13.
from liberation . . . to Protest
The spirits of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and hundreds of unknown rebels mingled with those in the ranks of the US African American armies of liberation. On a plantation near Richmond, Prosser had told his forces, “We have as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.” Now enslaved men in US uniforms rescued their Virginia sisters and brothers.
In Charleston, Vesey had told his followers, “We are fully able to conquer the whites if we were only unanimous and courageous.” Now the sons and grandsons of his followers carried their regimental banners into Charleston and freed thousands. A vision of “white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle” told Turner to overturn bondage in Virginia. Now that sight was replayed each day in the Confederate states.
Armies of former slaves kept David Walker’s promise—“Remember, Americans, that we must and shall be free.” African American bluecoats marched to the cadences of the Reverend Mr. Garnet’s “Rather die freemen, than live to be slaves. . . . Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! Resistance!”
With fixed bayonets and iron determination, African American forces overran and captured their foes, and proved wrong a racial mythology that had held them in slavery. One column led off white prisoners singing, “O Massa a rebel, we row him to prison, Massa no whip us anymore.” A soldier recognized his former owner among a group of prisoners and said, “Hi, massa—bottom rail on top this time!”
There were peaceful confrontations in which the newly freed tried to explain a revolution had taken place. A former enslaver asked her formerly enslaved worker, aged nineteen, “Why are you fighting against me?” He answered, “I ain’t fighting you, I’m fighting to get free.”
Black Union soldiers guarded Confederate prisoners. “Bottom rail on top this time,” said a formerly enslaved man.
Slavery melted away with the appearance of Black troops. They rescued families, protected women and children, emboldened runaways, and acted as an armed ally in the countryside for guerrilla units, families, and freedom seekers. As Frederick Douglass had predicted early in the war, the meaning of formerly enslaved men in US Army uniforms would be a lesson not lost on friend or foe.
Harriet Tubman, now known as “General” Tubman, was invited to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to assist US military operations. General Hunter asked her to accompany a Yankee raid on plantations along South Carolina’s Combahee River.
On June 2, 1863, she led Colonel Montgomery’s troops as they destroyed enemy railroad bridges and tracks. Tubman gathered up eight hundred rejoicing enslaved people. Later she described a wild scene along the riverbank as women swooped up their children, baskets, pigs, and chickens and jumped aboard federal gunboats. “All loaded. Pigs squealin’; chickens screamin’; young ones squallin’!” she recalled. “I never seen such a sight. We laughed and laughed and laughed.”
African American liberators touched the liberated with their electricity. A Black US sergeant said, “The change seems almost miraculous. The very people who, three years ago, crouched at their masters’ feet, on the accursed soil of Virginia, now march in a victorious column of freedmen, over the same land.” Another African American soldier reported how they “stroll fearlessly and boldly through the streets.”
There were unforgettable moments. “Men and women, old and young, were running through the streets, shouting and praising God,” said a private in Wilmington, North Carolina. “We could truly see what we had been fighting for.” A Black sergeant added, “I could do nothing but cry to look at the poor creatures so overjoyed.”
In Richmond, freed men and women asked Chaplain Garland White, accompanying the liberators, to give a speech about emancipation. Instead he broke into tears of “fullness of joy in my own heart.” A few hours later the Reverend Mr. White was again overwhelmed when he was brought face-to-face with his enslaved mother, whom he had not seen in twenty years.
Infantrymen marched into events that lived with them forever. As bluecoats neared Richmond’s Lumpkin’s Jail, they heard fellow African Americans singing: “Slavery chain done broke at last! Gonna praise God till I die!”
A Black soldier in Richmond described his regiment’s effort: “We have been instrumental in liberating some five hundred of our sisters and brethren from the accursed yoke of human bondage.”
The liberation moved Charles Fox, a white colonel who led the Fidty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment into Charleston on February 18, 1865: “The few white inhabitants left in the town were either alarmed or indignant, and generally remained in their houses; but the colored people turned out en masse. . . . Cheers, blessings, prayers, and songs were heard on every side. Men and women crowded to shake hands with men and officers . . . the chorus of manly voices singing ‘John Brown,’ ‘Babylon Is Falling,’ and the ‘Battle Cry of Freedom. . . .’ The glory and triumph of this hour may be imagined, but can never be described. It was one of those occasions which happen but once in a lifetime, to be lived over in memory forever.”
Emancipation repeatedly brought the joy of family reunions. In May 1865, a white Union officer wrote his wife: “Men are taking their wives and children; families which had been for a long time broken up are united and oh! such happiness. I am glad I’m here.”
The Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment of formerly enslaved and free Black people liberates Charleston, South Carolina, February 18, 1865.
* * *
Liberated men who served in the US Army had their first taste of citizenship, demanding equal pay. What had been resistance to bondage shifted to the American right of protest. Trouble began when the Massachusetts and South Carolina enlistees, promised the $13 monthly pay of whites (plus a $3.50 clothing allowance), were paid $10 with $3 deducted for clothing.
Letters, petitions, and demonstrations by the 54th and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments demanded the promise be kept. Corporal James Henry Gooding, Fifty-fourth Regiment, wrote to President Lincoln: “Not that our hearts ever flagged in Devotion, spite the evident apathy displayed on our behalf, but We feel as though our Country spurned us, now we are sworn to serve her.” He asked: “We have done a soldier’s Duty. Why can’t we have a Soldier’s pay?”
After discussing the pay issue with Frederick Douglass, Lincoln announced “ultimately they would receive the same.” But impatient protesters boycotted payday. A Fifty-fourth Regiment soldier wrote: “We quietly refused and continued our duty. For four months we have been steadily working day and night under fire.”
Governor John A. Andrews called the Massachusetts legislature into special session, and it voted funds to make the pay equal. The troops rejected this offer on principle, a Fifty-fifth Regiment soldier explaining, “We did not come to fight for money . . . we came not only to make men of ourselves, but of our colored brothers at home.”
When Congress failed to equalize the pay, protests became more bitter. By late 1864, there was a near-mutiny in the Fifty-fifth Regiment that lead to a court-martial and execution. Officers of the Fifty-fourth were forced to shoot and wound two soldiers who refused to obey orders, and more than twenty Black soldiers in the Fourteenth Rhode Island Artillery were jailed.
Among the South Carolina troops, Sergeant William Walker led his volunteer company to the captain’s tent. When they stacked their rifles and resigned, Walker was court-martialed and executed by firing squad. After eighteen months, Congress agreed to equalize pay retroactively. Sergeant James Ruffin of the Fifty-fifth reported the victory: “We had a glorious celebration, there was a procession, then a mass meeting.”
Formerly enslaved men in uniform eagerly sought liberty’s other benefits. Between battles or huddled over flickering campfires at night, soldiers struggled to learn the alphabet. Many carried their spelling books with them to guard duty. A Black sergeant wrote from Virginia in March 1865: “A large portion of the regiment have been going to school during the winter months.”
In Texas, Chaplain Thomas Stevenson wrote of his Kentucky regiment: “There is an ardent and universal desire among these men for books, especially those of an elementary character. . . . Nearly all of the men of my Regiment can spell and read with more or less accuracy, many can write with considerable mechanical excellence.”
Sergeant John Sweeny, in Tennessee, wrote about “the necessity of having a school for the benefit of our regement. We have never Had an institution of that sort and we Stand deeply in need of the instruction, the majority of us having been slaves. We Wish to have some benefit of education To make ourselves capable of business In the future. We have estableshed a literary Association which flourished previous to our March to Nashville. We wish to become a People capable of self support as we are Capable of being soldiers.”
Formerly enslaved, Susie King, fourteen, began four years of service as a volunteer teacher: “I have about forty children to teach, besides a number of adults who come to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read and write . . . above everything else.”
Formerly enslaved people line up outside their Arlington, Virginia, school.
The army experience taught more than reading and writing. The army chain of command became a vehicle for many formerly enslaved people seeking a redress of grievances. They petitioned their officers or sent letters to the War Department about enslaver abuse of their families after husbands and fathers enlisted in the Union army. Soldiers visiting wives still in bondage learned families had been punished because their men had enlisted.
Many requested aid in rescuing their wives and children. Captain Babcock, Twelfth US Colored Artillery in Nashville, listened to a Black Tennessee soldier and then sent him and an armed squad of ten to rescue his wife. Private George Washington asked President Lincoln to release his wife and four children from slavery in Kentucky, one of the border states untouched by the Emancipation Proclamation. He wrote: “If you will free me and her and children with me, I can take Cair of them,” and received no answer.
John Dennis asked the secretary of war for a pass to see his children, taken from him in 1859. As an enslaved father, he had only been allowed to visit them, and “it used to brake my heart” that “the man that they live with half feed them and half Cloth them & and beat them like dogs.” Apologizing for “my Miserable writeing,” Dennis also asked, “I being Criple would like to know of you also if I Cant be permited to rase a School Down there.”
