Baton Rouge had fallen.
While it seemed such a long time ago, only three months earlier New Orleans had fallen, too. What now kept Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler awake through the sweltering Louisiana nights, that summer of 1862, was protecting the gains his Union troops had made. Threatening from his north were the forces of the cunning Confederate general Meriwether Jeff Thompson, known also as the “Swamp Fox.” To make the area Butler controlled more defensible, he ordered a wide swath of forest cleared—from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain around New Orleans. An order he gave to General John W. Phelps. After all, Butler reasoned, Phelps could use the large number of runaway slaves at his camp (“contraband,” they were called) as labor for accomplishing the task.1
But Phelps refused.
For the past several weeks, Phelps, a Vermont native and graduate of West Point, had been training ex-slaves and free Black men as a fighting force. He’d requested of Butler not axes but arms for them.
Butler tried reason. President Lincoln forbade using negro troops, even disbanding the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored) organized by General David (“Black David”) Hunter. Butler had ordered runaways returned to their masters. Besides, Butler told Phelps, the arms and equipment sent him were specifically reserved for White men; or, as General William T. Sherman would say, a year later, “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war.”2
Phelps would not back down. He trained men to fight. “[W]hile I am willing to prepare African regiments for the defense of the Government against its assailants I am not willing to become the mere slave-driver you propose . . .” Phelps then resigned. Butler denied it. So, Phelps returned his commission to President Abraham Lincoln. At one point, Butler described Phelps as “mad as a March Hare on the ‘nigger question.’”3
While Lincoln brooded over Phelps, Butler’s need grew. He impressed former Confederate soldiers into the Union’s ranks. He requested reinforcements from the war department. When they refused, he threatened, “if they could not do anything for me by sending troops, I would call on Africa for assistance.”
Call on Africa he did.
The 1st Louisiana Native Guard of the Confederate States of America was a militia of free Blacks, formed in New Orleans in 1861, to fight on the side of the Confederacy. When the Louisiana legislature passed a law in early 1862 that militias were to be composed only of “free white males capable of bearing arms” the Native Guard was forced to disband. But as Union troops, and the Union Navy under Admiral David G. Farragut, trained an assault on New Orleans, the Native Guard was briefly reinstated as a last-ditch effort before finally being disbanded when the city fell in the spring of 1862.
Butler, in the fall of that year, ordered the officers of the Native Guard rounded up. It surprised him that mostly light-skinned men stood before him, yet they had chosen as their spokesman a man he described “as dark as the ace of spades.”
“My officers, most of them, believe that negroes won’t fight,” Butler said.
“Oh, but we will,” said the group.
“Then tell me why some negroes have not in this war struck a good blow somewhere for their freedom?” Butler asked the spokesman. “All over the south the men have been conscripted and driven away to the armies, leaving ten negroes in some districts to one White man, and the colored men have simply gone on raising crops and taking care of their women and children.”
The spokesman admitted his fear of answering the general’s question.
Butler assured him that “whatever the answer may be it shall harm no one of you.”
“General, will you permit a question?” the spokesman asked.
“Yes.”
“If we colored men had risen to make war on our masters, would not it have been our duty to ourselves, they being our enemies, to kill the enemy wherever we could find them, and all the White men would have been our enemies to be killed?”
“I don’t know but what you are right,” Butler said. “I think that would be a logical necessity of insurrection.”
“If the colored men had begun such a war as that, General, which general of the United States Army should we have called on to help us fight our battles?”
That, Butler admitted, was unanswerable.
“Well,” Butler said, “why do you think your men will fight?”
“General, we come of a fighting race. Our fathers were brought here as slaves because they were captured in war, and in hand-to-hand fights, too. We are willing to fight. Pardon me, General, but the only cowardly blood we have got in our veins is the White blood.”
The 1st Regiment of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard of the United States of America “became soldiers of the United States on the 22d day of August, 1862. In a very short time three regiments of infantry and two batteries of artillery were equipped, drilled, and ready for service. Better soldiers never shouldered a musket,” Butler said.4
Their first test under fire was almost a year away.
