Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops

Afterword

97 Afterword At two o’clock on Wednesday, April 19, 1865, five days following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Washington’s church bells tolled. A hearse drawn by six gray horses carried the dead president’s body in the two-hour-long funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol, where the open coffin was to lie in state in the Rotunda. Three hundred men of the Twenty-Second USCT, a battle-tested regiment recruited in Philadelphia, traveled overnight to Washington, fresh from the Virginia front. Once arriving in the capital city, the black unit accidentally positioned itself at the front of the long funeral cortege. With the street filled with marchers and the sidewalks overrun with onlookers, the Twenty-Second could not reposition itself. Unable to redirect the black troops, the parade marshals, “swallowing hard, decided to let them lead the way.” The USCT unit, considered by its commander General Godfrey Weitzel to be one of his best, halted, wheeled into column, reversed its arms and stood at “rest.” According to an observer, “the band struck up a dirge, and the regiment immediately moved forward, thereby becoming the head of the procession.” A newspaperman reported that the black soldiers “appeared to be under the very best discipline, and displayed admirable skill in their various exercises.” A mile to the rear, thousands of African Americans trailed along in their accustomed place, in the back.1 The New York Times reported that “their walk and their mien were the very impersonation of sorrow.” Three days later, the 98 | Afterword Twenty-Second USCT boarded a boat at Charles County, Maryland, to join in the hunt for Lincoln’s assassin.2 The irony and symbolic meaning of black soldiers leading the procession, and then participating in the search for Lincoln’s murderer , would not have been lost on the deceased chief executive. By the end of the war, the president had developed a special interest in the accomplishments of the men of the USCT, a force that his supporters increasingly identified as one of the landmark achievements of his first administration and that his critics considered an insult to whites and a harbinger of racial equality and miscegenation. As the war unfolded, Lincoln “had staked the credibility of his racial policies on their performance.”3 To be sure, Lincoln had freed the Confederacy’s slaves with his pen, but they had helped to suppress the rebellion with their military service. Lincoln relied on free African Americans to draw the slaves to Union lines and to add almost 180,000 men to the Federal forces. Though the president had limited direct contact with people of color, following his death they came to consider him their emancipator, father, friend, and leader. For example, the indefatigable and redoubtable Harriet Tubman, Civil War nurse, recruiter, scout, and spy, had criticized Lincoln’s appeasement of slaveholders early in the war; his lethargy in freeing and arming the slaves; and later his foot-dragging in equalizing the USCT’s pay. Three decades later, however, Tubman appreciated fully what Lincoln had done for her people. “Yes, I’se sorry now I didn’t see Massa Lincoln and tank him,” she said.4 Many African Americans transformed Lincoln into their Messiah , a Christ-like figure, as God’s instrument for freeing the slaves.5 For instance, in May 1865 Orderly Sergeant James C. Taylor of the Ninety-Third USCT pronounced that “God, in his divine wisdom, through the instrumentality of our noble President, Abraham Lincoln , saw fit to remove, the only dark spot (Slavery) from one of the most glorious flags the sun ever shone upon.” Six months later I. N. Triplett, formerly an orderly sergeant in the Sixtieth USCT, proposed a resolution on the late president at a convention of black veterans in Iowa. Triplett mourned “the sad fate of the martyr President, Abraham Lincoln, the great Emancipator, and devoted friend of our race, Afterword | 99 yet rejoice that the great work which God appointed him to perform has been so nearly accomplished that the wrath of the oppressor is utterly powerless to prevent a full and glorious consummation.”6 To a certain extent Lincoln had considered himself the vehicle for freeing the slaves, arming blacks, and helping them to assert themselves as men. In April 1865 he modestly told Lieutenant Daniel H. Chamberlain of the all-black Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, and later Reconstruction...