12.

The Bayonets of Freedom

“Liberty won by white men,” said Frederick Douglass, “would lose half its luster.” In the name of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown, Douglass summoned his people: “Men of Color, To Arms! To Arms!” “By every consideration which binds you to your enslaved fellow countrymen, and the peace and welfare of your country; by every aspiration which you cherish for the freedom and equality of yourselves and your children; by the ties of blood and identity which unite us with the black men now fighting our battles in Louisiana and in South Carolina, I urge you to fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave.”

Henry Highland Garnet and William Wells Brown joined him in a committee to direct recruiting. Douglass became an adviser to President Lincoln.

As African Americans flocked to enlist, white northerners and southerners scoffed at the idea of their being able to fight. A northern missionary on the Sea Islands said: “I don’t believe you could make soldiers of these men at all—they are afraid, and they know it.” A southern paper claimed: “The idea of their doing any serious fighting against white men is simply ridiculous.” Less than a year before his proclamation, President Lincoln said: “If we are to arm them, I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.”

After centuries of racial propaganda, the first major test of equality would be on the battlefield. “If slaves make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong,” said Confederate General Howell Cobb. The Confederate Congress knew he was right. Late in the war it discussed recruiting enslaved men, but steadfastly refused to train or arm them.

Most northerners were as strongly infected as enslavers with a belief in Black inferiority and bitterly resented fighting for Black liberation. Northern whites feared newly freed enslaved people would settle in the North and, by working for less pay, take their jobs. This fear of emancipation and an unpopular military draft led to city rioting by the poor and uneducated. In New York City, a draft riot lasted for four days as white mobs burned Black homes and lynched Black people in the streets. US troops recalled from the battle of Gettysburg had to quell a slaughter that left hundreds dead.

Emancipation had to be tested in fire, and a lot was riding on its success or failure. Black success on the battlefield would determine white willingness to grant citizenship and equality after the war. There was also an immediate political consequence. Unless African Americans proved courageous soldiers, President Lincoln might face defeat in 1864’s national election.

The news from the battlefield soon stilled the doubts. The army’s new recruits bravely attacked heavily armed foes and doggedly defended their positions. On May 27, formerly enslaved Louisianans faced deadly artillery fire as they charged over open ground toward a Confederate stronghold at Port Hudson. On June 7, a thousand African American soldiers, so recently enrolled they had not finished their training, used bayonets to push back a Confederate army twice their size. On July 18, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a Black regiment that included Frederick Douglass’s son, demonstrated grit and daring in a charge against a heavily fortified position at Fort Wagner. Facing heavy casualties, they were forced to retreat. But their heroism won them admiration and unstinting praise in the North.

A young man who fought for freedom—his own and his people’s.

On August 26, 1863, President Lincoln, based on reports from his commanders in the field, declared that “the emancipation policy and the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt the rebellion.” These Black troops, he wrote, “with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and a steady eye, and well-poised bayonet” have “helped mankind.”

Before the war ended, 178,958 Black men took part in 449 engagements and thirty-nine major battles. More than a fifth of all Black males under forty-five served in the Union army and comprised a tenth of the US land forces. Some 29,511 African Americans served in the US Navy, meaning every fourth sailor was Black.

The battlefield bravery of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment helped to convince Lincoln that Black troops could be depended on.

These African American volunteers arrived as both sides began to exhaust their supply of reserves. Without his Black troops, President Lincoln wrote in August 1864, “we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.”

At sea and on land, twenty-two African Americans earned the newly minted Congressional Medal of Honor. US General Daniel Ullman interviewed hundreds of his soldiers and found they “are far more earnest than we.” He concluded, “They understand their position full as well as we do” and know “that if we are unsuccessful, they will be remanded to a worse slavery than before.”

From the moment they enlisted, Black soldiers faced greater dangers than whites. Their training period was short, their guns and medical supplies inferior, their hospitals and doctors few. Many were marched to the front woefully unprepared, and some were used as shock troops to soften up the foe for white soldiers. For these reasons, 37,300 Black men lost their lives, a casualty rate far surpassing that of white troops.

White officers began by scoffing at their intelligence, doubting their fighting capacity, and questioning their battle readiness. The US government treated them as inferior by denying them Black officers and by paying them half the wages given white soldiers.

The Confederacy announced that Black soldiers and their white officers would be treated as rebels and executed when captured. This danger turned African Americans into what General Ullman called “daring and desperate fighters.”

Some one hundred seventy-nine thousand Black soldiers served in the army. An even larger number of Black men, women, and children helped in Union camps as laborers.

The threat was carried out. “The men were perfectly exasperated at the idea of negroes opposed to them & rushed at them like so many devils,” wrote a Confederate private, describing a massacre that followed a surrender. At Fort Pillow, on April 12, 1864, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops massacred Black prisoners by locking them in houses that were then set on fire. After the war Forrest became the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The atrocities finally ended when Lincoln threatened retaliation against Confederate prisoners.

