The Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied United States citizenship to the Negro. This decision was little more than a ratification of the status of black men in most parts of the American republic. In fifteen Southern states Negroes were denied not only the rights of citizenship, but many of the rights of humanity as well. In the eyes of the law, the slave was an article of property rather than a human being. He had almost no control over his own destiny or that of his family. The condition of Southern free Negroes was little better. Nor did most blacks in the North enjoy equal rights. In many Northern states blacks were educated in segregated schools when they were educated at all, subjected to the humiliations of Jim Crow in public transportation, denied the right to vote, and denied equal rights in the courts.
The Civil War wrought a revolution in the Negro's status, North as well as South. It brought freedom, citizenship, and eventually, equal civil and political rights (in theory at least) to all Negroes. It brought the rudiments of education to thousands offreedmen. The impetus of wartime change impelled the desegregation of schools and transporation facilities in many parts of the North. Time was to show that the revolution in the Negro's status was not so complete as it appeared, but in 1865 the black man could look back on four years of startling and rapid change, and could look forward hopefully to acceptance as an equal in American life.
In a biography of General Ulysses S. Grant published in 1928, Mr. W. E. Woodward stated that “the American negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own…. [The Civil War] was not their business. They had not started the war nor ended it. They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious sprirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule. “* In spite of the large number of articles and books dealing with the Negro's active part in the Civil War that have been published since 1928, the belief still persists among many laymen and some historians that the slave was a passive, docile, uncomprehending recipient of freedom in 1865, and that the four and one-half million Negroes in the United States played no important or effective role in the tragic drama of civil war.
The “Negro Question” was one of the main issues of the war. The South went to war in 1861 to protect itself against the North's alleged threat to “Southern institutions.” The chief Southern institution was slavery. In a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens, the newly elected vice president of the Confederacy, said that the slavery controversy was the “immediate cause” of Southern secession. “Our confederacy,” continued Stephens, “is founded upon… the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery—subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and mortal truth.”2
The South fought to protect and preserve slavery, but the North did not at first fight to destroy the “peculiar institution.” The principal Northern war aim, was restoration of the Union. Nevertheless, from the surrender of Fort Sumter to the surrender at Appomattox, the question of the Negro's status in the restored Union occupied much of the attention of the Northern people and their leaders. A writer in an antislavery newspaper declared in 1863 that the Negro was “the observed of all observers; the talked of by all talkers; the thought of by all thinkers; and questioned by all questioners.”3 In April 1864, Senator James A. McDougall of California complained to the Senate that “from the time I took my place here until this day … hardly a quarter of an hour has passed that has not been occupied by discussing the status of the negroes in the southern confederacy. Our home policy, our finances, our legitimate business, our foreign relations, have all been ignored.”4
Negroes, abolitionists, and antislavery Republicans in the North argued that the war could not be won nor the Union restored without the abolition of slavery. By 1863, President Lincoln had come to accept this argument. With his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, the war took on a new dimension. The abolition of slavery became a Northen war aim inseparably linked with the restoration of the Union. The South had gone to war to preserve slavery. By 1863 the North was fighting to abolish slavery. From beginning to end, slavery was one of the central issues of the war.
Free Negroes and emancipated slaves played an active and vital part in the Northern war effort. Approximately 500,000 slaves came within Union lines during the war. Most of these freedmen went to work as laborers or soldiers for the North. More than 200,000 Negroes fought in the Union Army and Navy. Without their help, the North could not have won the war as soon as it did, and perhaps it could not have won at all. The Negro was crucial to the whole Union war effort.
Several books about the Negro in the Civil War have been written since 1928. Herbert Aptheker's brief account, The Negro in the Civil War, and Bell Irvin Wiley's thorough study, Southern Negroes, 1861-1865, were published in 1938. In 1953 there appeared the very readable The Negro in the Civil War, by Benjamin Quartes, followed in 1956 by Dudley T Cornish's scholarly and well-written The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865. In 1962 Benjamin Quartes published his informative Lincoln and the Negro. In addition, many articles dealing with various aspects of the Negro's contribution during the Civil War have appeared in The Journal of Negro History and other historical quarterlies.
In recent years several collections of primary source materials touching upon the Negro in the Civil War have been published. Three separate editions, two of them in paperback, of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's famous Army Life in a Black Regiment have appeared since 1960. Ray Allen Billingon's edi-ton of The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten was published as a paperback in 1961. Between 1950 and 1955 the massive four-volume Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip Foner, was published. Volume III of this collection includes most of Douglass' important writings and speeches during the Civil War. And finally, one section of Herbert Aptheker's Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (1951; paperback edition, 1962) contains material on the history of the black man during the Civil War.
These works have added immensely to our knowledge of the part played by Negroes in the sanguinary conflict. But there is still a need for a documentary collection that will present all aspects of the Negro's role in the war largely in the Negro's own words—his contributions and achievements, his hopes and aspirations, his opinions and frustrations. This book is designed to fill that need. Most of the material contained in these pages has been previously unavailable to the general reader. Some of the newspaper and manuscript sources have been heretofore untapped even by scholars and specialists. It is hoped that this material will fill many gaps in our understanding of the Negro's part in America's greatest crisis.
This collection is designed to be of value to the scholar, to the student seeking information about the history of American Negroes, and to the general reader. The book is arranged in narrative form, with considerable interpretive and factual information supplied by the editor to bridge and clarify the documents. It can be read as a narrative; and at the same time the scholar in search of specific source material can use the chapter titles and the index to find what he is looking for. Most of the items in this book are excerpts rather than entire documents. To have reproduced the documents in full would have reduced the scope and variety of the material that could be included, and would have bored the reader with much repetitive, irrelevant, and sometimes obscure discourse. Every effort has been made to avoid any distortion of the original meaning or intent of the documents in the process of excerption.
The Negro was not merely a passive recipient of the benefits conferred upon him by the war. Negro orators and writers provided leadership in the struggle for emancipation and equal rights. Blacks were active in the movements to bring education, suffrage, and land to Southern freedmen. And perhaps most important of all, the contribution of Negro soldiers helped the North win the war and convinced many Northern people that the Negro deserved to be treated as a man and an equal. The future status of the black man in America was one of the central issues of the Civil War. Then as today this issue divided the nation, and the demands of Negroes for freedom and equality in the 1860s are as fresh and relevant in our own time as they were one hundred years ago.