* * *
Instead of accepting his resignation, Lincoln offered Phelps a promotion to major general, placing him at the same rank as Butler. Phelps agreed, but only if the commission was postdated to the day of his resignation. That, Lincoln could not agree to because it would have legitimized Phelps’s contravention of Butler’s order. So, Lincoln refused. Phelps returned to his Vermont farm. Butler was recalled to Washington. And Major General Nathaniel Banks took Butler’s place.
In the summer and autumn of 1862, as this intrigue unfolded, Lincoln put the final touches on the Emancipation Proclamation. Following the advice of Edwin M. Stanton, his secretary of war, Lincoln would not announce his intention to free slaves until after the Union’s next victory, which came on September 17 in Maryland at Antietam, where Union major general George B. McClellan repulsed the troops of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
For Black leaders at the time, those hundred days between when Lincoln informed the south and when emancipation took effect were filled with apprehension. Was it a bluff, or would Lincoln actually sign the order? And what exactly would the order say? Lincoln himself equivocated. The chaplain of the Senate, Byron Sunderland, urged Lincoln to keep his promise.
“‘Well, Doctor,’” Sunderland reported Lincoln saying, “‘you know Peter was going to do it, but when the time came he didn’t.’”5
Lincoln was, of course, referring to the biblical account of Jesus at the Last Supper foretelling the Apostle Peter’s denial. Peter declared he would never disavow Jesus. But that next day, after Jesus’s arrest, Peter did deny knowing him, denied it three times.
With all the gloss heaped on the proclamation, many facts remain conveniently overlooked. Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation out of a desire to end slavery. Like the Founders before him, who appeased the south at almost every turn in crafting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s overarching concern was preserving the Union. He said as much in response to abolitionist and editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley:
If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.6
Wednesday, December 31, 1862, was tense with hope and fear. At a Washington, DC, “contraband camp,” where the federal government gave fugitive slaves temporary quarters, George Payne, a former slave, counted down the minutes. “Friends, don’t you see de han’ of God in dis?” he asked. “I have a right to rejoice; an’ so have you; for we shall be free in jus’ about five minutes.”7
Another ex-slave stood before the crowd to welcome in “the Year of Jubilee.”
Now, no more dat! no more dat! no more dat! When I tink what de Lord’s done for us, an’ brot us thro’ de trubbles, I feel dat I ought go inter his service. We’se free now, bress de Lord! (Amens! were vociferated all over the building.) Dey can’t sell my wife an’ child any more, bress de Lord! (Glory, glory! from the audience.) No more dat! no more dat! no more dat, now! (Glory!)8
In Boston, on December 31, 1862, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison delayed printing of The Liberator, hoping for word from Washington before going to press. By the next morning, the Emancipation Proclamation still had not been signed. Later that evening, Frederick Douglass and others gathered at Boston’s Tremont Temple, voiced their hopes and aired their doubts. A line of messengers had been set up between the telegraph office and the temple. Eight p.m. came and went. Nine o’clock, then ten. Still no word. A cloud of despair began settling over the hall.9
Douglass recalled it might have been Judge Thomas B. Russell who then burst into the hall screaming, “It is coming! It is on the wires!”
When the initial tears and shouts of jubilation subsided, Douglass led the assembly.10
Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound
let all the nations know,
to earth’s remotest bound:
The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Then, his old friend, a Black preacher named Rue, picked up11
Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea;
Jehovah has triumphed; his people are free.
Sing for the pride of the tyrant is broken,
His chariots, his horsemen, all splendid and brave;
How vain was their boasting! the Lord hath but spoken,
And chariots and horsemen are sunk in the wave.
The celebration moved from the temple to Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, where an overflowing crowd lasted through the night.
But upon examining the proclamation in the cold light of a new day, a heavy veil of disappointment descended. It was brief and dry. Gone was Lincoln’s typical grandiloquence. Military necessity was repeated throughout, with nothing said of human or moral responsibility. And a question remained as to whom, exactly, the proclamation emancipated.
The proclamation only freed slaves in ten Confederate states. But those were states that did not recognize Lincoln’s authority anyway, and were in open rebellion precisely because they desired to maintain slavery. Some slaveholding border states, such as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, were excluded from the proclamation, which meant slavery could continue there. Nor did the proclamation apply to Tennessee, Louisiana, or the western counties of Virginia, which would go on to be West Virginia. Finally, some regions of the south already under the control of Union forces were excluded as well. Lincoln was, at least, true to his word: he issued a proclamation which freed some slaves, and left many still in chains.
