Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (69 page)

The Confederate nation-state did not survive the Civil War, but the Southerners who died in its battles, and the four years of fire that it sustained in the teeth of the North’s industrial and military might, are a warning not to underestimate how close they came to succeeding. The Confederacy’s internal fractures were not more serious
than the ones other governments have lived with, nor was a nation that glamorized a Romantic aristocracy an impossibility; what made it ultimately unsustainable was the constant military pounding to which it was subjected. The Confederacy might have survived its fractures; culturally speaking, it actually did, as postwar Southerners went about converting the basic elements of Confederate nationalism—race, class, and sectional politics—into the badges of a peculiar people. What the Confederate government could not survive was the defeat of its armies in battle.
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What Jefferson Davis needed was time—time bought by military victory, time to persuade slaveholders and nonslaveholders that each served the other’s best interests, time to make the kind of mistakes in finance and domestic policy that all politicians must make when they attempt to invent a regime on untried blueprints. But time was not on the side of the Confederacy, and the hands pushing the clock were attached to soldiers in blue.

W
illard Glazier was a lithe, sharp-witted nineteen-year-old when he enlisted in the 2nd New York Cavalry in 1861. Starting out as an ordinary private, he soon climbed the ladder of promotion, and at the end of August 1863 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant for Company M of the 2nd New York. That was where his promotions ended. In a skirmish at New Baltimore, Virginia, on October 19, 1863, Glazier’s horse was shot from under him, and he was captured by Confederate cavalry.
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Just as neither North nor South had been prepared to wage war, neither had been prepared to deal with one of the major encumbrances of war, the keeping of enemy prisoners. Both governments quickly constructed elaborate exchange systems to get enemy prisoners off their hands and to retrieve their own soldiers. But the exchange systems were cumbersome, the personnel needed for running the system were sorely needed elsewhere, and more often than not the improvised prisoner camps degenerated into slow-moving pools of maltreatment, humiliation, hunger, and death. Glazier got a taste of this early on, when the Virginia militia who shoved him along the road from New Baltimore to Warrenton neatly stripped him of his watch and his overcoat, then dumped him into Libby Prison, a converted tobacco warehouse that had become Richmond’s principal holding pen for Union officers. There Glazier languished until May 1864, when Libby Prison was closed down and the inmates piled onto trains that would take them further South. Glazier then bounced from one prison camp to another in Georgia and South Carolina until he was finally delivered to a camp near
Columbia in November. There Glazier and a friend slipped into a column of paroled prisoners who were leaving the camp and made off into the woods.

Then began the most curious part of Glazier’s adventures. Without food, weapons, or even decent clothing, Glazier and his friend somehow had to find their way to Union lines from deep within rebel territory, and they had not the faintest idea of how to do it. Nevertheless, Glazier had some unsuspected allies, fashioned for him by the war and emancipation, and he recognized those allies as soon as they came down the road he was standing on. Those allies were, of course, black slaves, for in spite of the conventional wisdom up to 1863, the slaves had known all along that the war and the Yankees meant freedom, and now Willard Glazier was about to have a similar epiphany on that Carolina road. The slaves walked by him, eyeing Glazier and his friend suspiciously. “I reckon deys Yankees,” remarked one. “Golly, I hope to God dey is,” replied another. Glazier took his chance. “We are Yankees and have just escaped from Columbia,” he pleaded. “Can’t you do something for us?” The slaves stopped and laughed. “Ob course,” they replied eagerly, and one added, “I’ll do all I can for you, marster.”
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So Willard Glazier, Federal officer and prisoner of the Confederacy, became the ward of the most powerless class of people in the American republic. With black slaves as his providers and guides, Glazier and his friend were passed surreptitiously from one plantation to another. Eventually Glazier and his friend met up with two other bands of fugitive Yankee prisoners, and all them were moved by night with slave guides and sheltered by day in huts and barns. One slave family found and repaired a boat to get them across the Savannah River; another slave resoled Glazier’s worn-out shoes. Twenty miles north of Savannah, on December 15, Glazier blundered into Confederate pickets and was recaptured. Four days later he slipped away again and found his way once more to “the hut of a negro.” Occasionally he was even able to beg a meal from a hard-eyed white farmer’s wife who held no love for Confederate conscription agents and tax gatherers. A free black family near Cherokee Hill, Georgia, found him a guide named March Dasher, another free black who at last guided Glazier to Federal lines in northern Georgia on December 23, 1864.
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As a white male and an officer, Glazier was the embodiment of a social order in which white men held power and ruled over submissive white women and black slaves. But the chance of war had inverted those relationships: Willard Glazier found himself powerless and completely dependent on the leadership and goodwill of black slaves and farm women. That same chance determined Willard Glazier’s story over and over again throughout the war years, for the Civil War imposed on American society as much social disruption as it did physical destruction. Within that disruption, for one brief and bloody historical moment, an entirely new way of ordering race and gender within a republican society became possible.

After more than a century, nothing disenchants the romantic image of the Civil War as a crusade for freedom and against slavery more than the realization that white Northerners were less than enthusiastic about the Emancipation Proclamation, although emancipation helped fend off the possibility of outside intervention in the war and provided nearly two hundred thousand extra soldiers and sailors to help win it. Even among Northerners who genuinely believed that slavery was an evil, emancipation was celebrated largely for the way it redeemed the reputation of a white republic and not as a down payment on the way to civil equality to African Americans. Emancipation cured the problem of slavery, but emancipated African Americans were a problem to be dealt with in quite another way.