Some letters complained to the president and the secretary of war of mistreatment of wives by white Union officers. “We are here and our wives and children are living out doers,” wrote a Kentucky soldier. White officers, he said, called them “you darned bitches.” The Kentuckian concluded: “It is now more than what a master would have done. . . . Shame, Shame, Shame how we are treated.”
The right of peaceful protest often focused on the irritations of army life. “Instead of the musket it is the spade and the Wheelbarrow and the Axe cutting in one of the most horrible swamps in Louisiana stinking and miserable,” wrote one soldier. Others expressed anger about “no chance to get home,” “no pay,” poor medical treatment, and new volunteers being beaten by white officers for failing to immediately grasp army routines.
Complaints alleged that white officers cheated their men or acted in old, bigoted ways. “We have been Treated more like Dogs than men,” said one volunteer, and another claimed officers “beat the older soldiers.” “There has not been one Indiana Colored Soldier who has deserted . . . and yet we are treated Like Slaves,” said one, pointing out, “We came to be true union soldiers, the Grandsons of Mother Africa Never to Flinch from Duty.”
Soldiers used their new literary skills to write loved ones they were safe and would soon reunite their families. In 1864, Spottswood Rice wrote: “My Children . . . I have not forgot you and that I want to see you as bad as ever now my Dear Children I want you to be contented . . . be assured that I will have you if it cost me my life. Dont be uneasy my children . . . I expect to have you. . . . Oh! My Dear children how I do want to see you.”
Freedom meant an education. In Charleston, a room for auctioning enslaved people is transformed into a classroom by African American teachers and children.
Soldiers received emotional letters from their wives. Alsie Thomas on a Louisiana plantation wrote four letters to her husband. “My children are going to school, but I find it hard to feed them all. . . . Come home as soon as you can, and cherish me as ever.”
The war inspired African Americans in the North to demand that high officials insure just treatment for relatives in the US Army. In 1863, Hannah Johnson, a Buffalo, New York, mother of a volunteer in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, wrote President Lincoln demanding he intervene to halt the Confederate mistreatment of Black prisoners. She proudly pointed out her father escaped from slavery in Louisiana, lamented her lack of a formal education, “but I know just as well as any what is right.”
Freedom under assault. The KKK and other white supremacist groups began systematic attacks on freed people and the reforms of Reconstruction.
The right to vote, granted to formerly enslaved men in 1867, was meant to ensure all other rights.
Of enslavers, Mrs. Johnson said, “They have lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor and made savages of the colored people, but they now are so furious because they [African American troops] are proving themselves to be men.” She concluded by asking the president to threaten retaliation against the Confederacy, “quickly and manfully, and stop this mean, cowardly cruelty. We your poor oppressed ones, appeal to you, and ask for fair play.”
It was clear to formerly enslaved men who fought for freedom that their courage on the field of battle had paved the way for citizenship rights. Private Thomas Long, formerly enslaved, served in the First South Carolina Volunteers. Asked to deliver the daily sermon one day to his fellow soldiers, Long reminded his fellow infantrymen of a painful legacy.
When they first enlisted, he said, “it was hardly safe” to pass white camps unless “we went in a mob and carried sidearms. But we whipped all dat down—not by going into the white camps for to whip em . . . but we lived it down by our natural manhood.” He continued:
If we hadn’t become soldiers, all might have gone back as it was before; our freedom might have slipped through de two houses of Congress and President Lincoln’s years might have passed by and nothing been done for us. But now things can never go back, because we have showed our energy and our courage and our natural manhood.
Another thing is, suppose you had kept your freedom without enlisting in dis army; your children might have grown up free and been well cultivated so as to be equal to any business, but it would always have been flung in dere faces—‘Your father never fought for he own freedom’—and what could dey answer? They never can say that to dis African Race anymore.
“At last came freedom. And what a joy it brought!” wrote Jacob Stroyer about his liberation in the spring of 1865. “The stars and stripes float in the air. The sun is just making its appearance from behind the hills, and throwing its beautiful light upon green bush and tree. The mocking birds and jay birds sing this morning more sweetly than before.” Stroyer went on to become a successful minister in Salem, Massachusetts, where he wrote an autobiography.
Freedom did not bring equality, justice, or even happiness for all. A united country preserved much of its ancient prejudice and introduced forms of bigotry better adapted to a new time. Those who had charged forward with poised rifle and bayonet to liberate their people had to face new enemies wielding not guns but pens. There were scholars, such as historian W. E. Woodward, who argued that African Americans “were the only people in the history of the world who became free without any effort of their own.”