Other forces also worked on Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. A Union victory was not certain, even after Antietam. So, the proclamation offered freed slaves the opportunity to take up arms against their former masters. “I further declare and make known,” the proclamation reads, “that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”12
Even with its obvious flaws, Douglass and others comforted themselves with the knowledge that the Emancipation Proclamation made clear this was not merely a war for the abstract notion of national unity, but a war for the concrete ideal of freedom. And freedom was a cause for which men would fight, and die.
* * *
In New Orleans, with the exception of Butler, no generals wished to be in command of Black troops. Two months prior to his recall to Washington, Butler assigned the 1st Louisiana Native Guard to Brigadier Godfrey (Gottfried) Weitzel. Weitzel refused the command. “I cannot command those negro regiments,” he said.
Since the arrival of the negro regiments symptoms of servile insurrection are becoming apparent. I could not, without breaking my brigade all up, put a force in every part of this district to keep down such an insurrection. I cannot assume the command of such a force, and thus be responsible for its conduct . . . I have no confidence in the organization. Its moral effect in this community, which is stripped of nearly all its able-bodied men and will be stripped of a great many of its arms, is terrible. Women and children, and even men, are in terror. It is heart-rending, and I cannot make myself responsible for it. I will gladly go anywhere with my own brigade that you see fit to order me. I beg you therefore to keep the negro brigade directly under your own command or place some one over both mine and it.13
Black troops caused enslaved Blacks to leave plantations, join the Union, or in other ways advocate for their freedom (“servile insurrection”), and this was causing consternation among the White citizens of New Orleans, whom Weitzel was more interested in protecting. Weitzel followed up with another communication to Butler.
I have the honor to inform you that on the plantation of Mr. David Pugh, a short distance above here, the negroes who have returned under the terms fixed upon by Major-General Butler, without provocation or cause of any kind, refused this morning to work, and assaulted the overseer and Mr. Pugh, injuring them severely, also a gentleman who came to the assistance of Mr. Pugh. Upon the plantation also of Mr. W. J. Miner, on the Terre Bonne road, about sixteen miles from here, an outbreak has already occurred, and the entire community thereabout are in hourly expectation and terror of a general rising.14
Soon, Butler would be recalled to Washington, and his replacement, Nathaniel Banks, felt much the same as Weitzel did about Black troops. Banks purged most of the Black line officers from the Native Guard. But Weitzel, still saddled with them, assigned the Native Guard to building bridges and acting as sentries. Then, in May 1863, Banks received orders that Port Hudson was to be taken, a Confederate stronghold north of Baton Rouge, along the banks of the Mississippi. Grant had been charged with operations against the Confederacy at Vicksburg. The success of Grant and Banks would mean the Mississippi River was effectively in Union hands.15
The infantry attack on Port Hudson began in the early morning hours of May 22, 1862. Despite a night of naval fire to soften the Confederate forces, Weitzel’s troops, under the field command of Brigadier General William Dwight, were soon pinned down in a ravine. Bullets whined from a fortified ridge on one side of the ravine, called the Bull Pen; from a small dome-shaped pillbox on another ridge, known as Fort Desperate; and from an artillery battery on Commissary Hill. The Confederacy held the high ground, and their sharpshooters seemed to pick off Union soldiers at will. Poorly aimed “friendly fire” from the 1st Maine battery landed on Union troops as well.16
Into the slaughter, Dwight ordered the 1st and 3rd Regiments of the Louisiana Native Guard. They’d been working on a nearby pontoon bridge over the Mississippi, north of the main battle, which placed them in the worst possible position of attack. The remainder of the Union forces were to the northeast of Port Hudson, which meant the Native Guard had no backup or support as they approached the Confederate guns at the fort of Port Hudson.17
Six times, the Guard, under command of one of the few remaining Black line officers, Captain André Cailloux, charged the parapets protecting the fort. Some soldiers leapt into the waters of a bayou leading to the fortification and attempted to swim across. Nearly every man was killed. Again and again, they tried. Some managed to engage the enemy, but with no backup they were soon repulsed.