Dramatic changes in social relations rocked the South by 1863.

Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, who commanded the First South Carolina Volunteers, said his troops ranked among the best in the army: “Their superiority lies simply in the fact that they know the country, which white troops do not; and, moreover, that they have peculiarities of temperament, position, and motive, which belong to them alone. Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for their homes and families; and they show the resolution and 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.”

An enslaved man serving as a spy for the Union armies.

Higginson was one of many officers who relied on African Americans as spies. “They have been spies all their lives. You cannot teach them anything in that respect.” Allan Pinkerton of the Union Secret Service found them “invaluable.” To gather vital data for Pinkerton, John Scobel, a formerly enslaved man, repeatedly crossed into enemy lines.

Confederates could do little but complain that every enslaved person was a potential spy. A southern clergyman called people in bondage “traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber! They know every road and swamp and creek and plantation in the county.” In 1864, a Confederate officer insisted enslaved people were “an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our valuable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources and yet acting so safely and secretly that there is no means to guard against it.”

Confederates also had to deal with enslaved people who provided crucial aid to Union soldiers trapped behind their lines or held in prisons. “To see a black face was to find a true heart,” said one escapee. A prisoner told this story: “Sometimes forty negroes, male and female, would come to us from one plantation, each one bringing something to give and lay at our feet.”

African American communities inside the Confederacy formed networks to aid escapees. “Knowing no one in the city [Charleston],” two white fugitives from a Confederate stockade recalled, “we relied upon the negroes.” They were provided a hideout for two months, and then guided to Union lines.

Private John Ransom and several fellow prisoners were led by Black guides, even through a Confederate fortress, and over sleeping soldiers. Ransom recalled: “The negroes were fairly jubilant at being able to help genuine Yankees.”

Alonzo Jackson, enslaved in Georgetown, South Carolina, who ran a freight business, and his wife, a pastry chef, rescued ragged, starving, “weak . . . no shoes on” Yankees fleeing a Confederate prison at Florence. Though Mr. Jackson “wanted to be free—and wanted my race to be free,” he and his wife first aided their white allies. Enemy patrols often threatened or fired at him, recalled Jackson, but “I fed and took them towards [the Union fleet at] North Island.”

African American women, Susie King wrote, also risked much for prisoners. “There were hundreds of them who assisted the Union soldiers by hiding them and helping them to escape. Many were punished for taking food to the prison stockades. . . . [In a Savannah stockade in 1865] soldiers were starving and these women did all they could towards relieving those men, although they knew the penalties should they be caught giving them aid. Others assisted in various ways the Union army. These things should be kept in history before the people.”

Northerners expected that emancipation would trigger explosive rebellions that would disrupt the foe.

But southern slave patrols had been doubled, every adult white male was armed, and with Confederate units everywhere, rebellion became suicidal. President Lincoln emphasized that the Confederacy was “constituted on a basis entirely military. It would be easier now than formerly to repress a rising of unarmed and uneducated slaves.”

The Black Christian Recorder of Philadelphia answered those northerners who wanted a revolt: “Rise against what?—powder, cannon, ball, and grapeshot? Not a bit of it. They have got too much sense. Since you have waited till every man, boy, woman, and child in the so-called Southern Confederacy has been armed to the teeth, ’tis folly and mockery for you now to say to the poor, bleeding, and downtrodden sons of Africa, ‘Arise and fight for your liberty!’ ”

During the Civil War, enslaved people seeking freedom and Union soldiers united behind enemy lines.

By the summer of 1863, Confederate solidarity began to unravel under sustained attacks by Black and white troops. The fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson severed the Confederacy and brought the Yankees mastery of both sides of the Mississippi. To prevent the loss of their valuable property, enslavers drove an estimated one hundred fifty thousand enslaved people at gunpoint into Texas, a thousand miles from the advancing, liberating Yankees.

The invaders turned the South into churning confusion. Refugees clogged roads as Black and white Union troops fanned out to overturn centuries of enslaver domination. Outlaw bands that united Confederate and Union deserters with formerly enslaved people and American Indians roamed the land foraging for food. Abandoned plantations were seized by the Union army for recruiting stations for African American men and as quarters for women and children.

A way of life began to collapse. Planters increasingly found their enslaved workers fled, would not work, or insisted on pay. People in bondage had begun to destroy the basis of white supremacy and slavery. The uncertainty of slave labor led to the steady dwindling of the Confederate food supply. As early as March 1863, a former Virginia governor wrote to the Confederate secretary of state about the impact of massive desertions by enslaved people. His melancholy report included: “Very little grain was raised last year, and less will be raised this year.” He was worried about people “getting something to eat.” By withholding their labor power, enslaved people were driving Confederate armies toward hunger and defeat.

