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Fighting to be Free--the Civil War

When southern states responded to the election of Abraham Lincoln by forming the Confederate States of America and seceding from the United States, most enslaved and free African Americans knew that slavery lay at the heart of the rebellion. They knew that southern whites seceded in order to preserve and protect the institution of slavery. White southerners feared that, with Lincoln as President, the anti-slavery forces in the northern states would ram through a constitutional amendment ending slavery. They also feared that Lincoln, the first Republican President and a man openly opposed to slavery, would appoint anti-slavery judges to Federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

Northern free blacks responded to the outbreak of war between the North and the South by volunteering to fight for the Union. But, it took two years for the North to accept blacks as soldiers. Lincoln rejected the initial offers of volunteer units of black soldiers because he feared turning the War into a war against slavery. He feared that, by accepting black soldiers, he would undermine white support for the War and might lose loyal Border States like Missouri to the Confederacy. President Abraham Lincoln was determined to fight the War as a battle to save the Union rather than as a war to end slavery. To this end, he refused to allow for the enlistment of black soldiers until mounting numbers of white casualties softened white public opinion towards using blacks in combat.

In the summer of 1862, five black infantry regiments were authorized for action in the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia. Six months later, following Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 (which officially ended slavery in Confederate areas not under Union authority), black units were formed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In May of 1863, the War Department created the Bureau of Colored Troops and began vigorously recruiting black soldiers. The most famous of these northern regiments was the 54th Massachusetts, which counted 100 dead and 146 wounded in its assault on Fort Wagner at Charleston Harbor on July 18, 1863. Due to the 54th Massachusetts' valiant efforts, no one could doubt of the ability of black soldiers to fight or their willingness to die for the Union cause.

Eventually, 178,000 African Americans served as soldiers during the Civil War, and up to 33,000 served in the Navy: 80 percent of them were former slaves. Ultimately, 166 African-American regiments--consisting of 145 infantry, seven cavalry, 12 heavy artillery, one light artillery, and one regiment of engineers--served in the Civil War. Although they fought and died with courage and honor, black soldiers suffered discrimination both officially and unofficially. Almost all officers in the black units were whites. Of the 7,200 officers who served in the United States Colored Troop, only 110 were African Americans. More than 70 of the 110 were so harassed by their superiors that they resigned their commissions. Black soldiers were paid less than white soldiers, received unequal medical care, poor equipment and supplies, and worked at digging ditches, latrines, and fortifications so the white soldiers to be rested and ready for battle. It was only after black soldiers refused to accept the unequal pay, in what amounted to a pay strike against the Federal Government, that matters changed, although full equality in pay was more of a promise than a reality for black soldiers.

Still, black units fought in 39 major battles and in hundreds of minor engagements, skirmishes, and incidents. They gained public acclaim for their heroism in the battles of Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, Fort Wagner, Fort Pillow, and the final battles on the Virginia front leading to the fall of Petersburg, Virginia, the Confederate Capital. Approximately 3,000 soldiers lost their lives in battle, and another 33,000 died from war-related diseases--a proportion much higher than the disease-caused casualties of white troops. The high death rate of black soldiers from diseases stemmed principally from the fact that black troops were often assigned to the least healthy posts, such as guarding river fortifications or doing fatigue labor in swamps and marshy areas.

Black soldiers also confronted angry reaction from Confederate soldiers that made their duty in the field especially dangerous. For the most part, Confederate soldiers treated black soldiers as runaway slaves to be executed when captured or else sold into slavery. The great black leader, Frederick Douglass, demanded that President Lincoln take actions to prevent the summary execution of captured black soldiers by threatening to stop his recruitment efforts. The President announced that for every black soldier killed or sold into slavery, a rebel prisoner would be executed or put to hard labor. Yet, Lincoln's order did not end the execution or enslavement of captured black soldiers, partly because he never carried it out. No Confederate prisoners were ever executed under the policy.

In one of the worst episodes of the War, Confederates under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest (who later became infamous as a founder of the Ku Klux Klan massacred Union soldiers at Fort Pillow on the Tennessee River on April 12, 1864, giving "no quarter," especially to surrendering black soldiers. Lincoln refused, however, to carry out his earlier proclamation to execute rebel prisoners, probably understanding that Confederate soldiers would never recognize the legitimacy of African-American soldiers.

Black sailors also served with distinction in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. Estimates on the number of black sailors range from a low of 10,000 to a high of 33,000. The exact number is uncertain because the Navy did not classify sailors by race. Black sailors did experience discrimination, often being assigned the hardest tasks, such as working the boilers on steam-powered vessels. Many sailors also were used as stewards or waiters to serve white officers. But in general, black sailors were treated better than the soldiers in the United States Colored Troops. The Navy had a long tradition of using black sailors, and most white Americans did not view naval service to be of high social status or to consist of anything but work typically done by the lowest classes of white Americans. Moreover, whereas black soldiers were overwhelming rural and former slaves, black sailors typically were urban, skilled, and usually free men before the Civil War. And, large numbers of foreign-born blacks came to the U.S. during the War to enlist in the Navy. Black sailors served side-by-side with white sailors in cramped quarters on the ships, received equal pay, and shared equally with white sailors in any prize money from captured ships. Naval courts generally treated black sailors as equal to white sailors--blacks sometimes even received less severe punishments for crimes when compared to white sailors.

