capacity, and in August, he authorized the creation of the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a black regiment that by November was commanded by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Having been a member of John Brown’s Secret Six of supporters, Higginson later recalled, “I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well, not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be.”67 (Not only was Higginson one of the most radical people of the era, but he had a head for language. He was the first to publish Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and he helped preserve Negro spirituals and the Gullah dialect in his book Army Life in a Black Regiment.) Higginson declared that “the key to the successful prosecution of this war lies in the unlimited employment of black troops.”
The Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 freed the enslaved in rebel states and announced that “such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”68 The proclamation gave Lincoln confidence to recruit black troops. Recruit he did, with pent-up enthusiasm. He wrote letters, made appointments, and issued calls for African American volunteers. Within seven months, the War Department had raised more than thirty black regiments.69 Each regiment consisted of one thousand black soldiers, led by white officers.
The payoff came soon. In May, during the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, on the Mississippi River, eight Negro regiments took part in the assault on the Confederate fort there. The black troops “fought & acted superbly,” a captain wrote home. “The theory of Negro inefficiency is . . . at last thoroughly exploded by facts.”70 Another officer reported that the black soldiers “fought splendidly; could not have done better. They were far superior in discipline to the white troops, and just as brave.”71
In early June, at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, two African American regiments resisted a Confederate attack on the fort they were guarding on the Mississippi River. Though raw and untrained, these formerly enslaved men stood their ground despite withering enemy fire and hand-to-hand combat. They suffered many casualties. Union gunboats saved the day. The war reporter Charles A. Dana averred, “The bravery of the blacks in the battle of Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the army with regard to the employment of negro troops.”72
In July 1863 came the battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, which still lives in the national memory, thanks in part to the film Glory. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, under the command of Robert Gould Shaw, led the attack on the Confederate fort at dusk, sweeping across an exposed beach and clambering up the sides of the fort, receiving heavy fire from above. A group of African American soldiers reached the parapet and took over part of the fort until the Confederates drove them back into the night. Shaw died in the attack and reportedly was buried in an impromptu grave. Confederates boasted, “We buried him below his niggers!”73 Although the attack was ill planned, the courage of Shaw and his black troops became legendary.
Other sterling performances by African American troops followed, including the Battle of Olustee, or Ocean Pond, in Florida on February 20, 1864. Though heavily outnumbered, Union soldiers, led by the newly recruited Eighth United States Colored Troops from Pennsylvania, rushed into the battle. “The black man stood to be killed or wounded,” an officer said.74 Other black regiments that fought bravely at Olustee were the Thirty-fifth United States Colored Infantry and the famed veterans of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.
The stellar performance by black troops was especially remarkable because of the many obstacles they faced. They typically were armed with inferior guns, such as old-style smoothbore muskets that were inaccurate, hard to load, and erratic in performance. The commanding officer of the Ninety-second United States Colored Infantry declared that his regiment was armed with smoothbores “of very inferior and defective quality; many of them becoming useless at the first fire.”75 Raw troops, such as those at Port Hudson and Olustee, frequently had to quit firing and fight the advancing enemy with bayonets or rifle butts.
Another problem was the racism of white officers. Although officers such as Higginson and Shaw treated their black troops respectfully, others, such as General Truman Seymour, who served with Shaw at Fort Wagner, saw the African Americans as cannon fodder. Seymour declared, “Put those damned niggers from Massachusetts in the advance; we may as well get rid of them one time as another.”76 This problem could have been alleviated by the promotion in rank of blacks, but that happened rarely. Around 7,000 white officers served as leaders of the nearly 187,000 African Americans who enlisted in the war; at various times about 100 blacks held commissions, which were, in the main, lieutenancies, with the notable exception of Martin R. Delany, who in February 1865 was appointed as a major of infantry.77
Then there was the issue of low pay. The Militia Act of July 1862 set the monthly wage for the black soldier at $10 a month, of which $3 could be applied toward clothing, in contrast to his white private’s $13 a month plus a clothing allowance of $3.50.78 Vehement complaints arose among black troops and their champions, such as Frederick Douglass. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, in which Douglass’s sons Charles and Lewis served, refused the paltry government pay for more than a year and adopted an ironic battle cry: “Three cheers for Massachusetts and seven dollars a month!”79 Such protests led to the equalization of the pay in June 1864, retroactive to January 1, 1864.
