Themes of the American Civil War
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| particular.” 44 As one Union commander pointed out to the Freedmen’s Bureau, intones of exasperation, the inescapable fact was that colored Soldiers families and their friends are totally unlike in condition to the white Soldiers families and friends and to expect them to manage as white soldiers in the North did was to ignore the often violent conditions of the South in these early months of Reconstruction. In the North, he noted, the land is in many hands, little villages everywhere—homes and residences already provided or plenty of friends who have them and, most important, a sentiment favorable to the soldiers, their families, and cause, are scattered everywhere over the north and pervades the entire community but it was quite another matter in the South. Although black troops helped to protect the freedmen and women from the worst violence that elements in the white South sought to inflict on their former slaves, they were themselves too often the targets of violence, whether in or out of uniform. A year after the war ended, it was difficult for black veterans in the South to find work as one agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau reported from Kentucky, white people were often afraid to employ black men, particularly those recently mustered out of the U.S. Military service for fear of injury to their persons or property, by the self styled regulators.” 45 In the North, too, black veterans frequently fared less well than their white contemporaries. Larry Logue has provided figures for Rhode Island that reveal that black veterans were four times as likely to be unemployed as white veterans, and five times as likely to be jobless as black civilians.” Compounding the problem, Northern black veterans were often denied voting rights, whereas the Reconstruction governments in the South had, by 1867, established black male suffrage, even though this proved to be a short-term gain, swiftly and brutally removed by the Jim Crow South. By that year, however, all black volunteer soldiers had been discharged and, on their return to their communities, forcibly disarmed of the weaponry they had brought home—quite legally—from the war. Many more were attacked, or their families were threatened, sometimes murdered. In vain did one Union veteran point out, I have defended the country in the field and most respectfully request that I be protected at home.” 46 Faced with the reality of the Reconstruction South, black Union veterans could have been forgiven had they failed to share the enthusiasm of one officer who, on discharging his troops at the start of 1866, assured them African-American Soldiers • 203 that the time is coming, and is not far distant, when those who enslaved you, shall be forced to acknowledge, that to have been a colored soldier, is to be a citizen, and to have been an advocate of slavery, is but another name for traitor.” 47 Of course, some black veterans in the South did farewell after the war. Donald Shaffer highlights the example of Robert Anderson, formerly a slave in Kentucky and then a soldier in the 125th United States Colored Troops (USCT), who became a successful property owner but, notably, in Nebraska, not in Kentucky. Another success story was that of Robert Smalls, a slave in Charleston whose later fame derived from his capture in, and delivery into Union hands, of the cotton steamer Planter. During the war he was instrumental in the Union’s combined operations along the South Carolina coast after it he became a public speaker and businessman, serving both in the South Carolina legislature and in the US. Congress. Smalls, like Anderson, was unusual, however black veterans were not widely represented in political office in the Reconstruction South, even after “Presidential” had given way to Radical Reconstruction in 1866/67 and the Fifteenth Amendment had made the franchise for African-American men the sole route back into the Union for the former Confederate states. This represented no lack of commitment, but the tendency for black veterans to serve in their home states limited their number in those states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia—where Union recruitment had been low. Former soldiers were more strongly represented in the Reconstruction legislatures in Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Louisiana. The relative success of such individuals, however, was not representative of the African- American veteran’s postwar experience, even if it laid the groundwork for greater—and more broadly applied—political and economic gains in the future. 48 It is perhaps hardly surprising, therefore, that when Joseph T. Wilson, a veteran of Port Hudson, came to write his history of black troops in the American army in 1887, he concluded sadly that their devotion has been not only unappreciated, but it has failed to receive a fitting commemoration in pages of national history.” 49 Ultimately, to the detriment of the black soldier and his role in the Civil War, whites simply chose to ignore not only the sacrifice of the African-American regiments but the implications of their involvement in America’s greatest national crisis. The opportunity to reconstruct the United States on the basis of full racial equality was thrown away. Instead, the reconciliation of the North and South was based on an increasingly selective interpretation of what the Civil War had been about. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln had expressed the hope that the nation might experience anew birth of freedom yet North and South increasingly looked to the past, and not to the future, when contemplating the recent conflict. Increasingly, over the years, the Civil War became less about changing than about preserving the American nation. If the Union had been 204 • Susan-Mary Grant preserved in an altered form, there were many African-Americans who could have been forgiven for not appreciating the difference between the old Union and the new. As the African-American writer and activist Frances Harper saw it, postwar whites continued to regard her race as good enough for soldiers, but not good enough for citizens.” 50 On Memorial Day in 1871, speaking at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, Frederick Douglass observed with sadness the call in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it.” 51 In the end, the need to find some common ground between North and South encouraged the growth of a patriotism that could not acknowledge the sacrifices of the African-American soldier. This was a patriotism in which the pride of those black troops who had fought and died fora Union that chose to betray them had no valid place. 52 By the time Douglass spoke the process of constructing monuments to the Civil War was beginning, a process that gathered momentum during the sands. Few of the monuments acknowledged the role taken by African- American troops in the conflict. The explanation for this, again, goes beyond racism alone. The link between the figure of the black soldier and the emancipation issue was too unsettling fora nation which, it was clear by the shad failed to live up to both Lincoln’s and Douglass’s expectations. As both North and South devoted themselves to the practicalities of reunion, any reminder of the causes of the Civil War proved unwelcome. 53 Equally unwelcome was any reminder that African-American troops had willingly fought not just for freedom for their race but in defence of a Union which, once reestablished, continued to deny them the full benefits of citizenship. Saint-Gaudens’s monument, therefore, was destined to be, and was until only recently to remain, one of only a very few commemorative sites that acknowledged the sacrifice of African-American troops in the American Civil War. 54 On May 31, 1997, 100 years after Saint-Gaudens’s monument was unveiled, a rededication ceremony was held at the site. The day included an historical reenactment of Shaw’s troops leaving for the South and a speech by General Colin Powell in which he drew parallels between the Union’s decision to raise black regiments during the Civil War and the contemporary army’s leading role in the fight for racial equality in America today. Despite Colin Powell’s words, however, despite the many thousands of books written to date on the American Civil War, and despite the cinematic success of a Hollywood film about the Massachusetts 54th, Glory, the war continues to be regarded by some as a white man’s war. For many, the importance of Saint-Gaudens’s monument lies not in the black troops that are represented by it, but in the sacrifice of the regiment’s white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, whose death inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to reflect: African-American Soldiers • 205 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can. 55 To acknowledge this in noway diminishes either the heroism or the tragedy of Shaw’s death on the ramparts of Fort Wagner. Yet the very poignancy of this Boston youth’s untimely end has served to obscure, to a great extent, the cause for which he gave his life, and the equally tragic deaths of those black troops who fought alongside him. Yet, at the same time, it is perhaps also in the Saint-Gaudens’s monument that the full implications of what the 54th, and all the other African American regiments, had fought for, stood for, and, in many cases, died for are revealed. In his sculpture, Saint-Gaudens, as Thomas Brown has argued, envisioned the procession down Beacon Street on Mayas an exemplar of the timeless formation of a community of conscience.” 56 It was, and is, this community of conscience that, in the end, ensured that the sacrifice of the Civil War’s African-American regiments could never be forgotten the monument stood and stands as a reminder of past sacrifice, a challenge neither present nor future can ignore. Notes 1. Robert Hughes, American Visions The Epic History of Art in America (New York, 1997), pp. 209–10. For an extended discussion of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s approach to the monument see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves Race, War, and Monument in Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
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