Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [55]
Six months after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than thirty black regiments had been organized, camps had been established to receive and train them, recruiting was taking place almost everywhere, and several units had already participated in combat action. That was only the beginning. By December 1863 over 50,000 blacks had been enrolled in the Union Army, and the President was assured that this number would rapidly increase as Federal troops moved deeper into the Confederacy. Before the end of the war, more than 186,000 would be enlisted, including 24,000 in Louisiana, 17,800 in Mississippi, and 20,000 in Tennessee. The President even overcame his initial reluctance to organizing black regiments in the loyal border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. Although he tried to restrict enlistments in those states to the slaves of disloyal masters, army recruiters made little or no effort to enforce such discrimination, and the promise of freedom to enlistees and their families went far, in fact, to undermine the entire institution of slavery in those regions excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation. “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” President Lincoln wrote to a Kentucky newspaper. “Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party or any man devised, or expected.” Christopher A. Fleetwood, a Baltimore free black who had enlisted in the Union Army, voiced almost the same sentiments when he noted in his diary at the end of 1863: “This year has brought about many changes that at the beginning were or would have been thought impossible. The close of the year finds me a soldier for the cause of my race.”17
The transformation of public sentiment on the enlistment of blacks pointed up the extent to which military necessity managed to surmount prevailing racial attitudes. The passage of the Draft Act in March 1863, reflecting as it did the desperate need for more troops, broke down still further the remaining objections to blacks as soldiers. For many war-weary Northerners, especially those who were now subject to military conscription, the arming of the black man suddenly took on a new meaning. The immediate and widespread popularity of a song ascribed to Irish Americans testified not so much to its melodic quality as to its persuasive logic:
Some tell us ’tis a burnin shame
To make the naygers fight;
An’ that the thrade of bein’ kilt
Belongs but to the white;
But as for me, upon my soul!
So liberal are we here,
I’ll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself
On every day in the year.18
Capitalizing on the apparent changes in public sentiment, black spokesmen and newspapers in the North insisted that the very nature of the Civil War had been fundamentally altered. “The strife now waging is not between North and South,” a black meeting declared in mid-1863, but between “barbarism and freedom—civilization and slavery.” For the North to lose this war would “rivet our chains still firmer” and seal “our perpetual disfranchisement.” The most effective remedy for what ailed blacks, the meeting resolved, was “warm lead and cold steel, duly administered by two hundred thousand black doctors.” Now that the Civil War promised to liberate the slaves, the necessity for defeating the Confederacy was coupled with the urgency of black people helping to strike the decisive blow and setting themselves free. “Liberty won by white men,” Douglass maintained, “would lose half its luster.” But by breaking the chains themselves, he told prospective black volunteers, “you will stand more erect, walk more assured,