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Introduction
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
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1 Introduction On March 30, 1864, Private Hannibal Cox, an infantryman in the Fourteenth U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), sent President Abraham Lincoln a gift—a poem that he had written at his military post in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Cox described himself as “a Man of no Education” who had “been Doomed to Slavery.” He was born in Powhatan County, Virginia, raised in Richmond, and eventually became the property of a slaveholder named Green in Lincoln County, Tennessee. In August 1863, Cox escaped to the U.S. General Hospital at Tullahoma, Tennessee, where Dr. Benjamin Woodward, surgeon of the Twenty-Second Illinois Volunteer Infantry, took him in. Soldiers taught Cox how to read and write, and in spring 1864 he enlisted in the Fourteenth USCT.1 Cox informed Lincoln that although he had left his wife and children to join the army, “I have not yet for Saken them.” He decided to make “one grasp at the Flag of the union and Declared it shall never fall.” Cox hoped that he would meet Lincoln “in the bonds of love” and bid him “fare well,” hopeful that “History may tell.” In a postscript Cox added: “I. sends this for you to look at you must not laugh at it.”2 Dr. Woodward, who had heard Lincoln speak in Springfield before he left for Washington in 1861, described Cox, the escaped slave and soldier, as “but a sample of the glorious fruits of Your ‘Proclamation’ of Liberty.’” Woodward reminded the president that as he departed for his inaugural, he admonished the audience to 2 | introduction “Pray for me.” Now, the surgeon explained, “a thousand hearts responded , and we . . . thank God who has so ‘led You into all truth’ and thousands in the army rejoice in Your work and pray for you that you may be sustained till the great work which God has called You to is fully accomplished.”3 Lincoln left no record of his impressions of Cox’s poem. But it is doubtful that he laughed at it. By war’s end, the army had raised 178,975 enlisted men for the USCT. The War Department’s Bureau of Colored Troops organized the soldiers in 133 infantry regiments, four independent companies, seven cavalry regiments, twelve regiments of heavy artillery, and ten batteries of light artillery. Roughly 19 percent of the troops came from the eighteen northern states, 24 percent from the four Union slave states, and 57 percent from the eleven Confederate states. The 1860 Federal census reported around 750,000 male slaves, most residing in the Rebel states, of arms-bearing age and, accordingly, the majority of the men of the USCT were ex-slaves. Not only did slaves recruited in the South bolster Union armies, but they also denied the Rebels a sizable workforce, around eighty thousand bonded laborers. Overall 21 percent of the nation’s adult male black population between ages eighteen and forty-five joined the USCT, including almost three-quarters of all men in the free states of military age. Altogether, African Americans accounted for between 9 and 12 percent of all Union troops who served in the war. The USCT signified the first systematic, large-scale effort by the U.S. government to arm African Americans to aid in the nation’s defense.4 Just as the men of the USCT associated their freedom and military service with Lincoln and his administration, the president had become deeply appreciative of the African American soldiers’ contributions to the hard-fought Union victory.5 Lincoln experienced a metamorphosis during the war, which by mid-1862 had become a stalemate between the forces of slavery and southern independence on the one hand, and those of free labor and national Union on the other. For months he had marked time making only “small, token gestures” toward freeing the slaves.6 Finally on January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, a military decree that freed and armed the Rebels’ slaves. [3.236.138.253] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:03 GMT) introduction | 3 Eight months later, after black troops had distinguished themselves in bloody combat at Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina, Lincoln informed a friend that his field commanders, including those unsympathetic to abolitionism, now believed that “the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion; and that, at least one of those important successes, could not have been achieved when it was, but for the aid of...