Grimmer than all these challenges were the ones that faced blacks who were captured by the rebels. They were likely to be either killed on the spot or sold into slavery. Their white officers faced execution. Lincoln was anguished over injustices against black troops, which became a main talking point in antislavery periodicals and in letters sent to him. He felt, however, that the twin bombs of emancipation and black enlistment that he had dropped on January 1, 1863, were, for the time being, the most powerful advances he could propose for African Americans without sacrificing a large portion of the support of the American public.
He explained his position to Frederick Douglass, who visited him on August 10, 1863. Nine days earlier, Douglass had temporarily stopped recruiting blacks for the military in protest against what he regarded as the government’s slowness in responding to the unequal treatment of African Americans. Having greeted Douglass warmly, Lincoln said he had read in the papers of Douglass’s complaints about being “tardy” and “hesitating” in his policies.80 Lincoln admitted that he was sometimes slow to take action for blacks but added that once he had made a commitment to them, he stuck to it. The charge of vacillation was therefore inaccurate. He told Douglass that if he acted too swiftly, a racist public reaction might overwhelm any gains he had made. As Douglass later recalled, “He felt that the colored man throughout this country was a despised man, a hated man,” and that if he went too far too fast “all the hatred that is poured upon the head of the negro race would be visited upon his Administration.” Lincoln said that he had hesitated to that point because “the country was not ready for it.” He declared that the “preparatory work had now been done,” thanks to the performance of blacks who had proved their military capabilities irrefutably. “Remember this, Mr. Douglass,” Lincoln said; “remember that Milliken’s Bend, Port Hudson and Fort Wagner are recent events, and that these were necessary to prepare the way for this very proclamation of mine.”
The proclamation he referred to was his recent order of retaliation against the Confederates for their treatment of black prisoners. In the order, which he had issued on July 30, Lincoln denounced the Confederate policy as “a relapse into barbarism, and a crime against the civilization of the age.”81 The president stipulated that for every Union prisoner the rebels killed or enslaved, a captured Confederate would be sent into hard labor for the duration of the war. This call for recognition of the POW status of captured black soldiers followed the provisions of the Lieber Code, except for its harsher penalty of death for those committing reenslavement.
Unfortunately, Lincoln’s attempt to protect his black soldiers led to misery for captured white soldiers. In the summer of 1863, in reaction to the South’s summary execution and/or reenslavement of captured black soldiers, the Lincoln administration announced it would cease exchanging prisoners until the South complied. The suspension of the prisoner cartel led to misery for the white Union POWs, whose privations in captivity were extended to make Lincoln’s point about racial egalitarianism. Union soldiers were dying at the rate of one hundred a day in the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. The humanitarian price of not exchanging prisoners was paid by Confederates as well, as their prisoners were stranded in prison camps in the North. All in all, 55,000 captured soldiers of both sides were kept prisoner instead of being exchanged and freed due to the North’s principle. The suspension of prisoner exchanges is thus another example of Lincoln’s commitment to blacks, even at great political cost to himself as well as injury to whites. It further belies the charges of these critics that Lincoln was really a racist or indifferent to the plight of blacks. Not only did Lincoln consider the recruitment of black soldiers as crucial to the Union army, but he respected their humanity enough to realize that blacks would not enlist if they thought the Union would not protect them.
