Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [56]
Although emancipation did not directly affect northern blacks, they were urged to act upon the sympathy they had long expressed for their enslaved southern brethren. Participation in the war, moreover, could not help but improve their own precarious place in American society and break down the barriers white Northerners had erected against them. “There never was, nor there never will be, a better opportunity for colored men to get what they want, than now,” the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Christian Recorder wrote in June 1863. “Suppose,” he asked, “500,000 colored men were under arms, would not the nation really be under our arms, too? Would the nation refuse us our rights in such a condition? Would it refuse us our vote? Would it deny us any thing when its salvation was hanging upon us? No! never!” Whether in the North or in the South, then, the prospects for black Americans seemed inseparable from their military exploits—the way to the ballot box, into the classroom, and onto the streetcar was through the battlegrounds of the Confederacy. The rifle and the bayonet, Douglass insisted, would speak more forcefully for civil rights than any “parchment guarantees.”
Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.
To learn the use of arms, moreover, was “to become familiar with the means of securing, protecting and defending your own liberty.… When it is once found that black men can give blows as well as take them, men will find more congenial employment than pounding them.”20
Once an advocate of nonresistance and only recently a major critic of President Lincoln for refusing to endorse emancipation, Frederick Douglass agreed in early 1863 to become a recruiting agent for the United States Army. “There is something ennobling in the possession of arms,” he told a meeting in Philadelphia, “and we of all other people in the world stand in need of their ennobling influence.” Having undertaken the mission of enlisting blacks in the newly formed 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Douglass toured western New York seeking volunteers. “In Rochester,” he wrote in April 1863, “I have thirteen names, my son heading the list.”21
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THE CIVIL WAR provided Americans with various opportunities to exploit the nation’s military needs for personal profit and advantage. That white men should have used the recruitment of black regiments for such purposes is not altogether surprising. With the end of racial restrictions on enlistments, state and local bounties and military conscription instantly made black men valuable and marketable commodities. Capitalizing on the law which permitted a draftee to send a person in his place, the “substitute broker” viewed the black man as a likely candidate; his lowly economic position often made him easier and cheaper to purchase, some were intimidated into enlisting, and the broker’s commission for finding a “substitute” justified whatever method he needed to employ. The practice became so widespread, in fact, that the War Department finally interceded and ruled that Negroes could substitute only for other Negroes. That decision not only forced brokers to look elsewhere but depressed the price which some blacks had been asking (and obtaining) for a substitute enlistment.22
Mixing patriotism and personal profit in varying degrees, more than a thousand “state agents” combed the cities and countryside, particularly in the occupied