proclamation that became effective on January 1st, 1863, and which cleared the way for enlistment of black troops. “The opportunity is given us to be men,” Douglass told an audience shortly afterwards. “With one courageous resolution we may blot out the hand-writing of ages against us. 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 of citizenship in the United States.”

By the time the Proclamation went into effect, some 3-4,000 black soldiers were already in arms, recruited as a result of small-scale, semi-official initiatives in areas under Union occupation, and by the end of the war nearly 180,000 black men would serve in the Union military. Eastern North Carolina and lowcountry South Carolina became the sites for some of the most ambitious early attempts to assemble black regiments: General David Hunter had been recruiting men in coastal Georgia and South Carolina from early in the summer of 1862, and by the end of the same summer Union forces had established a presence on some of the sea islands and port towns of eastern North Carolina. There, black soldiers assisted in harassing Confederate forces. The Emancipation Proclamation gave local commanders the formal authority and the logistical support they needed to broaden these efforts, and by the next summer Union officers were aggressively organizing in both states: General Edward A. Wild assumed responsibility for organizing the ‘African Brigade’ in North Carolina, and a team of abolitionist-minded commanders—Rufus B. Saxton, James Montgomery, Robert Gould Shaw and Thomas W. Higginson–undertook similar work in organizing the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. In both states the black regiments were made up overwhelmingly of former slaves. The radicalizing effect of Union occupation on the coastal Carolinas was repeated for the interior, in early 1865, when General William T. Sherman marched his troops up from Savannah and deep into the interior of both states. For a long time afterwards white residents of the piedmont and the upcountry would heap special abuse upon Sherman's black troops who they held responsible for disrupting the status quo by urging slaves to desert their owners and strike for their freedom.

While the role of the Lincoln administration was crucial to the project of building up the ‘colored’ regiments, as the documents included here suggest it would be a serious mistake to underestimate the slaves’ own initiative in transforming the Union military, or to assume that they enlisted for military service without expecting anything in return. Almost everywhere, black men enlisted with the full knowledge that they would face racism and inequality within the Union army. Forced to fight for the right to take part in combat operations, the right to equal treatment and pay, and the right to equal protection as prisoners of war, black soldiers waged a heroic struggle on two fronts—against Confederate foes who reacted with outrage to the sight of black men in military uniform, and against racist treatment within the army of Yankee 'deliverance'.

In this process of transforming the Union army, and the war itself, the ‘colored’ regiments became “schools of politics” in which former slaves debated the issues of the day, began to articulate a collective vision about the kind of society they wanted to see replace slavery, and assumed an important role as guardians of the black community as a whole. Unsurprisingly, as some of the documents included here suggest, they occasionally came into conflict with their white ‘comrades-in-arms,' with army authorities and government officials, and with ex-Confederates after the war. Their experience in the ranks of the Union military helps to explain why such a large proportion of black veterans would play leading roles in grassroots Radical politics during the period of Reconstruction, just as their prominence in galvanizing black communities to assert their rights invested black soldiers with a special pride and authority after emancipation.

Sources:
Document 1. General Rufus B. Saxton’s Report on an Early Engagement by Black Troops
Document 2. New Bern’s Black Community Negotiates their Terms for Military Service
Document 3. North Carolina’s ‘African Brigade’ Raids the State’s Interior
Document 4. General Saxton Protests against the Forced Enlistment of Freed Slaves
Document 5. Clashes between White and Black Union Troops in Charleston
Document 6. Georgetown (SC) Whites Petition for the Removal of Black Troops
Document 7. Contrasting Attitudes toward Union Troops in the South Carolina Upcountry
Document 8. Black Troops, White Hostility & Radicalization in the Upcountry
Document 9. Petition from Union County Republicans against Removal of Troops