Lincoln’s effort to protect blacks by suspending prisoner exchanges did not end the atrocities, as evidenced by two infamous massacres in April 1864: at Poison Spring, Arkansas, where Confederate soldiers murdered and mutilated members of the First Kansas Colored Infantry; and at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where Southern troops slaughtered more than three hundred blacks and their white officers after they had surrendered. But the president’s order, along with the Lieber Code, did reduce the number of such outrages, which in fact fired up black troops, who now had new battle cries: “Remember Poison Spring!” and “Remember Fort Pillow!”82
Lincoln’s order of retaliation also enforced the idea that the life of a black person was just as valuable as that of a white one. Equality, after all, was an implied message of the inclusion of African Americans in the military. The issues of race and slavery came down, ultimately, to the question of the humanity of blacks and other ethnic minorities. By displaying valor, skill, and patriotism in battle, soldiers gave undeniable proof that they were human beings. As the Republican congressman Thomas Williams declared in the House of Representatives in April 1864, the black man “has a musket in his hand, and stands revealed as a soldier and a man, of higher physical and moral type than his persecutors themselves. . . . The flesh that fed and crisped and crackled in the flames of [Port Hudson and Fort Wagner] . . . has turned out to be human, and the blood that was licked up by the devouring element, to be as red and warm as our own, the physiologists and philosophers to the contrary notwithstanding.”83
Here Williams cut through racial pseudoscience and sham proslavery apologia and pointed to the sheer physical basis of shared humanity: as he put it, the black man’s flesh “has turned out to be human,” his blood is “as red and warm as our own.” By saying that the African American soldier is “of higher physical and moral type than his persecutors,” he also was testifying to the ethical and psychological soundness of African Americans.
This association of the universally human with both the physical and the mental was a point Walt Whitman had made in the 1855 poem eventually titled “I Sing the Body Electric.” Picturing a man and a woman at auction, Whitman invites us to consider people of different races, bonded by the sameness of their bodies and their minds:
Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, [. . .]
Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations.84
Blacks who fought for the Union put on a powerful display of their humanity that gave Lincoln a fresh opportunity to air his views on race. Although he still avoided radical statements, he made his progressive views clear.
In August 1863, the same month he met with Douglass, Lincoln received from an Illinois friend, James C. Conkling, an invitation to attend a mass meeting of “unconditional Union men of all parties” in Springfield on September 3. A longtime law associate of Lincoln’s who had married a close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln’s, Conkling hoped Lincoln would use this opportunity to defend his policies against attacks from Democrats, who had held a huge rally in Springfield on June 7. The Democrats were calling for a peaceful restoration of the Union as it had been before the war, with slavery in place. Lincoln declined Conkling’s invitation, citing other duties, but wrote him a long letter that he asked to be read at the meeting.
In the carefully worded missive of August 26, Lincoln backed into the issue of race by covering other topics first. The Democrats said they wanted peace and objected to the Emancipation Proclamation and the use of blacks in the military. Lincoln replied saying that he also wanted peace, but that could only be restored by applying vigorous military pressure on the South. A compromise was beyond reach because the Confederacy’s survival depended on its army. Once the rebel army was defeated, peace could be restored. Recent Union victories, such as at Gettysburg and Murfreesboro, portended well.
Continuing to address the Democrats, Lincoln wrote, “[Y]ou are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not.”85 After this jab, he eased into the racial issue by mentioning the proslavery view of blacks. Even if we say that “slaves are property,” he wrote, “is there—has there ever been—any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it, helps us, or hurts the enemy?” Here was a defense of the Confiscation Acts that even—or especially—those who saw blacks as things would have to admit.
The Democrats called the Emancipation Proclamation invalid. So what? Lincoln asked. Even symbolically, it was a powerful weapon against the South. He said that commanders in the field, including those unassociated with abolition, had told him that “the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion; and that at least one of those important successes could not have been achieved when it was, but for the aid of black soldiers.”
Now to the human side of the question. On the guarantee of freedom for blacks who served in the military, Lincoln appealed to shared humanity: “[N]egroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”
His message was forceful and unmistakable: blacks are people. They act on motives and desires, like everyone else. We must respect them as fellow humans. If we promise them something, we are obliged to give it to them.
