Been in the Storm So Long (23 page)

Although the black soldier made few attempts to provoke the whites, he, too, had difficulty in containing his feelings. The position he now held, moreover, gave him a novel opportunity to demand obedience from whites and impress upon them how the old relationships had been rendered obsolete. When several “white ladies and slave oligarchs” came to Henry M. Turner at regimental headquarters to request government rations, they entered his office, he said, “in the same humiliating custom which they formerly would have expected from me.” And it gave him immense satisfaction, he confessed afterwards, to see them “crouching before me, and I a negro.” Several weeks later, Chaplain Turner accompanied his regiment as they crossed a river near Smithfield, North Carolina. Before wading through the stream, the men stripped off their clothes. “I was much amused,” Turner wrote, “to see the secesh women watching with the utmost intensity, thousands of our soldiers, in a state of nudity.”

With obvious pride and satisfaction, some black soldiers chose to visit their old masters and mistresses. After the Battle of Nashville, a nineteen-year-old black youth from Tennessee used his furlough for this purpose. His former mistress seemed happy to see him. “You remember when you were sick and I had to bring you to the house and nurse you?” she asked him. He replied affirmatively. But now, she exclaimed, “you are fighting me!” “No’m, I ain’t fighting you,” he replied, “I’m fighting to get free.”
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B
Y THE END
of the Civil War, more than 186,000 black men, most of them (134,111) recruited or conscripted in the slave states, had served in the Union Army, comprising nearly 10 percent of the total enrollment. Almost as many blacks, men and women, mostly freedmen, were employed as
teamsters, carpenters, cooks, nurses, laundresses, stevedores, blacksmiths, coopers, bridge builders, laborers, servants, spies, scouts, and guides. “This army would be like a one-handed man, without niggers,” a Union soldier conceded. “We have two rgts. of fighting nigs. and as many more of diggers.… The nigs. work all night, every night, planting guns and building breast-works.” Seldom paid (if at all), herded together and marched from their tents to work, sometimes under the watchful eyes of overseers, black military laborers often perceived little change in their lives, except for the acknowledgment of their “freedom.”
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Among both the soldiers and the laborers, the Civil War exacted a heavy price in human lives. Some one third of the black soldiers—an estimated 68,178 men—were listed as dead and missing, 2,751 of them killed in combat. For both white and black soldiers, the overwhelming majority of deaths resulted from disease rather than military action. Among the more unglamorous statistics of the Civil War is the fact that deaths from diarrhea and dysentery alone exceeded those killed in battle. And most diseases did not discriminate according to race any more than enemy fire in their devastation of the ranks. Despite the claim that blacks were less susceptible to diseases which felled whites, the death rate from disease was nearly three times as great for black soldiers as for whites.
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When blacks were first recruited, considerable doubt prevailed as to how they would perform as soldiers, particularly under enemy fire. “Many hope they will prove cowards and sneaks,” a New York newspaper perceived, while “others greatly fear it.” Two years of experience with black troops made believers of most of the doubters. The evaluations made by Union officers, while agreeing rather remarkably on the military capabilities of blacks, also revealed that the very qualities often stressed in racial stereotypes as marking blacks different from (hence “inferior” to) whites made them commendable soldiers. Since they were “more docile and obedient,” blacks were thought to be easier to control and command. “Their docility, their habits of unquestioning obedience,” one soldier observed, “pre-eminently fit them for soldiers. To a negro an order means obedience in spirit as well as letter.” Accustomed as they were to heavy menial labor, black soldiers were found to work “more constantly” and “obediently” than whites and to offer fewer “complaints and excuses.” Although blacks were considered to be excessive in their religious worship (“Their singing, praying, and shouting in camp had to be arrested, sometimes, at the point of the bayonet”), this characteristic, too, could be viewed as a military virtue. The fact that blacks were “a religious people” suggested to one Union officer “another high quality for making good soldiers,” while it prompted Major General David Hunter, who had organized the first slave regiment in South Carolina, to observe that “religious sentiment—call it fanaticism, such as you like … made the soldiers of Cromwell invincible.” The white man had also conceded to blacks a natural gift for music and rhythm, and this helped to explain their aptness for military drill and marching. “In mere drill they must beat the whites,” one soldier conceded; “for ‘time,’
which is so important an item in drilling, is a universal gift to them.” But even if blacks clearly had the potential for becoming good soldiers, the assumption prevailed that only white men could properly lead them, largely because blacks were accustomed to obeying whites and had too little regard for their own race. “They certainly need
white
officers for a while, and the best of officers, too,” a sympathetic white soldier argued, “for they will, like children, lean much on their superiors.”
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Although former slaves made up the largest portion of black troops, disagreement prevailed over whether they were better soldiers than the northern blacks who had never experienced bondage. Ignoring the question of motivation (which black commentators usually cited), a Union officer from New York thought the northern blacks had more self-reliance and came closer “to the qualities of the white man in respect to dash and energy”; several other officers in his unit concurred with this judgment and they unanimously agreed that slaves were less desirable as soldiers. The most vigorous defense of the slave as soldier was made by Colonel Higginson, whose South Carolina regiment consisted almost exclusively of recently held bondsmen. He preferred them as soldiers, he explained, because of “their greater docility and affectionateness” and “the powerful stimulus” which prompted men to fight for their own homes and families. The demeanor of his men, moreover, he considered superior to “that sort of upstart conceit which is sometimes offensive among free negroes at the North, the dandy-barber strut.” But Higginson refused to argue, as did some Union officers, that slavery with its emphasis on submission and obedience had prepared slaves for military service. “Experience proved the contrary,” he insisted. “The more strongly we marked the difference between the slave and the soldier, the better for the regiment. One half of military duty lies in obedience, the other half in self-respect. A soldier without self-respect is worthless.”
