A Politics of Service: Black Northerners’ Debates over Enlistment in the American Civil War

Although Abraham Lincoln had issued the final Emancipation Proclamation and the Union had begun to recruit black troops months before, August 1863 saw black Washingtonian Thomas H. C. Hinton complaining in the Christian Recorder, the Philadelphia-based black newspaper, of many black northerners’ reluctance to fight. Hinton, a strong proponent of black enlistment, wrote that many African Americans in his city had reacted to his own conscription by tauntingly asking, “Drafted; I wonder how he likes it?” Hinton was pleased at his conscription, believing his ability to fight for his country confirmed his citizenship, and he bristled that members of his community saw the enlistment question differently, reacting to the call to serve only by asking, “What am I going to fight for [?]” Hinton cautioned black men not to follow the examples set by Washington’s “colored copperheads . . . the slush hounds of our kindred,” who opposed black enlistment, urging fellow black leaders to discredit these opponents of black participation and show black northerners that their interests indeed lay with the Union.¹

Over the past sixty years, historians have paid increased attention to black soldiers’ roles in the American Civil War and have developed a rich literature that recognizes their key contributions to Union victory, slavery’s end, and the expansion of African Americans’ rights and privileges; this literature, though, has tended to portray black service as a foregone conclusion. Black northerners engaged in vigorous, at times acrimonious, discussion over whether and under what conditions they should enlist, debating whether they ought to use service as a vehicle for achieving government recognition of black manhood and citizenship or whether they ought to insist on federal recognition of black manhood and citizenship before enlisting. In this debate, black northerners articulated a politics of service that sought to use enlistment as a bargaining chip for the attainment of expanded rights and privileges—and through this politics of service, they evinced that they fought not to restore the old Union but to usher in a new, reformed one in which they would be treated as men and citizens.

Historians dealing with African Americans’ Civil War experiences have tended not to focus on this debate. Authors writing in the 1950s and 1960s had to contend with deeply held, popular misconceptions, especially the myth of black wartime passivity. Influenced by the burgeoning civil rights movement, they concentrated on African Americans’ military experiences, especially those of slaves-turned-soldiers, highlighting black troops’ myriad contributions to Union victory and chronicling the hardships and inequalities they faced. These authors acknowledged that, following the Union’s initial rejection of black enlistment, black northerners publicly discussed the prospect of their future service, but focused little on these discussions’ progress. Additionally, they concentrated on prominent black northerners like Frederick Douglass rather than on black northerners’ wartime thoughts.² Subsequent investigations of black service have similarly bypassed black northerners’ wartime dialogues about enlistment. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s magisterial 1982 volume The Black Military Experience, for instance, contains invaluable discussion and primary-source documentation of nearly all aspects of black soldiers’ lives but little on the dialogues that accompanied their decisions to enlist.³ More recent works on black service have continued this trend.⁴

Lately, though, historians have examined how African Americans parlayed their wartime service into expanded citizenship rights. Christian G. Samito, for instance, has called the Union army a “primary site . . . of rethinking . . . citizenship,” in which African Americans helped solidify the concept of a national citizenship incorporating certain rights by using the long-held equation of military service with citizenship to argue that loyalty should trump race as a marker of citizenship. Samito noted the integral part public deliberations played in spurring constitutional development but gave little attention to black northerners’ dialogues about enlistment—their “typical response,” he said, to the chance to serve was to volunteer quickly and take an expansive view of enlistment’s potential benefits.⁵ Samito implied that black northerners saw enlistment as constitutive of citizenship, and surely there were black northerners who considered themselves full citizens upon donning Union...