Been in the Storm So Long (11 page)

Even as the white South persisted in touting the fidelity, contentment, and docility of its black population, there were limits to how much trust could be reposed in them and to what kinds of services they would be permitted to render. The employment of blacks as military laborers and body servants occasioned no particular alarm, as their duties were consistent with the servile position they occupied in southern society. But the proposal to enlist blacks as regular soldiers proved to be a different matter altogether. In opposing any such move, an Alabama legislator could think of no more effective argument than the example of his own body servant
“who had grown up with him from boyhood, who had gone with him to the army and had shared with him, share and share alike, every article of food and clothing,” and yet, inexplicably, “had seized the first opportunity which presented of deserting him, and joining the Yankees.” Nevertheless, the Confederacy would have to confront the issue of slaves as soldiers, particularly after the Yankees began to reap such successes from the experiment.
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After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, free blacks in several towns organized themselves into military companies and offered their services to their respective states. The most notable example proved to be the free colored community of New Orleans, with its strong Creole element and the tradition of having fought under Andrew Jackson in 1815. After announcing early in the war their determination to “take arms at a moment’s notice and fight shoulder to shoulder with other citizens” in defense of the city, two regiments of free colored men, known as the Native Guards, were soon parading the streets with white soldiers. Although formally incorporated into the Louisiana militia, the Native Guards were never called upon for combat duty. The same disinclination to employ black troops appeared elsewhere in the Confederacy. When sixty Richmond free blacks, bearing a Confederate flag, proffered their services as soldiers, the local authorities praised their loyalty and sent them home.
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Whether such volunteers were motivated by opportunism, a genuine patriotism, community coercion, or the prospect of better treatment is difficult to determine. By serving the Confederates, a New Orleans black leader later explained, they had hoped to improve their legal and social position; at the same time, almost in self-defense, they had felt the need to prove their fighting abilities and to learn the use of firearms, thereby raising their esteem among both the whites and their own people. “No matter where I fight,” a New Orleans black later told the Yankees, “I only wish to spend what I have, and fight as long as I can, if only my boy may stand in the street equal to a white boy when the war is over.” This may help to explain the ease with which the Native Guards quickly switched their loyalties after the fall of New Orleans; the colored troops—“the darkest of whom,” said one Union general, “will be about the complexion of the late Mr. [Daniel] Webster”—were subsequently mustered into Federal service and sent into battle against the Confederates at Port Hudson, Louisiana.
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When Colonel James Chesnut’s slaves volunteered in March 1862 “to fight for him if he would arm them,” he professed to believe them. But one person could not make that decision, he told them. “The whole country must agree to it.” Although there had been some proposals early in the war to enlist slaves, usually in the form of appeals from planters in threatened areas for permission to arm their slaves, the wisdom of such a drastic move was never seriously debated by the Confederacy until late in 1063. With the steady deterioration of the military effort, the question suddenly took on a new importance. In the ensuing and often far-reaching debate, the reasons
advanced for slave enlistments ranged from the improved moral position of the South in the world community to how it might demoralize the black Yankees. But the most compelling argument, as it had been in the North, was that of military necessity. For some whites, at least, the urgent need to preserve the independence of the South took precedence over the institution upon which it was based, and the system they had initially viewed as the economic strength of the South now loomed as a critical source of military manpower as well. “The element which has been the foundation of wealth should now be made the instrument of our salvation,” a Mississippi slaveholder told his fellow planters. “Arm our slaves.” If the Confederacy failed to utilize this manpower, he warned, “the Yankees will, and the terminal scenes of this struggle … will be the subjugation of the Southern gentleman by his own slaves.” It behooved every patriotic slaveholder, then, to “prepare the negro’s mind for the position he is about to assume, and excite in him that love of country and of home which, I believe, exists strongly in the negro’s breast.” Having reprinted this slaveholder’s appeal, the
New Orleans Tribune
, a black newspaper established in 1864, could not help but comment on its tragic irony: “The
chivalrous
Southerners, after bragging so long of their superiority above all other people, are now, in the pangs of agony, stretching their hands for help to those for whose enslavement they are trying to destroy their country.… They have, with their own lips and by their own acts, given the lie to their diabolical purpose.”