Even Abraham Lincoln appeared to many blacks to have signed the Emancipation Proclamation with one finger crossed behind his back, and it was clear that many Northerners (Lincoln included) believed that the next step for freedmen after emancipation was colonization to Central America or the American Southwest, or repatriation to Africa. “The African race here is a foreign and feeble element,” explained Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward—a view that was echoed by the secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, who reluctantly agreed that “the separation of the races” was unavoidable and that African Americans should seek “happier homes in other lands,” and by the Republican Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, who stated the problem of the free black with unbecoming precision: colonization was “the most beneficent yet projected for the amelioration of the African, and at the same time the relief of the people of the country from the evils of a black population in their midst.”
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This was decidedly not a view shared by free and newly freed black people, as well as being a horribly shortsighted concept of beneficence. But if numbers and influence meant anything, there did not seem at first to be much they could do about it. Out of a total population in the United States of 31,443,000 in 1860, African Americans numbered only about 4,441,000, or about 14 percent of the population, and of that number, less than 500,000 were free. Of those who were free, only a small number enjoyed anything like full participation in the political life of their communities or the republic as a whole. Still, it is one measure of the promise of liberal democracy in America that from the very beginning of the Civil War, African Americans consciously set out to make the conflict both a war against slavery and a struggle for full equality in the life of that democracy. To reach this goal meant that free blacks
in the North and newly freed slaves in the South would be forced to make alliances, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, with the unreliable and halfhearted sympathies of Northern whites. William Wilson, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, wickedly asked whether whites were as trustworthy and “
as good by nature
as we are.” If there were moments of hesitation and second thought, though, they were exceedingly rare. By adding their numbers to the white volunteers, African Americans could lay claim to “a common cause” that whites and blacks shared equally. If blacks could fight and die alongside whites, they were certainly fit to vote and work alongside them, too. “No nation ever has or ever will be emancipated from slavery,” wrote a black schoolteacher in the pages of the newspaper
Anglo-African
in 1861, “but by the sword, wielded too by their own strong arms.”
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The actual conditions in which black volunteers found themselves turned out to be something less than ideal. Both the state-recruited “colored infantry” of New England and Louisiana and the new federal United States Colored Troops were to be segregated, all-black regiments—all black, that is, except for the officer grades, which were reserved for whites. When Massachusetts governor John Andrew tried to issue a state commission as a second lieutenant to Sergeant Stephen Swails of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the two “colored” infantry regiments raised by the Bay State, the Bureau of Colored Troops obstinately refused to issue Swails a discharge from his sergeant’s rank, and Swails’s promotion was held up until after the end of the war. “How can we hope for success to our arms or Gods blessing,” raged the white colonel of the 54th, Edward Hallowell, “while we as a people are so blind to Justice?”
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Black soldiers also had their patience tried to the point of mutiny by the War Department’s decision to pay them only $10 a month (the same pay as teamsters and cooks) instead of the $13 paid to white volunteers, and to issue some black regiments inferior equipment and weapons. Medical services for black soldiers were thinner on the ground than for white volunteers, and black soldiers died from camp diseases at three times the rate of their white counterparts. Black soldiers also suffered taunts and humiliation from the white civilians whose nation they were enlisting to save, and from white soldiers whom they were supposed to fight beside. In August 1862 a mob of immigrant workers, fearful of job competition from free blacks, attacked
the Lorillard and Watson tobacco warehouses in Brooklyn (Watson’s employed only blacks, Lorillard’s employed a mix of black and white workers); the following March, an angry mob of whites burned down homes in a black neighborhood in Detroit. Other riots broke out in Troy and Buffalo, and in July 1863 savage anti-draft riots in New York City quickly turned into race riots that resulted in the murder and beatings of dozens of blacks. In November of that year, the 2nd USCT was mobbed in the streets of Philadelphia as it prepared to board a troop train for New York.
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The greatest danger posed to the black soldier, however, came from the Confederates, and not just the conventional dangers faced by all Union soldiers in combat. The Confederate government acted as early as August 1862 to frighten off any prospect of black recruitment by issuing a general order threatening that any “commissioned officer employed in drilling, organizing or instructing slaves with a view to their armed service in this war… as outlaws” would be “held in close confinement for execution as a felon”; on December 24, Jefferson Davis followed this with a proclamation warning that “all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong, to be dealt with according to the laws of said States.” What the “authorities of the respective States” had in mind was up to them, but South Carolina took the lead in proposing to put free blacks to work on “the Chesterfield coal pits” and sell any former slaves back into slavery. This required a cumbersome process of hearings and determinations, so impatient Confederates soon found shorter ways of dealing with the problem. Edmund Kirby Smith, who had overall command of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, simply advised General Richard Taylor to skip the niceties and execute black soldiers and white officers on the spot. “I hope… that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers. In this way we may be relieved from a disagreeable dilemma.”
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That attitude, combined with the explosive power of racial hatred and the blood heat of battle, could produce singularly ugly results. On April 12, 1864, the onetime slave trader and now Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest overran the small
Union garrison of Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River. Fort Pillow was defended by only 600 Union soldiers, a little more than a third of them black soldiers from the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, and after three assaults, the Confederates forced the little outpost to surrender. What happened afterward became the subject of fiercely tangled controversy, but it seems clear in retrospect that at the very least Forrest lost control of his men, who proceeded to massacre 231 Union soldiers, most of them black, after they had surrendered. A white soldier of the 13th West Tennessee (Federal) Cavalry left a graphic description of the rampage: