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10. Soldiers There are two drafts of this chapter, one at the Harsh Research Collection and the most recent at the Newberry Library. The more recent version that appears here was written by Arna Bontemps. Corrections made in Jack Conroy’s handwriting have been incorporated by the editor. In the IWP papers, there are also two earlier essays of significance, a tenpage essay by Edward Joseph, “The Negro Soldier,” and a fifty-four-page essay by George Coleman Moore, “Soldiers: 1865–1913.” One night a band of young copperheads met John Henry, a colored man, and asked: “What side are you on?” John Henry replied truthfully: “I’m for President Lincoln and the government of the United States.” “You might expect that from a d——d nigger,” the ruffians commented and administered a beating. Ten minutes later a detective halted the man who was still sore from the mistreatment he had received at the hands of the copperheads. “What side are you on?” the detective asked. The Negro, half-frightened, replied: “I’m for Jeff Davis and the Confederate States of America.” At this John Henry was immediately placed under arrest, but after explanation he was promptly released. He had walked a block or two from the jail when a man stopped him and asked the same question: “What side are you on?” This time the victim of so much questioning straightened up and looking the stranger squarely in the face said: “You tell me what side you’re on, Mister, and I’ll tell you what side I’m on.” So characterizes the Chicago of the 1860s. George W. Williams, writing about the Negro, discloses the fact that Illinois provided 1,811 soldiers during the Civil War; however, Champaign’s Union and Gazette states, Dolinar_Text.indd 78 3/14/13 9:59 AM Soldiers 79 . . . of the colored men enlisted in the war, Illinois raised one thousand one hundred and eleven. . . . The correct number was perhaps an average between the two figures; downstate Quincy alone is said to have raised 903 of these men. Congress was appealed to decide whether or not Negroes were to fight; after long months of pro and con debate an act was passed which required that Negroes be paid ten dollars per month, with three dollars deducted for clothing while white soldiers received thirteen dollars per month in addition to their uniforms. In a further discussion on the Civil War, Williams states that— The Negro soldier had to run the gauntlet of the persecuting hate of white Northern troops, and if captured, endure the most barbarous treatment of the rebels, without a protest on the part of the government—for at least nearly a year. Hooted at, jeered, and stoned in the streets of Northern cities as they marched to the front to fight for the Union; scoffed at and abused by white troops under the flag of a common country, there was little of a consoling or inspiring nature in the experience of Negro soldiers. “But,” the writer adds, “here was a war about the Negro, a war that was to declare him forever bond, or forever free.” Judge Advocate Joseph Holt in an official letter to Secretary of War Stanton, August 20, 1863, rendered this decision: The obligation of all persons—irrespective of creed or color—to bear arms, if physically capable of doing so, in defense of the Government under which they live and by which they are protected, is one that is universally acknowledged and enforced. Corresponding to this obligation is the duty resting on those charged with the administration of the military service, whenever the public safety may demand it. Out of such conflicts arose a hero—H. O. Wagoner, friend of Frederick Douglass and John Brown, confidant of John Jones, and trusted worker in the Underground Railway. Wagoner had come to Illinois from Colorado as early as 1839, settling at Galena. When announcement came that colored men were to be inducted into the armed forces of the nation, Governor John Albion Andrew of Massachusetts commissioned him to recruit for the Fifth Cavalry of that state. His outstanding services there brought national attention to his work. So impressed was the Illinois governor, Richard Yates, that he too commissioned Wagoner to go down to Mississippi and recruit refugees and contrabands under act of Congress, and Order Number 227 of the War Department. Under Wagoner’s direction the Negro personnel of Civil War forces in Illinois increased and swelled the Union...

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