They Know Everything that Happens

Blacks throughout the country – North and South, free and enslaved – rejoiced as word of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation spread. Despite its limited nature, it was astonishing to see such a document coming from a president who had once supported a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery forever. In little more than a year, blacks had forced Lincoln and the country further toward the right side of history. They still had some way to go, but black folk would continue pointing the way. The Emancipation Proclamation may have been signed with Lincoln’s pen, but blacks were its author. They would take ownership of the document and make it much more than it was. Within days of the preliminary Proclamation’s announcement on September 22, slaves were escaping to Union lines and claiming its promise of freedom months before it went into effect. The editors of the New York Times wrote on September 28 that there must surely be “a far more rapid and secret diffusing of intelligence and news through the plantations than was ever dreamed of at the North.”

On January 1, 1863, at prayer meetings across the South and mass meetings across the North, blacks and their white abolitionist allies celebrated the day of “Jubilee.” A huge crowd packed Boston’s Music Hall for a celebratory concert.¹ At nearby Tremont Temple, there were three meetings that day – morning, afternoon, and evening – all of which packed the house. Among the speakers were black abolitionists William Wells Brown, John Rock, and Frederick Douglass. William C. Nell – journalist, author, and, as a Boston postal clerk, the first black ever to serve in the federal civil service – spoke of the day as a turning point in the lives of enslaved Americans. “New Year’s day – proverbially known throughout the South as ‘Heart-Break Day,’ from the trials and horrors peculiar to sales and separations of parents and children, husbands and wives – by this Proclamation is henceforth invested with new significance and imperishable glory in the calendar of time.”

Even as Nell praised the Emancipation Proclamation, he also took a jab at Lincoln’s colonization plan. Although he never mentioned the word colonization, Nell’s audience understood his meaning in the lines of verse he quoted.

There’s a magical tie to the land of our home,

Which the heart cannot break, though the footsteps may roam;

Be that land where it may, at the line or the pole,

It still holds the magnet that draws back the soul;

‘Tis loved by the free man, ‘tis loved by the slave,

‘Tis dear to the coward, more dear to the brave.

Ask any the spot they like best on the earth,

And they’ll answer with pride, ‘Tis the land of our birth.²

Frederick Douglass spoke at Tremont that afternoon, then remained waiting for news from the telegraph office that Lincoln had signed the Proclamation. Evening came but still no word. “We waited on each speaker,” Douglass recalled, “keeping our eye on the door.” At eleven o’clock, with no news yet, Douglass shouted to the crowd, “We won’t go home till morning.” “In view of the past,” he later wrote, “it was by no means certain that it would come.” Finally, a messenger arrived with word that the deed was done. “I never saw Joy before,” said Douglass. “Men, women, young and old, were up; hats and bonnets were in the air.”³

To spread word of the Proclamation in Mississippi, enslaved people formed an organization that freedman George Washington Albright remembered as “the 4-Ls – Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League.” Albright, who later served as a Mississippi state senator, was a runner for the 4-Ls, traveling “about the plantations within a certain range” and speaking at “small meetings in the cabins.” “The plantation owners tried to keep the news from us,” said Albright, but it was no use. Such efforts as those of the 4-Ls and other grapevine telegraph operations kept slaves well informed, as they had been doing since the war’s outbreak. As early as May 1861, one Louisiana planter exclaimed to a visitor, “D—n the niggers, they know more about politics than most of the white men. They know everything that happens.”⁴

Even slaves in the border states and occupied South, where the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply, claimed the document as their own. Along the Union-held Virginia tidewater, more than 5,000 enslaved people, many of them from area plantations, gathered at Norfolk on January 1 to celebrate the Proclamation. A few weeks later in Tennessee, by then almost completely under federal control, one Union officer wrote of a “large number of contrabands now finding their way into our camps. … Whole families of them are stampeding and leaving their masters.” In federally controlled areas of southern Louisiana, some slaves refused to work, insisting that they were free. Others demanded wages. In Plaquemines Parish, slaves on one plantation drove off the overseer and claimed the estate for themselves. Planters in Terrebonne Parish complained to Union officers that blacks were traveling freely, sometimes by rail, and congregating on deserted plantations, all “in defiance of the orders of their masters.”⁵

Weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation was official, a reporter who witnessed the scale of black resistance wrote from southern Louisiana that slavery was “forever destroyed and worthless no matter what Mr. Lincoln or anyone else may say on the subject.” Within months of the Proclamation taking effect, whites in Tennessee were admitting the same. “It matters not what may have been our opinions upon this subject, or whether we prefer a different state of things,” wrote twenty Tennessee slaveholders to Secretary of War Stanton. Nor did it matter that the Proclamation held no force in Tennessee. “The destruction of Negro Slavery in this country is an accomplished and immutable fact.”⁶

In Missouri, slaves headed for the neighboring free state of Kansas by the hundreds. One witness estimated the daily out-migration in his section of the state at between fifty and a hundred. “They emigrate during the night, in squads or families, accompanied generally by a span of good mules and a lumber wagon with whatever portables they can seize upon.”⁷ Near Lexington, Missouri, a local man recorded the flight in his diary.

At sunrise this morning Mr Wallace came over to see if we had lost our team or any thing last night. Told us all of his negros had gone, nine, taken his oxen and wagon. In a short time Mr Bellis came by, said his waggon harness and hoarses wer stolen last night. I went in town. Doc Hassell told me all of his, two, negros wer gone, Judge Stratton lost all his (two). Brigadire General Vaughn lost two, Mr Parrner, Mr Packard, Mrs White and many others lost thare negros besides many teams wer stolen by them. Mr Musselman came in town and stated abought 80 negros passed his neighbourhood this morning on thare way to Kansas.⁸

A slave patrol tried to turn back one band of fugitives from Munroe, Missouri, but “the negroes being resolute and about to show fight,” the patrol backed down.⁹

Near Paducah, Kentucky, one slaveholder complained to a Union officer of “the almost daily departure of slaves from their owners.” In Maryland, slaves pretending to be refugees from behind Confederate lines poured into Washington and Baltimore. From Salisbury, Maryland, the commander of an Ohio regiment wrote to his superiors that escaping slaves were a constant annoyance. “They come to me for protection, and refuse to go back to their masters. … The master claims them under the laws of Maryland – And they claim they are fugitives.”¹⁰

Figure 3.1. Although the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Confederate South, slaves in the Union South made it their own. They headed for free states or Union camps by the tens of thousands, claiming to be from behind Confederate lines. Federal officers had no way of knowing any different. Slaveholders tried to stop the exodus, but to little effect. A slave patrol halted one band of fugitives in Missouri, but “the negroes being resolute and about to show fight,” the patrol backed down. Image from William Still, The Underground Railroad (1872).

Slaveholders throughout the border states had much the same difficulty recovering escapees. Missouri slaveholders protested to the governor that when they saw their slaves “in camp or around the Camp, the Commander will not do anything. … no matter what proof the master offers, the negroes say that they belong to secessionists.” Colonel C. Maxwell, commanding U. S. forces in southwestern Kentucky, freely admitted that “no distinction is made between the loyal and disloyal [slave] owner.”¹¹

Some slaveholders tried to take matters into their own hands. When the commander at Benton Barracks, Missouri, refused to assist in recovering slaves, the slaveholders replied “that they knew what to do.” When they tried to take their “property” by force, other fugitives intervened and a wild melee broke out. The slaveholders were nearly killed. One officer stationed in Kentucky curtly remarked that slaveholders should keep their slaves at home if they wished to keep them at all.¹²

That was easier said than done. Slaves who escaped to Union camps frequently armed themselves and returned home to recover family and friends. A slaveholder in Jackson, Missouri, protested to the commander of federal forces in the state that “hundreds [of slaves] from this and the adjoining Counties have escaped and sought protection … at Camp Girardeau.” Whenever the fugitives wished to release anyone from bondage, they would “issue out from that place … armed” and free slaves by force as they went. “Many instances of that kind have occurred.”¹³

Unoffending Negroes Brutally Assailed

Black folk throughout the country reacted to the Emancipation Proclamation much as they had to the war itself. They made the most they could of it, forcing a response in the process. The Proclamation simply reflected that reality, with blacks welcoming the document and pushing it far beyond its stated limits.

Reaction to emancipation among many northern whites could hardly have been less welcoming. On the contrary, the Proclamation fed their racist fears. Large segments of the white working class were by no means convinced that freedom would keep blacks in the South. It might only free them to migrate north. Democrats had tapped into those fears and secured significant gains in the fall 1862 elections. When the results came in, a white New Jersey soldier took them as a happy sign “that the North is not ruled by a set of infernal fanatics and nigger worshippers.” He was probably just as pleased to see New Jersey’s newly elected legislature, with support from the governor, promptly declare the Emancipation Proclamation illegal.¹⁴

Such attitudes were widespread among white Union soldiers. A New York captain wrote that his men were “much dissatisfied” with the Emancipation Proclamation. To them, the conflict had become a “nigger war,” and they were all “anxious to return to their homes for it was to preserve the Union that they volunteered.” An Indiana private wrote from Mississippi that his comrades “will not fite to free the niger … there is a Regment her that say they will never fite untill the proclamation is with drawn there is four of the Capt[ains] in our Regt sent in there Resignations and one of the Liutenants there was nine in Comp. G tride to desert.”¹⁵

One white soldier who had voted for Lincoln in 1860 threatened to desert so that “the negro worshippers might fight it out themselves.” James McPherson’s study of letters from Union soldiers suggests that prior to 1863, not three in ten felt that ending slavery should be a war aim. Sergeant William Pippey of Boston thought there were far fewer than that. “I don’t believe there is one abolitionist in one thousand in the army.” The few who held abolitionist views usually keep their opinions to themselves. When Henry Wooten, an enlisted man from New York, spoke up for abolitionism early in the war, one of his comrades shot him.¹⁶

For a variety of reasons, the Emancipation Proclamation among them, thousands of soldiers deserted during the winter of 1862–63. In January, when Joe Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac, hundreds were deserting every day. His rolls showed 25 percent of the men had already left. It was the same everywhere. February’s compiled reports for all Union armies showed a third of the troops absent. Private Adam Pickel of Pennsylvania wrote that month, “If it were not treason to tell the truth I would say that the whole army would run home if they had the chance.”¹⁷

With the November 1862 elections behind him, Lincoln reacted to the wave of desertion by calling on Congress to pass a draft act. Congress had authorized militia drafts the previous summer, and Lincoln himself had imposed recruitment quotas on the states. Neither measure was effective enough in bringing new recruits to replace losses from death and desertion. So on March 3, 1863, Congress enacted compulsory military service.

Draft riots erupted across the North that spring and summer, fueled by white animosity toward being forced to fight in an abolition war. That wealthy men could avoid the draft by paying a $300 exemption fee when working folk barely saw such wages in a year led to cries of “rich man’s war!” Democrats easily played on widespread anger, fanning the flames of antidraft sentiment and racial hatred. Republicans responded by pleading patriotism, calling those who opposed the draft traitors. Neither party expressed much sympathy for blacks.¹⁸

Fictitious or overblown “negro outrages” were often the focal point of racist rhetoric. Accusations ranged from assault to rape and murder, with Democrats calling such crimes the inevitable result of “Black Republican” rule. In reality, blacks were more often victims of white violence. That March, as a black man in Detroit was being taken to jail, accused of an “outrage” upon a white orphan girl, angry whites tried to grab him. After being warned off by police, the rioters, estimated at several thousand, rampaged through the city’s black neighborhoods “with the cry of death and vengeance.” Businesses owned by or employing blacks were special targets of the mob. One cooper shop between Fort and Lafayette streets was bombarded with brickbats and set alight. Rioters caught one of the shop’s black workers and beat him nearly to death with a shovel. They chopped another to death with an axe.¹⁹

Blacks throughout the North felt the weight of anti-emancipation and antidraft backlash in early 1863. To make matters worse, failed labor strikes in Boston, Brooklyn, Albany, Cleveland, and Chicago

Figure 3.2. Most northerners bitterly opposed efforts to resettle refugees in their neighborhoods. “Massachusetts don’t want them,” reported the Springfield Daily Republican in 1862. “No free state wants them.” In the summer of 1863, when government agents tried to draft whites to fight what many were calling a “nigger war,” riots broke out all across the North. Mobs in New York City went on a week-long rampage, attacking any blacks they could find. On Clarkson Street, the rioters lynched William Jones and set his quivering body afire. Image from New York Illustrated News, July 25, 1863.

