Pride and Prejudice in the American Civil War

...You can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden. We too have suffered and died in defence of that starry banner which floats only over free men... I feel assured that the name of the colored soldier will stand out in bold relief among the heroes of this war...
(Henry S. Harmon, 3rd United States Colored Infantry, October 1863)

Far better the slow blaze of Learning’s light,
The cool and quiet of her dearer fane,
Than this hot terror of a hopeless fight,
This cold endurance of the final pain,
Since thou and those who with thee died for right
Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!
(Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘Robert Gould Shaw.’)

In 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very special monument to that war was erected opposite the Statehouse in Boston. Designed by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it depicted in profile the figure of Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-year-old white officer of the North’s showcase black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, leading his men through Boston on their way to South Carolina in 1863. An unusual piece of sculpture, Saint-Gaudens had worked hard to avoid representing the black troops in any kind of stereotypical manner, portraying them instead as noble patriot soldiers of the American nation. Both in its novelty and in its sentiment the monument remains impressive according to the art critic Robert Hughes, ‘the most intensely felt image of military commemoration made by an American.’

However, the Saint-Gaudens monument in no way reflected the general mood of the American people towards those black troops who had fought in the conflict, as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s response to Shaw’s sacrifice reveals. Between 1863, when Henry Harmon expressed his optimism about history’s treatment of the black soldier, and 1897, the American nation had all but forgotten that black troops had ever played a role in the Civil War. Both Saint-Gaudens and Dunbar were working at a time when segregation was beginning to bite in the South with the ‘Jim Crow’ Laws, but the exclusion of black troops from the national memory of the Civil War began long before the 1890s. In the Grand Review of the Armed Forces which followed the cessation of hostilities very few blacks were represented. Relegated to the end of the procession in ‘pitch and shovel’ brigades or intended only as a form of comic relief, neither the free black soldier not the former slave was accorded his deserved role in this poignant national pageant. Rather than a war fought for liberty, in which the role of the African-American soldier was pivotal, the image of the American Civil War as a ‘white man’s fight’ became the norm almost as soon as the last shot was fired.

The relationship between the black soldier and the ‘land of the free’ has always been ambiguous. The involvement of black troops in America’s wars from colonial times onwards followed a depressing pattern. Encouraged to enlist in times of crisis, the African-American soldier’s services were clearly unwelcome in time of peace. Despite this, the link between fighting and freedom for African-Americans was forged in the earliest days of the American nation, and once forged proved resilient. During the colonial era, South Carolina enacted legislation that offered freedom to slaves in return for their military services. By the conclusion of the American Revolution military service was regarded as a valid and successful method of achieving freedom for the slave, as well as an important expression of patriotism and loyalty to the nation.

It was unsurprising, therefore, that when hostilities commenced between North and South in 1861 blacks throughout the North, and some in the South too, sought to enlist. However, free blacks who responded to Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers found that their services were not required by a North in which slavery had been abolished but racist assumptions still prevailed. Instead they were told that the war was a ‘white man’s fight,’ and offered no role for them. The notable black leader, Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped slave, summed the matter up:

Colored men were good enough to fight under Washington. They are not good enough to fight under McClellan. They were good enough to fight under Andrew Jackson. They are not good enough to fight under Gen. Halleck. They were good enough to help win American independence but they are not good enough to help preserve that independence against treason and rebellion.

Douglass further recognised that unless the issues of arming free blacks and of freeing the slaves were addressed, the Union stood slim chance of success. The Union, however, showed little sign of heeding his warnings. In the early months of the conflict the National Intelligencer reinforced the view that the war ‘has no direct relation to slavery. It is a war for the restoration of the Union under the existing constitution.’ Yet under the pressures of conflict it became increasingly difficult to maintain such a limited policy. This was particularly true for those generals in the field who found themselves having to deal with both the free black population and a growing number of slaves who, dislocated by the war, were making their way to Union lines. Whilst the Federal Government prevaricated on the question of arming blacks for a variety of mainly political reasons, the Union generals found themselves faced with a problem that required immediate resolution. Consequently, the first moves towards both arming blacks and freeing slaves during the American Civil War came not from Washington but from the front line.

