Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War

2 The Pride of True Manhood

c h a p t e r t w o The Pride of True Manhood The decision to enroll black men into northern armies was made amid a complex discourse about the black body and its capacity for full manhood . Some northern reformers argued that the great transition from slavery to freedom could be partially e¤ected by turning slaves into soldiers , and soldiers into full citizens. “Slave to soldier to man” would solve the most pressing social disruption of nineteenth-century America, the liberation of some 4 million slaves. While this slogan ignored slave women, their status entered this discourse in discussions of the male slave’s adherence to the marriage vow and his likelihood of supporting his wife within her proper sphere. Others claimed, however, that the black body was inherently too weak to allow this transition to take place. Southern apologists alleged that the black man was naturally a slave and could not live successfully in any other condition, while a subset of northern abolitionists felt that black men could live on a level of total equality. Yet the vast middle of northern thinkers saw weaknesses in the black body and questioned the degree to which these were biological or subject to the amelioration of education and enlightened attention. The induction of black men into northern armies opened a vast laboratory for investigation and study. The 1850s and 1860s were times of high anxiety about the black man and his fate. Southerners feared slave revolts and the restriction/destruction of their prized peculiar institution. Northern abolitionist literature increasingly challenged the morality of slavery, especially utilizing the figure of the mulatto to indict the southern male as a fiend who not only sold his own children but took his daughters as concubines. Even as southerners built a defense of slavery on the biological predisposition of the black man for slavery, the presence of mulattoes challenged the rigid distinctions inscribed in such biracial assumptions. A¤luent southern women voiced increasingly open disgust at the existence of mixed-race children, while slavery was growing ever whiter. The black and brown body had come to center stage of slavery’s defense.1 In 1862, when refugee slaves swarmed Union camps and Lincoln penned his Emancipation Proclamation, it became increasingly clear that numerous black people would achieve their freedom and perhaps even flood northern cities like the Irish before them. This prospect raised great anxiety in the north about their ability to live as free men and productive citizens. What was to become of the black man? Would he make a citizen? How was postwar society to evolve? Could he take on the role of true manhood , and would his body allow it? Northern intellectuals were in a flurry to find out. Would all the mulatto men, who appeared to be the intellectual and social leaders of the black world, really die out due to their inherent weakness, or continue to lead their darker brothers toward civilization ? All was in flux at midcentury. Isaac Strain, Oªcer and Gentleman In 1865 Joseph Smith, the medical director for Union troops in Arkansas , reported his observations about the health of the black soldiers under his care. After noting that that these troops were obedient and courageous , Smith qualified his praise. “They however have not the intelligence of the white troops and must be made to take proper steps for the police of their persons and their camp. His [sic] moral and intellectual culture is deficient and the lack of this culture renders him unequal to the white soldier in power to resist disease.” That this deficiency was key to their achieving citizenship—nay, even full manhood—was driven home by his next statement. “That there is a connection between this power to resist disease and death and high mental and moral culture was never more clearly exemplified than in the exploration of the isthmus of Darien by Lieut Strain and party whose adventures and su¤erings and endurance have become historical.”2 So who was this Strain fellow? Why did he exemplify white manhood, much less its power to “resist disease and death?” At thirty-three, Naval The Pride of True Manhood 15 Lieutenant Isaac Strain was one of the most famous Americans of his time. Although e¤orts in the late nineteenth century to pierce the Isthmus of Panama with canal and rail are well known, the...