Themes of the American Civil War

Negro soldiers decrease. It was discovered that Negroes were not only loyal persons and good mule drivers, but exceedingly competent to bear arms.”
12
Even if prejudice did not decrease, racist objections to the arming of blacks could easily be countered on the grounds that it was better that a black soldier die than a white one. Such attitudes were summed up accurately if cruelly in a poem written by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halpine, under the pen name of Private Miles O’Reilly,” entitled “Sambo’s Right to be Kilt,”
which ran:
The men who object to Sambo
Should take his place an fight,
And it’s better to have a naygur’s hue
Than a liver that’s wake an white.
Though Sambo’s black as the ace of spades,
His finger a trigger can pull,
And his eye runs straight on the barrel-sights
From under his thatch of wool!
So hear me all, boys, darlings,—
Don’t think I tippin’ you chaff The right to be kilt I’ll divide wid him,
And give him the largest half!
13
Abraham Lincoln sought to convey a rather more positive version of the message in his famous letter to James Conkling, written in August, 1863, in which Lincoln defended his emancipation decision in the face of criticism that he was changing the nature of the war. You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you Lincoln noted,
“but no matter . . . I thought that whatever Negroes could begot to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union.”
This was Lincoln appealing to the practical side of the question, but in conclusion he made a more incisive observation on the future of the nation and the role of African-Americans in it when he argued that:
there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet,
they have helped mankind onto this great consummation while,
I fear, there will be some white ones unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.
14
For many blacks, Lincoln’s latter point was the important one, and they were initially confident that their acceptance, however reluctantly granted,
by the Union army offered them the opportunity both of short-term military
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glory and longer-term acceptance into the nation as a whole. As Frederick
Douglass put it, once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters
U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”
15
George E. Stephens,
a Philadelphia cabinetmaker and volunteer in the 54th Massachusetts
Colored Infantry (the famous Massachusetts 54th”), argued that the Union army was the proper field for colored men, where they may win by their valor the esteem of all loyal men and women—believing that Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow’.”
16
Corporal James Henry Gooding, a former seaman, and another volunteer in the Massachusetts 54th, similarly reminded his people that their position is a very delicate one the least false step, at a moment like the present, may tell a dismal tale at some future day It was essential, Gooding argued, that the black soldier be seen to be active in this regard, and he warned blacks throughout the Union not to trust to a fancied security, laying comfort to your minds, that our condition will be bettered because slavery must die. It depends on the free black men of the North, whether it will die or not.”
If blacks left it to whites to effect emancipation, Gooding concluded,
“language cannot depict the indignity, the scorn, and perhaps violence, that will be heaped upon us unthought of laws will be enacted and put in force,
to banish us from the land of our birth He stressed the need for blacks to grasp the opportunity now being offered in a letter to the New Bedford
Mercury:
Our people must know that if they are ever to attain to any position in the eyes of the civilized world, they must forego comfort, home,
fear, and above all, superstition, and fight for it makeup their minds to become something more than hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives. Consider that on this continent, at least, their race and name will be totally obliterated unless they put forth some effort now to save themselves.
17
Gooding anticipated, optimistically, that if the colored man proves to be as good a soldier as it is confidently expected he will, there is a permanent field of employment opened to him, with all the chances of promotion in his favor The st Arkansas Colored Regiment had an equally optimistic view of the future following the Emancipation Proclamation. They gleefully marched into battle singing, to the tune of John Brown’s Body”:
We have done with hoeing cotton, we have done with hoeing corn,
We are colored Yankee soldiers, now, assure as you are born;
African-American Soldiers
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When the masters hear us yelling, they’ll think it’s Gabriel’s horn,
As it went sounding on.
They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin,
They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin,
They will have to give us houseroom, or the roof shall tumble in!
As we go marching on.
Father Abraham has spoken, and the message has been sent,
The prison doors he opened, and out the prisoners went,
To join the sable army of the African descent,”
As we go marching on.
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Not everyone shared such optimism. One black New Yorker argued that it would be foolish for blacks to heed the Union’s call to arms since the race had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by entering the lists as combatants To respond to the Union’s call for troops, he asserted, would be simply to repeat the errors of previous generations of blacks, who had
“put confidence in the words of the whites only to feel the dagger of slavery driven deeper Given the virulent racism of the North, he concluded,
free blacks were in no condition to fight under the flag which gives us no protection.”
19
Initially the pessimistic view appeared to be the more accurate one. The white response to the raising of black regiments was far from positive, and indeed in someways inspired a backlash against the whole idea of emancipation. Despite the relative success of racist arguments in favor of blacks rather than whites being killed, most whites did not believe that blacks would make effective soldiers, seeing them as, at best, cannon fodder.

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