were all blamed on black competition. White strikers in Buffalo killed several blacks and injured many others. Irish longshoremen along New York’s East River “set out upon a Negro hunt.” They went after black workers along the docks, “pummeled them without mercy,” then spread out through the ward attacking black porters, cartmen, and laborers. In May, violence again broke out on the docks when “a number of unoffending negroes were brutally assailed while quietly pursuing their labors.”²⁰

Blacks in New York City were even more brutally assailed during the draft riots that summer. In July’s nearly week-long rampage, white mobs beat, burned, tortured, and killed as many blacks as they could lay their hands on. Three blacks walking home after work on the riot’s first evening were attacked on Varick Street in the Eight Ward. Two quickly escaped. The other was beaten several times – to shouts of “Kill the nigger! Kill the black son of a bitch!” – during a chase that went all the way to Clarkson Street. There the crowd caught sight of an unsuspecting black man named William Jones who had come out to buy a loaf of bread. The rioters grabbed Jones, hanged him from the nearest tree, then set his quivering body on fire. William Williams, a black seaman who stopped to ask for directions in the Ninth Ward, was beaten nearly unconscious. As he lay helpless on the street, some of the rioters threw rocks at him. One rowdy kicked at his eyes. Another picked up a heavy flagstone and slammed it down on Williams’s chest. Police finally arrived, put Williams in a cart, and took him to New York Hospital where he lingered for two hours before death ended his agony.²¹

Most blacks stayed indoors, some preparing to defend themselves should the mob attack. In a house on Thompson Street, eight women banded together, determined to make their stand in the kitchen. Using several large pots, they brewed a concoction of water, soap, and ashes that they called “the King of Pain.” William Wells Brown found the defiant women gathered around the boilers with dippers in their hands. “How will you manage if they attempt to come into this room,” Brown asked. “We’ll all fling hot water on ‘em, and scald their very hearts out,” came the reply. Brown further inquired, “Can you all throw water without injuring each other?” “O yes, honey,” they said, “we’s been practicin’ all day.”²²

These women represented blacks by the hundreds of thousands who were ready to fight – in or out of the army. The army was where Lincoln needed them, and his Proclamation had its intended effect on black men. They flooded into recruiting offices across the North and flocked to Union lines across the South, tens of thousands of them eager to enlist.

We Will Fight for Our Rights and Liberty

Frederick Douglass was among the most enthusiastic supporters of black enlistment. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open,” he told northern blacks as he urged them to arms. “One gallant rush … will fling it wide.” Two of Douglass’s sons joined that rush. So did nearly 200,000 other black men, along with at least a dozen black women disguised as men, who enlisted in the Union’s army and navy. The vast majority were former slaves.²³

Despite the eagerness of so many to serve, some former slaves were reluctant to exchange one kind of servitude for another, much less fight for a government whose commitment to their freedom seemed so tentative. They were sometimes given no choice but to enlist. Recruiting companies in New Orleans seized blacks off the streets and forced them to serve. In York County, Virginia, a shoemaker with a wife and three children to support was taken by force. General David Hunter so often resorted to heavy-handed coercion in trying to get recruits in South Carolina that some of the conscripts deserted. Others were more resigned to their fate. Jacob Forrester of Union-occupied Fernandina, Florida, told recruiters that “if I was compelled to go, I would go, for I was no better to die than any other man.” Still, resentment persisted. Solomon Lambert, drafted in Arkansas at the age of fifteen, was sure that emancipation came not because of any altruistic motive white northerners had but only because Union ranks began “to get slim.”²⁴

When blacks voluntarily enlisted, they did so for their own reasons. “Liberty is what we want and nothing shorter,” wrote a Louisiana man. “We will fight for our rights and liberty we care nothing about the union we have been in it Slaves for over two hundred And fifty years.”²⁵ At a “war meeting” of former slaves on St. Simons Island, Georgia, a northern correspondent witnessed several speakers, including one black man, trying to draw new recruits.

They were asked to enlist for pay, rations and uniform, to fight for their country, for freedom and so forth, but not a man stirred. But when it was asked them to fight for themselves, to enlist to protect their wives and children from being sold away from them, and told of the little homes which they might secure to themselves and their families in after years, they all rose to their feet, the men came forward and said “I’ll go,” and the women shouted, and the old men said “Amen.”²⁶

That blacks tended to enlist more for personal than patriotic reasons had much to do with the way they viewed whites in general, not just slaveholders. The treatment many received at the hands of Union soldiers did little to alter their suspicion of northern whites. Most northerners blamed not only slaveholders but slaves as well for the war. The weight of that resentment could fall hard on blacks who sought refuge with the Federals. For some it could be deadly. James W. Hildreth of the Fourth New York Heavy Artillery believed that blacks were better off in slavery. Outside slavery, it was best simply to kill them. His comrades agreed. When a black man showed up in their camp, he was met with the cry “Kill him!” The soldiers almost clubbed the poor man to death.²⁷

In most cases, mistreatment of blacks by white Union soldiers was more casual, although hardly less cruel. Drunken Federals occupying Alexandria, Virginia, shot blacks in the streets for amusement. Some Indiana soldiers entertained themselves by shoving a black child into a large cask of molasses. The boy nearly suffocated before he could clear his nostrils and mouth. One white company set up camp on a plantation and found entertainment locking terrified black children in a dark store room. A bemused sergeant recalled that “such a yell of terror as they set up, Pandemonium never heard! They shrieked, groaned, yelled, prayed, and pulled their wool!”²⁸

Freedman Sam Word of Arkansas recalled years after the war his mother’s first disappointing encounter with federal troops. Although she had little of value in her shack, among her few prized possessions were her quilts. “One day a Yankee soldier climbed in the back window and took some of the quilts. He rolled em up and was walking out of the yard when mother saw him and said, ‘Why you nasty, stinkin’ rascal. You say you come down here to fight for the niggers, and now you’re stealin’ from em.’” The thief yelled back, “You’re a G— D— liar, I’m fightin’ for $14 a month and the Union.”²⁹

To supplement their meager income, soldiers occasionally captured fugitive slaves and sold them to slavecatchers. John Oliver, a free black carpenter from Virginia who had moved north before the war, witnessed such kidnappings in Norfolk. Working as a teacher among Virginia fugitives in 1863, Oliver wrote to his sponsors at the American Missionary Association that he was himself afraid to walk the streets after dark for fear of Union soldiers. “Human life,” said Oliver, “is most terabely insecure in Norfolk, for the Colored people.”³⁰

For black women, there was the additional danger of rape. From early in the war, as Union forces moved into Confederate territory, black residents began reporting “outrages.” One complaint from South Carolina detailed a rape committed by three drunken officers. In another case, Private Adolph Bork raped a “woman of color” named Susan. When she refused his advances, as Susan testified, Bork “took out his revolver and said, ‘God damn you, I will force you to do it.’ He said he would blow me to pieces if I didn’t let him do it.” Bork was eventually executed by firing squad, not for the crime of rape but for shooting another soldier.³¹

Rape or attempted rape of a woman with any degree of African ancestry was hardly considered a crime at all. Private Patrick Manning of New Hampshire assaulted a “quadroon” named Clara Grier, who testified at his court-martial, “He took hold of me and attempted to throw me down and I hollered and he kicked me. He asked me if I wanted five dollars. I said no. He asked me if he could stay with me. I said no.” The court found Manning not guilty of attempted rape, but for other crimes sentenced him to three years at hard labor wearing a ball and chain.³²

Whether by intent or neglect, rarely were any soldiers brought to justice for abusing blacks. And the higher one’s rank, the less likely was prosecution. When General William T. Sherman’s army marched through Georgia, a single column reported 17,000 blacks trailing behind. That so many slaves took flight to follow Sherman was more a reflection of their desire for freedom than of any love they had for Union troops. Few were under any illusion that “Uncle Billy,” as Sherman’s men affectionately called him, held any great affection for them. If any did, they were soon disappointed. With Confederate cavalry hot on their heels, Sherman pulled up his pontoon bridges after crossing Ebenezer Creek near Savannah, leaving more than 500 terrified refugees stranded on the opposite bank. Some were shot down by pursuing Rebels. Others, with children clinging to their backs, jumped into the swollen creek and drowned. Survivors were rounded up and carried back to their owners. Reflecting on the callousness of his army’s role in the affair, one appalled Union soldier asked, “Where can you find in all the annals of plantation cruelty anything more completely inhuman and fiendish than this?” Such expressions of sympathy for blacks were infrequent among white Union soldiers.³³

What they did frequently express was a deep aversion to serving in the army with black soldiers. As one Pennsylvania sergeant wrote, “We don’t want to fight side and side by the nigger. We think we are too superior a race for that.” A Michigan corporal insisted that white men were “superior to niggers” and that he did not want “to go through the rough life of a soldier and perhaps get shot, for a d—d nigger.” After white Union soldiers at Plymouth, North Carolina, heard rumors that black troops were being sent from Massachusetts, they threatened to “throw down their arms.” An Indiana private wrote home to his parents that “if old Abe arms them niggers I will quit and go South.”³⁴ Few went South, but many did desert.

Of those who stayed, most came to abolitionism grudgingly. Some refused to call themselves abolitionists at all. “I am no abolitionist,” insisted an Ohio soldier, “in fact dispise the word.” But, as did so many others, he came to see that “as long as slavery exists … there will be no permanent peace for America. … Hence I am in favor of killing slavery.” An Indiana sergeant wrote to his wife that he would support freeing the slaves “if it will only bring the war to an end any sooner I am like the fellow that got his house burned by the guerillas he was in for emancipation subjugation extermination and hell and damnation. We are in war and anything to beat the south.”³⁵

Jacob Allen, a white abolitionist in the Union army, knew how his comrades felt about blacks and worried that their new antislavery feelings might not last. “Though these men wish to abolish slavery,” he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, “it is not from any motive outside of their own selfishness; and is there not a possibility that at some not very distant day, these old rank prejudices, that are now lulled to sleep by selfish motives, may again possess these men and work evil?”³⁶ Frederick Douglass was worried too. What the government could do, it could try to undo. Might emancipation be in danger if the political winds turned against it? Barely a month after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Douglass voiced his concern before an assembly in New York.

Much as I value the present apparent hostility to Slavery at the North, I plainly see that it is less the outgrowth of high and intelligent moral conviction against Slavery, as such, than because of the trouble its friends have brought upon the country. I would have Slavery hated for that and more. A man that hates Slavery only for what it does to the white man, stands ready to embrace it the moment its injuries are confined to the black man.³⁷

For the moment, however, proslavery Confederates were the much greater threat.

Entering the Army by Hundreds and Thousands

On January 5, 1863, four days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis issued an enslavement proclamation under the heading “An Address to the People of the Free States.” White northerners, he charged, had “degraded” themselves by allying with blacks. His government would redeem white honor by robbing all blacks of their freedom. As of February 22, 1863, Davis declared, “all free Negroes in the Southern Confederacy shall be placed on the slave status, and be deemed to be chattels, they and their issue forever.” Any black Union soldier captured in combat would be subject to enslavement.³⁸

The threat of enslavement was little deterrence to those whom the Confederacy already considered slaves. Blacks continued escaping by the tens of thousands and enlisting with the Federals. Charles Grandy of Virginia saw the war as answering his prayers for freedom. As soon as he saw a chance to get away, he and a friend headed for Union lines. After several narrow escapes, they made it to Norfolk and enlisted. When an Alabama slave named Ned prayed aloud for freedom and was severely beaten for it, he escaped and joined the Union army. Soon after, Ned sent a letter to his former owner, Tom White, telling him where he was and daring White to come and take him.³⁹

Slavery was still legal in the border states, and only free blacks could legally enlist. But that did not stop slaves from enlisting. So badly were their services needed that all they had to do was show up at a recruiting station claiming to be free. Enrollment officers trying to meet their quotas simply accepted blacks at their word. Union forces in Missouri were in such need of recruits that they accepted any able-bodied black man of military age, free or slave, promising freedom for those still enslaved and compensation for their owners. Much the same policy applied in Maryland. Slaveholders protested bitterly, claiming that their slaves were faithful and would not leave “unless enticed or forced away.” “This is a delusion,” wrote General William Birney of Camp Stanton, Maryland. “I have yet to see a slave of this kind.”⁴⁰

To appease Kentucky slaveholders, Lincoln exempted their state from efforts to recruit blacks, but that hardly mattered to the enslaved. Freedwoman Mary Crane, born in Kentucky, recalled that her father “and most all of the other younger slave men left the farms to join the Union army.” Freedman George Washington Buckner recalled the night that his mother awoke her children and said “Get up and tell your uncles goodbye. … They were starting away to fight for their liberties, and we were greatly impressed.”⁴¹

