|
The foundation for black participation in the Civil War began more than a
hundred years before the outbreak of the war. Blacks in America had been in
bondage since early colonial times.
In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankind’s
inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the
institution of slavery had become firmly established in America. Blacks worked
in the tobacco fields of Virginia, in the rice fields of South Carolina, and
toiled in small farms and shops in the North. Foner and Mahoney report in A
House Divided, America in the Age of Lincoln that, “In 1776, slaves composed
forty percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia,
but well below ten percent in the colonies to the North.” The invention of the
cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 provided a demand for cotton thus increasing
the demand for slaves.
By the 1800’s slavery was an institution throughout the
South, an institution in which slaves had few rights, and could be sold or
leased by their owners. They lacked any voice in the government and lived a life
of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the slave population never
abandoned the desire for freedom or the determination to resist control by the
slave owners.
The slave's reaction to this desire and determination resulted in
outright rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place
the strongest reaction in the enlisting of blacks in the war itself. Batty in
The Divided Union: The Story of the Great American War, 1861-65, concur with
Foner and Mahoney about the importance of outright rebellion in their analysis
of the Nat Turner Rebellion, which took place in 1831. This revolt demonstrated
that not all slaves were willing to accept this “institution of slavery”
passively. Foner and Mahoney note that the significance of this uprising is
found in its aftermath because of the numerous reports of “insubordinate”
behavior by slaves.
8 Individual acts of defiance ranged from the use of the
Underground Railroad - a secret, organized network of people who helped fugitive
slaves reach the Northern states and Canada - to the daily resistance or silent
sabotage found on the plantations. Stokesbury acknowledges in, A Short History
of the Civil War, the existence of the Underground Railroad but disagrees with
other historians as to its importance. He notes that it never became as well
organized or as successful as the South believed.
Even with the groundwork
having been laid for resistance, the prevalent racial climate in America in 1860
found it unthinkable that blacks would bear arms against white Americans.
However, by 1865 these black soldiers had proven their value. Wilson writes in
great detail describing the struggles and achievements of the black soldiers in
his book The Black Phalanx. McPherson discusses in The Negro’s Civil War that
widespread opposition to the use of blacks as soldiers prevailed among northern
whites.
Whereas McPherson relates the events cumulating in the passage of two
laws that aided black enlistment, Wilson focuses on the actual enlistment. He
notes that the first regiment of free blacks came into service at New Orleans in
September 1862 through the efforts of Butler. Wilson credits Butler’s three
regiments of blacks as the first officially mustered into Union ranks. North
Carolina and Kansas also organized additional black units where minor skirmishes
proved to be successful.
Wilson also notes that “Kansas has ... the honor of
being the first State in the Union to begin the organization of Negroes as
soldiers for the Federal army.” McPherson believes that up to this point
President Lincoln had opposed the idea of blacks fighting for the Union but
after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that slaves
in states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, “shall be then, thence forward,
and forever free,” he reversed his 8 thinking.
At the end of the Emancipation
Proclamation Lincoln announced that the freed blacks “would be received into the
armed service of the United States....” Lincoln planned to tap into a new source
of fighting individuals, “...the great available and as yet unavailed of, force
for the restoration of the Union.”. Lincoln thought this would both weaken the
enemy and strengthen the Union.
The recruitment of the blacks took laborers from
the South and placed these men in the Union army in places which otherwise must
be filled with so many white men.” Lincoln also felt that seeing the blacks
fighting against the Confederacy would have a psychological effect upon the
South. With the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freeing the
slaves, the North began recruiting black soldiers but, as reported by Batty and
Parish, this was a slow recruitment at first. In the Spring of 1863 only two
black regiments existed, however, this had grown to sixty by the end of 1863. By
1864 this had expanded to 80 more regiments.
Jordan provides a comprehensive
account of one of the first black regiments to fight for the Union Army, the
54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment that numbered at least 1,000 soldiers. This
all-volunteer regiment, lead by a white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, helped open
the 22- month land and sea assault on Charleston, South Carolina. Leading an
unsuccessful hand-to-hand attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston, this regiment
engaged in one of the most famous black actions of the Civil War and suffered
approximately 44 percent casualties, including Colonel Shaw.
Their performance
in this battle helped to make the blacks more acceptable in the Union army. One
of its soldiers won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Eventually twenty-three
other black soldiers earned this honor. The reports of the tenacity of the
blacks at Fort Wagner plus 8 engagements at Port Hudson, Louisiana, Fort Pillow
and Milliken’s Bend helped to fuel the fire of black enlistment. Historians
differ in the actual number of blacks in the Union Army.
|
