One Drop in a Sea of Blue: The Liberators of the Ninth Minnesota

Conclusion: Drops in the Sea of Blue

Fidelity and Courage The saga of the thirty-eight liberators during the Civil War is a part of the greater story of the Ninth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry in the struggle to destroy Southern slavery and reunite the United States. The Minnesotans overcame the shame of one of the bitterest defeats of the war at Brice’s Crossroads to triumph at Tupelo, Nashville, and Mobile. Over two hundred endured hell on earth at Andersonville and other Confederate prisons at a staggering cost of lives. Ultimately, though, the liberators, as with all their comrades in the Ninth Minnesota, were just drops in the vast sea of Yankee blue, sharing to one degree or another the fortunes, good and bad, of the more than a million Union men who fought and won that most terrible of American wars. It is the excellence of the surviving documentation that,  years later, fortunately allows a better understanding and appreciation of their specific contribution to that victory. If their overall narrative is one of common experience in the Civil War, what the liberators did at Otterville on November , , sets them apart in one vital respect. Their actions there help illuminate a fundamental controversy : Just why did Northern soldiers fight? The obvious answer is to put down the rebellious Southern states and preserve the Union. Waging war with such fervor and ferocity underscored the enmity most Northerners bore against the Southerners that matched the South’s own hatred for the North. Still quite contentious are the extent of anti-slavery sentiment among the Northern soldiers and the true level of their support for emancipation. One school of thought holds that in fact a considerable and ever-growing percentage of Union soldiers came rather early to identify slavery as the predominant  conclusion ‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Drops in the Sea of Blue cause of the conflict and to readily accommodate, if not wholeheartedly cheer, emancipation. The other point of view counters that the current overwhelming “focus on emancipation and race” stresses contemporary values in the place of the original period beliefs and obscures what Union soldiers really thought at the time. As historian Gary W. Gallagher writes, only “a small minority of soldiers enthusiastically greeted news of emancipation as a moral accomplishment.” Humanitarian considerations were at first only a minimal factor as to the way Union troops viewed black people in general and slaves in particular. Before the war many Northerners, Gallagher notes, “could go about their lives without encountering many, if any, African Americans .” Sympathy for the slaves and freedmen grew only gradually as more bluecoats came to see and understand their plight.1 Where in light of these competing interpretations do the Ninth Minnesota and the incident at Otterville properly fit? It would seem the preponderance of evidence supports the contention that very few Northerners at the outset of the war would have put the destruction of slavery very high on their list of war goals. Only later did ending slavery emerge as a valuable tool in harming the Southern war effort and morale. It is evident, therefore, the anti-slavery sentiment of a high percentage of the Ninth Minnesota clearly differed from the vast majority of the Union army. In common with other Northern volunteers , the Minnesotans had enlisted in August  consumed with the desire to punish the seceded states and restore the Union. The war effort had faltered and desperately needed their help. Slavery itself was at most a peripheral issue for nearly all of them. Reverend John Arnold was probably one of the very few members of the Ninth Minnesota who was a committed abolitionist prior to the war. The men, nonetheless, appear to have hewed strongly to the Republican Party and to the general concept of emancipation. They had a great distaste for slaveholders, no matter how loyally the masters might support the Union. Once they got their first actual look at the appalling reality of slavery in Missouri, they understood the baleful institution not only harmed the enslaved but degraded their masters. Many Union soldiers in Missouri and Kentucky, in particular, were completely disgusted at having to preserve slavery while the rest of the Union army did everything it could in the seceded Southern states to eradicate it. The furor surrounding the Missouri state elections only intensified Radical sympathies in the Ninth Minnesota for the swift and decisive end of slavery, a cause that resounded in numerous statements expressed by liberators and their comrades both before and following the rescue of John’s...