Men Is Cheap by Brian P. Luskey

Author:Brian P. Luskey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

M. H. Kimball, Emancipated Slaves (New York, 1863).

(The Library Company of Philadelphia)

For Webster, this attempt to support the education of former slaves was intertwined with his recruitment of black soldiers. The means he took to succeed in the two spheres were similar. By December 1863 Philadelphia had increased its bounty offers to white and black recruits to $250. Beyond the monetary inducements, Webster urged that “extensive advertising” in the form of handbills and “huge posters” be used to stoke interest in recruitment events in Philadelphia and neighboring Delaware and Maryland for the Supervisory Committee’s black regiments. The lithographic print produced by the Philadelphia firm of P. S. Duval & Son evokes Duross Brothers’ advertisements for retailers and military recruiters at the beginning of the war by portraying a commander and soldiers under an American flag. Emancipation modified the premise of those earlier images. Webster and his committee used this depiction of African American soldiers to encourage black men to serve their nation and the cause of “FREEDOM!” Webster underscored this call for civic virtue by arranging for recruiting events to be accompanied by enlisted black soldiers marching in martial splendor and music from a military band to provide an inspiring backdrop for speakers exhorting still more black men to enlist. Webster believed that pomp and circumstance, coupled with access to bounty funds and a willingness to “canvass” as if in a political campaign, would cause a “furore” of “excitement among the colored people” and ensure large enlistments. Once they were mustered in, these men must not be imposed on by middlemen. When a sutler at Camp William Penn “speculated freely” at the expense of African American recruits who had just been paid their bounties, he was dismissed, and Webster wrote to the War Department to ask that it not appoint a replacement immediately. The committee hoped to “select a perfectly reliable person to recommend” for the post. In 1864, the committee recommended William Still for the position, and the War Department appointed him. Still’s business speculations, Webster and other antislavery Philadelphians knew, would be constrained by his desire to treat black soldiers fairly in their transactions in order to promote collective independence.50

Webster and the Supervisory Committee also opened the Free Military School for Applicants for Commands of Colored Troops in Philadelphia to train white men seeking commissions in USCT regiments. Webster sent Phelps money to place advertisements for the academy in Vermont newspapers and encouraged the general to write a training “text book” for the students at the school. In correspondence with Major C. W. Foster of the War Department’s Colored Troops Division, Webster contrasted the existence of the committee’s school and the importance of its work with the “accounts in the papers of the conduct of … certain officers in command of colored Troops in Genl Butlers department.” These officers were, he told Phelps, “disgraced” for their “cruelty, Drunkenness, and other vices,” grouping them with slaveholders and their violence. He told the War Department that he and the Free

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