Initial steps in this direction proved clumsy, though an important precedent as far as the slaves were concerned was set early on in the conflict. In 1861 Benjamin A. Butler, in charge of Fortress Monroe in Virginia, declared that all slaves who escaped to Union lines were ‘contraband of war’ and refused to uphold the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law, which bound him to return to their owners. Butler’s policy did not have much of an impact on attitudes in Washington, but it did reinforce the views of those who felt that slavery was of great military use to the Confederacy and ought to be attacked on those grounds alone. In Missouri in 1861, John C. Fremont, commander of the Department of the West, declared all slaves owned by Confederate sympathisers to be free. Lincoln insisted that Fremont modify his announcement to bring it into line with the 1861 Confiscation Act, which removed slaves only from those actively engaged in hostilities against the Union.

In late March 1862, Major General David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, emancipated all slaves held in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, and forced as many escaped male slaves as he could find into military service. Not only was Hunter’s announcement rejected by Lincoln, but the aggressive manner in which he went about recruiting blacks for the Union army served only to alienate the very people he was attempting to help. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the white officer in charge of what became the First South Carolina Volunteers, was in no doubt that the suspicion his troops expressed towards the Federal Government was the natural ‘legacy of bitter distrust bequeathed by the abortive regiment of General Hunter.’ More successful were the efforts of Jim Lane in Kansas. A former US Senator and a brigadier general in the Union army, Lane chose simply to ignore the War Department and raised a black regiment, the First Kansas Colored Volunteers, in 1862. This regiment was finally recognised the following year, by which time it had already seen active service against the Confederacy.

Although the War Department sanctioned the recruitment of black troops in August 1862, black regiments were not properly raised until after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1863. The decision came at a time when the war was not going well for the Union, and coincided with the first draft in the North. In some ways this helped. Racist objections to the arming of blacks could easily, if cynically, be countered on the grounds that it was better that a black soldier die than a white one. As John M. Broomall, Congressman from Pennsylvania noted:

I have never found the most shaky constituent of mine, who, when he was drafted, refused to let the blackest negro in the district go as a substitute for him.

Abraham Lincoln acknowledged such sentiments in his famous letter to James Conkling, written in August, 1863, in which he defended his emancipation decision. ‘You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you,’ Lincoln noted, ‘but no matter... I thought that whatever Negroes could be got to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union’. He concluded:

...there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.

For many blacks, Lincoln’s latter point was the important one. They were initially confident that their acceptance, however reluctantly granted, by the Union army offered them the opportunity both of short-term military glory and longer-term acceptance into the nation as a whole. As Frederick Douglass put it:

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.

Corporal James Henry Gooding, a former seaman and volunteer in the Massachusetts 54th, anticipated that ‘if the colored man proves to be as good a soldier as it is confidently expected he will, there is a permanent field of employment opened to him, with all the chances of promotion in his favor.’ The First Arkansas Colored Regiment had an equally optimistic view of the future. They gleefully marched into battle singing, to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’:

We have done with hoeing cotton, we have done with hoeing corn,
We are colored Yankee soldiers, now, as sure as you are born;
When the masters hear us yelling, they’ll think it’s Gabriel’s horn,
As it went sounding on.
They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin,
They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin,
They will have to give us house-room, or the roof shall tumble in!
As we go marching on.

