Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (70 page)

We all threw down our arms and gave tokens of surrender, asking for quarter… but no quarter was given. Voices were heard upon all sides, crying, “Give them no quarter; kill them; kill them; it is General Forrest’s orders.” I saw 4 white men and at least 25 negroes shot while begging for mercy, and I saw 1 negro dragged from a hollow log within 10 feet of where I lay, and as 1 rebel held him by the foot another shot him. These were all soldiers. There were also 2 negro women and 3 little children standing within 25 steps from me, when a rebel stepped up to them and said, “Yes, God damn you, you thought you were free, did you?” and shot them all. They all fell but 1 child, when he knocked it in the head with the breech of his gun.
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This was, as the commandant of the United States Colored Troops units in Tennessee remarked in a letter to his congressman, a “game… at which two can play.” In Kansas, an indignant white Federal officer in Jim Lane’s Kansas brigade learned that “one of the colored prisoners” from his unit who had been captured by Confederates in your camp “was murdered by your Soldiers.” He wanted “the body of the man who committed the dastardly act” or else “I shall hang one of the men who are prisoners in my camp.” Ultimately, Lincoln himself took a hand in the matter by promising in July 1863 that “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works.” In the face of this threat, the Confederates backed down from their plans for execution and reenslavement. Still, they refused to exchange black Federal prisoners for white Confederate ones, and so the entire prisoner exchange cartel that had been established in 1862 broke down, choking prisoner-of-war camps (which had been designed to be mere transit points before exchange) into overcrowded death swamps.
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Still, the chance to lend their own hands to the process of freedom made up in some measure for the inequities and harassment visited on African American volunteers. “It really makes one’s heart pulsate with pride as he looks upon those stout and brawny men, fully equipped with Uncle Sam’s accoutrements upon them,” wrote James Henry Gooding, a black corporal in the 54th Massachusetts, “to feel that these noble men are practically refuting the base assertions reiterated by copperheads and traitors that the black race are incapable of patriotism, valor, or ambition.”
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It also helped that the white officers of the USCT regiments were, on the whole, better-trained and better-motivated than their counterparts among the white volunteers. Since the USCT were mustered directly into federal rather than state service, officers’ commissions came through the War Department rather than through politicians in the state capitals, and the Bureau of Colored Troops quickly instituted a rigorous application and examination process to screen whites who wanted to become USCT officers. As a result, officers’ commissions in the USCT frequently went to experienced former sergeants and officers from white volunteer regiments, many of whom were ardent abolitionists who saw the USCT as the troops themselves saw it, as a lever for self-improvement.
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The ultimate proof of their faith would be in combat—although that depended on whether Union generals could actually be persuaded to let the USCT fight, instead of merely doing occupation duty or manual labor. “Can we not fight our own battles, without calling on these humble hewers of wood and drawers of water,” complained one of George Meade’s staffers. “We do not dare trust them in the line of battle.” Nathaniel Banks, however, was one of the rare abolitionists in the Union high command (although a better abolitionist than a general, as it turned out), and in May 1863 he hazarded his three all-black Louisiana Native Guard regiments on a series of attacks on Confederate fortifications at Port Hudson, Louisiana. “They answered every expectation,” Banks reported afterward, “In many respects their conduct was heroic. … The severe test to which they were subjected, and the determined manner in which they encountered the enemy, leaves upon my mind no doubt of their ultimate success.” The Philadelphia poet George Henry Boker exulted in how

Bayonet and sabre stroke

Vainly opposed their rush

Through the wild battle’s crush.

With but one thought aflush,

Driving their lords like chaff.

… All their eyes forward bent,

Rushed the Black Regiment.

“Freedom!” their battle cry,

“Freedom! or leave to die!”

Ah! and they meant the word.

… Soldiers, be just and true!

Hail them as comrades tried;

Fight with them side by side;

Never in field or tent

Scorn the Black Regiment.
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The action at Port Hudson was followed the next month by the hand-to-hand defense of a post at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, by five Union regiments, four black and one white. Even the commander of the Confederates, Henry E. McCullough, was forced to concede that “this charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy’s force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.”
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The bloodiest laurels for black soldiers were won by the cream of the black volunteers, the 54th Massachusetts, with a blue-stocking Harvard-educated colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, at its head. On July 18, 1863, Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts spearheaded an infantry attack on Battery Wagner, one of the outlying fortifications covering the land approaches to the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. A full day’s worth of bombardment by Federal gunboats off shore had failed to silence the Confederate artillery in the fort, and when the 54th raced forward to the fort’s walls, their ranks were shredded by Confederate fire. Nevertheless, the 54th swept up over the walls and into the fort, with Shaw and one of his black color sergeants dying side by side on the parapet.