Since they could not legally enlist in Kentucky, escapees headed for neighboring states. A group of Todd County slaveholders complained to Kentucky’s federal adjutant-general that several hundred slaves had escaped to the nearby town of Clarksville, Tennessee, where many of them enlisted. “They are still going,” grumbled the slaveholders, “in large numbers.” It was the same on Kentucky’s northern border, so much so that it seemed slavery might soon expire in the state. “The Great Deep of Slavery in Kentucky is broken up,” wrote a resident of Evansville, Indiana, “and the fragments are rapidly drifting northward across the Ohio River. The Men are entering the Union Army by hundreds and thousands – their wives and children, following their husbands.”⁴²

Kentucky slaveholders tried to save some remnant of slavery by hiring armed patrols to intercept runaways. One slave in Taylor County was caught and “badly whipped.” Another in Adair County was “subjected to the most unmerciful beating” for trying to enlist. In Nelson County, patrols killed a number of blacks trying to escape and join the Union army. Blacks were not the only victims of proslavery vigilantes. A deputy provost marshal in Spencer County was severely beaten for seeking black recruits. An enrolling agent in LaRue County, was, according to one report, “stripped, tied to a tree and cow-hided for enlisting slaves.” Trying to curb the violence, and because the recruits were badly needed, the War Department ended Kentucky’s black recruiting exemption in early 1864. Violence continued, but so did black volunteering. Nearly 60 percent of Kentucky’s military-aged black men enlisted, the largest proportion of any slave state.⁴³

Black men from the free states, unhampered by slaveholders, joined the army at even higher rates. Seventy percent of all northern black men of military age served, roughly three times the percentage for northern whites. Despite continuing objections to blacks serving in the military, some northern governors saw in black recruits an opportunity to help fill their draft quotas and reduce casualties among whites. Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts took a leading role, even casting his recruiting net out of state. Pennsylvania, which lagged in forming black regiments, became a prime recruiting ground. One black abolitionist enrolled dozens of men for Massachusetts regiments, much to the dismay of Pennsylvania whites. In April 1863, the Chambersburg Valley Spirit, a Democratic paper that had only weeks earlier voiced opposition to enlisting blacks, now wrote that “we scarcely like the idea of their being credited to Massachusetts, and thus filling up her quota under the last draft, while Pennsylvania was compelled to fill her quota, under the same draft, with free white male citizens.” Pennsylvania eventually furnished more black men for the Union army than any other free state, although many served in units from other states.⁴⁴

Although a few blacks had earlier joined existing white units, in January 1863, Secretary of War Stanton ordered that black recruits be placed in all-black regiments. A further stipulation, one that black leaders vigorously protested, was that only whites could be commissioned as officers in black regiments, although the Louisiana Native Guards already had black officers. Stanton and other administration officials justified the white officers only restriction by arguing that since blacks officially had no prior military service, there were no blacks qualified to oversee training. But that reasoning did not apply to white regiments. Stanton failed to acknowledge that hundreds of inexperienced whites served as officers, some even as generals. Nor would Stanton recognize that since 1850, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, northern blacks had formed any number of unofficial militias, effectively led and well-trained by black officers.⁴⁵

The injustice of having blacks serve in separate units led by white officers so enraged some Boston blacks that they organized a campaign against enlistment. So effective were their efforts that most of Boston’s eligible black men refused to serve in the state’s first black regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry. For others, military service seemed to offer an opportunity to press their struggle forward by some degree even if it was not to the degree they wished. Despite their disgust at the army’s inequitable treatment, leading black New Englanders such as James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, Charles Lenox Remond, Martin Delany, and John Langston became active recruiters for the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry regiments, the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Infantry, and the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery.⁴⁶

The objection of most whites to appointing blacks as officers stemmed more from racism than anything else. To officially recognize any black man as “an officer and a gentleman” would not only elevate his status above that of white enlisted men, but it might also potentially place him in authority over whites. Although blacks could serve as noncommissioned officers (corporals and sergeants) within their own units, the army sought to maintain the distinction between “man” and “gentleman” along racial lines.⁴⁷

Black soldiers vigorously spoke out against the injustice of denying them any hope of being led by black officers or becoming officers themselves. “We want black commissioned officers,” wrote a sergeant to The Liberator. Although there were some white officers who treated their black troops with respect, many others did not. “We want men whose hearts are truly loyal to the rights of man. … we want simple justice. … Can [we] have confidence in officers who read the Boston Courier [an anti-emancipation newspaper] and talk about ‘Niggers’?” Two sergeants of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts boldly wrote to Stanton asking permission to raise a field artillery unit to be led by black officers.⁴⁸

Some few white officers who supported black efforts to gain commissions ignored protocol and granted them field promotions. After an inspection tour, one officer reported that Captain James M. Williams, heading the Fifth Kansas Cavalry Regiment, had black officers leading one of his companies. “Laying aside the question as to the policy or propriety of making soldiers of the Negroe,” he wrote, “I must say that the inspection was highly satisfactory – They exhibit a proficiency in the manual and in company evolutions truly surprising and the best company is the one officered by black men.”⁴⁹

Stanton refused to be influenced by earnest petitions and glowing reports. During 1863 and 1864, he authorized commissions for only about two dozen blacks as surgeons and chaplains. Surgeons carried the rank of major. Chaplains held an undefined rank, usually understood to be between the ranks of major and captain. Whatever the case, both positions were outside the chain of command. Even those commissions were granted reluctantly and sparked loud complaints from white officers and enlisted men. Still, some blacks did gain field commissions from local commanders eager for their services as recruiters among emancipated former slaves. Through it all, blacks served well as noncommissioned officers on combat duty. So lauded were they by their white officers and so persistent were their demands for promotion that in the war’s closing weeks, Stanton finally relented and authorized more black commissions.⁵⁰

Although tens of thousands of black troops eventually proved themselves under fire, so strong was prejudice against their abilities that it seemed at first that they might never be used for anything but menial labor. William T. Sherman bluntly told a recruiter that blacks were “not the equal of the white man.” According to Sherman, blacks should “be used for some side purposes and not be brigaded with our white men.” Most other officers felt the same way. They set black soldiers to building fortifications, hauling carts, or digging latrines – anything that might rob them of an opportunity to earn the respect that came with combat service. In some regiments, the colonel was “Ole Massa.” Squads were “work gangs,” and their officers “nigger drivers.” The soldiers may as well have been slaves.⁵¹

Such attitudes persisted even in the face of early reports lauding the value of black soldiers. As early as January 1863, Colonel T. W. Higginson, commanding a regiment of former slaves recruited mainly along the southeastern tidewater, found black troops indispensable. “They know the country, while white troops do not,” he wrote after a successful raid along the Georgia-Florida coast.

Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight they are fighting for their homes and families, and they show the resolution and the sagacity which a personal purpose gives. It would have been madness to attempt, with the bravest white troops, what I have successfully accomplished with black ones. Everything, even to the piloting of the vessels and the selection of the proper points for cannonading, was done by my own soldiers. Indeed the real conductor of the whole expedition up the Saint Mary’s was Corporal Robert Sutton of Company G, formerly a slave upon the Saint Mary’s River, a man of extraordinary qualities, who needs nothing but a knowledge of the alphabet to entitle him to the most signal promotion. In every instance when I followed his advice the predicted result followed, and I never departed from it, however slightly, without finding reason for subsequent regret.

The men’s performance was such that “no officer in this regiment now doubts that the key to the successful prosecution of this war lies in the unlimited employment of black troops.”⁵²

The value of black troops also became obvious to Union officers at Washington, North Carolina, after Confederates began siege operations. They did not have enough white soldiers to man their defensive perimeter, so they armed all the town’s able-bodied black men and put them on the line. “This was our first experience with armed negroes,” wrote one Union soldier, who recalled “how quietly it was submitted to by many whites who had loudly declared ‘they never would fight side of a nigger!’ Whitworth shots, exploding shells, and bullet tz-z-zps were wonderfully persuasive arguments on such a question.”⁵³

Despite the obvious need for black troops and clear evidence of their skill, strong prejudice against using them remained. So certain were some departments that their black troops would never see combat that no weapons were issued. “Instead of the musket,” complained one black soldier, “it is the spad and the Whelbarrow and the Axe.” Charlie Davenport, a Mississippi freedman, recalled that when his father enlisted at Vicksburg, “they put a pick in his hand instead of a gun. … He worked a heap harder for his Uncle Sam than he’d ever done for the master.” An elderly slave named Moses told a Union officer that “some of our bucks run away and enlisted board a gun-boat, and expected to be treated just like white men. They put those bucks to shovel coal and working before a hot fire, and didn’t even give them good hog and hominy.” “If I had my way,” he insisted, “I’d be on the Canada side. The colored man is safe there.”⁵⁴

“The duty performed is of the hardest kind,” wrote Captain Edmund Fowler of the “very arduous fatigue duty” his black company was ordered to perform. “The men are nearly used up. I have quite a number sick, at times I have had to put the sick on duty in order to make out the number called for.”⁵⁵ Such treatment, even for the sick, was hardly uncommon. Nor was it uncommon for sick men to be worked literally to death. A black soldier who had been working with his comrades in what he called “the most horable swamps in Louisiana stinking and misery,” wrote to President Lincoln asking for justice.

We are treated in a Different maner to what others Rigiments is. … Men are Call to go on thes fatiuges wen sum of them are scarc Able to get Along the Day Before on the sick List And Prehaps weeks to And By this treatment meney are throwen Back in sickness wich thay very seldom get over. … Meney of them old and young was Brave And Active. But has Bin hurrided By and ignominious Death into Eternity. But I hope God will Presearve the Rest Now in existence to Get Justice and Rights.⁵⁶

A medical review board found that more than a third of the men in three black Missouri regiments had died of unknown illness, brought on mostly by overwork and physical abuse. Most of those left alive were in a sorry state. The board recommended that almost 200 men be discharged on account of poor health. A newly appointed post commander improved conditions. He provided better sanitation and diet and reduced “heavy labor, in mud and water.” For most of the original volunteers, it was too late. They were either dead or their health ruined, some beyond recovery.⁵⁷

In spite of the prejudicial obstacles, some commanders of black regiments were committed to earning respect for their men and pushed hard for combat assignments. One officer wrote to his superior from Fort Scott, Kansas, “These men have been recruited with the promise that they were to fight, not work as common laborers, that they were to be treated in every way as soldiers … that they would have an opportunity to strike a blow for the freedom of their brothers.”⁵⁸ The men made the most of such opportunities when they came.

We Did Our Duty as Men

On May 27, 1863, Union regiments attacked Confederate fortifications on the Mississippi River at Port Hudson, twenty-five miles north of Baton Rouge. They included the First and Third Louisiana Native Guards, led mainly by black company officers. In an after-action report, a white officer admitted that he had entertained some fears as to his men’s “pluck.”

