The Negro's Civil War by James M. McPherson

Author:James M. McPherson [McPherson, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48860-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1993-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

BLACK TROOPS FROM THE NORTH

In January 1863 the War Department authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to raise a regiment of Negro soldiers in his state. Massachusetts' Negro population was too small to fill up a regiment, so Andrew called upon the wealthy abolitionist George L. Steams to form a committee of “prominent citizens” to raise money for the recruitment of men for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment from all over the North. Steams hired several Negro leaders as recruiting agents, including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Charles L. Remond, John Mercer Langston, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin R. Delany. These men traveled all through the North and even into Canada, urging black men to join the army.1

But Northern Negroes seemed much less eager to flock to the colors now than they had been at the outbreak of the war. There were several reasons for this. In the first place, the booming war economy had created full employment and prosperity for Negroes in some parts of the North. A white Bostoniaw wrote in February 1863 that “the blacks here are too comfortable to do anything more than talk about freedom.”2 An Ohio Negro said, “I have no inclination to go to war. I had as soon pay three hundred dollars if I had it.”3 And William Parham of Cincinnati wrote that an agent from “Mass.” was here a few days since for the purpose

of getting recruits for the 54th Massachusetts. A few of us met with him and selected a committee to see what could be done. I do not think, however, that more than 10 or 12 if so many, will go. The fact is, our men … are like the whites. At the beginning of the War when it was thought that there would be little, if any fighting every man you met with wanted to go to War; but now when they know that hard fighting is to be done, hardships to be suffered and privations endured, it is rather difficult, in fact impossible to get their courage screwed to the fighting pitch.4

In the second place, there were hints from Confederate sources that captured Negro soldiers would not be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. On May 1, 1863, the Confederate Congress authorized President Jefferson Davis to have captured officers of Negro regiments “put to death or be otherwise punished at the discretion” of a military tribunal. Black enlisted men were to “be delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured to be dealt with according to the present or future laws of such State or States.”5 This could mean death or sale into slavery. Few Northerners believed that the Confederacy would actually carry out such a barbarous policy wholesale, but in 1863 there were several reports, a few of them well authenticated, of the murder or sale into slavery of captured Negro soldiers.6 Prospective black recruits naturally hesitated to sign up until they learned what measures the Union government meant to take to protect them if they were captured.

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