The regiment advanced at quick time, changed to double-quick when at some distance on. The intervening distance between the place where the line was formed and the Fort was run over in a few minutes. When within one or two hundred yards of the Fort, a terrific fire… was poured upon them along the entire line, and with deadly results. They rallied again, went through the ditch, in which were some three feet of water, and then up the parapet. They raised the flag on the parapet, where it remained for a few minutes. Here they melted away before the enemy’s fire, their bodies falling down the slope and into the ditch.
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The 54th gamely hung on to one corner of Battery Wagner, but they were finally pushed off after a stubborn resistance. Sergeant William H. Carney staggered back from the fort with wounds in his chest and right arm, but with the regiment’s Stars and Stripes securely in his grasp. “The old flag never touched the ground, boys,” Carney gasped as he collapsed at the first field hospital he could find.
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The valor of the black troops at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Battery Wagner sent waves of amazement over the North—bemused and often condescending amazement, but amazement all the same. Abraham Lincoln, who had been as dubious about the fighting qualities of the black soldiers as other whites, now agreed that “the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” Ulysses Grant concurred. In a letter to Lincoln one month after the assault on Battery Wagner, Grant noted that “by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion as they strengthen us.”
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The ordinary Union soldier felt the same way. “The colored troops are very highly valued here & there is no apparent difference in the way they are treated,” wrote one USCT officer in Virginia. “White troops and blacks mingle constantly together & I have seen no single Evidence of dislike on the part of the soldiers. The truth is they have fought their way into the respect of all the army.” It was time, now that black soldiers had proven themselves under fire, for white Northerners to begin thinking about what was owed to African Americans at home. “The American people, as a nation, knew not what they were fighting for till recently,” wrote Corporal Gooding, but now it was clear that “there is but two results possible, one is slavery and poverty and the other is liberty and prosperity.”
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The achievements of blacks as soldiers forced on Lincoln and the federal government the question how African Americans who fought to defend the Union could any longer be denied full political equality—the right to vote, to be elected to office, to serve on juries, to benefit from publicly funded schools—in that Union. “Once let a black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” said Frederick Douglass, “let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pockets, and there is no power on earth which can deny he has won the right to citizenship in the United States.” (For Douglass, that claim had a personal tinge: two of his sons, Claude and Lewis, were with the 54th Massachusetts, and a third, Frederick junior, worked as a recruiter for the black regiments among freed slaves in Mississippi). Lincoln, who in 1858 had only been willing to endorse the
natural
equality of whites and blacks, could not reconcile asking blacks for the risk of their lives without also offering them the privileges of
civil
equality as well. “Negroes, like other people, act upon motives,” Lincoln argued in a public letter addressed to James Cook Conkling in the fall of 1863 and widely published across the North. “Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”
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The principal difficulty lay in determining where an experiment in black civil rights ought to take place. His authority as president ran only as far as the District of Columbia and the wartime zones of the army, and he had no way to unilaterally reverse state actions that denied free blacks the right to vote. That problem, however, was solved for Lincoln by the Federal navy when it seized New Orleans in April 1862 and opened most of southern Louisiana to Federal occupation by the end of the year. In the summer of 1863 Lincoln approved a plan for electing a Unionist state legislature in Louisiana that would rescind the state secession ordinance and adopt a new state constitution. In March 1864, Lincoln urged the new Unionist governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, to make some limited provision in the new state constitution for black voting rights. “I barely suggest for your private consideration,” Lincoln proposed softly (since he had no more authority as president to require things of a civilian Unionist government than he had of the old slave-state government), “whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.”
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In the event, Hahn’s constitutional convention abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude” and prohibited the legislature from making any law “recognizing the right of property in man.” It balked at granting full voting rights to blacks, however, and would only concede that in the future the legislature might consider “extending suffrage to such other persons, citizens of the United States, as by military service, by taxation to support the government, or by intellectual fitness, may be deemed entitled thereto.” But the camel’s nose was in the tent, and Lincoln had signaled that the federal government would back up any steps taken toward political equality, even if granted grudgingly and of necessity. When Lincoln sent one of his White House staffers, William O. Stoddard, to Arkansas as a federal marshal in 1864 to assist in the organization of a Unionist state government there, he enjoined Stoddard to “do all you can, in any and every way you can, to get the ballot into the hands of the freedmen!”
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It proved harder to turn the tide of Northern white opinion at home than it had been among Northern soldiers in the army, and black soldiers were the first to discover this, almost literally in the streets of Northern cities. In the great Northern urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, segregated streetcar systems immediately became a flashpoint for conflict, especially when, as in New York City, streetcar operators began throwing black soldiers off the cars and into the streets. When the widow of a black sergeant was pushed off a New York City streetcar by a policeman, a public scandal followed, with Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
growling, “It is quite time to settle the question whether the wives and children of the men who are laying down their lives for their country… are to be treated like dogs.”
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In Philadelphia, where white and black abolitionists had been demanding an end to segregation on the city rail lines since 1859, a coalition of Republican and black civic organizations appealed to the city’s Democratic mayor, and then finally to the state legislature, to end racial discrimination in public accommodations throughout Pennsylvania. In occupied New Orleans, fights broke out between streetcar drivers and black soldiers and were resolved only by a compromise that allowed black officers to ride with whites while relegating black enlisted men to the “star cars” (blacks-only streetcars marked with a black star). In Washington, D.C., the veteran black abolitionist Sojourner Truth deliberately challenged a whites-only rule on the city streetcars by standing at streetcar stops and screeching “I want to ride!” at the top of her lungs. When a conductor on another streetcar tried to throw Truth off the car, he dislocated her shoulder; she promptly hired a lawyer, sued the streetcar company, and forced the company to abandon its racial discrimination policies. “Before the trial was ended,” Truth announced sardonically, “the inside of the cars looked like pepper and salt.”
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