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The gravity of the military situation notwithstanding, any proposal to enlist slaves as soldiers was bound to provoke strong opposition. When confronted with the prospect of armed slaves, in fact, many whites all too easily belied their previously expressed confidence in black loyalty and fidelity. “Would they not, with arms in their hands, either desert to the enemy or turn their weapons against us?” a prominent North Carolinian asked. By undertaking this experiment, opponents warned, the South will only have succeeded in introducing into the towns and countryside a veritable Trojan horse. “Are we prepared for this?” a Virginian asked. “To win their freedom with our own independence, to establish in our midst a half or quarter of a million of black freemen, familiar with the arts and discipline of war, and with large military experience!” At best, critics charged, black recruitment would exchange “a profitable laborer for a very unprofitable soldier,” and, at worst, it leveled all distinctions and elevated blacks to equality with whites. If the Confederacy had to resort to such measures, thereby violating all previous practices and teachings, some whites thought it unworthy of survival. “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution,” General Howell Cobb warned. “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
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After the military reverses of late 1864, the Confederacy edged still closer to raising a black army. If nothing else, the heavy casualties they were sustaining impressed whites with the need to draw upon their immense reservoir of black manpower. Why condemn to destruction “the
flower of our population, the hope of the country,” a Virginia newspaper asked, “rather than mould to our use and make subsidiary to the great ends of independence, the inferior race that has so long acknowledged our guidance and control! Surely, they are good enough for Yankee bullets.” What little was left of slavery, Mary F. Akin wrote her husband in the Confederate Congress, “should be rendered as serviceable as possible and for that reason the negro men ought to be put to fighting and where some of them will be killed. [I]f it is not done there will soon be more negroes than whites in the country and they will be the free race. I want to see them
got rid of soon
.” Walter Clark, a young Confederate officer, had initially opposed the enlistment of blacks but he now thought the policy deserved full support. “Let Negro fight negro,” he advised. “This is an age of progressive ideas and mighty changes.”
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The arguments grew increasingly bitter and vindictive as the war reached a desperate point. On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress, with the strong backing of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, finally authorized the enlistment of 300,000 additional troops “irrespective of color.” To allay the fears of many whites, the act stipulated that no state was to enlist more than 25 percent of her able-bodied slave population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Within a few days, advertisements appeared in newspapers to urge the recruitment of blacks. In Richmond, a company of blacks in Confederate uniforms paraded in the streets to attract additional volunteers. Among those witnessing the spectacle was John S. Wise, a Confederate officer and the son of a former governor of Virginia. “Ah!” he thought, as he watched the “Confederate darkeys” drill in Capitol Square, “this is but the beginning of the end.”
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Although the law authorizing black recruits avoided the question of emancipation, leaving that decision to the slave owners and the states, the clear implication was that slaves who served in the Confederate Army would be freed at the end of the war. But the promise of freedom as a reward for military service, whether by law or by implication, came too late to impress or deceive most slaves. “I’ll work for Massa Randolph good ’nough,” said a slave belonging to the former Confederate Secretary of War, “but no want to fight for Massa Davis.” Bewildered by the remark, someone asked him how he could stand by idly while the Yankees robbed his master. “I knows nuthing ’bout politics,” the slave replied. But when told that he might win his freedom by enlisting, this same slave suddenly revealed a sound grasp of politics: “We niggers dat fight will be free, course; but you see, massa, if some ob us don’t fight, we all be free, Massa Lincum says.” That same perception of reality had made Colonel James Chesnut’s slaves far less enthusiastic about military service. When the question had first been broached, back in March 1862, they had talked enthusiastically about enlisting and securing their freedom and a bounty. More than two years later, however, with the military and political situation quite different, their tone had changed. “Now they say coolly that they don’t want freedom if they have to fight for it. That means they are pretty sure of having it anyway.”
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Even before the Confederate Congress authorized enlistments, some slaves found ways to communicate their aversion to fighting for their masters. In early 1865, a Richmond newspaper published a letter allegedly written by a black man to the president of the Confederate Senate:

When slaves were later questioned by Union soldiers about their willingness to bear arms for the Confederacy, they no doubt told them what they wanted to hear but there is little reason in this instance to suspect the blacks of duplicity. “My master offers me my freedom if I will take up arms,” one slave told an escaped Union prisoner, “but I have a wife and five children, and he does not offer them their freedom, and we have come to the conclusion that there is no use fighting for our masters and our freedom when any children we may have are to be made slaves, and we have thought when we get arms and are allowed to be together in regiments, we can demand freedom for our wives and children, and take it.” The day the Confederacy arms its slaves, a Georgia black assured General Sherman,
“dat day de war ends!”
Equally explicit, another slave vowed that his people would never have fought the Yankees. “I habe heard de colored folks talk of it. They knowd all about it; dey’ll turn the guns on the Rebs.”
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The Confederacy had anticipated little difficulty in mobilizing slaves for military duty. Nor did the proponents of black enlistments doubt the efficiency with which such soldiers would serve. After all, an Alabama newspaper suggested, “masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshalled to labor.” The end of the war, however, rendered such questions academic. Few slaves were ever enlisted, and none of them apparently had the opportunity to fight. Had the Confederacy managed to raise a black army, it would seem unlikely, particularly after 1863, that it could have fought with the same sense of commitment and self-pride that propelled the black troops in the Union Army. When he first heard of the act to recruit blacks for the Confederate Army, a Virginia freedman recalled, he had suddenly found himself unable to restrain his emotions. “They asked me if I would fight for my country. I said, ‘I have no country.’ ”
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W
HILE BLACKS WERE RELUCTANT
to take up arms to perpetuate the bondage of their people, many were to regret that they had not struck harder
for their liberation. If only there had been a massive upheaval, undermining the Confederacy and expediting a Union victory, what wonders that might have achieved for black self-pride. Felix Haywood, a former Texas slave, tried to sort out his thoughts about that failure.