Thaddeus Stevens by Bruce Levine

Author:Bruce Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN Stevens’s Civil War, Part II

For Black Union Troops and Nationwide Abolition

Confiscation and emancipation naturally raised another major question—whether to employ freed slaves as soldiers. From the start of the war, black men in the North had been trying to don Union uniforms. And in the summer of 1861 Thaddeus Stevens foresaw the day when “every bondman in the South… shall be called upon to aid us in war against their masters, and to restore this Union.”

But, following national policy in force since the 1790s, the government long rejected that idea and those initiatives. Most northerners were sure that black men could not make good soldiers; deep-seated racial ideology told them so. Nor did most white men wish to serve alongside black men in anything like the same status. That would insult their racial pride and presumably make it more difficult to recruit or keep whites in the ranks. Widespread initial expectations of an early Union victory made it easy to avoid reconsidering that policy. As a member of Lincoln’s secretarial staff recalled, “so many of us, even of those opposed to slavery, found it hard to approve of what was doubtless so wise, so necessary a policy as the arming of the blacks.” More than a year into the war, Lincoln assured an old friend that “none are to be armed” because “it would produce dangerous & fatal dissatisfaction in our army, and do more harm than good.”1

Three factors eventually combined to change the president’s mind. The first was the war’s stubborn refusal to correspond with optimistic expectations about it. It became ever clearer that defeating the rebellion would take much more time and require far larger armies than most northerners had foreseen. As the need for numbers grew, the question naturally arose, where could the additional soldiers be found? The second factor was the pressure and example of free blacks and emancipated slaves. With the aid of a few bold Union officers, some black men demonstrated in action the value of changing Union policy. Third, Thaddeus Stevens and other radical Republicans in Congress pressed Lincoln’s government to recognize and accept the logic of the situation, demanding that it not only accept black men into its armies but vigorously seek to recruit them.

As General Benjamin Butler’s conduct at Fort Monroe back in 1861 portended, practical challenges to conservative policy toward slavery often arose from within the military. Although most members of the country’s officer corps were politically conservative, some in the military machine did come to appreciate the war effort’s requirements. At the beginning of December 1861, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Simon Cameron, drafted a report that pointed toward a new policy. Cameron was far from a radical politically, but his responsibility to oversee the war effort had led him to face some hard truths. “It is clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves when it may become necessary as it is to take gunpowder from the enemy,” his draft read in part. It followed for

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