It was a masterful, quietly radical declaration. Conkling soon reported to Lincoln that he read the letter to the enthusiastic crowd at the meeting and sent it to newspapers. He assured the president that it was “a document that will occupy an important position in the history of our country,” one that would invigorate “the war power” and the push toward “universal liberty,” so that “when peace arrives, there can be no question as to the condition and rights of ‘American citizens of African descent.’”86
Lincoln knew that millions would see the letter. Indeed, newspapers across the nation printed it.
He repeated similar ideas in a letter he wrote a year later, in August 1864, in response to a note from the Wisconsin newspaper editor Charles D. Robinson, a War Democrat who was disturbed by what he saw as a radical turn in Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Lincoln had recently made a strong antislavery pronouncement. In response to Horace Greeley’s proposal in early July to meet with Confederate commissioners for a peace conference at Niagara Falls, Lincoln had written a terse statement saying he would entertain a peace deal that included the South’s “abandonment of slavery.”87 Fully aware that the Confederates would reject his terms, he sent his message through Greeley and John Hay, who met three Confederates at Niagara on July 18. The conference quickly collapsed. Newspapers were filled with reports of Lincoln’s insistence on an abolitionist war.
To Charles Robinson, the president’s position seemed like a betrayal of the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, Robinson said, emancipation was merely a military tool, not the unequivocal goal of the war. Robinson insisted that Lincoln’s statement about the Niagara Falls meeting “puts the whole war question on a new basis, and takes us War Democrats clear off our feet, leaving us no ground to stand upon.”88
In his reply to Robinson, Lincoln denied the accuracy of his charge. He referred to physical force. The Emancipation Proclamation opened the way to peace “by inducing the colored people to come bodily over from the rebel side to ours.” Black soldiers, seamen, and laborers, whom Lincoln numbered at between 130,000 and 150,000, had made the big difference in the war because of the sheer strength they brought to the Union cause. Lincoln wrote, “It is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force, which may be measured, and estimated as horsepower, and steam power, are measured and estimated.”89 Take that force away and give it to the enemy, Lincoln argued, and the war would be lost.
Nor did Lincoln neglect the human and ethical dimensions. He referred to the Conkling letter, in which he had said the blacks act from motives “like other people.” If they were not motivated by the promise of emancipation, why would they fight for the North? “As a matter of morals, could such treachery by any possibility, escape the curses of Heaven, or of any good man?” Lincoln asked.
He worked carefully on the letter, writing two drafts of it and showing it to others, including Frederick Douglass. But he didn’t send it. That in itself was not unusual for him. But why did he hold this letter back? Wouldn’t it have been another publicity coup for him, as the Conkling letter had been a year earlier?
For the answer, we must look at his situation in August 1864. It was much different from that of the previous August. At that time he was able to refer to recent military victories. Now progress on the main military fronts—Virginia, Georgia, and the Gulf of Mexico—was murky. Extreme war weariness gripped the nation.
From the right, Copperheads had been pummeling Lincoln mercilessly with their demands that he achieve peace by disbanding African American troops, canceling the Emancipation Proclamation, and reenslaving freedmen. From the left, Radical Republicans were furious over his pocket veto in July of the Wade-Davis Bill, which would have imposed stiff terms on the South for Reconstruction, in contrast to the more lenient ones he had proposed. Salmon Chase, who had resigned as treasury secretary in June, wrote during the summer, “There is great and almost universal dissatisfaction with Mr. Lincoln among all earnest men. They doubt he can be reelected.”90
The presidential election was just ten weeks away. From New York, the Republican mastermind Thurlow Weed wrote William Seward on August 22 that he had recently informed Lincoln that his reelection was “an impossibility. . . . [N]obody here doubts it; nor do I see any body from other States who authorises the slightest hope of success.” Many in the North now seemed ready to compromise with the South. Weed wrote, “The People are wild for Peace. They are told that the President will only listen to terms of Peace on condition Slavery be ‘abandoned.’ . . . That something should be done and promptly done, to give the Administration a chance for its life, is certain.”91
Even antislavery friends of the president urged compromise. Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, opined that if something dramatic was not done, “all is lost.” He recommended that peace commissioners be sent to Richmond to make a deal to restore the Union.