Perhaps it was the adrenaline coursing through Cailloux’s veins from a serious gunshot wound to his arm, but on May 27, he rallied his men for a final charge. Now berserk, in the original sense of that word,18 with his wounded arm flailing wildly, Cailloux led the charge. His voice could be heard above the din of battle:
“Suivez-moi. Follow me. Suivez-moi!”
He alternated between French and English, yelling like a wild man.19
Cailloux fell fifty yards before the fort. His Native Guard was ordered to withdraw. Cailloux’s body remained on the battlefield until July 9, when the forty-eight-day siege of Port Hudson ended. Grant had conquered Vicksburg, which led to the surrender of the port. On July 29, trumpets and trombones blared, in typical New Orleans style, leading the hearse that carried Cailloux on his final journey.20
Because of Port Hudson, and Cailloux, Banks had a change of heart. When reporting to the war department on the Siege of Port Hudson, he said of the Native Guard,
In many respects their conduct was heroic. No troops could be more determined or more daring . . . The highest commendation is bestowed upon them by all the officers in command . . . Whatever doubt may have existed heretofore . . . the history of this day proves conclusively to those who were in condition to observe the conduct of these regiments that the Government will find in this class of troops effective supporters and defenders. The severe test to which they were subjected, and the determined manner in which they encountered the enemy, leaves upon my mind no doubt of their ultimate success.21
Contrary to popular opinion, and the Hollywood movie Glory, starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment was not the first official Black regiment in the Union Army, the Louisiana Native Guard was. The 54th went into battle, leading the charge against Fort Wagner in South Carolina on July 18, 1863. But that was two months after André Cailloux led his men, and lost his life, against the Confederate garrison at Port Hudson.
Many Black soldiers and sailors followed. About 179,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army, another 19,000 in the Union Navy. Roughly 40,000 Black members of the military died during the years of conflict, 75 percent of those from disease, and from the refusal of field hospitals to treat soldiers of color. Early in the conflict, Black soldiers received $7 per month serving in the US military, while White soldiers received $13 per month. The 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiments spearheaded the fight for equal pay, refusing to accept anything less than what White soldiers received. After a nationwide outcry, which included a number of White soldiers, Congress passed an act in 1864 that granted equal pay. While that may have brought pay equity to Blacks and Whites serving in the armed forces, problems of unequal promotion and prejudice plagued Blacks in the military during the Civil War, and still plague Blacks in the military today.
This refusal of Union hospitals to treat Black soldiers, leading to their deaths, highlighted the medical disparities of the time, though these disparities began well before the end of the Civil War. In 1716, Onesimus, a slave to Cotton Mather, had proposed a means of inoculation against smallpox, but was cast aside in favor of White doctor Zabdiel Boylston, who then used Onesimus’s skin prick method to prevent a serious 1721 outbreak in Boston.22 After Edward Jenner’s creation of a smallpox vaccine, Jefferson, in the late eighteenth century, experimented by inoculating his slaves, then challenging them with live smallpox virus. Only once they showed no symptoms, did he give the vaccine to his family.23 And, perhaps, most infamously, by the end of the Civil War, J. Marion Sims had used Black slave women for painful experiments in gynecological surgery without anesthesia, in an effort to make them more productive “breeders” for White slave owners, earning him the title, “the father of modern gynecology.”24
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study,25 where the disease was allowed to run its full course untreated in Black men, had not taken place yet. Henrietta Lacks’s cells had not yet been culled for medical experimentation.26 The Influenza Outbreak of 1918, disproportionately affecting Black Americans, had not happened.27 COVID-19 deaths ravaging Black communities were almost 150 years in the future.28 Pulse oximetry, the ability to read oxygen levels through the skin, was an unheard-of technology. So, its importance in diagnosing diseases like COVID-19 coupled with its inaccuracy when reading through dark skin was unknown.29
Yes, the Civil War settled the question of whether the United States would remain united, but opened up so many more questions of how Black Americans would be treated in these United States, in medical care and beyond. Still, Black soldiers were there at the end.