Not everyone shared such optimism. One black New Yorker argued that it would be foolish for blacks to heed the Union’s call to arms since the race had no reason ‘to fight under the flag which gives us no protection.’ Initially, this pessimistic view appeared to be the more realistic. The white response to the raising of black regiments was far from positive, and inspired a backlash against the whole idea of emancipation. Notwithstanding racist arguments in favour of blacks rather than whites being killed, most whites did not believe that blacks would make effective soldiers, seeing them as cannon fodder at best. Attitudes began to change only with the battlefield successes of several of the black regiments. Even before its official recognition by the War Department, Jim Lane’s black regiment had performed well in Missouri, prompting one journalist to write that it was ‘useless to talk any more about negro courage. The men fought like tigers, each and every one of them.’ Skirmishes between Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s First South Carolina and the rebels, and between Benjamin Butler’s Second Louisiana Native Guards and Confederate cavalry and infantry regiments were equally decisive in terms of proving that the black troops could and would fight, but did little to alter the northern public’s perception of the black regiments. The first major engagement for those came in the spring of 1863, with an assault on Port Hudson on the Mississippi in Louisiana. The assault itself was misconceived, and the Union army suffered a defeat, but for the black troops who had fought there Port Hudson proved a turning point of sorts. One lieutenant reported that his company had fought bravely, adding ‘they are mostly contrabands, and I must say I entertained some fears as to their pluck. But I have none now’. The New York Times was similarly impressed:

Those black soldiers had never before been in any severe engagement. They were comparatively raw troops, and were yet subjected to the most awful ordeal that even veterans ever have to experience – the charging upon fortifications through the crash of belching batteries. The men, white or black, who will not flinch from that will flinch from nothing. It is no longer possible to doubt the bravery and steadiness of the colored race, when rightly led.

If further proof were required that the black soldier had potential, one of the Civil War’s most bloody engagements, the battle of Milliken’s Bend, fought shortly after the Port Hudson defeat, provided it. Here, too, raw black recruits found themselves facing substantial Confederate forces. In the black units engaged, casualties ran to 35 per cent and for the Ninth Louisiana Infantry alone casualties reached 45 per cent. The cost was high but, as at Port Hudson, white commanders declared themselves impressed with the behaviour under fire of the black troops. Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of War, concluded that:

The sentiment in regard to the employment of negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent Battle of Miliken’s Bend. Prominent officers, who used in private to sneer at the idea, are now heartily in favor of it.

At the same time as black soldiers were proving their valour on the Mississippi at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend, the North’s most famous black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, was preparing to set off for its first major campaign and a place in the history books. Fort Wagner, on the northern tip of Morris Island in South Carolina, was the main defence both for Charleston and for Battery Gregg which overlooked the entrance to Charleston Harbour. The taking of the fort would have been a significant prize for the Union forces, enabling them to attack Fort Sumter and hopefully Charleston itself. Originally, the plan had been to use the 54th in a minor supporting role, but its commander, Robert Gould Shaw, recognised the importance of being seen to take an active part in the forthcoming engagement and campaigned vigorously for his regiment to be given a more prominent place in the attack. He was successful, and the 54th received orders to head the attack on the fort on July 18th, 1863.

As with Port Hudson, the attack on Fort Wagner, one of the most heavily defended of the Confederate forts, was doomed to failure, and the Union forces sustained heavy casualties. The Massachusetts 54th lost over half its men, including Shaw who was shot through the heart as he took the parapet of the fort. His troops held the ground he had reached for barely an hour. Yet in the more general battle against racism Fort Wagner, like Port Hudson, was a significant success. The New York Tribune reminded its readers that:

If this Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hundred thousand colored troops for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field... But it did not falter. It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees... To this Massachusetts 54th was set the stupendous task to convince the white race that colored troops would fight, – and not only that they would fight, but that they could be made, in every sense of the word, soldiers.

Thanks in part to the bravery of the Massachusetts 54th, therefore, by the end of 1863 the Union army had recruited some 50,000 African-Americans – both free blacks and former slaves – to its ranks. By the end of the war this number had risen to around 186,000, of which 134,111 were recruited in the slave states. African-American troops comprised 10 per cent of the total Union fighting force, and some 3,000 of them died on the battlefield plus many more in the prisoner of war camps, if they made it that far. Overall, one-third of all African-Americans who fought were casualties of the Civil War.

