This Hallowed Ground (41 page)

Negroes were in some inexplicable manner what the war itself was mostly about. Their status seemed mysteriously to be changing, and as it changed —
if
it changed — there must be corresponding changes in each of the social levels that lay above, and finally in the way Americans looked upon their fellow human beings. For the most fundamental change of all was that it was becoming necessary to look upon the Negro as a man rather than as a thing. Let that once take hold, and racism in all of its forms must receive a mortal wound, even though it might be a very long time dying. What was won for the least of these would finally be won for everybody; and once a common humanity was admitted, an incalculable victory would have been gained, because sooner or later the admission would have to be acted on.

Yet victories are won in odd ways, sometimes by men who are thinking about something very different. The General Grant who could express a subconscious but profound racial prejudice in his order expelling the Jews — an order that, by direction of President Lincoln, he very shortly withdrew — could at the same time be working most effectively to destroy racism’s foundations, not because he understood what he was about, but simply because he wanted to do everything possible to win the war. One of the instruments he would use would be the Negro as a soldier, the ex-slave put into uniform and empowered to make war against the men lately his masters. The government had come to that step this winter, and colored troops were being raised wherever there were Federal armies.

This decision to use the Negro as a soldier did not necessarily grow out of any broad humanitarian resolve; it seems to have come largely out of the dawning realization that, since the Confederates were going to kill a great many more Union soldiers before the war was over, a good many white men would escape death if a considerable percentage of those soldiers were colored.

Halleck put the thing quite bluntly in a message to Grant in March. It was good policy, he said, to withdraw as many slaves from the South as possible; equally good policy, having withdrawn them, to use them to help win the war. They could certainly be used as teamsters and as laborers, and some people believed they could be used as combat soldiers. Grant must try, and if he found — as he undoubtedly would — that many of the people in his army objected to it, he must ride their objections down and see that this new policy was carried out.

“There can be no peace,” wrote Halleck, “but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the Rebels or be conquered by them.… This is the phase which the rebellion has now assumed. We must take things as they are.”
³

This new phase of the rebellion was a good deal broader than Halleck dreamed. To accept the Negro as a soldier was to state, in a back-handed but decisive way, that the base of membership in the American community had been immeasurably widened. Once widened, it could not again be narrowed. The war henceforth would be fought for this, even though some of the men who were most effectively fighting it had no idea that the base was not already quite wide enough. For the war had become a breaking up of the foundations of the great deep, and to “take things as they are” meant to change things to their fundamentals.

Grant dutifully went to work — this chore came upon him while the various mud-and-water expedients were being tried above Vicksburg — and he instructed corps, division, and post commanders to speed the organization of the Negro regiments. He warned dissenters: “It is expected that all commanders will especially exert themselves in carrying out the policy of the administration, not only in organizing colored regiments and rendering them effective, but also in removing prejudice against them.”
⁴

Removing the prejudice would not be easy. Soldiers who disliked slavery very often looked upon the slaves themselves as subhuman creatures who belonged neither in the army nor in America itself. An Illinois veteran wrote from Tennessee that he and many others would be emancipationists “if the brutes could be shipped out of the country,” but that did not seem to be possible. Slavery, he admitted, was “an awful sin,” but if Negroes had to remain in America they ought to remain as slaves; the only suggestion he could make was that they be transferred from Confederate masters to masters thoroughly loyal to the Union.
⁵

An Ohio soldier reported that there was intense opposition in his division to the recruiting of Negro troops, which at times “assumed the character of anarchy,” with officers and enlisted men vowing that they would throw down their arms and go home if Negroes became soldiers.