When Grant crossed the Rapidan River to engage Lee’s forces in the battles of his Overland Campaign, he had with him a division of Black troops, numbering about 8,000. At the same time, attacking Richmond, Benjamin F. Butler, long since returned from lessons learned in Louisiana, brought with him 5,000 Black infantrymen and 1,800 Black cavalries. As Grant outflanked Lee, heading into some of the war’s most bloody hand-to-hand combat at Virginia’s Spotsylvania Courthouse and Cold Harbor, he ordered General W. F. (“Baldy”) Smith south of Richmond to advance on Petersburg. On June 15, 1864, Black troops, then called the United States Colored Troops (USCT), led the attack and succeeded in punching a mile-wide hole through the Confederacy’s defenses, capturing six big guns and two hundred prisoners.30
But Smith did not press his advantage (Butler later accused him of “dilatoriness”), giving Confederate forces time for reinforcement.31 This led to a ten-month siege of the city, participated in by thirty-four USCT regiments, battling at Darbytown Road, Fair Oaks, Deep Bottom, Hatcher’s Run, New Market Heights, and Fort Gilmer. Black troops sustained heavy losses.
In early April 1865, Lee abandoned both Petersburg and Richmond, fleeing west toward Appomattox with the USCT 2nd Division in hot pursuit. It ended there, with Black troops “moving forward at double quick” and Confederate soldiers “retreating in confusion.”32
On land and sea, Black troops were involved in every theater of the Civil War. They served with distinction, and died with honor. The Medal of Honor was created by the US Congress during the Civil War. Over fourteen hundred Union troops received the award; of those twenty-five were Black. General Benjamin Butler, at his own expense, created a medal officially known as the Army of the James Medal, but popularly known as the Butler Medal or as the Colored Troops Medal, which he issued to two hundred Black Union soldiers for their bravery and heroism in the Richmond and Petersburg campaign. But after Butler’s removal from command, Black troops were forbidden to pin this “unofficial” medal on their uniforms.33
During these years of national strife, Black men and women helped shape the military, one of the principal institutions of America. Military service in America has long translated into political power and wealth, from the time of George Washington until the present day. Ulysses S. Grant, of course, became the eighteenth president of the United States; Benjamen Butler, the governor of Massachusetts; George B. McClellan, the governor of New Jersey; Nathaniel Banks, the twenty-first Speaker of the House of Representatives; “Baldy” Smith, the president of both the International Telegraph Company and the board of police commissioners for New York City; and the list is long. For a time, a very brief time, at that, Black men who’d fought against the Confederacy also experienced a similar rise in power and wealth, as we shall see in the next chapter.
* * *
For years, I lived in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. My office was just off the north end of Monument Avenue, where the statues of Civil War generals rode high atop their horses. I’d always heard there was a secret code. Depending upon which direction the horse was facing, north or south, and whether the horse’s head was sculpted up or down, you were supposed to be able to tell whether that general was killed in battle by Union troops or died of some other cause. I never committed the code to memory. I found the monuments distasteful, and avoided the avenue whenever I could. So, I rejoiced when after a yearlong legal battle, Lee’s statue was taken down. My barbershop in Richmond was atop a former slave auction site. And I got an eerie feeling whenever I sat down for a cut. One of the main Confederate cemeteries in Richmond had a rather large pyramid modeled after the one at Giza, Egypt, which I passed each day as I drove into work. I don’t know the backstory, but I always believed it had something to do with Antoine Bovis, the Frenchman who in the 1930s claimed that pyramids had the power to preserve the dead.
Richmond was particularly good at preserving the past. In the 1980s, one of the city’s newspapers still referred to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression” or “the late hostilities.” As though the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War were merely insignificant blips.
I have long wondered why the south seems never to have gotten over the Civil War; why the Confederate flag remains such a potent and powerful symbol; why Civil War generals are still revered as heroes; why it is still debated whether the war was fought over slavery.
Historians have offered many explanations, but, perhaps, there is none more powerful than the one chiseled into the marble memorial for the Confederate soldiers of South Carolina at the Gettysburg National Military Park: “That men of honor might forever know the responsibilities of freedom. Dedicated South Carolinians stood and were counted for their heritage and convictions. Abiding faith in the sacredness of States Rights provided their creed. Here many earned eternal glory.”34
“Responsibilities of freedom”? What responsibilities of freedom exist that seek to enslave and hold enslaved human beings? “Abiding faith in the sacredness of States Rights”? By what moral creed does States Rights extend to the buying, selling, and ownership of human beings? It seems not only a civil war but a civil delusion. The only way an inscription like this makes any sense is if looked at as another instance of American freedom built atop the horrors of American slavery.