But now I have none. … Valiantly did the heroic descendants of Africa move forward cool as if Marshaled for dress parade, under a most murderous fire … these men did not swerve, or show cowardice. I have been in several engagements, and I never before beheld such coolness and daring. Their gallantry entitles them to a special praise. And I already observe, the sneers of others are being tempered into eulogy.⁵⁹

A few days later, on June 7, two regiments of former slaves helped fend off attacking Rebels at Milliken’s Bend, a federal stronghold on the Mississippi River just north of Vicksburg. “Here ensued a most terrible hand to hand conflict,” reported one officer, “our men using the bayonet freely and clubbing their guns with fierce obstinacy, contesting every inch of ground.” So doggedly did they resist the Rebels that Captain M. M. Miller wrote afterward, “I never more wish to hear the expression, ‘The niggers won’t fight.’” One official reported that “the sentiment of this army with regard to the employment of negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent Battle of Milliken’s Bend. Prominent officers, who used in private to sneer at the idea, are now heartily in favor of it.”⁶⁰

The notion that blacks lacked the discipline for soldiering was dealt a further blow on July 16 when the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts fought off a rebel charge on James Island just south of Charleston, South Carolina. “It is not for us to blow our own horn,” Corporal James Henry Gooding wrote home to Boston, “but when a regiment of white men gave us three cheers as we were passing them, it shows that we did our duty as men should.” An even tougher test came two days later when the Fifty-Fourth led an assault on Fort Wagner, guarding the southern approach to Charleston Harbor. Gooding later recalled that when the charge sounded,

we went at it, over the ditch and onto the parapet through a deadly fire; but we could not get into the fort. We met the foe on the parapet of Wagner with the bayonet – we were exposed to a murderous fire from the batteries of the fort, from our Monitors and our land batteries, as they did not cease firing soon enough. … The color bearer of the State colors was killed on the parapet. Col. [Robert Gould] Shaw seized the staff when the standard bearer fell, and in less than a minute after, the Colonel fell himself. When the men saw their gallant leader fall, they made a desperate effort to get him out, but they were either shot down, or reeled in the ditch below.⁶¹

Six hundred men of the Fifty-Fourth went in on the assault. Nearly half were captured, killed, or wounded. One of the most severely injured was Sergeant William H. Carney, a refugee from slavery in Virginia. When a color sergeant went down, Carney grabbed the flag, planted it on Wagner’s parapet, fought off attempts to capture it, and carried it away with him despite wounds to his head, chest, right leg, and arm. On arriving at a field hospital, he passed the colors to a regimental officer, reporting, to the cheers of his wounded comrades, “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground.” Carney became one of twenty-three black Civil War servicemen awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.⁶²

The value of black troops became increasing apparent as they gained more combat assignments. To one white soldier serving in Louisiana, it was clear that blacks would indeed fight. “It has been proved where ever they have had a chance.” They proved it again at Petersburg, Virginia, when four untested black regiments sent veteran Confederates in headlong retreat. “The majority of the whites expected that the colored troops would run,” according to a correspondent on the scene, “but the sable forces astonished everybody by their achievements. With a wild yell that must certainly have struck terror into the hearts of their foes [they] charged, under a hot fire of musketry and artillery, over the rebel ditch and parapet, and drove the enemy before them.” Not content with simply taking their objective, members of the Twenty-Second Regiment laid hold of a captured cannon, swung it around, and fired into the fleeing Confederates.⁶³

Figure 3.3. The Twenty-Second Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USCT), at Petersburg, driving Confederates from their fortifications and into the woods beyond. Not content with simply taking their objective, the men laid hold of a captured cannon, swung it around, and fired into their retreating foe. This assault of June 15, 1864, was the opening salvo of the Siege of Petersburg, which marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. Image from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York), July 9, 1864.

After the Battle of Nashville, where blacks and whites had advanced together “while the fire of the enemy poured upon them in torrents,” an officer rode over the field in front of the dislodged Confederate positions. “Black and white dead lay side by side,” he wrote. “Death had known no distinction of color, nor had Valor, for the blacks were as near the enemy’s line as were the whites.”⁶⁴

If death did not discriminate, white officers often did by placing blacks in the vanguard of attacks, where casualties were always highest. Just before the assault on Fort Wagner, General Quincy Gillmore, commanding the Department of the South, asked his operational subordinate General Truman Seymour how he planned to organize his forces. Seymour replied, “Well, I guess we will let Strong lead and put those d—d niggers from Massachusetts in the advance; we may as well get rid of them one time as another.” William Ball “Soldier” Williams, a former slave and Union veteran, recalled with bitterness that white soldiers “put us in front to shield themselves.” He considered quitting the army but “didn’t know how to get out.”⁶⁵

Field commanders used blacks as cannon fodder so frequently that their superiors became increasingly sensitive to accusations of callousness. Just before the Battle of the Crater, in which Union forces attempted to break the Confederate lines at Petersburg with a massive explosion, General Ulysses S. Grant changed an order that had blacks leading the attack. He later testified before a congressional committee that he and his subordinates had feared being charged with “shoving those people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.” Nevertheless, when blacks were finally ordered into the fray, they attacked along the right crest of the crater and captured a number of rebel prisoners. Others were ordered directly into the crater, where they became entangled with a mass of white troops unable to move up the other side. There, like the whites, they suffered huge casualties. Recalled one commander of black troops, “Had it not been for the almost unpassable crowd of troops, Cemetery Hill would have been our’s, without a falter upon the part of my Brigade. … Too much praise cannot be awarded to the bravery of both officers and men.”⁶⁶

There were individual as well as collective acts of bravery. Albert Jones, a Virginia freedman who had escaped with his brother to join the Union army, remembered that in one battle the Rebels “sent a bullet through my hand. … But that didn’t stop me. I had it bandaged and kept on fighting.” He never regained full use of his wounded hand. At Dalton, Georgia, just before black troops were sent into the attack, a white lieutenant warned, “it may be slavery or Death to some of you today.” One of the men, Henry Prince, responded, “Lieutenant, I am ready to die for Liberty.” And so he did. “The vows were scarce uttered,” recalled the regiment’s commander, who singled Henry out for praise, “until a ball pierced his heart and he was dead!”⁶⁷

In March 1863, two companies of whites near Washington, North Carolina, trying to escape attacking Confederates by river found one of their transports stuck fast in the mud from the weight of the soldiers. As an eyewitness recalled, they “were saved from death or capture by the self-sacrifice of a gallant negro, who, seeing the boat aground … jumped overboard and pushed the flat into the river.” Hit by enemy fire, “the brave man fell lifeless into the water, but the launch floated away to a place of safety.”⁶⁸

Blacks sometimes received grudging admiration even from Confederates. After the engagement at Milliken’s Bend, one rebel officer wrote that his black foes fought “with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs.” Such observations provide evidence that the respect soldiers often displayed across the lines could be displayed toward black soldiers as well. One Federal wrote of his surprise when Confederates agreed to a picket-line truce with black soldiers facing them. “The rebels and our colored soldiers now converse together on apparently very friendly terms, and exchange such luxuries as apples, tobacco, and hard tack, by throwing them to each other. It was hardly deemed possible that the enemy could be induced to refrain from firing on black troops wherever they could be seen.”⁶⁹

Rebel commanders usually wanted their men to do precisely that – to kill as many black troops as possible, at times including those who could have been taken prisoner. Despite the government’s official policy that captured blacks be enslaved, the unofficial policy of many Confederate officers was that blacks in uniform be shot on sight, even those trying to surrender. Still, some Rebels balked at such barbarism. At Milliken’s Bend, they took blacks prisoner rather than murder them in cold blood. One officer recalled hearing his men shout during the battle that surrendering blacks should be spared. When General Edmund Kirby Smith heard that so many blacks had been captured alive, he told one of his commanders, “I hope this may not be so, and 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.” A rebel deserter later testified that three days after the battle, he witnessed the hanging of one white officer and several black soldiers taken at Milliken’s Bend.⁷⁰

Such atrocities took place in numerous engagements, often on direct orders of rebel officers. The colonel of an Alabama regiment told his men “to shoot, wherever and whenever captured, all negroes found armed.” In Louisiana, one Texas colonel ordered his cavalry brigade to charge a fort held by black soldiers and to “take none with uniforms on.” In Arkansas, at the Battle of Poison Springs, eyewitnesses reported black prisoners being “murdered on the spot.” The same occurred at the Battle of Saltville in Virginia, where Confederates “brutally murdered” black prisoners. During the Battle of the Crater, Rebels ran bayonets through wounded black soldiers.⁷¹

After rebel forces captured Plymouth, North Carolina, Sergeant Samuel Johnson put on civilian clothes and passed himself off as a slave, an act that saved his life. Captured and placed in servitude, he finally escaped and told a harrowing story.

All the negroes found in blue uniform or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him was killed – I saw some taken into the woods and hung – Others I saw stripped of all their clothing, and they stood upon the bank of the river with their faces riverwards and then they were shot – Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt end of the muskets in the hands of the Rebels.⁷²

When nearby Fort Williams fell to the Rebels, a Union lieutenant recalled that “the negro soldiers who had surrendered, were drawn up in line at the breastwork, and shot down as they stood.”⁷³

At Tennessee’s Fort Pillow, former slaves and white southern Unionists were outnumbered four to one by attacking Confederates under General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The defenders tried to surrender, but most were ruthlessly cut down. Confederate Sergeant Achilles Clark vividly recalled the massacre.

The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity.

A few Confederate officers, and Clark himself, tried to stop the killing but got no support from their commander. “Gen. Forrest,” Clark wrote, ordered the prisoners to be “shot down like dogs.” After the massacre, an enthused Forrest called Fort Pillow a clear demonstration that “negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”⁷⁴

After the Battle of Olustee, west of Jacksonville, Florida, victorious Confederates roamed among wounded Federals shooting every black soldier they could find. When William Penniman of the Fourth Georgia Cavalry rode up to ask what the men were doing, an officer replied, “Shooting niggers, Sir.” Penniman protested that it was shameful to murder wounded prisoners, but the killings continued. Another Georgia soldier who was at Olustee later recalled, “How our boys did walk into the niggers, they would beg and pray but it did no good.” Next day, Penniman rode over the battlefield. “The results of the previous night became all to[o] apparent. Negroes, and plenty of them, whom I had seen lying all over the field wounded, and as far as I could see, many of them moving around from place to place, now … all were dead. If a negro had a shot in the shin, another was sure to be in the head.”⁷⁵

Ultimately, the take-no-prisoners policy worked more against Confederates than for them. When word of the murders spread, black soldiers began to fight with a rage that astonished friend and foe alike. Rebel prisoners, recalled one Union officer, “told me that they would rather fight two Regiments of White Soldiers than one of Niggers. … [They] fear them more than they would fear Indians.” A white cavalryman from Maine wrote home of black troops shooting captured Confederates. “The officers had hard work to stop them from killing All the prisoners,” he recalled. “When one of them would beg for his life the niggers would say remember port hudson.” After a company of black cavalrymen surrounded a band of Confederate guerrillas, someone shouted “Remember Fort Pillow.” The blacks captured seventeen prisoners, then shot them all dead. A white officer in one black regiment wrote to his wife that his men had killed five captured Confederates. “Had it not been for Ft Pillow,” he lamented, “those 5 men might be alive now. … It looks hard but we cannot blame these men much.”⁷⁶ Indeed, few of their comrades faulted black soldiers for giving no quarter to men they believed would give them none. The general rule was kill or be killed.

Even when some degree of humanity prevailed and blacks survived initial captivity, life as a prisoner of war was always brutal and often brief. Private Joseph Howard of the 110th Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USCT), wrote of his after-capture experience, “We were kept at hard labor and inhumanly treated. If we lagged or faltered or misunderstood an order we were whipped and abused. … For the slightest causes we were ubjected to lash.” Medical care for black prisoners was poorly provided or nonexistent. An inmate at Georgia’s Andersonville prison witnessed the treatment of 200 black captives, many of them wounded, who survived the slaughter at Olustee: “One fellow had a hand shot off and some enraged brutes had cut off his ears and nose, and otherwise mutilated him. The doctors refused to dress his wounds, or even amputate his shattered arm; he was naked in the prison, and finally died from his numerous wounds.” Blacks held in Confederate prison camps died at a rate of 35 percent, more than twice the average for white captives.⁷⁷

They Treat the Men Like Dogs

The treatment black soldiers received from their own comrades was nearly as appalling, especially when it came to medical care. One black soldier complained in a letter to the secretary of war, “My Left Leg is very Badley [in]fected from an old cut.” He had told the surgeon that the leg “was getting worse but he will driv Me off Like a dog and Say That he cant do any thing for Me.” The soldier was sure that such treatment had everything to do with the color of his skin. “Sir, if I was a white Man I would be discharged Sum time a go.” Samuel Johnson, a Florida slave who escaped to join the Union army, changed his mind when he saw the “feeble medical attention” given to wounded members of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts.⁷⁸

Blacks were assigned the worst doctors and received the least medical attention. An inspector general reported that the surgeon who ran one black hospital “did not evince much knowledge of his duties.” Other surgeons attached to black regiments were described as simpletons and even murderers. When one black soldier reported for sick call, the surgeon had him bucked and gagged on suspicion of faking the illness. Next day, the soldier was dead. Another surgeon kicked a black patient for leaving his tent without permission. The man had needed to relieve himself. He died that evening. As a dying black soldier lay moaning in pain, one surgeon yelled, “god damn him if he was a going to die and don’t [make] So much fuss about it.” “The officers see all this,” wrote one black soldier, “and don’t Seem to pay any attention to it.” Small wonder that the rate of death from disease for black soldiers was more than twice that of whites.⁷⁹

If the death rate was higher, basic pay for blacks was lower – $10 a month instead of the normal $13. And the army withheld $3 more for the cost of their uniforms. Even for those blacks who rose in the ranks, there were no corresponding pay increases as there were for whites. Still, the need for income among black soldiers’ families was no less than for whites. As one soldier expressed the need, “Our families – hundreds, nay thousands, of helpless women and children – are this day suffering for the natural means of subsistence, whose husbands and fathers have responded to the country’s call.” For soldier Solomon Steward, not being able to support his family was especially painful. Writing from Union-held Fernandina, Florida, his wife Emma informed him that an “administering angel Has Come and borne My Dear Little babe To Join In Tones with Them sweet and pure as angels whispers. My babe only Live one day It was

