Been in the Storm So Long (20 page)

While Congress failed to act on their grievances, resentment among the black troops mounted. “Fifty-two of the non-commissioned officers are going to hold a meeting upon the subject,” a soldier with the 1st District of Columbia Regiment reported; “we don’t feel like serving the United States under such an imposition.” Henry M. Turner, who was serving as a chaplain to that regiment, confirmed growing apprehension that the hitherto peaceful protests might assume other forms. Unless the troops received their full pay soon, Turner wrote,
“I
tremble with fear for the issue of things
.” Discontent in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment reached mutinous proportions, with reports that one soldier had been court-martialed and executed and two had been shot and wounded for refusing to obey orders. “The fact is,” a corporal reported, “this regiment is bordering on demoralization.” The commanding officer confessed his sympathy with the men, “and yet,” he added, “military necessity has compelled me to shoot two of them.” Conditions in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment were also close to open rebellion, with more than half the men indicating they were ready to stack arms and perform no more duties unless fully paid. Sergeant William Walker of the 3rd South Carolina Volunteers did more than threaten action; he marched his company to the captain’s tent and ordered them to stack arms and resign from the Army. Since the government had broken its contract with his men, he explained, it had no right to demand their allegiance. Sergeant Walker was court-martialed and shot for mutiny.
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Confronted with growing resentment of discrimination and the still pressing need to attract more recruits to a war of liberation, black spokesmen on the home front pressed for equal rights in the Army while at the
same time urging more enlistments. After assuring black recruits that the “magnanimity” of this nation would speedily grant them equal pay, Frederick Douglass suggested that some blacks might be overreacting to the issue. “Do you get as good wages now as white men get by staying out of the service? Don’t you work for less every day than white men get? You know you do.” Similarly, the influential
Christian Recorder
, which had wavered between protest and patriotic accommodation, lamented the inequality in pay but fully supported black enlistments and expressed the hope “that our men will not stand now on dollars and cents.” What greater inducement was necessary to fight, John S. Rock asked a black regiment, than “two centuries of outrage and oppression and the hope of a glorious future?” What greater inducement was necessary, a black newspaper in New York asked, than “a chance to drive a bayonet or bullet into the slaveholders’ hearts?” It was even possible to argue, as did a broadside calling for black volunteers, that the inequality in pay and bounties should, “rightly considered,” act as “a fresh incentive” to enlist. Here was the opportunity to demonstrate “that you are actuated not by love of gain but by promptings of patriotism.”
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That the refusal to accept unequal pay was essentially a northern protest is undeniable. This raised the inevitable charge that, not being slaves, northern blacks had less of a stake in the war and were more apt to be moved by such mundane matters as pay, bounties, and benefits. Disagreement prevailed among the various black regiments as to how they should respond to unequal treatment, whether this was the proper time or place for protests, and whether the grievances warranted any kind of protest. “Those few colored regiments from Massachusetts make more fuss, and complain more than all the rest of the colored troops in the nation,” observed Garland H. White, a former Virginia slave who had escaped to Ohio before the war. He regarded their protests as a disservice to the great mass of black people, whom he urged to rebuke the “spirit of dissatisfaction and insolence” and compel the “rebellious” troops “to be quiet and behave themselves like men and soldiers.”
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With an even greater sense of urgency, the regiments made up largely of former slaves questioned the protests of their northern brethren. After noting “some pretty hard grumbling” among the northern regiments in South Carolina, two soldiers with the 78th United States Colored Troops (recruited from slaves and free Negroes in Louisiana) conceded “that we are pretty much in the same boat with them” but thought they had “put it on a little too thick.” Although their own regiment had enlisted under the same expectations of full pay, the two soldiers suggested that southern blacks had entered military service with more compelling motives than those which moved the northern blacks.

When Congress finally acted in June 1864 to resolve the controversy over unequal pay, the resulting legislation only partially satisfied black demands. Although racial distinctions in pay were abolished, the new law made a curious distinction in retroactive payments between free Negroes (those free before April 19, 1861), who would be paid from the date of their enlistment, and freedmen, whose retroactive payments would begin on January 1, 1864. This posed a considerable problem in the regiments which included both free Negroes and ex-slaves. It “divides the colored soldiers into two grades,” one abolitionist charged, and “does honor to injustice with a vengeance.” In the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Colonel E. N. Hallowell worked out a rather ingenious solution. Since the commanders of black regiments were to determine which of their men were free Negroes, he simply had them all take an oath that on or before April 19, 1861, they “owed no man unrequited labor.” This was satisfactory for the 54th, which included very few former slaves, but such a solution was deemed unacceptable in the regiments made up almost exclusively of freedmen. “If a year’s discussion … has at length secured the arrears of pay for the Northern colored regiment,” an irate Colonel Higginson remarked, “possibly two years may secure it for the Southern.” Still, the action of Congress placated the northern regiments, and the first payday (October 1864) under the new law took on a festive air. “Two days have changed the face of things,” an officer with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment observed. “The fiddle and other music long neglected enlivens the tents day and night. Songs burst out everywhere; dancing is incessant; boisterous shouts are heard, mimicry, burlesque, and carnival; pompous salutations are heard on all sides.”
