Black Experience in the Union Army: The Other Civil War

BLACK EXPERIENCE IN THE UNION ARMY: THE OTHER CML WAR Richard M. Reid Viewed from an international perspective, one of the distinctive features of the American CivilWar, especially given the widespread material destruction and the bloody loss of life, was the restraint and control exercised by the armed participants on both sides. It stood in sharp contrast to many of the wars, civil and international, in Europe, Asia and Africa, where the line between combatants and noncombatants blurred and where atrocities became all too frequent. A major factor contributing to this restraint had been the Union decision at the War's start, "to treat the Confederate forces as if they were the army of a legitimate belligerent" even though the Union denied legitimacy of the Confederate government. 1 As long as the rebel army and the Southern population observed the laws and usages of war they were effectively treated as a foreign power. Moreover, courage, combat, and a common background, as Gerald Lindeman and James Robertson have recently shown, helped create a bond between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank which acted "to contain violence within the limits of formal battle."2 For one group of Americans, however, the conflict was a very different civil war, one which included a strikingly brutal and savage side. Black Americans, primarily Southerners, became increasingly caught up in the conflict as Union armies first occupied significant parts of the Confederacy and then began to use the blacks as a military resource. For them the formalized rules of war did not always apply and for them the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was frequently ignored. Moreover, for black soldiers and their families it was not alwayspossible to identify their enemies by the colour of the uniforms.3 In the first year of the War both sides agreed that it was a "white man,s war," and the Union War Department refused to accept even Northern black volunteers.4 This kept black involvement in the early stages of the War to a minimum. The first attempts by Union officers, acting independently, to enroll blacks as soldiers led to failure and reprimands. In April 1862General David Hunter had sought permission, unsuccessfully, to arm 50,000 blacks in 146 Richard M. Reid South Carolina.5 Three months later General John W. Phelps began to raise black troops in Louisiana despite the hostility, at that time, of General Benjamin Butler. 6 Both men were checked by their superiors and their black enlistees were never officially recognized. Rapidly moving events, however, soon achieved what Hunter and Phelps could not. Manpower demands, Union occupation of larger parts of the South, and a changing war goal forced the Northern government to alter its policy on black enlistment. The militia act of July, 1862, authorized the enrollment of blacks, envisioning their use in labour battalions which would free white soldiers for combat. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, went further, and provided for the enlistment of black soldiers and sailors. Two months later, the nation's first draft act accelerated white demands throughout the North that blacks be recruited, a demand which had produced a popular war song, "Samba's Right to be Kilt." Several New England states, led by Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, took steps early in 1863 to raise regiments of black soldiers, initially made up of free .Northern blacks, but later including Southern ex-slaves credited to the Northern states. Soon after, the Union army began to raise its own regiments of black soldiers. 7 Major recruiting efforts were conducted in the spring of 1863 in Louisiana by General Daniel Ullman, in the upper Mississippi Valley by Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas, and by General Edward A. Wild, who was ordered to raise a brigade in North Carolina "from the freedmen of that state."8 These soldiers, their families and blacks elsewhere in both the North and South began to experience, in a series of ways, a very different civil war from their white comrades. One immediate difference faced by some lay in the way by which they were enlisted. For a minority, neither choice nor due process played a part. Instead they were virtually kidnapped. In April 1863...