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By Root 1099 0

of emancipation and black recruitment. “If a bob-tail dog can stick a bayonet on his tail, and back up against a rebel and kill him, I will take the dog and sleep with him,” a Union officer declared, “and if a nigger will do the same, I’ll do the same by him. I’ll sleep with any thing that will kill a rebel.” Although this may have been a curious kind of recognition, the argument gained increasing acceptance with every casualty list. To enlist blacks was to preserve the more valuable lives of white men. The best men of the North were dying in the swamps of the South, an officer observed, and this was a loss the nation could ill afford. “[Y]ou can’t replace these men, but if a nigger dies, all you have to do is send out and get another one.”8

The same Administration that had summarily rejected black volunteers at the outset of the war began in mid-1862 to consider the employment of blacks in the armed forces. The initial proposals contemplated using such troops primarily for menial labor and for garrison duty in areas deemed unfit for white men, such as the malarial regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. The advantages of deploying blacks in these ways were obvious. “The blacks,” said the New York Times, “thoroughly acclimated, will be saved from the risks of the climate, while in the well-defined limit of fortifications they will be restrained from the commission of those revengeful excesses which are the bug-aboos of the Southern people.” In a series of articles on “Colored Troops,” a columnist for the Christian Recorder, the voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, seemed to share the prevailing belief that blacks were “especially adapted to service in the South” because they were less susceptible to diseases which easily felled white men. When Vicksburg surrendered, the black columnist noted, the hospitals were filled with southern white soldiers suffering from malarial diseases and fevers “from which colored men are almost exempt.” Citing the many advantages of black troops, he welcomed the proposal to use them to guard prisoners of war and to protect garrisons in the occupied areas. Such duty, he thought, would be especially “pleasant” to the emancipated slaves, enabling them “to stand guard over those who have so long abused the power they held over them.”9

To resolve the doubts which persisted about the military capabilities of black men, some suggested that they first be tested in battle against the Indians. If the experiment proved successful, black troops could then be deployed for combat duty in the South. Nothing came of this proposal, and it won little favor among blacks themselves. “I am very doubtful whether the negro could display his bravery as well against his co-sufferer, as he could against his enemy,” wrote Henry M. Turner, the black clergyman. “Like us,” the Indian has been “scattered and peeled.” How could blacks, of all people, share in a deliberate policy of racial extermination? The Indians, Turner observed, “cherished no special hatred against my race,” and the “scalping knife and tomahawk were not shaped nor moulded to injure us.” Rather than wage war on the Indians, Turner suggested that black people might well learn to emulate their bravery. “If we had one half of the Indian spunk, to-day slavery would have been among the things of the past.” Whatever the merits of Turner’s argument, blacks had been used to fight Indians in the past, and they would do so again in the postwar Indian wars, but to have employed them for this purpose in 1863 must have struck some blacks as a perversion of priorities.10

While the President refused to alter his position on emancipation and black enlistments, the Union Navy was using “contraband” slaves as apprentice seamen and the Army began to employ them extensively as laborers and officers’ servants. Limited and unauthorized attempts, moreover, had been undertaken in Kansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina to arm, drill, and use black soldiers. After General Benjamin Butler overcame his initial reluctance to enlist blacks, three regiments