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113  Marching to Freedom: The U.S. Colored Troops John F. Marszalek 1resident Abraham Lincoln had guided the nation through a harsh and bloody civil war caused by the nation’s inability to solve the problem of slavery. In 1863, he had issued a historic antislavery document, the Emancipation Proclamation, but its validity after the war’s conclusion was uncertain. There was need for something more definitive, and the result was the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in January 1865, ratified during that year, and made official in December. It ended any doubts about slavery and eliminated it throughout the nation. With the passage of this amendment, victorious Unionists breathed a collective sigh of relief, and even many uncompromising abolitionists believed that the nation’s major problem of race relations had finally been solved.1 With the benefit of hindsight, however, historians know that while this amendment eliminated slavery, it never dealt with the underlying attitudes supporting the enslavement of black people. The winding road to emancipation is the story of a nation’s racism and a civil war resulting from it, the evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s mind-set, and the actions of black slaves and free people themselves. There was little agreement on the path to be taken or the speed of the trip, but eventually everyone seemed to agree that black men wearing Union uniforms would play a major role in bringing about emancipation. It was indeed over the mangled or dead bodies of the black soldiers in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) that emancipation, freedom, and equality were debated. The black men themselves best understood their central role in this process when the Emancipation Proclamation was promulgated in the middle of the war and their participation in the military was insured. One of the black units they formed, the First Arkansas Colored Regiment, expressed their thoughts john f. marszalek 114 to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” later the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Several verses of this song demonstrated the black soldiers’ understanding of the connection between their soldiering and emancipation: We heard the Proclamation, master hush it as he will. The bird he sing it to us, hoppin’ on the cotton hill. And the possum up the gum tree, he couldn’t keep it still, As he went climbing on. (Chorus) They said, “now colored brethren, you shall be forever free From the first of January, eighteen hundred, sixty-three We heard it in the river going rushing to the sea. As it went sounding on. (Chorus) Father Abraham has spoken and the message has been sent. The prison doors he opened, and out the pris’ners went, To join the sable army of the “African Descent,” As we go marching on. (Chorus)2 The very idea of a black man in uniform seemed outrageous to most white Americans in both the North and the South in 1861. Conveniently, they ignored the black soldiers who had fought in places like Bunker Hill and under Andrew Jackson in New Orleans, viewing such individuals as the exceptions rather than the rule. Whether in the slave states or in the free, in the South or in the North, white people viewed blacks as inferior. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott decision that the Founding Fathers had not included blacks when they wrote the Constitution. Blacks had no rights that “whites were bound to respect”; they were not citizens of the United States. Because Americans considered soldiering as one of the highest marks of citizenship , blacks were not to have that privilege. It was not far into the Civil War, however, when black participation in the military began to appear possible, even necessary. There was no plan; the idea evolved over time and from necessity rather than out of any heartfelt desire to benefit a downtrodden race. As in American wars before and after, it came down to a conflict between society’s fear of a black man in arms and the need for his services. The need eventually won out, but the fear created discrimination and hesitancy throughout the process.3 Blacks could hardly become soldiers in the Civil War as long as most of them remained slaves. In Virginia, where the first battles of the war took place, black people took quick action to gain their own freedom; they fled to Union army camps, causing a dilemma for military commanders. Should these of...

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