• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1014 0

grateful and respectful.” But the soldiers destroyed their property, shot at them, and abused them “in every possible way,” and it now appeared to him “as if we had no one to protect us, and there’s nothing left us but to protect ourselves.” Such experiences were more than unsettling; they raised real questions about the quality of the newly acquired freedom. What were the blacks to think when “those individuals whom we all regarded as our friends, and hailed as our deliverers,” broke up their celebrations, heaped physical and mental abuse on them, shoved them off sidewalks, cursed them as “niggers” and “mokes,” robbed them of their few belongings, and ravished their women? It was as if one set of masters had been replaced by another, and that was precisely how a Norfolk black woman viewed the change in her status: “I reckon I’m Massa Lincoln’s slave now.”56

Reflecting the wide range and diversity of northern opinion, the Union Army also contained in its ranks men who were imbued with abolitionist ideals, who were anxious to wage an antislavery war, and who would have resented any implication that they harbored racist attitudes. “I tell the boys right to their face I am in the war for the freedom of the slave,” a Wisconsin soldier boasted. Initially indifferent or hostile to emancipation, some Union soldiers were won over by military considerations, while others resolved their doubts when they came face to face with the victims of the “peculiar institution.” After hearing from slave runaways the stories of their escape and the bondage they had left behind them, a Union soldier in North Carolina wrote his parents that “every man in our army is now an abolitionist.” Even more convincing than the familiar tales of whippings and the separation of families was the direct physical evidence of how slaves had been treated. Upon visiting several plantations near New Orleans, where he released slave prisoners from heavy chains and weights, one Union soldier said he had seen “enough of the horrors of slavery to make one an Abolitionist forever.” When several new black recruits stripped for a physical examination in Louisiana, prior to their induction, a Union soldier afterwards described in detail the marks which bondage had left on the bodies of these men. It was a depressing sight.

Some of them were scarred from head to foot where they had been whipped. One man’s back was nearly all one scar, as if the skin had been chopped up and left to heal in ridges. Another had scars on the back of his neck, and from that all the way to his heels every little ways; but that was not such a sight as the one with the great solid mass of ridges from his shoulders to his hips. That beat all the antislavery sermons ever yet preached.57

The more sympathetic Union soldiers tried to alleviate the condition of the slave refugees who flocked in ever greater numbers to their camps. Anticipating the movement of teachers and missionaries into the South, they volunteered their time to establish informal classes for the slaves in reading and writing, and some insisted on giving them religious instruction. The life of an abolitionist in the Union Army, however, much like that of his counterpart in the North, was never very comfortable, particularly if he sought to proselytize his fellow soldiers, and he almost always sensed that he was in a small minority. “Most of the boys have their laugh at me for helping the ‘Niggers,’ ” a Wisconsin soldier confessed. The hostility toward abolitionism and blacks that so many Northerners carried with them into the war was sometimes vented on those who tried to agitate the subject in the Army. “If some of the niger lovers want to know what the most of the Solgers think of them,” an Ohioan informed his father, “they think about as much as they do a reble. They think they are Shit asses.”58

The abolitionist Yankee found himself troubled by more than the hostility of his fellow soldiers. Mirroring the ambivalence of the antislavery movement itself, he often found it easier to preach abolitionism than to accept the black