On the home front within the Confederacy, enslaved African Americans were forced to labor for the Confederacy by building fortifications and working in other fatigue labor to support rebel troops. Over 1,000 slaves and free blacks worked in the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond during the War, and some enslaved men lost their lives manning Confederate cannons and laboring as supply hands. Untold numbers of free blacks in the South and in northern areas captured by the Confederacy were enslaved. Some slaves and hundreds of free blacks actually volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, probably fearful of being enslaved or mistreated if they failed to express their loyalty to the new government. In Charleston, for example, free black fire brigades fought fires caused by Union cannon fire. White Union troops occasionally encountered armed blacks fighting for the Confederacy, and some free blacks even won official recognition for their service. For example, John Wilson Buckner, a free black, fought for the defense of Charleston at Fort Wager against the 54th Massachusetts, suffering wounds in action. Many more black men and women contributed to the Confederacy by serving as personal servants to their white owners when they fought as officers in Confederate units. Many others were impressed into service as nurses in military hospitals.

By 1864, some southern whites began talking about the need to arm slaves in defense of the Confederacy, giving freedom to those who served. Most whites recognized the absurdity of arming slaves, agreeing with the opinion of one Confederate Senator from North Carolina who said: "If we are right in passing this measure (to arm the slaves), we were wrong in denying to the old government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery and to emancipate slaves. Besides, if we offer slaves their freedom, we confess that we were insincere, were hypocritical, in asserting that slavery was the best state for the Negroes themselves." In the end, however, with the enemy at the very gates of Petersburg, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, along with General Robert E. Lee, commander of Confederate forces, endorsed using slaves as soldiers. In March of 1865, the Confederate Congress voted to enlist 300,000 black troops, granting them freedom with the consent of their owners. This was a desperate move that was never implemented, and a few weeks later Lee surrendered to Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The War to save slavery had become, for the South, a war to preserve southern independence even if it meant giving up slavery by arming the enslaved.

In those areas where the soldiers of the Confederacy and the Union met in battle, enslaved blacks experienced the special hardships of war. Forces from both sides abused the enslaved by forcing them to work in difficult and often deadly tasks, separated them from their families, and molested especially women left defenseless by the War. Thousands of slaves were uprooted as their owners marched them into the interior and to faraway Texas to escape invading Union forces. Although Union forces molested few white women in the occupied Confederacy, many enslaved women were raped, robbed, and assaulted by Union soldiers.

More than anything else, the outbreak of war offered enslaved African Americans the opportunity to break for freedom and to liberate themselves. At the first sign of hostilities, blacks stopped acting like slaves and broke for freedom by the thousands. Invading Union troops encountered armies of black refugees fleeing to Union lines. Most came with just the clothes on their backs. The waves of black refugees threatened to overwhelm Union war efforts, pressuring Lincoln to establish a refuge program wherein women, children, and the elderly were initially put in refugee camps and then placed on abandoned or occupied plantations to work for wages. The plan called for able-bodied black males to be recruited into the army, with the black units serving as a home guard on the plantations where their families lived and worked. Several 100,000 black refugees lived in these camps and worked on occupied plantations protected by black soldiers during the War in the Mississippi River Valley and in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina. Confederate guerrilla forces often hit these plantations, killing blacks and taking them back into slavery.

Besides breaking for freedom and fighting to protect their families as soldiers, numerous southern blacks served as spies, Union scouts, and as sources of military intelligence for the Union forces. Harriet Tubman, for example, who knew the South well from her days in slavery and her efforts in helping slaves escape via the Underground Railroad, was formally commended by the Secretary of War for her work as a Union scout and as a nurse in the Sea Islands. Thousands of other blacks led Union troops to hidden valuables, buried cotton, and food stores left behind by fleeing Confederates.

For the most part, however, southern blacks simply stopped acting like slaves once the War began and awaited the outcome of the fighting, especially slaves in the interior of the Confederacy. The problem of slave disobedience became so troublesome to the Confederacy that whites owning at least 20 slaves were exempt from service so that they could stay at home to better control the black population. To most southern whites' surprise, no outbreak of slave rebellion occurred during the War. Indeed, no southern white women were molested or abused by angry slaves; no retaliation of any great extent occurred against white masters; and few acts of vengeance were demonstrated in acts of violence against southern property or southern whites. In many cases, the enslaved simply snuck away in the night, seldom taking anything but their clothes. Some even provided provisions for the families of their white masters before leaving. And much to the surprise of nearly all whites, the first to leave were the household servants: men and women believed to be loyal and contented slaves.

For most southern slaves and northern free blacks, the Civil War experience represented a high point in their history. After the War, the nation all but abandoned efforts at providing justice for the formerly enslaved except during a few short years from 1865 to 1876, known as the era of Reconstruction. After that brief period, during which southern blacks experienced significant political and social empowerment, there descended upon the region over 100 years of segregation, lynching, disfranchisement, and racial violence commonly known as the era of Jim Crow. Writing in the 1890s in the midst of Jim Crow, black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose father served as a Union soldier, wrote with pride about the Civil War experience of blacks who fought to free themselves from slavery, both actually and symbolically.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_overview.htm