Figure 3.4. Despite their dedicated and much-needed service, blacks were treated worse and paid less than white soldiers. “We have done a soldier’s duty,” wrote Corporal James Henry Gooding of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts to President Lincoln. “Why can’t we have a soldier’s pay?” Letters from soldiers’ families were filled with news of suffering for lack of income. One general commanding black troops reported to headquarters, “The effects of such letters on the minds of the enlisted men of these regiments may be easily imagined.” Photo of unknown soldier and family courtesy of the Library of Congress.

a Little Girl. Her name Is alice Gurtrude steward I am now sick In Bed and have Got nothing To Live on.” Such letters made clear the impact of discriminatory pay.⁸⁰

“I have a wife and 3 Children … and my wife is sick,” wrote a black soldier to President Lincoln. “She has sent to me for money … I have No way of geting Eney money to send to her Because I cant Get my Pay.”⁸¹ He had been in the army seven months and had received no funds. It was an all too common experience. The commanding general of the Union’s Northern District, Department of the South, wrote to his superiors from Folly Island, South Carolina:

Letters have been constantly arriving for six months in these regiments, in which the wives of the enlisted men describe their sufferings, and the sufferings of their families – children have died because they could not be supplied with proper food, and because the Doctor could not be paid, or medicines obtained from the Druggist. Mothers advise their sons to throw down the musket and come home. … The effects of such letters on the minds of the enlisted men of these regiments may be easily imagined.⁸²

Even when soldiers were paid, to many the principle of equal pay was as important as its practicality. Black soldiers had fought and died just as whites had. Were their lives worth less? In a letter to Lincoln, Corporal James Henry Gooding reminded him that “when the war trumpet sounded o’er the land, when men knew not the Friend from the Traitor, the Black man laid his life at the Altar of the Nation – and he was refused.” But when the need for more soldiers became so great that blacks had to be called upon, how did they respond? “Let their dusky forms, rise up, out the mires of James Island, and give the answer. Let the rich mould around Wagners parapets be upturned, and there will be found an Eloquent answer. … We have done a Soldiers Duty. Why cant we have a Soldiers pay?”⁸³

If they could not have a soldier’s pay, many refused to take any at all. In a show of support for their men, neither did some white officers. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw refused to have anyone in his regiment paid until all his men received equitable pay. Captain A. W. Heasley told his company, “Boys, stand up for your full pay! I am with you, and so are all the officers.” Unfortunately, not all officers were so supportive. When soldiers of Pennsylvania’s Thirty-Second Regiment, USCT, declined to accept reduced pay, the officers were “very much put out.” One soldier reported that “they began to treat the men like dogs. The least thing that the men would do, they were bucked and gagged, and put on knap-sack-drill, and made to stand in the hot, broiling sun for four hours at a stretch; in consequence of which, a few of the men got sun-struck.”⁸⁴

Several black regiments threatened mutiny or desertion over the pay issue. In a letter to President Lincoln, seventy-four soldiers of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts demanded “imediate Discharge Having Been enlisted under False Pretence.” They warned that if “imediate steps are not taken to Relieve us we will Resort to more stringent mesures.” Threats sometimes turned to action, especially when officers would not support their men. When their officers failed to petition the government on their behalf, several black units stacked arms and refused to do any service until they received equal pay. When a black artillery company declined to fall out for inspection in protest over pay, fourteen men were sent to a remote prison in the Florida Keys. The army court-martialed Sergeant William Walker of the Third South Carolina Regiment for “leading the company to stack arms before their captain’s tent, on the avowed ground that they were released from duty by the refusal of the government to fulfill its share of the contract.” Walker was sentenced to execution.⁸⁵

The frequent and intense complaints, petitions, and protests finally forced Congress to equalize pay in June 1864. Still, discrimination was present in the act. Men who had been free before the war would receive back pay to the time of their enlistment. Those who had been enslaved would receive back pay only to January 1, 1864. Some soldiers got around the restriction by taking a “Quaker Oath” concocted by Colonel Edward Hallowell of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. His troops simply stated that from the war’s outset, “no man had the right to demand unrequited labor” of them. From the perspective of former slaves, that had always been the case.⁸⁶

There was discrimination too in equipping black soldiers. In April 1864, long after the percussion cap Springfield rifle became standard issue, one officer wrote to the War Department following an inspection of a black field unit, “This Regiment, like most of this class of soldiers, have the old flintlock muskets, altered to percussion, which have been used for a long time. The muskets of this Regiment were condemned once, and have been condemned by an Inspector a second time.” Some whites were reluctant to trust blacks with even these antiquated weapons. Several officials suggested that blacks be armed only with pikes.⁸⁷

Just as discouraging as the abuse blacks suffered through official channels was the unofficial abuse they suffered from white soldiers. Despite their steadfast combat service, blacks were verbally insulted, physically abused, and socially degraded. “Our boys don’t think much of them,” wrote a white Indiana volunteer. “They still say this is a White Mans War.” At one point, roughly forty white soldiers assaulted a group of black enlisted men, injuring several.⁸⁸ Colonel James S. Brisbin witnessed various forms of abuse just before blacks were sent into combat at the First Battle of Saltville in southwestern Virginia.

On the march the Colored Soldiers as well as their white Officers were made the subject of much ridicule and many insulting remarks by the White Troops and in some instances petty outrages such as the pulling off the Caps of Colored Soldiers, stealing their horses etc was practiced by the White Soldiers. These insults as well as the jeers and taunts that they would not fight were borne by the Colored Soldiers patiently or punished with dignity by their Officers but in no instance did I hear Colored soldiers make any reply to insulting language used toward [them] by the White Troops.

Of the 400 blacks who went into battle that day, more than 100 were killed or wounded. “On the return of the forces,” recalled Brisbin, “those who had scoffed at the Colored Troops on the march out were silent.”⁸⁹

The most degrading aspect of military life for some black troops was the way they were often used as slave labor for white troops. Colonel James C. Beecher, commanding a regiment of former North Carolina slaves, complained to superiors about his men being

put to work laying out and policing camps of white soldiers. … they are regarded as, and called “d – d Niggers” by so-called “gentlemen” in uniform of U. S. Officers, but when they are set to menial work for white regiments what those Regiments are entitled to do for themselves, it simply throws them back where they were before and reduces them to the position of slaves again.⁹⁰

As they had resisted inequitable pay, black soldiers also resisted inequitable treatment – especially treatment that reminded them too much of slavery. When one captain had a soldier tied up, just as a plantation overseer might have done, two of the victim’s comrades freed him. Being free had to mean that one could not be bound, else what was the point of being free? One private cut a friend loose and exclaimed, “No white son of a bitch can tie a man up here.” Such resistance constituted mutiny and could have severe consequences. Although blacks accounted for roughly 10 percent of Union servicemen, almost three-fourths of those executed for mutiny were black. And those were the ones who received at least the formality of a hearing. Many did not. Robert Gould Shaw wrote of Colonel James Montgomery, who commanded another regiment of blacks in the same brigade, “He shoots his men with perfect looseness, for a slight disobedience of orders.” So did Lieutenant Francis Bichinel of the Thirty-Sixth Regiment, USCT, who shot a black soldier named Silas Holley for nothing more than “alleged stubbornness” and “manifesting a mutinous spirit.” Had such traits been capital crimes, nearly every soldier, black or white, would have been executed. From the officers’ perspective, almost all soldiers were guilty of these shortcomings at one time or another.⁹¹

White officers in black regiments were a mixed lot. Although some treated their men with respect and advocated their advancement, many others did not. The problem stemmed from lax officer review boards that failed to question prospective officers about their racial attitudes or their motives for applying for positions in black regiments. Some did so to avoid combat, sure their men would never be used in battle. Others sought only the privileges and pay of higher rank. Some had been, and still were, slaveholders, certain that they knew how to “handle” blacks better than nonslaveholding officers.⁹²

Army regulations required that superiors behave “with kindness and justice to inferiors.” Officers were “forbidden to injure those under them by tyrannical or capricious conduct, or by abusive language.” But those prohibitions were not well-enforced when it came to black troops. An army chaplain in Louisiana wrote to the commander of his brigade of the “abuses practised by officers upon the men, such as cursing and vilifying, in the most shameful language, striking and kicking,” all of which was “practised habitually.” Most of the soldiers had until recently been enslaved, and the chaplain pointed out that military service “ought to present to them a contrast to the irresponsible cruelties of slavedriving, instead of a too faithful reproduction of them.” He wished that such behavior could be eradicated but doubted that there was “a disposition in the governing powers of the army to take cognizance of this class of offences, and enforce a better principle.”⁹³

That was all too clear to David Washington of the Third U. S. Colored Cavalry. After his captain struck him, Washington reported the incident to headquarters. He was told to wait for his captain to be called up. When the captain finally arrived two days later, he accused Washington of desertion. For that crime, Washington was sentenced to a year imprisonment at hard labor without pay. Washington wrote directly to President Lincoln, telling his commander-in-chief, “I am a good solger all ways has done what is right. … I ought not to be in pr[i]son if I had [justice] done me I am a colerd man I have no edication I don’t know nothing at all abought law. … pleas doe all you can fer me.” There was no reply.⁹⁴

Private Newton Rucker wrote to his commanding general about a Lieutenant Brown, complaining that he “daily treats the men of company [A] with such excesive cruelty that they can no longer submit to the degredation heaped upon them.” Rucker himself had been forced “to walk a ‘beat’ untill I have deposited the excrement of my body in my pants.” After a white officer, Augustus Benedict, whipped two drummer boys of the Fourth Louisiana Regiment, soldiers staged a mutiny and threatened to kill Benedict. Most of the men were former slaves who had been promised that, in accordance with army regulations, they would never be whipped. Eight of the mutineers went to prison for the crime of insisting that regulations be evenly applied.⁹⁵

Poorly as most black soldiers were treated, it is a testament to fortitude that their desertion rate was only slightly above the average for whites. For those who did desert, a frequent complaint was that they had been treated not as soldiers but as slaves. In September 1864, Private Spencer Brown of the Fifth Regiment, USCT, deserted. His comrades had heard him remark with disgust “that he was no better treated in the army than he was by his former master.”⁹⁶

Still, there were small signs that black soldiers’ sacrifices were having at least some impact on northern white attitudes. For the most part, those attitudes remained deeply racist and paternalistic. Many remained downright hostile. In Baltimore, whites attacked a black army surgeon, commissioned as a major, tearing the rank insignia from his uniform. Thugs in Zanesville, Ohio, nearly killed a black soldier who walked into a barbershop for a haircut. Such violence against blacks, even black soldiers, was hardly uncommon.⁹⁷

But there were also scenes that a year before would have been unimaginable. In February 1864, the same month that the Zanesville incident occurred, New York City saw its first black regiment formed, the Twentieth Regiment, USCT. Before it left for the front, supporters insisted on having the Twentieth parade down streets where blacks had been brutally beaten and murdered just seven months earlier during the draft riots. Now black soldiers marched boldly down those same streets, greeted, as one witnessed recalled, with “waving handkerchiefs, flowers [and] acclamation.” The New York Times saw the event as symbolic of a “prodigious revolution which the public mind everywhere is experiencing.”⁹⁸

Opposition to using blacks in the army was indeed crumbling rapidly in 1864 as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York organized black troops by the thousands. In the army too, attitudes were changing. Much as they had resisted it, most white soldiers gradually came to accept emancipation and black soldiers as a necessary part of the war effort. Some even took pride in it. To one Massachusetts private, there was no question that it was “worth dying to attain … the freedom of every human being over whom the stars and stripes wave.” Most took a more practical view of blacks in uniform. “I don’t care if they are one ½ mile thick in front in every Battel,” wrote one soldier. “They will stop Bullets as well as white people.”⁹⁹ Charles G. Halpine, who served for a time on General David Hunter’s staff, penned the following verse under the pseudonym Private Miles O’Reilly, mimicking Irish brogue.

Some tell us ‘tis a burnin’ shame

To make the naygers fight;

And that the thrade of bein’ kilt

Belongs but to the white:

But as for me, upon my sowl!

So liberal are we here,

I’ll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself,

On every day in the year.