In the turmoil of the southland, African American fathers, mothers, and children tried to locate one another. They searched crowded “contraband” camps that began to dot the countryside. Some men and women set off to find their loved ones.

In 1863, in the border states, enslavers saw their system of bondage disintegrate before their eyes. Enslaved people seemed to melt away in Delaware, Missouri, and parts of Maryland. Since they were not touched by the Emancipation Proclamation, 44,300 chose enlistment in the Union army as the route to freedom.

But their enslavers had other ideas and launched a new kind of warfare to stop enlistments. Enslavers formed armed posses that stationed themselves between the formerly enslaved and their goal, the recruiters. Many an eager enslaved man never reached the Union recruiting offices. Thousands were beaten, arrested, or slain. But still large numbers of African Americans in the border states ran to enlist.

The fall of Atlanta in September 1864 opened the road to freedom for hundreds of thousands in the Deep South. By December, General William Sherman, who vowed he would “have nothing to do with” the African American population, began a sweep through Georgia to Savannah and the sea. A wave of Black men, women, and children—equal in numbers to Sherman’s army—picked up and followed in his wake.

One elderly enslaved man told him, Sherman reported, he had been looking for “the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union, he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom.” Did generals now listen to enslaved people talking politics?

Sherman changed his mind and relied on the full-scale use of armed African Americans to move his supplies to the front and protect his rear from Confederate raiders. A few days later General Grant also decided to make use of the masses of people who trailed after his invading army.

In January 1865, Sherman met with Savannah’s African American leaders. He issued Order #15, which handed abandoned coastland plantations from Charleston through the Georgia Sea Islands to formerly enslaved people who were willing to cultivate them. Hardly pausing after this radical land redistribution, Sherman wheeled his army into South Carolina, burning a dozen towns and shredding the state’s system of bondage in the process.

Turmoil spread along country paths and city streets. Enslaved people spilled onto roads searching for relatives and sometimes clashed with Confederate soldiers trying to get home. Other enslaved workers remained at home on abandoned plantations trying to bring in crops. Enslavers used guns to gather them for transportation to the interior, to Texas, to anywhere far from liberating armies.

By this time Sherman’s foragers were raiding plantations in their path, and sometimes enslaved people’s quarters as well. Food was taken from people who did not have enough to eat. Women who had been raped under slavery were now abused by northerners.

The line between enslaved and free African American in the South vanished as Confederates drafted free Black men between eighteen and fifty. Free and enslaved brother and sister, sometimes together, tried to flee their forced impressment for the safety of Union or “contraband” camps.

Contraband camps became sanctuaries for thousands—displaced persons trying to collect their families, calculate their next move, and guess which direction pointed to safety. In the heart of the Confederacy these camps became homes, educational networks, and experiments in African American self-government. Formerly enslaved people from Georgia and the Carolinas were taught how to read and write by Union soldiers from Vermont and Minnesota. Those from Alabama and Georgia told young Yankee soldiers from Michigan and Kansas about what their families had suffered. Everyone talked of a better future.

Southern whites complained about the “uppityness” or “insubordination” of enslaved people who slowed or left work, challenged white rule, or simply slipped away. In South Carolina, twenty-two irate enslavers in March 1864 wrote the Confederate secretary of war saying the men and women they held in bondage were breaking into homes, hen and meat houses, killing cattle and hogs, “and stealing everything they can lay their hands on knowing we are not able to help ourselves.”

White resentment appeared in many forms. In Athens, Georgia, free Black people danced around a liberty pole in the center of town. At night whites cut it down. In Charleston, Black troops spent four days putting out fires, rescuing white people, and guarding their property. But some Charlestonians, unwilling to accept the new relations required by freedom, continued to insult them. Enslaved people who escaped to enlist heard tales about their wives and children being denied food or being beaten by revengeful enslavers.

A constant stream of freedom seekers crossed into Union lines. In the winter of 1864–65, T. Morris Chester, a young Black reporter for the Philadelphia Press, wrote: “The underground railroad, from Richmond, seems to be thoroughly repaired and is not only in running condition, but is doing an increasing business. . . . For some time past we have had an arrival from Richmond every day, and not infrequently two or three times in the 24 hours. . . . Men, women, and children, of all colors, with their household effects, are daily coming into our lines.”

Enslaved men, women, and children follow in the wake of General Sherman’s march through the South.

Some escapees represented changing racial relations. A body servant risked his life to carry the wounded man who enslaved him to safety—then mounted the man’s horse and rode off to the Yankees. One woman enslaver told of an affectionate servant who nursed her through an illness and then suddenly “left me in the night.” Another, whose denunciations of Yankees were published in Richmond papers, fled to Union lines bringing valuable information and twenty new Confederate uniforms.

When her servants suddenly disappeared, one woman enslaver asked, “If they’re not my slaves anymore, then whose are they?”