Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [54]
After the Administration committed itself to the military employment of blacks as soldiers, the changes came so rapidly that Frederick Douglass could only describe them as “vast and startling.” Less than three weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers marched through the streets of Beaufort, with a white regimental band leading the way. “And when dat band wheel in before us, and march on,” a black sergeant remarked afterwards, “my God! I quit dis world altogeder.” The astonishment of the native whites at this awesome spectacle was matched only by the obvious pride manifested in the eyes of the black soldiers, their faces set rigidly to the front. “We didn’t look to de right nor to de leff,” one of them recalled. “I didn’t see notin’ in Beaufort. Eb’ry step was worth a half a dollar.” Several weeks later, they made their initial contact with the enemy, and Colonel Higginson was deeply impressed. “Nobody knows anything about these men who has not seen them in battle. I find that I myself knew nothing. There is a fierce energy about them beyond anything of which I have ever read, unless it be the French Zouaves. It requires the strictest discipline to hold them in hand.” There could no longer be any doubt in Higginson’s mind that “the key to the successful prosecution of this war” lay in the unlimited use of black troops.
Their superiority lies simply in the fact that they know the country, which White troops do not; and, moreover, that they have peculiarities of temperament, position, and motive, which belong to them alone. Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for their homes and families; and they show the resolution and sagacity which a personal purpose gives. It would have been madness to attempt with the bravest White troops what I have successfully accomplished with Black ones.15
The “vast and startling” changes manifested themselves throughout the occupied South. While black troops marched in Beaufort, a regiment recruited largely from fugitive slaves out of Arkansas and Missouri went into combat as the Kansas 1st Colored Volunteers Infantry. “I believe the Negro may just as well become food for powder as my son,” the commander of this regiment had previously declared. In the lower Mississippi Valley, meanwhile, the thousands of slaves crowding the Union camps were being mobilized into military units, and in Louisiana the previously organized free colored and slave regiments were augmented despite bitter objections from native whites. “When we enlisted,” one black soldier wrote, “we were hooted at in the streets of New Orleans as a rabble of armed plebeians & cowards.” On May 27, 1863, two of the Louisiana black regiments joined in the assault on Port Hudson, a major Confederate stronghold on the lower Mississippi River. That morning, Henry T. Johns, a white private, wrote: “I am glad to know that on our right and on our left are massed negro regiments, who, this day, are to show if the inspiration of Freedom will lift the serf to the level of the man. Whoever else may flinch, I trust they will stand firm and baptize their hopes in the mingled blood of master and slave. Then we will give them a share in our nationality, if God has no separate nationality in store for them.” Although the attack was repulsed with heavy losses, the blacks had proven themselves in battle, and a Union officer confessed that his “prejudices” in regard to black troops had been dispelled in a single day. Private Johns thought, too, that the question of black troops had been firmly settled, “and many a proud master found in death that freedom had made his slave his superior.” To many observers, in fact, Port Hudson was the turning point in white recognition