Yet, the Union had delusions of its own. With the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the north finally had a principle behind its cause. And, while the proclamation is read primarily as a document freeing enslaved Black citizens, it can equally, and perhaps more powerfully, be read as a document clarifying the “responsibilities of freedom” for White citizens, north and south. The primary responsibility being that a nation cannot hold another human being in bondage and still call itself the land of the free.
In this regard, the Emancipation Proclamation is a statement of “freedom dues” both to those who claim to have “freedom” and to those who most assuredly do not. The Civil War, then, by this reckoning, represented a third opportunity for America to take “the road not taken.” The first opportunity came not long after Anthony and Isabella, and their malungu, set foot on American soil. The second opportunity came when the Founders broke from England, and set about creating a new society based on new ideas about liberty, equality, and justice. The third now came after a blood-soaked conflict pitting the country against itself.
The results of the first two opportunities are well-known. By 1660, slavery was clearly established in the colonies, and by the Second Constitutional Convention in 1787, slavery was clearly encoded in the great founding documents of America. But with the end of the Civil War, a question remained: How would America respond given this third chance to pay freedom dues?
One major problem with the Union’s response was that Lincoln had no plan. It’s probably not a great idea to release four to five million enslaved people simply on a wing and a prayer, but that’s exactly what Lincoln did: “And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.”35
Recommending that formerly enslaved people find work “for reasonable wages” is not a plan, it’s a prayer.
The south, in contrast, actually did have a plan for what to do with slaves if they prevailed in the war. In March 1865, near the end of the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis, an ardent slaveholder, and the Confederate Congress advanced a policy of arming and emancipating slaves. Davis was authorized to recruit up to 300,000 slaves for the Confederate forces, with no more than 25 percent of male slaves between 18 and 45 drawn from any given state.36 Black Confederates, as they were known, trained in segregated regiments, though the war was over before they ever saw battle. Many more slaves populated the Confederate ranks as bound servants to White officers, as cooks, and on the staff of field hospitals.
Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin laid out what would happen after the south won its independence and had to deal with Black soldiers who helped bring about that victory.
The next step will then be that the States, each for itself, shall act upon the question of the proper status of the families of the men so manumitted. Cautious legislation providing for their ultimate emancipation after an intermediate state of serfage or peonage would soon find advocates in different States. We might then be able, while vindicating our faith in the doctrine that the negro is an inferior race and unfitted for social or political equality with the white man, yet so modify and ameliorate the existing condition of that inferior race by providing for it certain rights of property, a certain degree of personal liberty, and legal protection for the marital and parental relations, as to relieve our institutions from much that is not only unjust and impolitic in itself, but calculated to draw down upon us the odium and reprobation of civilized man.37
The south’s plan was simple: maintain White supremacy and slavery under the guise of serfage and peonage. The north won the war. The emancipation of slaves took place. But what plan for ex-slaves would rule the peace?
At least Union general William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton seemed to know that Lincoln needed a plan. And on the evening of January 12, 1865, before the Civil War was officially over, Sherman and Stanton addressed a gathering of Black Baptist and Methodist ministers, some former slaves, some formerly free, who’d climbed to the second floor of Sherman’s headquarters in a private mansion bordering a lush tropical square in Savannah. The meeting began at 8:00 p.m. with Major General Edward Davis Townsend, one of Lincoln’s military advisers, recording the affair.38
Garrison Frazier had been selected to speak for the group of Black ministers. Frazier, at sixty-seven years old, was born in North Carolina, and had been a slave until he bought his freedom, and his wife’s, in 1857, for one thousand dollars in silver and gold. He’d been an ordained Baptist minister for thirty-five years. Though he no longer had a church, he did have the support of the assembled delegation.39
Sherman questioned Frazier on his understanding of Lincoln’s actions and the goals of the United States at war. Frazier matched each question with a sophisticated answer. Sherman, then, got around to the most urgent matter—the need for a plan.