The propaganda success of the assaults on Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend and Fort Wagner were, however, only part of the story as far as the African-American troops were concerned. The fact that blacks had shown that they could fight in no way diminished the prejudice they experienced in the Union army. Nor did it resolve the crux of the issue which was that the war, for many of the black troops, was in essence a very different conflict from that experienced by the whites. In purely practical terms, the conditions experienced by African-American troops were far inferior to those experienced by some white ones. It is important not to overstate this, however. By the time the black regiments were raised and sent into the field the Civil War had been going on for almost two years. Fresh recruits, therefore, of whatever colour, found themselves facing a rebel army with much more combat experience. At Milliken’s Bend, for example, the most experienced officers had been in uniform for less than a month. Even worse, some of the black troops had received only two days of target practice prior to the battle, and in a war where fast reloading was crucial for survival they simply lacked the necessary skill.

The African-American regiments also received a greater proportion of fatigue duty than many of the white regiments, thereby denying them essential fighting experience. The quality of weapons distributed to them was also not always on a par with those the white regiments received, although again it is important to bear in mind that adequate weaponry was a problem for many regiments, both black and white. Medical care for the black regiments was equally inadequate, and a particular problem given the high rate of combat casualties in these regiments. Many of the black troops, being relatively new to the field, had little immunity to the diseases that infected the camps, and the problem was compounded by a white assumption that blacks were not as susceptible to disease as whites. Finding surgeons to work with black troops was also difficult. Again, racism alone does not account for this. By 1863 there was a general shortage of physicians in the Union army, and those that could put up with the rigours of camp life had long ago been snapped up by regiments formed earlier in the war.

Unfortunately, deliberately prejudicial policies compounded the more general problems that the African-American regiments faced after 1863. Most obviously, blacks were never promoted on a par with whites. Benjamin Butler, in mustering in the Louisiana regiments, had created a mixed officer class. Jim Lane in Kansas did likewise, and since he was acting against orders anyway he never troubled himself to defend his actions. However, when Governor Andrew sought to appoint black officers to the Massachusetts 54th and 55th, he was told that white officers only would be accepted.

Similarly, when Jim Lane’s Kansas regiments were officially recognised, its black officers were not. In the South, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, on taking over from Butler, promptly set about removing all the black officers, usually by forcing them to resign. In many cases the argument used to defend such blatant racism was that blacks lacked the necessary literacy skills and knowledge to cope with high command. In many cases, particularly as far as the contraband regiments were concerned, there was an element of truth to the charge. The white officers were no more capable in this regard than the blacks: the only difference was that the white officers were not being put under the microscope to the same extent. By the conclusion of the war only one in 2,000 black troops had achieved officer rank, and these mostly by the indirect route of becoming either chaplains or physicians.

Of all the discriminatory policies to impact on the African-American regiments, however, the most damning related to pay. At the outset there was no indication that the War Department intended to pay black troops less than whites. When Governor Andrew was granted permission to raise the Massachusetts 54th, he was instructed to offer $13 per month, plus rations and clothing, along with a bounty of $50 for signing up and $100 on mustering out. However in June 1863, the War Department decided that black troops were entitled to only $10 per month, of which $3 should be deducted for clothing. The reasoning was that the raising of black regiments came under the Militia Act of 1862, which specified the lower rate of pay on the grounds that it was intended for non-combatants.

The matter prompted an angry backlash from black troops and many of the officers. Governor Andrew, embarrassed at the turn of events, offered to make up the difference out of his own pocket, but the 54th would not let him. There was a principle at stake. As one black volunteer put it:

Now it seems strange to me that we do not receive the same pay and rations as the white soldiers. Do we not fill the same ranks? Do we not cover the same space of ground? Do we not take up the same length of ground in a grave-yard that others do? The ball does not miss the black man and strike the white, nor the white and strike the black.

