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By Root 1281 0

stripped, tied to a tree and cowhided” before being driven out of town. What made the work of the agent all the more exasperating was his frequent lack of success in obtaining many enlistments. The reports of white violence no doubt discouraged prospective volunteers but this may not adequately explain the disturbing report of a Federal official that in nearly four months of recruitment work, more than a thousand men had been employed to enlist a total of 2,831 blacks. More likely, many blacks simply shared with their white countrymen an aversion to the hardships and risks of military service. “The negroes re-indicate their claim to humanity,” an officer wrote from South Carolina, “by shirking the draft in every possible way; acting exactly like white men under similar circumstances.” He conceded, however, that the black conscript was less likely to desert than his white counterpart. Some recruiting agents came away disgusted with the refusal of blacks to yield to their appeals. Initially enthusiastic about his recruiting mission in northern Alabama, James T. Ayers, who had been an antislavery Methodist preacher in Illinois, urged blacks to accept the responsibility for liberating their brethren from bondage. But his best efforts did not produce the results he had expected, and less than a year after his appointment Ayers was a thoroughly disillusioned man. “I feel now much inclined to go to Nashville and throw up my papers and Resign, as I am hartily sick of Coaxing niggers to be Soaldiers Any more. They are so trifleing and mean they dont Deserve to be free.”25

After making their way to the Union camps, many slave refugees eagerly volunteered for military service, believing that this act would confirm their freedom. The more reluctant blacks might be inducted anyway. “It seems that pretty nearly all the refugees join the army,” a Federal official wrote from South Carolina. “You wish to know whether the refugees are kept in the guard house until they are willing to volunteer. I do not know whether they are kept confined till they do volunteer but I know that they always let them out when they do volunteer.” Increasingly, the Army resorted to forcible impressment, though in some regions they would try to balance the demand for recruits with the need to maintain plantation labor. The effectiveness of the recruitment campaign in the lower Mississippi Valley rested partly on the insistence that slaves who had left their masters should be forced to serve either as soldiers or as military laborers; the methods employed by officers in this region were often questionable but they achieved spectacular results. “The plan for ‘persuading’ recruits,” one officer wrote from Memphis, “while it could hardly be called the shot-gun policy was equally as convincing, and never failed to get the ‘recruit.’ ” The commissioner entrusted with raising black troops in Maryland simply conceded that “no recruits can be had unless I send detachments to particular localities and compel them to volunteer.”26

Despite assurances to South Carolina blacks of voluntary enlistment, freedmen in the Sea Islands region stood in perpetual fear of raiding parties—often composed of black soldiers—which descended upon communities and plantations in the dead of night to carry them away to nearby military camps. “Not a man sleeps at night in the houses,” a missionary teacher wrote, “except those too old to be taken. They have made a camp somewhere and mean never to be caught.” Prospective recruits here and elsewhere often hid out in the woods or swamps for considerable periods of time rather than be inducted into the Army. Having already experienced forced separations from their loved ones, black women did not necessarily look with favor upon similar disruptions undertaken by their professed liberators; in South Carolina, women field workers attacked a black impressment party with their hoes, shouting that white men were too frightened to fight and only wanted blacks to do their dirty work for them. “The womens all hold back der husbands,” a black sergeant complained,