This anarchic opposition was quickly tamped down, partly because of Grant’s orders and partly because of the unexpected intervention of a rather unlikely hero — lanky, dry-as-dust Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army, the paper-shuffler from Washington who had been sent to the Mississippi Valley on a mixed mission that seems vaguely to have included the task of telling the War Department just what Grant was up to out there. Part of Thomas’s job was to speed the raising of Negro regiments, and he took to this with crusty enthusiasm. He called troops together and warned them that Negroes fleeing from slavery were to be made welcome: “They are to be received with
open arms, they are to be fed and clothed; they are to be armed.” He was empowered, he added, to dismiss from the army “any man, be his rank what it may, whom I find maltreating the freedmen. This part of my duty I will most assuredly perform if any case comes before me.”

The division in which the Ohio soldier had reported so much discontent was drawn up in hollow square and addressed by Thomas. Men who left the army because of the recruiting of Negroes, he warned, would be considered guilty of treason and would be shot, and there would be courts-martial for all who interfered with the program. The boys talked it over around campfires afterward and concluded finally that “a Negro could stop a bullet just as well as a white man,” and that “for everyone so sacrificed there would be just that many more white soldiers to return north to their families and friends.”
⁶

Undeniably the Negro could stop a bullet. He could also help meet a draft quota back home, and northern state officials who were finding it increasingly hard to raise troops began to look his way optimistically. The only trouble seemed to be that most northern states did not, after all, contain so very many colored folk; the source of supply, untapped though it was, did seem to be limited. In Massachusetts the state authorities sent agents far afield, recruiting Negroes wherever they could find them, and forming two whole regiments of them. This led Governor John A. Andrew into trouble. He had promised the Negro recruits that they would be treated precisely as white soldiers were treated, and he presently learned that by a War Department ruling the colored soldiers could be paid no more than ten dollars a month, of which three dollars would stand for a clothing allowance. Since white troops got thirteen dollars a month in addition to their clothing, this represented a substantial difference. Andrew stormed down to Washington to get the ruling changed, failed, and then went back to Boston and got the legislature to agree to make up the difference with state funds.
⁷

Negroes could stop bullets and meet draft quotas; they could also open the avenue for promotion to white soldiers. The new colored regiments would need officers. The officers, except in the rarest cases, would not be colored; they would be white men, combat veterans, selected from the ranks of the line regiments, given a quick course of sprouts in an officer-training school, and then commissioned as lieutenants, captains, or even better. The veterans perked up their ears at this news. Some of those who had been most bitter about the new program became reconciled to it when they considered that they themselves, as a result of it, might wear shoulder straps. There was no lack of candidates for the training schools. (A veteran in the Army of the Potomac complained that the selection board was biased; soldiers
who might have won commissions in their own regiments if vacancies existed, he asserted, were passed over, while the young sprigs fresh out of college who had never seen gun smoke got in with ease.) In one way or another, colored regiments were called into being, officered, and put to work.
⁸

There was a great deal of self-interest in the decision to turn Negroes into soldiers, but there was also the pressure of sheer necessity. The contraband slave was becoming uncommonly numerous; simply by his presence — by his insistence on fleeing from bondage and by his mute faith that the nearest Federal army would be his sure protector — he was compelling the authorities to do something with him, and very often the easiest thing to do was to put him into uniform.

In Virginia in 1863 this problem was not quite so acute. The Army of the Potomac had not penetrated very deeply into Confederate territory; it was living in a war-ravaged area in which there were not very many slaves, and the contrabands who did come in could easily be shipped back to Washington — where, for the most part, the government utterly failed to devise any intelligent system for handling them. But in the West so many slaves were seeking refuge with the Federal armies that some sort of action was imperative.

Shortly before the new policy was adopted a Union force came back to its base at Corinth, Mississippi, after some foray deeper into the state, and when it marched in it was followed by hundreds upon hundreds of fugitive slaves. The army command at Corinth did not want these people — had, in fact, very little idea what it could do with or about them — but it could not send them back, and it fenced off a big camp, put the ex-slaves into it, detailed a couple of infantry regiments to guard it, and plucked a chaplain from the 27th Ohio and told him he was in charge. The soldiers objected bitterly to guard duty, declaring that they had come down to Dixie to fight Rebels and not to be policemen for a lot of runaway slaves, and the chaplain came up with an idea. Let him (he urged) form a few infantry companies from among the men in the contraband camp; with a little drill and the proper direction they ought to be able to stand guard over their own people.

