Themes of the American Civil War

PART
Emancipation
Race and Gender in the Civil War
III

CHAPTER
Fighting for Freedom
African-American Soldiers in the Civil War
SUSAN-MARY GRANT
In 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very special monument to that war was unveiled opposite the Statehouse in
Boston. Designed by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it depicted in profile the figure of Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-year- old white officer of the North’s showcase African-American regiment, the
Massachusetts 54th (Colored, leading his men through Boston on their way to South Carolina in 1863. It was an unusual and in many ways seminal piece of sculpture. Not only was it the first American monument focused on a group rather than a single figure, it was the first example of a monument portraying blacks as central actors in the Civil War. Although Saint-Gaudens had neglected the opportunity to represent the features of the individual soldiers from that regiment—only Shaw’s image was a specific likeness—he nevertheless avoided representing the black troops in any kind of stereotypical manner, portraying them instead as noble patriot soldiers of the
American nation. Both in its novelty and in its sentiment the Saint-Gaudens monument remains, according to art critic Robert Hughes, the most intensely felt image of military commemoration made by an American.”
1
Impressive though it was—and indeed still is—the Saint-Gaudens monument in noway reflected the general mood of the American people towards those black troops who had fought in the conflict. By 1897 the
American nation had all but forgotten that black troops had ever played a role in the Civil War. Saint-Gaudens completed his monument at a time when segregationist legislation—“Jim Crow”—was beginning to bite in the South, but the exclusion of black troops from the national memory of
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the Civil War began long before 1897. In the Grand Review of the Armed
Forces which followed the cessation of hostilities very few blacks were represented, despite the fact that many of the black Union regiments had fought longer and harder than some of the white regiments on parade that day. Relegated to the end of the procession in pick and shovel brigades,
or intended only as a form of comic relief, neither the free black soldier nor the former slave was accorded his deserved role in this most poignant national pageant.
2
The reasons for this were in part, but only in part, practical ones. Those troops who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on May 23–24,
1865, represented Northern armies which had not included black units,
notably the Army of the Potomac and those under Sherman’s command.
In addition, having enlisted later than many of the white troops, the African-
American units had time left to serve, and so many of the black regiments were still on duty in the South when their white comrades were parading in Washington.
3
The limited role taken by black troops—however explicable the grounds for it—did not bode well for the future. Rather than a war fought for liberty,
in which the role of the African-American soldier was pivotal, the image of the American Civil War as a white man’s fight became the national norm almost as soon as the last shot was fired, and remained so until the late twentieth century. Indeed, although Brooks Simpson is undoubtedly right to observe that Americans today are much more aware of the role taken by African-Americans infighting for their freedom during the Civil War”
it remains the case that the black soldier is still not regarded as a central figure of that conflict.
4
This is in someways unusual, given that the American
Civil War became a war for liberation, for emancipation, for freedom, and fora Union in which slavery had no place. From another angle, however,
it is not unusual at all. There is, after all, more than one kind of freedom.
The paradox of the African-American soldier lies in the fact that he was fighting not simply for freedom from slavery for his own race during the
Civil War but fora much broader and more demanding kind of freedom;
freedom not just fora race but fora nation.

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