“State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom,” Townsend records Sherman saying,40
The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn in and it by our labor—that is, by the labor of the women, and children, and old men—and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare; and to assist the Government the young men should enlist in the service of the Government, and serve in such manner as they may be wanted. (The rebels told us that they piled them up and made batteries of them, sold them to Cuba, but we don’t believe that.) We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.41
“State in what manner you would rather live, whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by yourselves?” asked Sherman.42
Frazier answered, “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in South that will take years to get over, but I do not know that I can answer for my brethren.”43
Townsend notes, when polled, every minister agreed with “Brother Frazier.”44
Finally, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had the makings of a plan. Four days after this meeting, from the self-expressed desires of Black men long held in bondage, came General Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, accepted by Abraham Lincoln and otherwise known as “40 acres and a mule.” Mules were not actually in Sherman’s original order. He later requisitioned the US Army to lend them to newly freed Black landholders.
The scope of this post-emancipation plan was nothing short of breathtaking: distribute 400,000 acres of coastline stretching from Charleston to the St. John’s River in Florida, and extending some thirty miles inland, to newly emancipated slaves—land formerly belonging to southern White slaveholders, and the most agriculturally productive land in those states. Furthermore, in this area, allow African Americans to organize and govern their own communities. In Special Field Orders No. 15, “freedom dues” had been accepted, allocated, and acted upon by the federal government. “40 acres and a mule” showcased the American government at its finest regarding her citizens of color. Reparations were the order. Sweeping promises were made. The country, it seemed, had risen to the challenge and taken “the road not taken” before.
Brigadier General Rufus Saxton commanded the Union fort at Port Royal, South Carolina. A West Pointer, born in Massachusetts, and an abolitionist, Saxton immediately began processing thousands of requests for land. By June 1865, 40,000 Black Americans had settled on the first 400,000 acres of land, called derisively by Sherman’s critics “Sherman’s Reservation.” Six weeks before Lincoln’s assassination, Congress passed the first Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865, placing General Oliver O. Howard (for whom Howard University is named) in charge of land grants. Howard ordered Saxton to continue the land redistribution program, and another 500,000 acres of land were under consideration, to be taken from slaveholders and redistributed to slaves. Nearly one million acres of land, one million acres of wealth, were up for redistribution in this way.
* * *
Ex-slave William Colbert recalled the feeling of leaving slavery behind. He was ninety-three years old when he spoke with John Morgan Smith, a WPA writer, in 1937.
“Sho, I remember de slavery days. How could I forgits?”
“Was your master good to you?” Smith asked.
“[H]e was so mean. When he wuz too tired te whup us he had de oberseer do it; and the oberseer was meaner dan de massa . . . So when brother January he come home, de massa took down his long mule skinner and tied him wid a rope to a pine tree. He strip’ his shirt off and said:
“‘Now, nigger, I’m goin’ to teach you some sense.’
“Wid dat he started layin’ on de lashes. January was a big, fine lookin’ nigger, finest I ever seed. He wuz jus’ four years older dan me, an’ when de massa begin a beatin’ him, January neber said a word. De massa got madder and madder kaze he couldn’t make January holla.
“Den,” Colbert continued, “de war came. De massa had three boys to go to war, but dere wuzn’t one to come home. All the chillun he had wuz killed. Massa, he los’ all his money and de house soon begin droppin’ away to nothin’ . . . de las’ time I seed de home plantation I wuz a standin’ on a hill. I looked back on it for de las’ time through a patch of scrub pines and it look so lonely. Dere warn’t but one person in sight, de massa. He was a-settin’ in a wicker chair in de yard lookin’ out ober a small field of cotton and cawn. Dere wuz fo’ crosses in de graveyard in de side lawn where he wuz a-settin’. De fo’th one wuz his wife.”
Although 150 years premature, one cannot help but hear in the opening stanza of John Legend’s stirring anthem “Glory” (theme song for the film Selma) a soundtrack also for William Colbert’s vision looking back at Massa through a patch of scrub pines. When that day comes, the glory will be ours.45
The war was won. Black men and women had proved their mettle, laid down their fire along with their lives; lives that mattered in bringing forth a new American military, a new American union, a final decisive blow against slavery. Many were sure that in wresting their freedom, they would finally secure their freedom dues. “So sure America,” as rapper Common ad-libs to Legend, that some whispered of a second American Revolution coming on the heels of victory at Appomattox. Oh glory!