Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [59]
Impressment of Sea Islands freedmen not only alarmed the intended victims and forced many of them into hiding but provoked some furious protests from the white teachers and missionaries who had come there from the North to ease their transition to freedom. The coercive recruitment practices reminded them, they said, of what they had only recently criticized in their indictments of slavery. What was impressment, after all, if not the forcible enslavement of blacks, albeit under different auspices? After Union troops had carried away still another black man during the night, one missionary observed that only recently Confederate soldiers had shot and killed black men for refusing to go along with them. How were the freedmen, she asked, to know the difference? “It strikes me as very important,” a high-ranking Federal official wrote to a Union officer, “to avoid all things likely to impair the self respect of the emancipees. Fresh from slavery, if they enlist freely they must feel themselves very different persons from what they would regard themselves if forced into the ranks.”28
Despite a flurry of protests, army commanders defended their conduct not only on the grounds of military necessity but as in the best interests of the blacks. That recruitment had been progressing more slowly than expected was only one reason why General Hunter wanted to impress all blacks not regularly employed as officers’ servants or military laborers. Military discipline, Hunter insisted, was the best way to lift these people to “our higher civilization.” The slaves, moreover, could never adequately appreciate freedom until they realized “the sacrifices which are its price.” And finally, he noted, the recruitment of black men made a servile insurrection less likely. In defending the conduct of impressment parties in Washington, D.C., a black resident singled out the contemptuous way in which some of his people responded to recruitment appeals. When asked to enlist, they would “make light” of the proposal and demand to know “what am I going to fight for? this is a white man’s war,” and accompany their response with verbal abuse. “Well, now,” the observer added, “the colored soldiers think this is too much; they suffer enough at the hands of the white race, without being buffeted by their own race, whose sympathies should be in their behalf.”29
Less coercive methods were employed in the North, where state governors and patriotic citizens’ committees were initially responsible for mounting recruitment campaigns. To mobilize support among northern blacks, mass meetings were called, broadsides were circulated (the most popular of which was written by Frederick Douglass), and the few black newspapers sought to inculcate their readers with the obligations of black men in a war of liberation. Although the Christian Recorder had initially disapproved of the war and the resort to violence, it now urged black men to take up arms for their country and race. “Shame on him who would hang back at the call of his country,” the newspaper declared, in supporting the efforts to raise a black regiment in Philadelphia. “Go with the view that you will return freemen. And if you should never return, you will die with the satisfaction of knowing that you have struck a blow for freedom, and assisted in giving liberty to our race in the land of our birth.”30
Critical to the raising of a black army in the North were, in fact, the black recruitment agents. When Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts was authorized in January 1863 to organize a Negro regiment, he immediately recognized the far-reaching implications of his new responsibility. Since this would be the first black regiment raised in the North, he thought the success or failure of the effort would “go far to elevate or to depress the estimation in which the character of the Colored Americans will be held throughout the World.” Although two companies were