The commanding officer agreed that this was a good idea. He had no legal authority to do anything of the kind, but he dug up rifles and uniforms, detailed a few line sergeants to act as officers, and before long here was a detachment of illegal but effective Negro troops, pleased as could be with their uniforms and their responsibility, and the Corinth contraband camp was in effect taking care of itself.
⁹

These contraband camps were not usually very inspiring places to look at. There was a huge one on a levee not far from Vicksburg,
crammed with fugitives who huddled without shelter, subsisted on army rations, got no real care from anyone, and died by the dozen from bad sanitation, exposure, overcrowding, and general homesick bewilderment. Yet the faith that had brought them here — a faith that freedom was good and that the road to it somehow led through the camps of the Union army — did not seem to leave them, even when their camp became a shambles. A Wisconsin soldier who was detailed for duty around this camp looked on in silent wonder at the prayer meetings that were held every night. There were no lights; none was needed, he thought, since the leaders of the meeting had no Bibles or hymnals and could not have read from them if they had them; there was just a great crowd of men and women, dimly seen, bowed to the ground, swaying rhythmically as they prayed that God would set His people free and would send His blessing down on Massa Lincoln, Massa Grant, and all of Massa Lincoln’s soldiers.

Before and after the prayers the air would be tremulous with music, which was of a kind the Wisconsin boy had never heard before. “I beg you,” he wrote, “not to think of it as being like the jargon of the burnt-cork minstrels who sing for money. I cannot describe the pathos of the melody nor the sweet tenderness of the words as they arose on the night air.”
¹⁰

Almost to a man the male contrabands were eager to enlist when the chance was offered. Yet disillusionment usually came soon afterward. It was hard for generals to think of them as combat troops; for the most part the Negro was looked upon as a sort of servant to the white soldiers, he got much more than his share of fatigue duty, and in some camps he was excused from drill altogether so that he might dig ditches, raise fortifications, and perform other pick-and-shovel work. When they were kept at this non-military work, it was noted, most colored soldiers became restive, sullen, sometimes insubordinate.
¹¹

In the main, though, the newly enlisted Negro was intensely proud of his status as soldier. His pride could be surprising at times, because it seemed to go deeper than mere pride in a musket and a uniform and became pride in a new status as a human being. When Governor Andrew of Massachusetts induced the legislature to appropriate money to equalize the pay for the state’s two colored regiments, he and the legislators got an abrupt shock. The paymaster went to pay the men and they refused to take the money. They appreciated what the state of Massachusetts was trying to do, they said, but they would serve without any pay until their enlistments ran out rather than take from the Federal government less money than the Federal government was paying its other soldiers. It was a matter between themselves and Uncle Sam —
their
Uncle Sam — and they would not let Massachusetts make
up the difference. (The business caused a stir in Congress; ultimately, many months later, Congress revised the law and equalized the pay scales for white and colored troops.)
¹²

Yet if the decision to put a uniform on the Negro had been taken partly from selfishness and partly because of necessity, and if the new recruits found that soldiering was not quite the stirring and uplifting thing they had supposed it would be, something momentous had nevertheless been taking place with the formation of the Negro regiments. Tough old Senator Zachariah Chandler, militant anti-slavery man from Michigan, who had shared the common abolitionist fear that the Emancipation Proclamation might someday be withdrawn, exulted: “Every Negro regiment of a thousand men presents just one thousand unanswerable arguments against the revocation of the President’s proclamation.” And the eloquent former slave Frederick Douglass, who had worked and hoped long to see his people brought to freedom, saw even more in it than that: