“Blooding” of Black Troops

in Louisiana. The assault itself was misconceived, and the Union army suffered a defeat, but for the black troops who had fought there Port Hudson proved a turning point of sorts. This was recognized by some white troops as well as by black. Before the actual assault, white private Henry T. Johns expressed his belief that the black regiments would perform well, and that consequently whites would give them a share in our nationality, if God has no separate nationality in store for them.”
21
In the aftermath of the battle,
Johns’s optimism seemed justified. One lieutenant reported that his company had fought bravely, adding they are mostly contrabands, and I must say I entertained some fears as to their pluck. But I have none now The New
York Times was similarly impressed:
Those black soldiers had never before been in any severe engagement. They were comparatively raw troops, and were yet subjected to the most awful ordeal than even veterans ever have to experience
—the charging upon fortifications through the crash of belching batteries. The men, white or black, who will not flinch from that will flinch from nothing. It is no longer possible to doubt the bravery and steadiness of the colored race, when rightly led.
22
If further proof were required that the black soldier had potential one of the Civil War’s most bloody engagements, the battle of Milliken’s Bend in
June, 1863, came shortly after the Port Hudson defeat. Here, too, raw black recruits found themselves facing substantial Confederate forces. In the black units engaged, casualties ran to 35 percent, and for the 9th Louisiana Infantry
(later the 5th US. Colored Heavy Artillery) alone casualties reached percent. The cost was clearly high but, as at Port Hudson, white commanders declared themselves impressed with the behavior under fire of the black troops. Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of War, concluded that the sentiment in regard to the employment of negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent Battle of Milliken’s
Bend. Prominent officers, who used in private sneer at the idea, are now heartily in favor of it.”
23
At the same time as black soldiers were proving their valor on the
Mississippi at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend, the North’s most famous colored regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, was preparing to set off from
Massachusetts toward its first major campaign and a place in the history books. Fort Wagner, on the northern tip of Morris Island in South Carolina,
was the main defence both for Charleston and for Battery Gregg, which overlooked the entrance to Charleston Harbor. The taking of the fort would have been a significant prize for the Union forces, enabling them to attack
Fort Sumter—where the Civil War had begun in April, and, it was hoped, Charleston itself. Originally the plan had been to use the thin a minor supporting role, but its commander, Robert Gould Shaw, recognized
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the importance of taking an active part in the forthcoming engagement and campaigned vigorously for his regiment to be given a more prominent role in the attack. Shaw was successful, and the 54th received orders to head the attack on the fort on July 18, 1863. Shaw and his men regarded this as an honor, although Major General Truman Seymour, in agreeing to Shaw’s request, expressed the opinion that it was a good idea to put those dd niggers from Massachusetts in the advance we may as well get rid of them onetime as another.”
24
As with Port Hudson, the attack on Fort Wagner, one of the most heavily defended and impregnable of the Confederate forts, was doomed to failure,
and the Union forces sustained heavy casualties. The Massachusetts 54th lost over half its men, including Robert Gould Shaw, who was shot through the heart as he took the parapet of the fort. His troops held the ground he had reached for barely an hour. To add insult to injury, the Confederates refused to return Shaw’s body to his family, as was normal procedure for senior ranks. When Shaw’s father requested that his son’s body be returned,
a Confederate officer is reported to have denied the request with the words
“We have buried him with his niggers In the face of this deliberate insult,
Shaw’s father merely responded that We hold that a soldier’s most appropriate burial place is on the field where he has fallen.”
25
Following the disaster of Fort Wagner the Massachusetts 54th and its sister regiment, the
55th, did achieve military victories against the Confederacy, but in the more general battle against racism Fort Wagner, like Port Hudson, was a significant, although not complete, success. One white Union soldier, who had expressed extreme hostility toward black troops prior to the 54th’s attack on the fort, felt compelled to declare afterwards that in his opinion the
“54th Mass Infantry colored is as good a fighting regiment as there is in the
10th Army Corps Department of the South Yet his objections to fighting alongside black troops remained.
26
More positively, at the end of the Civil War, the New York Tribune reminded its readers that to the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth was set the stupendous task to convince the white race that colored troops would fight,—and not only that they would fight, but that they could be made, in every sense of the word, soldiers From the outset, much had been riding on this particular regiment. Raised by Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts and numbering the sons of noted abolitionists and prominent Bostonians among its ranks—not only Robert Gould Shaw but two of Frederick Douglass’s sons fought in the 54th—much more than military success was at stake when the
Massachusetts 54th marched out of Boston, to cheering crowds, in the spring of 1863. As the New York Tribune put it:
It is not too much to say that if this Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hundred thousand colored troops
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for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field,
or would not have been put in for another year, which would have been equivalent to protracting the war into 1866. But it did not falter. It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as
Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees.
27
Thanks in part to the bravery of the Massachusetts 54th, therefore, by the end of 1863 the Union army had recruited some 50,000 African-
Americans—both free blacks and former slaves—to its ranks. By the end of the war this number had risen to some 186,000, of whom 134,111 were recruited in the slave states. African-American troops comprised 10 percent of the total Union fighting force, and some 3,000 of them died on the battlefield plus many more in the prisoner-of-war camps, if they made it that far. By 1865 black troops had taken part in thirty-nine major battles and some 449 engagements, and twenty-one of them had received the
Congressional Medal of Honor.
28
Toward the end of 1863 Henry S. Harmon,
a soldier in the rd USCI, felt confident enough to declare that you can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden. We too have suffered and died in defence of that starry banner which floats only over freemen. I feel assured that the name of the colored soldier will standout in bold relief among the heroes of this war.”
29
The propaganda success of the assaults on Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend and Fort Wagner were, however, only part of the story as far as African-
American troops were concerned. The fact that blacks had shown that they could fight in noway diminished the prejudice they experienced in the Union army. Nor did it resolve the crux of the issue, which was that the war,
for many of the black troops, was in essence a very different conflict from that experienced by the whites. In purely practical terms, the conditions experienced by African-American troops were far inferior to those experienced by some white ones. It is important not to overstate this, however,
as racism alone was not always the root cause. The fact was that by the time the African-American regiments were raised and sent into the field the Civil
War had been going on for almost two years. Fresh recruits, therefore, of whatever color, found themselves facing a Rebel army which had much more combat experience. At Milliken’s Bend, for example, the most experienced officers had been in uniform for less than a month. Even worse, some of the black troops had received only two days of target practice prior to going into battle, and in a war where fast reloading was crucial for survival they simply lacked the necessary skill. When the 29th USCT arrived at Camp
Casey in 1864, for example, they were issued with the 0.58 caliber Springfield rifled musket. They were not, however, given any training in how to use it beyond basic parade evolutions. In such circumstances it was unsurprising that the troops struggled under battlefield conditions.
30
Similarly, the racist
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comments of Major General Seymour notwithstanding, in the attack on Fort
Wagner it was not necessarily the case that the Massachusetts 54th was sent in on a suicidal mission. Throughout the Civil War, Bay State regiments fought in the front line of some of the very worst battles, and consequently
Massachusetts had some of the highest combat casualties of any of the Union states. In this regard the Massachusetts 54th was continuing the tradition of the Bay State troops in July, 1863, a considerable source of pride for this most famous showcase regiment, particularly in the context of what they were fighting for.

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