On every day in the year, boys,

And in every hour of the day;

The right to be kilt I’ll divide wid him,

And divil a word I’ll say.¹⁰⁰

Some white soldiers’ changing views reflected a more appreciative attitude. Near the war’s end, an officer remarked after a march through southern Alabama that he had never seen such friendly conduct between white and black troops. “During the whole march I have not heard a word of reproach cast upon a colored soldier. But on the other hand, I have seen the two divisions exchange gifts, and talk with each other with apparent equality.” In northern Alabama, when the Fourteenth Regiment, USCT, distinguished itself during operations near Decatur, the regiment’s commander, Colonel Thomas Morgan, noted that their action “elicited praises and cheers from all who witnessed it – It is no small event for a black regiment to receive three hearty cheers from a regiment of white men; and yet the 14th deserved the compliment.” Two companies of the regiment that had never been under fire before conducted themselves “like Veteran Soldiers.” Morgan expressed his pride in the regiment, telling the men that he “would not exchange its command for that of the best white regiment in the U. S. service.”¹⁰¹

One officer from Massachusetts had been described by those who knew him as “a bitter pro-slavery man, violent in his talk against abolitionists and ‘niggers.’” But after serving with blacks in Louisiana, he was so impressed that he returned home a committed abolitionist. On a Boston train, as a black soldier in uniform stepped onto the car, someone yelled, “I’m not going to ride with niggers.” The officer, in full uniform, rose from his seat for all to see and called out, “Come here, my good fellow! I’ve been fighting alongside of people of your color, and glad enough I was to have ‘em by my side. Come sit by me.”¹⁰²

Little Aid from the Government

Beyond their service in combat, another way in which the army’s freedmen sought respect was by learning to read and write. More than 80 percent of black servicemen had been slaves before the war and forbidden to become literate, although a few managed to achieve the skill. Now, as soldiers, they also tended to be eager students. E. S. Wheeler, chaplain of a black regiment in Louisiana, reported that “a majority of the men seem to regard their books as an indispensable portion of their equipments, and the cartridge box and spelling book are attached to the same belt.”¹⁰³

Regimental chaplains, pressed by black soldiers, took a leading role in establishing schools, acquiring books, and soliciting teachers for the men. Those few blacks in the chaplain corps were especially insistent on educating black troops. Henry McNeal Turner, an active abolitionist and the army’s first black chaplain, organized schools and harangued his superiors for time and tents in which to study. Chaplains also gained the support of missionary societies, which sent supplies and teachers, white and black.¹⁰⁴

Some white company and regimental officers were also supportive, even organizing schools themselves and holding out promotion to sergeant as a reward for literacy. Such efforts were more the exception than the rule. Most white officers outside black regiments, and many within, believed blacks to be inferior beings and saw no point in trying to educate them. When support was not forthcoming, the men pooled their resources, purchased books, and paid teachers. When teachers were unavailable, they taught themselves. With limited time and little backing, their struggle for literacy was an uphill struggle. By war’s end, most black soldiers remained functionally illiterate. But for the first time in their lives, many could not only sign their names but read and write as well.¹⁰⁵

Of more immediate concern to formerly enslaved black soldiers was seeing friends and family released from slavery. Often without orders, blacks made raids behind Confederate lines to rescue enslaved loved ones. In later life, freedman Claude Wilson of Lake City, Florida, told of the day a six-mule team pulled up to his mother’s cabin driven by a black soldier who told them they were free. “I been praying for this a long time,” his mother exclaimed. They loaded the wagon with what furniture they had and headed for Union-held Jacksonville. In Edenton, North Carolina, black troops freed a number of slaves and “threatened to have the town shelled if they were interfered with.” One officer recalled a young man named Moore who enlisted for the sole purpose of getting his parents and siblings out of slavery. Free them he did, but he later died in combat. His last words to his family were “I know I shall fall, but you will be free.”¹⁰⁶

Black soldiers extended freedom even to areas where the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply. Under the guise of recruiting volunteers, black servicemen regularly swept through central Kentucky’s plantation belt, emancipating slaves as they went. In Louisiana, members of the Native Guards received permission to go on recruiting detail. They had more on their minds than recruiting soldiers. With signed passes in hand, they marched across southern Louisiana freeing slaves and taking them to New Orleans. At one plantation in St. Bernard Parish, five soldiers showed up at their former owner’s place and freed their wives. When slaveholders protested that they were loyal Unionists in Union-held territory and that the Emancipation Proclamation had no force there, the soldiers leveled their rifles and threatened to shoot anyone who stood in their way.¹⁰⁷

In Missouri, Private Spotswood Rice wrote to his daughter’s owner warning that he was coming to claim his right as a father. “Mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own and you may hold on to hear as long as you can but I want you to remember this one thing that the longor you keep my Child from me the longor you will have to burn in hell and the qwicer youll get there.” A Louisiana soldier made plain to his commanding officer that he intended to have his children. “I am in your service; I wear military clothes; I have been in three battles; I was in the assault at Port Hudson; I want those children; they are my flesh and blood.” To him, his service entitled his family to the rights of free people.¹⁰⁸

Slaveholders who suffered only the loss of their slaves at the hands of black soldiers could count themselves fortunate. Some suffered worse. William Harris of the First Regiment, USCT, gave his former Virginia owner a lashing so violent that blood flew at every stroke. Harris then turned the whip over to three female ex-slaves who “took turns in settling some old scores.” Fortunately for slaveholders, such retribution was unusual. Most black soldiers were far more concerned with ending slavery than taking revenge. When slaveholders found themselves at the mercy of their former slaves, violence rarely came of it.¹⁰⁹

Major William Holden learned that first-hand, much to his relief. Henry, a former slave of Holden’s who had run off to join the Union army after being whipped, came marching back one day leading a dozen black soldiers. As a young slave who witnessed the homecoming later recalled:

Now ole Major was sitting in his favorite chair on the porch when he saw Henry coming with those soldiers and he like to fell, he was that scairt. … poor ole Major thought Henry remembered that whipping. But Henry drew the men up in front of ole Major and he said, “This is my master, Major Holden. Honor him, men.” And the men took off their caps and cheered old Major. And he nearly like to fell again – such a great big burden was off his shoulders then.

Henry and the other soldiers took their seats at Holden’s dining room table where his wife served them a roast chicken feast. For a former slave to be served at his former owner’s table brought a satisfaction that few but those once held in bondage could understand. For Henry, it was an image he would forever hold as a sign that his freedom was real.¹¹⁰

Another sign of freedom, among the first that soldiers demanded once their families were out of bondage, was a wedding ceremony with legal standing. Having a marriage certificate in hand reading that loved ones were lawfully joined in wedlock was tangible evidence that wives could not be sold from husbands, husbands from wives, nor children from their parents. It meant that husbands no longer had to see their wives raped by slaveholders. A. B. Randall, chaplain of a black regiment, reported twenty-five weddings in a single month. Another chaplain wrote that the “marriage relation” of forty-three couples of his regiment had been legalized. Some of them had been together for as long as thirty years, living precariously as husband and wife without the protection of a legally sanctioned marriage.¹¹¹

Married or not, soldiers’ families who followed their men to camp were left to support themselves, as one report noted, “with but little aid from the government by washing, ironing, cooking, making pies, cakes &c. for the troops.” Freedman John Finnely recalled that as a boy, he carried water for the soldiers. Women sometimes found work in government hospitals at wages of $4 a month.¹¹²

As more blacks fled to army posts, it became increasingly difficult to accommodate them. Some officers sent the refugees farther north to already overcrowded contraband camps. In February 1864, Captain Newton Flagg wrote to Secretary Stanton of “extreme want and destitution” among the refugees in Quincy, Illinois. About 400 were “scattered over the city in miserable hovels and stables” with little in the way of food or clothing. During the previous three months, local citizens had contributed $1,500 and “large amounts of clothing,” but those resources were now exhausted. Flagg implored Stanton to send help, but what little came could not meet the need. Conditions continued to deteriorate for the rest of that year and into the next. During the winter of 1864–65, between four and seven fugitives died each week in Quincy.¹¹³

Things were even worse that winter at a refugee camp in Nashville, Tennessee, where the death rate was thirty per day. In January 1865, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Putnam of the Forty-Second Regiment, USCT, in Chattanooga wrote to his superiors that “the men of my command appeal to me for relief from such treatment.” He told of one soldier whose wife and six children had been sent to Nashville several weeks earlier by order of the post commander. “Today the children were brought back, – how or by whom I cannot learn. They are nearly starved, their limbs are frozen, – one of them is likely to loose both feet, – Their mother died in the camp at Nashville.” Putnam requested that measures be taken to relieve suffering refugees.¹¹⁴

Soldiers did more than appeal for their families’ relief. They took matters into their own hands, deserted their posts, and delivered relief themselves. From Knoxville, Tennessee, Major John Shannon wrote to headquarters of being constantly annoyed by soldiers with suffering families “asking permission to be absent for the purpose of providing for them … many absent themselves without permission.” He would continue to lose men and be unable to recruit more unless the army provided for the men’s families.¹¹⁵

Black soldiers who rescued their families from bondage and brought them to camp could, and often did, see them hauled back into slavery. Officers who were unwilling to aid the fugitives simply turned them over when their former owners showed up to claim them. One captain in Missouri complained that such treatment impeded efforts to recruit black soldiers. He was told that “no remedy is known for the evils complained of” since the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply in the border states.¹¹⁶

In July 1864, General S. S. Fry of Kentucky’s Camp Nelson issued a circular informing local slaveholders that women, children, and men unfit for service would be “delivered up to their owners upon application.” By late that year, Fry was expelling soldiers’ families from the camp whether their owners applied for them or not. On November 23, Joseph Miller of the 124th Regiment saw his wife and children driven out into the bitter cold. Shortly after, Miller filed a complaint. “I told the man in charge of the guard that it would be the death of my boy I told him that my wife and children had no place to go.” The guards threatened to shoot them all if they did not leave, so leave they did. That night, without leave, Miller went in search of his family. He found them a few miles away in “an old meeting house belonging to the colored people.”

The building was very cold having only one fire. My wife and children could not get near the fire, because of the number of colored people huddled together. … I found my wife and children shivering with cold and famished with hunger They had not received a morsel of food during the whole day. My boy was dead … killed by exposure to the inclement weather. … I dug a grave myself and buried my own child.

Knowing he could be shot for desertion if he did not report back to Camp Nelson, Miller left his family at the meeting house and filed his complaint as quickly as he could. Other soldiers complained as well. After several were published in the abolitionist press, embarrassed army officers ceased their policy of turning out soldiers’ families. Barracks were built to house the refugees at Camp Nelson, but the army supplied little else. By February 1865, about half of the roughly 600 women and children were ill, mostly with pneumonia and smallpox. One witness described the sick as “huddled together in rags and dirt” waiting to die.¹¹⁷

On December 4, 1864, a black Kentucky soldier named George Washington wrote to President Lincoln demanding a discharge. His wife and four children were still held in slavery, suffering at the hands of an abusive owner. Washington asked that the president free them and release him from service so that he could care for them himself. He could hardly do so if he remained a soldier since the army had not paid him for some time.¹¹⁸

The volume of such demands and the outrage they expressed grew so great that finally, in March 1865, only weeks before the war’s end, Congress passed legislation providing that the wife and children “of any person that has been, or may be, mustered into the military or naval service of the United States, shall, from and after the passage of this act, be forever free.”¹¹⁹

¹ Boston Evening Transcript, January 2, 1863.

² Liberator, January 16, 1863. See also Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings from 1832–1874 (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002). Nell took his verse from the nineteenth-century English poet Eliza Cook.

³ Douglass, Life and Times, 428; Douglass’ Monthly, March 1863.

⁴ George Washington Albright, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 6, Mississippi Narratives, part 1, 12; Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, May 4, 1861.

⁵ John Oliver to Simeon S. Jocelyn, January 14, 1863, American Missionary Association Archives, Tulane University, in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 173; Gen. William Sooy Smith [commanding, First Division, Sixteenth Army Corps] to Lt. Col. Binmore [Headquarters, Sixteenth Army Corps], March 27, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 303; John C. P. Wederstrandt to Brig. Gen. Shepley [military gov. of Louisiana], September 19, 1862, in ibid., 219–21; W. J. Minor et al. to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks [commanding, Department of the Gulf], January 14, 1862, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 408–10.

⁶ New York Times, October 23, 1862; John W. Bowen et al. to Stanton, September 26, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 174–75.

⁷ Lela Barnes, ed., “An Editor Looks at Early-Day Kansas: The Letters of Charles Monroe Chase,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 26 (1960): 136.

⁸ Margaret Mendenhall Frazier, trans., Missouri Ordeal, 1862–1864: Diaries of Willard Hall Mendenhall (Newhall, Calif.: C. Boyer, 1985), 132–33.

⁹ W. A. Poillon to Dr. Martine, December 28, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 476–79.

¹⁰ A. Bradshaw to Brig. Gen. Hurlbutt [commanding, Sixteenth Army Corps], June [?] 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 584–85; J. P. Creager [civilian recruiting agent] to Col. William Birnie [superintendent of black recruitment in Maryland], August 19, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 204; Col. A. L. Brown [commanding an Ohio regiment] to Captain [?], [Headquarters, Middle Department and Eighth Army Corps], June 4, 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 382.

¹¹ John F. Ryland et al. to Gov. Hamilton Rowan Gamble, June 4, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 457; Maxwell to Gen. J. T. Boyle, December 5, 1863, in ibid., 594–95.

¹² Col. B. L. E. Bonneville [commanding, camp of instruction at Benton Barracks, Missouri] to Capt. H. C. Fillebrow[n] [Headquarters, St. Louis District], May 28, 1863, in Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 2, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 570 (hereafter cited as Upper South); Summary of a speech by Col. Smith D. Atkins, November 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 530–31.

¹³ Greer W. Davis to Gen. Curtis [commanding, Department of the Missouri], February 24, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 449–50.

¹⁴ E. B. Grubb to Henry Moffett, November 19, 1862, Clinton H. Haskell Collection, University of Michigan, in Randall C. Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 39–40; William Gillette, Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854–1865 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 218–19.

¹⁵ John Vliet to Mr. Bodge, February 2, 1863, Thomas W. Sweeny Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., in James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 63; Simeon Royse to father, February 14, 1863, Royse Papers, Duke University, in ibid., 63.

¹⁶ Kittanning (Penn.) Mentor, August 26, 1863, in Shankman, Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 110; McPherson, What They Fought For, 56; Pippey to A. Heath and B. Y. Pippey, July 31, 1862, William T. Pippey Papers, Duke University, in Jimerson, Private Civil War, 41; A. C. Wilcox to cousin Mary, May 31, 1864, New York Eighty-first Infantry Folder, United States Army Military History Institute, in Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), 14.

¹⁷ Ella Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 145, 151; Pickel to father, February 8, 1863, Adam H. Pickel Papers, Duke University, in Jimerson, Private Civil War, 232.

¹⁸ For a concise overview of antiwar activity and draft resistance in the North see David Williams, A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (New York: New Press, 2005), 253–83. For urban riots see Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker and Co., 2005); Robert D. Sampson, “‘Pretty Damned Warm Times’: The 1864 Charleston Riot and the ‘Inalienable Right of Revolution,’” Illinois Historical Journal 89 (1996): 99–116; Iver Bernstein, The New York Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Lawrence H. Larsen, “Draft Riot in Wisconsin, 1862,” Civil War History 7 (1961): 421–27; William F. Hanna, “The Boston Draft Riot,” Civil War History 36 (1990): 262–73.

¹⁹ Liberator, March 13, 1863; Detroit Free Press, March 7, 1863.

²⁰ Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 1863; New York Evening Post in Liberator, April 17, 1863; New York Principia in Douglass’ Monthly, June 1863.

²¹ Cook, Armies of the Streets, 82, 97–98.

²² William Wells Brown, The Rising Sun; or, Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston: A. G. Brown and Co., 1874), 385.

²³ Broadside entitled “Men of Color, To Arms!” (Rochester, N.Y.), March 21, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 3: 319z.

²⁴ Maj. George B. Drake [Headquarters, Department of the Gulf] to Gen. T. W. Sherman [commanding defenses of New Orleans], August 15, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 164; Jane Wallis [Virginia freedwoman] to Prof. Woodburry [northern missionary], December 10, 1863, in ibid., 138; General Orders No. 119, Headquarters, Department of the South, August 16, 1864, Official Records, series 3, vol. 4, 621; Affidavit of Jacob Forrester, April 28, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 57–58; Solomon Lambert, Arkansas Narratives, part 4, 231.

²⁵ Statements of A Colored man and one of the union Colored friends, [September ? 1863], in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 154–55.

²⁶ Boston Commonwealth, February 21, 1863.

²⁷ Hildreth to mother, November 23, 1862, and January 4, 1863, Flinbaugh Collection and Harrisburg Civil War Round Table Collection, United States Army Military History Institute, in Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 123.

²⁸ Robert Goldthwaite Carter, Four Brothers in Blue: or Sunshine and Shadows of the War of the Rebellion, a Story of the Great War from Bull Run to Appomattox (1913; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 89–90; Oscar Osburn Winther, ed., With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Letters, Diaries, and Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 135; John Frederic Holahan, Civil War Diary, April 26, 1862, Pamplin Historical Park, Petersburg, Va., in Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 122–23.

²⁹ Sam Word, Arkansas Narratives, part 7, 239–40.

³⁰ Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 136 n. 4; John Oliver to Simeon S. Jocelyn, January 14, 1863, in ibid., 5: 172–73.

³¹ Report of William E. Park [plantation superintendent, St. Helena Island, S.C.], March 18, 1862, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 166–68; Rev. Abram Mercherson [South Carolina black minister] to Maj. Gen. J. G. Foster [commanding, Department of the South], August 12, 1864, in ibid., 314.

³² Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1994), 124–25. The term “quadroon” generally referred to anyone of one-quarter African ancestry.

³³ Paul D. Escott, “The Context of Freedom: Georgia’s Slaves during the Civil War,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 58 (1974): 85; Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 64.

³⁴ Felix Brannigan to sister, July 16, 1862, Felix Brannigan Papers, Library of Congress, in Jimerson, Private Civil War, 93; Marion Munson to Joshua Van Hoosen, February 19, 1863, Joshua Van Hoosen Papers, University of Michigan, in ibid., 95; H. G. Spruill to Josiah Collins, March 16, 1863, Josiah Collins Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, in Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 173; Charles H. Sowle to parents, January 26, 1863, Charles H. Sowle Papers, Duke University, in Jimerson, Private Civil War, 41.

³⁵ Henry Henney to family, n.d. [late December 1862], United States Army Military History Institute, in McPherson, What They Fought For, 62; Amory K. Allen to My Dear Companion [Mary Delphany Allen], January 8, 1863, in “Civil War Letters of Amory K. Allen,” Indiana Magazine of History 31 (1935): 361. For an examination of how soldiers on both sides viewed slavery see Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

³⁶ Allen to Garrison, October 23, 1862, Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library, in McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 92.

³⁷ Douglass’ Monthly, March 1863.

³⁸ Broadside entitled “An Address to the People of the Free States by the President of the Southern Confederacy,” January 5, 1863, Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 245, Folder 13, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. The danger for captured black soldiers included execution as well as enslavement. In a joint resolution that spring, the Confederate Congress authorized Davis to turn captured black soldiers over to state governments, all of which had laws mandating execution for rebellious blacks. Furthermore, white officers in black regiments, if captured, were also subject to execution. Because the Confederacy feared retaliation against its own troops held captive in the North and because many Confederate commanders found the orders distasteful, Richmond did not press enforcement. See Confederate States Congress, Joint Resolutions, April 30–May 1, 1863, Official Records, series 2, vol. 5, 940–41; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 567–68.

³⁹ Charles Grandy, Virginia Narratives, 22; Mingo White, Alabama Narratives, 417.

⁴⁰ General Orders No. 135, Headquarters, Department of the Missouri, November 14, 1863, Official Records, series 3, vol. 3, 1034–36; Thomas Clagett Jr. et al. to Hon. Reverdy Johnson [U.S. senator from Maryland], October 28, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 213–14; Endorsement by Birney [superintendent of black recruitment in Maryland], January 28, 1864, in ibid., 215.

⁴¹ Mary Crane, Indiana Narratives, 10; George Washington Buckner, ibid., 30.

⁴² Adjutant Gen. [Lorenzo Thomas] to Edwin M. Stanton, February 1, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 253–54; H. G. Petree et al. to Lorenzo Thomas, August 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 601; A. L. Robinson [surveyor of customs at Evansville, Ind.] to Sec. of the Treasury W. P. Fessenden, October 10, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 680.

⁴³ Lt. Col. A. Jacobson [investigating officer] to Maj. Gen. W. S. Rosecrans [commanding, Department of the Missouri], February 17, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 240–41; Capt. James M. Fidler, historical report, June 15, 1865, in ibid., 257; Table 1. Black Soldiers in the Union Army and Black Male Population of Military Age in 1860, by State, in ibid., 12.

⁴⁴ Cincinnati Commercial in Washington National Daily Intelligencer, April 24, 1863; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 179; Edward Ayers, William G. Thomas III, and Anne Sarah Rubin, “Black and on the Border,” in Boritt and Hancock, Slavery, Resistance, Freedom, 72–73.

⁴⁵ L. Thomas to Gov. [William Sprague] of Rhode Island, January 15, 1863, Official Records, series 3, vol. 3, 16; Order of Edwin M. Stanton, January 26, 1863, ibid., 20–21; L. Thomas to Capt. Silvey, February 10, 1863, ibid., 38–39.

⁴⁶ Weekly Anglo-African, February 28, 1863; Boston Press and Post, March 30, 1863; Liberator, February 27, 1863; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 75. For the enlistment boycott in Boston see Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 2–3, 282–88.

⁴⁷ General Orders No. 143, War Department, May 22, 1863, Official Records, series 3, vol. 3, 215–16; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 304.

⁴⁸ Liberator, October 7, 1864; First Sergeant J. H. W. N. Collins and Sergeant John Shaffer to Edwin M. Stanton, September 11, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 339–40.

⁴⁹ Col. N. P. Cipman [chief of staff, Department of the Missouri] to Gen. Samuel R. Curtis [commanding, Department of the Missouri], October 16, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 70–72.

⁵⁰ Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 307–309.

⁵¹ Sherman to John A. Spooner [recruiter], July 30, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 110–111; Sherman to John Sherman, April 26, 1863, William Techumseh Sherman Papers, Library of Congress, in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 101; D. Densmore to Benjamin [December 1864], and to “Dear Friends at Home,” December 18, 1864, Benjamin Densmore Family Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, in Wilson, Campfires of Freedom, 39.

⁵² Higginson to Brig. Gen. [Rufus] Saxton, February 1, 1863, Official Records, series 1, vol. 14, 195–98.

⁵³ William P. Derby, Bearing Arms in the Twenty-Seventh Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteer Infantry During the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1883), 168–69.

⁵⁴ Unsigned to My Dear Friend [and] Pre. [Lincoln], August 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 501; Charlie Davenport, Mississippi Narratives, 41; Admiral David Dixon Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1885), 90–91.

⁵⁵ Fowler to Lt. Col. A. G. Bennett [commanding, Twenty-First Regiment, USCT], August 3, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 491–92.

⁵⁶ Unsigned to My Dear Friend [and] Pre. [Lincoln], August 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 501–502.

⁵⁷ Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 487.

⁵⁸ Col. N. P. Chipman [chief of staff, Department of the Missouri] to Gen. Samuel R. Curtis [commanding, Department of the Missouri], October 16, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 71.

⁵⁹ Capt. Elias D. Strunke [officer in a Louisiana black regiment] to Brig. Gen. Daniel Ullmann [commanding, Fifth Regiment, U. S. Volunteers, later Eighty-Second Regiment, USCT], May 29, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 528–29. See also Edward Cunningham, The Port Hudson Campaign, 1862–1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963).

⁶⁰ Brig. Gen. Elias S. Dennis [commanding, District of Northeast Louisiana] to Col. John A. Rawlins [Headquarters, Department of the Tennessee], June 12, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 533; Miller to aunt, June 10, 1863, Official Records, series 3, vol. 3, 452–53; Charles A. Dana [special commissioner, War Department] to Edwin M. Stanton, June 22, 1863, Official Records, series 1, vol. 24, part 1, 105–106.

⁶¹ Corporal James Henry Gooding, On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, ed. Virginia M. Adams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 36–39. In February 1864, Gooding was wounded and captured at the Battle of Olustee in Florida. He died later that year at Georgia’s Andersonville prison. Gooding’s letters constitute one of the few collections written by a black soldier ever to see print. A similar collection from a variety of black soldiers is found in Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

⁶² Return of Casualties in the Union Forces, Official Records, series 1, vol. 28, part 1, 210; Col. E. N. Hallowell [commanding, Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment] to Gen. Truman Seymour, November 7, 1863, ibid., series 1, vol. 28, part 1, 362–63. See also Peter Burchard, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 137–141.