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Perhaps, though, the real struggle had only begun. Despite the equalization of pay, black soldiers had not yet been accorded the same rights and recognition as whites. The question of equal protection for black prisoners of war persisted, as did the absence of black representation in court-martial proceedings, the exclusion of blacks from the military academies, and the small number of black commissioned officers. Both race pride and the brutal conduct of some white officers prompted increasing demands for the appointment of blacks to command black troops. But even some of the firmest advocates of black recruitment found the idea of black officers difficult to accept, violating as it did the white man’s sensibilities and racial stereotypes in ways that enlisting blacks as common soldiers had not. Since childhood, blacks had been trained “to obey implicitly the dictates of the white man” and to believe that they belonged to an inferior race. This
might still make them good soldiers but hardly leaders of men. “Now, when organized into troops,” a Union officer observed, “they carry this habit of obedience with them, and their officers being entirely white men, the negro promptly obeys his orders.” The impression that blacks would naturally serve white officers more loyally was difficult to dispel, and some observers seriously questioned if black troops would be willing to serve under black officers. In the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, “the universal feeling among the soldiers,” a regimental officer told an antislavery meeting, was that they did not want “a colored man to play the white man over them.” But many blacks denied these inferences, charged that the relative absence of black officers helped to perpetuate the idea of racial inferiority, and insisted that blacks be judged for promotions and commissions on the same basis as whites. “We want black commissioned officers,” one soldier argued, “because we want men we can understand, and who can understand us.… We want to demonstrate our ability to rule, as we have demonstrated our willingness to obey.”
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Shortly after the Civil War broke out, Martin R. Delany, still reflecting the racial pride that had made him an emigrationist and black nationalist in the 1850s, contemplated “a corps d’Afrique” modeled after the black Zouaves who had served the French in the Algerine War. Characteristically, he stressed that the origin, dress, and tactics of the Zouaves d’Afrique were uniquely African. Along similar lines, Henry M. Turner, whose racial pride matched that of Delany but whose advocacy of emigration still lay in the future, expressed the hope that there would be no racial intermingling in the newly organized black regiments. “If we do go in the field, let us have our own soldiers, captains, colonels, and generals, and then an entire separation from soldiers of every other color, and then bid us strike for our liberty, and if we deserve any merit it will stand out beyond contradiction.” But Turner’s proposal, like Delany’s, was premature. Having made the decision to use blacks as soldiers, the government was not prepared to flaunt numbers of black officers before an already apprehensive white public.
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No sooner had Congress equalized the pay of white and black soldiers than various schemes for a black army were revived, the most ambitious plan remaining Martin Delany’s “corps d’Afrique.” This time he took his idea directly to President Lincoln. What he proposed was a black army commanded by black officers that would operate essentially as a guerrilla-type force in the interior, emancipating and arming the slaves wherever they went. “They would require but little,” Delany assured the President, “as they could subsist on the country as they went along.” President Lincoln, as Delany described his reaction, could barely contain his enthusiasm. “This is the very thing I have been looking and hoping for,” he told Delany, “but nobody offered it.” Having agreed to command and raise such an army, Delany was commissioned a major and ordered to South Carolina. The war ended before he could put his plan into operation, but Delany remained in South Carolina and subsequently embraced and acted upon
still another vision—political power in a state where blacks comprised a majority of the population.
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W
HEN 1,100
U
NION PRISONERS OF WAR
were marched through Petersburg, Virginia, in August 1864, the spectators who lined the streets viewed with particular curiosity and mixed emotions the 200 black soldiers. To the whites in the crowd, few sights could have been more distasteful. At the very least, a Richmond newspaper observed, the black prisoners should have been separated from the white Yankees and driven “into a pen” until their status was determined and their owners located. “Two hundred genuine Eboshins sprinkled among the crowd of prisoners, and placed on the same footing, was a sight, the moral effect of which upon the slaves of Petersburg could not be wholesome.” Equally concerned, Emma Holmes of South Carolina wondered how Confederate authorities would deal with the black prisoners recently brought in—“barefoot, hatless and coatless and tied in a gang like common runaways.” To have them treated like other prisoners, she confessed, was not only “revolting to our feelings” but “injurious in its effects upon our negroes.”
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The Confederacy faced a real dilemma. When the North chose to enlist blacks as soldiers, the white South immediately conjured up visions of thousands of armed black men descending upon defenseless families. To contemplate one rebellious Nat Turner was sufficient cause for alarm, but to think that the same government which had been empowered by the Constitution to help suppress insurrections was now arming slaves and using them to fight white men provoked cries of disbelief. “Great God, what a state of helpless degradation,” a Virginia slaveholder exclaimed, “our own negros—bought by our own ancestors from the Yankees, the purchase money & interest now in their pockets, who first rob us of the negros themselves, & then arm them to rob us of every thing else—even our lives.” Although the white South kept insisting that the Negro would fail as a soldier, fears were expressed that he might succeed. There was an obvious urgency, then, about the question of how to dispose of captured black soldiers. What was said to be at stake was not only the security of white men, women, and children but also the well-being of the slave population.
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