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The prevailing assessment of the black soldier in combat was that he conducted himself as well as the white man. That in itself was a substantial concession. “They seem to have behaved just as well and as badly as the rest and to have suffered more severely,” concluded a white officer who but two years earlier had warned that the use of blacks as soldiers would be a serious blunder (like “Hamlet’s ape, who broke his neck to try conclusions”). Some black soldiers deserted under fire, though proportionately fewer than in the white regiments. Much like the white soldiers, blacks complained of camp conditions, oppressive officers, and punishments out of proportion to the offenses committed—and some blacks argued that racial discrimination aggravated each of these grievances. Like the white soldiers, blacks suffered the moments of disillusionment, frustration, and weariness that are characteristic of any war, particularly a struggle as agonizing and brutal as the Civil War. “More than one half of our whole command was … sacrificed without gaining any particular object,” a black soldier remarked after a battle in which 231 of the 420 men in his outfit
had been killed or wounded. The same observation might have been made by the common soldier of any war in history.
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Both white and black soldiers shared a capacity for incredible valor (seventeen black soldiers and four black sailors were awarded Congressional Medals of Honor), battle fatigue, and outright fear. “I prayed on the battle field some of the best prayers I ever prayed in my life,” one black soldier readily confessed, and “made God some of the finest promises that ever were made.” And for some blacks, as for some whites, the level of violence and inhumanity reached in this war was too much to bear. “I sho’ wishes lots of times I never run off from de plantation. I begs de General not to send me on any more battles, and he says I’s de coward and sympathizes with de South. But I tells him I jes’ couldn’t stand to see all dem men layin’ dere dyin’ and hollerin’ and beggin’ for help and a drink of water, and blood everywhere you looks.” But when it came down to the real test, most of the black soldiers fought, and many of them died, and that was all the evidence most observers required. Nor did the black soldier who had been a slave evince any hesitation about facing his former master in the field of combat. “Our masters may talk now all dey choose,” a black soldier replied when told that slaves loved their old masters too much to fight them; “but one ting’s sartin,—
dey don’t
dare to try us
. Jess put de guns into our hans, and you’ll soon see dat we not only knows
how
to shoot, but
who
to shoot. My master wouldn’t be wuff much ef I was a soldier.”
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The white Yankee soldier gradually grew accustomed to the sight of uniformed blacks. In some regions, the initial hostility subsided when black regiments relieved the whites of fatigue and garrison duties and did a disproportionate share of the heavy labor. “Never fear that soldiers will be found objecting to negro enlistments,” a Massachusetts private noted. “One hour’s digging in Louisiana clay under a Louisiana sun, and we are forever pledged to do all we can to fill up our ranks with the despised and long-neglected race.” With additional experience, moreover, impressions of the military capabilities of blacks also became more favorable. When he first undertook to train black troops in South Carolina, Lieutenant Colonel John S. Bogert thought it would take some time “to make soldiers of my darkies” but he was determined to succeed. “I will either make soldiers of them or make them wish they were slaves again.” Two weeks later, he was confident of making a disciplined regiment out of them. “You would be surprised to see how they improve by being kindly treated, they begin to act like men & they soon feel that they are of some account & have very curious ways of showing their dignity.”
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But even as black soldiers were said to be creating “a revolution in thinking” in the Union Army, the initial sources of hostility were not so easily displaced, and deeply entrenched racial antipathies still had a way of surfacing. For some whites, the black soldiers were never more than comic relief. “There are about three regiments of darkies raised here for Wilde’s brigade,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote home, “regular Congoes with noses as broad as a plantation and lips like raw beefsteaks, Yah!”
Although some white officers warned that they would withhold their troops from any engagement in which blacks were placed in command as commissioned officers, this never became a problem. Far more serious were the racial antagonisms that erupted into bloody encounters between white and black soldiers. After one such clash at Ship Island, Mississippi, white gunners disregarded orders to cover the advance of three black companies; instead, they turned the field pieces on their black comrades.
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But such occurrences proved to be rare. The conduct of the black soldier was such as to convince even white Yankees who refused to give up their racial hatreds that military necessity dictated a policy of recognition and cooperation. “I never believed in niggers before,” a Wisconsin cavalry officer confessed, “but by Jasus, they are hell in fighting.”
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Not only did the black soldier impress many of his white comrades but he proved himself to his own people, did wonders for their racial pride, and gave them some genuine heroes and prospective leaders. “Dey fought and fought and shot down de ‘Secesh,’ and n’er a white man among ’em but two captains,” a newly freed slave boasted to one of the white missionary teachers. When Robert Smalls, hero of the
Planter
affair, visited New York City in 1862, he was acclaimed and feted by the black populace for having performed a military feat “equaled by only a few events in any other war.” The black people of his native South Carolina would honor him in the next several decades by electing him to the state legislature and to the United States Congress. But even if few blacks reached such heights, the uniform and the rifle, as Douglass had predicted, were capable of effecting significant changes in the demeanor of many black men. “Put a United States uniform on his back and the
chattel
is a
man,”
one white soldier observed. “You can see it in his look. Between the toiling slave and the soldier is a gulf that nothing but a god could lift him over. He feels it, his looks show it.”
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