The Carney quote is from Robert Stewart Davis, “Three Months Around Charleston Bar; or The Great Siege as We Saw It,” United States Service Magazine 1 (1864): 282. Carney’s Medal of Honor, like most of those won by black servicemen, was awarded long after the war. Carney’s came in 1900, eight years before his death at age sixty-eight. Since his was the earliest engagement for which the medal was awarded, Carney is sometimes credited with being the first black serviceman to win the Medal of Honor.

⁶³ Benjamin Stevens to mother, August 12, 1863, in Richard N. Ellis, ed., “The Civil War Letters of an Iowa Family,” Annals of Iowa 39 (1969): 582; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 9, 1864; Col. Samuel A. Duncan [commanding, Second Brigade, Third Division, Eighteenth Army Corps] to Capt. Solon A. Carter [acting assistant adjutant-general], Official Records, series 1, vol. 51, part 1, 266. See also Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–5 (Harrisburg: B. Singerly, 1871), 5: 991–92.

⁶⁴ Col. Reuben D. Mussey [commissioner for the organization of black troops in middle and east Tennessee] to Capt. C. P. Brown [Headquarters, Tennessee Black Troops], December 21, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 560–62.

⁶⁵ Excerpt from testimony of Nathaniel Paige, special correspondent of the New York Times, before the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission [February ? 1864], in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 534–36; William Ball Williams, Arkansas Narratives, part 7, 191. Seymour was referring to General George Crockett Strong, whose brigade contained the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment. Both Seymour and Strong were wounded during the second day’s assault on Wagner. Strong died twelve days later of tetanus. Paige added that Seymour later became an “ardent admirer” of black soldiers.

⁶⁶ U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War: Battle of Petersburg, Senate Reports, Thirty-Eighth Congress, Second Session, no. 142, 111, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 522 n. 5; Col. J. K. Sigfried [commanding a black brigade] to Capt. George A. Hicks [Headquarters, Fourth Division, Ninth Army Corps], July 31, 1864, in ibid., 549–51.

⁶⁷ Albert Jones, Virginia Narratives, 42–43; Col. Thomas J. Morgan to Col. R. D. Mussey, October 8, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 556.

⁶⁸ Derby, Bearing Arms in the Twenty-Seventh Massachusetts Regiment, 168.

⁶⁹ Gen. Henry D. McCulloch [commanding a Confederate brigade] to Maj. R. P. Maclay [assistant adjutant and inspector general], June 8, 1863, Official Records, series 1, vol. 24, part 2, 467; R. J. M. Blackett, ed., Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 115.

⁷⁰ Richard Lowe, “Battle on the Levee: The Fight at Milliken’s Bend,” in Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue, 125; Smith [commanding, Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi] to Gen. R. Taylor [commanding, Confederate District of Louisiana], June 13, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 578; Lt. Commander E. K. Ewen [Union naval officer] to Adm. David D. Porter [commanding, Mississippi Squadron], June 16, 1863, in ibid., 581.

⁷¹ Col. Jno. R. F. Tattnall [commanding, Alabama Confederate regiment] to Capt. S. Croom [Headquarters, Confederate District of the Gulf], November 8, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 570–71; Gregory J. W. Urwin, “‘We Cannot Treat Negroes … as Prisoners of War’: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas,” in Gregory J. W. Urwin, ed., Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 141; Col. James M. Williams [First Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment] to Capt. William S. Whitten [assistant adjutant-general], April 24, 1864, Official Records, series 1, vol. 34, part 1, 746; Col. James S. Brisbin [superintendent of the organization of Kentucky black troops] to Gen. L. Thomas, October 20, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 558; Bryce A. Suderow, “Battle of the Crater: The Civil War’s Worst Massacre,” in Urwin, Black Flag Over Dixie, 203–209.

⁷² Affidavit of Samuel Johnson, July 11, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 588–89.

⁷³ Lieutenant Alonzo Cooper, In and Out of Rebel Prisons (Oswego, N.Y.: R. J. Oliphant, 1888), 34. For an overview of the Plymouth Massacre see Weymouth T. Jordan and Gerald W. Thomas, “Massacre at Plymouth, April 20, 1864,” in Urwin, Black Flag Over Dixie, 153–202.

⁷⁴ John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., eds., “Fort Pillow Revisited: New Evidence about an Old Controversy,” Civil War History 28 (1982): 299; Forrest to Lt. Col. Thomas M. Jack [assistant adjutant-general], April 15, 1864, Official Records, series 1, vol. 32, part 1, 610. See also John Cimprich, Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

⁷⁵ William Penniman reminiscences, 60–62, William Penniman Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in David J. Coles, “‘Shooting Niggers Sir’: Confederate Mistreatment of Union Black Soldiers at the Battle of Olustee,” in Urwin, Black Flag Over Dixie, 74–75.

⁷⁶ Benjamin Stevens to mother, August 12, 1863, in Ellis, “Civil War Letters of an Iowa Family,” 582; Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, 157.

⁷⁷ Statement of Private Joseph Howard, January 30, 1865, Official Records, series 2, vol. 8, 153; S. S. Boggs, Eighteen Months a Prisoner Under the Rebel Flag (Lovington, Ill.: n.p., 1880), 26–27; Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1997), 108.

⁷⁸ Colored [soldier] to [Edwin M. Stanton], January 21, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 646–47; Samuel Johnson, Florida Narratives, 179–80.

⁷⁹ Unsigned to Sir [unidentified Washington official], August 20, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 640–41. For contrast of death from disease between black and white soldiers see Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 11.

⁸⁰ Christian Recorder, May 21, 1864; Emma to husband John, February 8, 1864, in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Intensely Human,” Atlantic Monthly 93 (1904): 596–97.

⁸¹ George Rodgers et al. to Mr. President, August 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 680–81.

⁸² Brig. Gen. A. Schimmelfennig [commanding, Northern District, Department of the South] to Capt. W. L. M. Burger [Headquarters, Department of the South], June 2, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 397–98.

⁸³ Gooding to A. Lincoln, September 28, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 385–86.

⁸⁴ Col. E. N. Hallowell [commanding, Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers] to Gov. John A. Andrew, November 23, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 387; Shaw to brother Clem., July 1, 1863, in Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 367–68; Taylor, Reminiscences, 16; Christian Recorder, July 30, 1864.

⁸⁵ Sgt. John F. Shorter et al. to President of the United States, July 16, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 401–402; Capt. Thomas W. Fry to [?], September 21, 1864, in William H. Chenery, The Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored) in the War to Preserve the Union, 1861–1865 (Providence, R.I.: Snow and Farnham, 1898), 66; Statement of Sgt. William Walker, January 12, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 392–94.

⁸⁶ U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1866), 13: 129–30; Luis Fenollosa Emilio, History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865, second ed. (Boston: Boston Book Company, 1894), 220–21.

⁸⁷ Lorenzo Thomas to Edwin M. Stanton, April 7, 1864, in Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 204–205; Robert Gould Shaw to brother Clem., July 1, 1863, in Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 367–68.

⁸⁸ Winther, With Sherman to the Sea, 149; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana, 124–25.

⁸⁹ Brisbin [superintendent of the organization of Kentucky black troops] to Gen. L. Thomas, October 20, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 557–58.

⁹⁰ Beecher to Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild [commanding brigade], September 13, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 493.

⁹¹ Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, 115; Gary Kynoch, “Terrible Dilemmas: Black Enlistment in the Union Army During the American Civil War,” in Greenberg and Waugh, Price of Freedom, 1: 121; Shaw to Charley Morse, July 3, 1863, in Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 369; Blackett, Thomas Morris Chester, 115.

⁹² Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 408–409.

⁹³ Revised United States Army Regulations of 1861 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1863), 9; Chaplain Saml. L. Gardner to Gen. Daniel Ullmann, December 19, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 417–18.

⁹⁴ Washi[ng]ton to Mr. A. Linco[l]n, November 26, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 455.

⁹⁵ Rucker to Gen. T. W. Sherman [commanding defenses of New Orleans], December 6, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 456; Excerpts from proceedings of a military commission convened at Fort Jackson, La., December 12–13, 1863, in ibid., 442–49.

⁹⁶ Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War, 149–50; Blackett, Thomas Morris Chester, 115.

⁹⁷ Christian Recorder, May 30, 1863; Anglo-African, February 13, 1864 (the Weekly Anglo-African had become the Anglo-African by 1864).

⁹⁸ Henry O’Rielly, First Organization of Colored Troops in the State of New York to Aid in Suppressing the Slaveholders’ Rebellion (New York: New York Association for Colored Volunteers, 1864), 15–18; New York Times, March 7, 1864.

⁹⁹ James E. Glazier to parents, January 16, 1863, Glazier Papers, Huntington Library, in McPherson, What They Fought For, 57; Isaac Marsh to wife, May 12, 1863, Isaac Marsh Papers, Duke University, in Jimerson, Private Civil War, 96.

¹⁰⁰ Halpine, Life and Adventures, 55.

¹⁰¹ Chaplain C. W. Buckley to Gen. L. Thomas, April 1, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 563–65; General Order No. 50, Headquarters, Fourteenth Regiment, USCT, November 23, 1864, in ibid., 559.

¹⁰² Lydia Maria Child to Eliza Scudder, [n.d.] 1864, Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 180.

¹⁰³ Wheeler to Brig. Gen. Daniel Ullmann, April 8, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 618–19.

¹⁰⁴ Turner to adjutant-general, U. S. Army, June 29, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 626–27.

¹⁰⁵ Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 612, 613; General Order No. 31, Headquarters, Sixty-Second Regiment, USCT, July 3, 1864, in ibid., 617.

¹⁰⁶ Claude Augusta Wilson, Florida Narratives, 360; Edward Stanly [military gov. of N.C.] to Maj. Gen. Foster [commanding, Department of North Carolina], January 20, 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 87–88; Testimony of Col. George H. Hanks, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, February 6, 1864, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 519.

¹⁰⁷ J. L. Seaton [western Kentucky Unionist] to Hon. Lush. [Lucian, often misspelled Lucien] Anderson [Kentucky congressman], February 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 255; Capt. George G. Davis [provost marshal, St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana] to Gen. James Bowen [provost marshal general, Department of the Gulf], August 21, 1863, in ibid., 157–58; Col. H. N. Brisbie [commanding a Louisiana black brigade] to Lt. O. A. Rice [Headquarters, Post of Morganzia, Louisiana], September 24, 1864, in ibid., 511.

¹⁰⁸ Rice to Kittey Diggs, September 3, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 690; Testimony of Col. George H. Hanks, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, February 6, 1864, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 519.

¹⁰⁹ Christian Recorder, May 28, 1864; Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild [commanding a black brigade] to Maj. Robert S. Davis [Headquarters, Department of Virginia and North Carolina], May 12, 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 99–97. See also Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, 202.

¹¹⁰ Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom (New York: New Press, 1998), 255–56.

¹¹¹ Randall to Brig. Gen. L. Thomas, February 28, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 712; Chaplain Jas. Peet to Brig. Gen. L. Thomas, September 30, 1864, in ibid., 604.

¹¹² Vincent Colyer [former superintendent of the poor, Department of North Carolina] to Hon. Robert Dale Owen [chairman, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission], May 25, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 124; John Finnely, Texas Narratives, part 2, 39.

¹¹³ Flagg [quartermaster at Quincy, Illinois] to Edwin M. Stanton, February 5, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 586; ibid., 587.

¹¹⁴ Putnam to Brig. Gen. W. D. Whipple [headquarters, Department of the Cumberland], January 30, 1865, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 460–61.

¹¹⁵ Maj. John A. Shannon [commanding a Tennessee black regiment] to Lt. W. W. Deane [headquarters, chief of artillery, Department of the Ohio], March 6, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 444.

¹¹⁶ Capt. John Gould [commissary officer] to Edwin M. Stanton, January 21, 1864, and Endorsement, Headquarters, Department of the Missouri, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 247–48.

¹¹⁷ Brig. Gen. Speed S. Fry [post commander], Circular, Camp Nelson, Kentucky, July 6, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 672; Affidavit of Joseph Miller, November 26, 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 269–71; Marion B. Lucas, “Camp Nelson, Kentucky, During the Civil War: Cradle of Liberty or Refugee Death Camp?” Filson Club History Quarterly 63 (1989): 448. For the impact of apathy, neglect, and outright cruelty on the health of blacks during and after the war see Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

¹¹⁸ Washington to Lincoln, December 4, 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 608.

¹¹⁹ Statutes at Large, 13: 571.