Corporal John B. Payne, of the Massachusetts 55th, declared his unwillingness ‘to fight for anything less than the white man fights for’. The issue of pay went beyond prejudice alone. It represented the crux of the problem for those black regiments who fought in the Civil War, and threw into sharp focus many of the inconsistencies and contradictions that lay at the heart of Union war aims. The Union had, from the outset, been faced with two distinct yet linked problems: the role of the free black and the future of the slave. Equality and emancipation were not synonymous, yet one could not be addressed without affecting the other. The question over the citizenship right of free northern blacks went hand in hand with the larger and more troubling question of slavery – for many the root cause of the conflict. Northern blacks were well aware of this and, unlike northern whites, could not and would not avoid the wider implication of the conflict. Many blacks saw the Civil War as a battle for emancipation long before it became apparent that Lincoln shared this view and far ahead of a northern public who regarded it as a war for the restoration of the Union as it had been, with slavery intact. Frederick Douglass, for one, was of the opinion that the future of the American Republican experiment itself rested on the triumph of the black soldier and the freed slave. For Douglass, the evil of slavery had corrupted the white man as much as it had degraded the slave, and the Civil War was an opportunity not just to end the institution but to rededicate the nation to the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence. Freedom for both white and black depended not just on a Union victory but on complete reassessment of the national ideal. As he summed it up to a Boston audience in 1862:

My friends, the destiny of the colored American, however this mighty war shall terminate, is the destiny of America. We shall never leave you. The allotments of Providence seem to make the black man of America the open book out of which the American people are to learn lessons of wisdom, power, and goodness – more sublime and glorious than any yet attained by the nations of the old or the new world. Over the bleeding back of the American bondsman we shall learn mercy. In the very extreme difference of color and feature of the negro and the Anglo-Saxon, shall be learned the highest ideas of sacredness of man and the fullness and protection of human brotherhood.

Ultimately, the problem facing both African-American soldiers and their spokesmen in the North was that their vision of the meaning of the Civil War clashed with that of the majority of whites. For blacks, the Civil War offered an opportunity not just to end slavery, but to redefine American national ideals. Their determination to fight in the face of hostility and prejudice left their dedication to these ideals in no doubt whatsoever. In this regard, their experience of the Civil War gave them a far more expansive, optimistic and demanding vision of the nation’s future than it did many whites. As George Stephens of the Massachusetts 54th noted ‘this land must be consecrated to freedom, and we are today the only class of people in the country who are earnestly on the side of freedom’. This was not a message that whites wished to hear.

Ultimately, the nation as a whole chose to ignore both the sacrifice of the black regiments and the implications of their involvement in America’s greatest national crisis. As North and South came together over an increasingly selective interpretation of what the Civil War had been about, the opportunity to reconstruct the nation on a new basis of equality was thrown away. On Memorial Day 1871, speaking at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, Frederick Douglass lamented the call ‘in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it.’ In the end, the need to find some common ground between North and South encouraged the growth of a patriotism that rejected the pride of those black troops who had fought and died for the nation.

On May 31st, 1997, a hundred years after the Saint-Gaudens monument was first unveiled, a re-dedication ceremony was held at the site. The day included an historical re-enactment of Shaw’s troops leaving for the South and a speech by General Colin Powell in which he drew parallels between the Union’s decision to raise black regiments during the Civil War and the contemporary army’s leading role in the fight for racial equality in America today. Despite Powell’s words, the many thousands of books written on the American Civil War to date and the cinematic success of the Hollywood film about the Massachusetts 54th, Glory , the war continues to be regarded by many as a white man’s war. The overt racism of 1897 has dissipated, yet the significance of the black soldier in America’s bloodiest conflict continues to be downplayed.

Further reading

• Ira Berlin, et.al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
• Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Penguin/Meridian Books, 1991)
• Hondon B. Hargrove, Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War (McFarland, 1988)
• James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 1995)
• Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (University Press of Virginia, 1995)
• Edwin S. Redkey (ed.), A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Susan-Mary Grant is a lecturer in history at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the author of The American Civil War (UCL Press, forthcoming).