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By Root 1015 0

Although several thousand northern blacks did respond to the call for military service, the anticipated stampede to the recruitment offices failed to materialize. “Before an opportunity was presented for them to do so,” a disillusioned black soldier told a gathering of his people in Washington, D.C., “many of the black people were spoiling for a fight—they were ready and anxious to die for their race—but now whar are dey? What do you want Mr. Linkun to do—feed you on ice-cream? Suppose these white men here were about to be drove into Slavery, wouldn’t they fight? Certainly they would; but you—you would stand tamely and let your hands be crossed behind your back, and told to go on dar, nigger, without resisting it.”34

If this disgruntled soldier had looked around him, he might have perceived why some blacks had declined to enlist. The Civil War had expanded as Massachusetts volunteers, not as the United States colored forces or as military laborers’; moreover, Governor Andrew had promised them “the same treatment, in every respect, as the white volunteers receive.” In the appeals for enlistments, recruiters repeatedly assured blacks of the same wages, rations, equipment, protection, bounties, and treatment as enjoyed by white troops. “I have assured myself on these points,” Frederick Douglass told prospective black recruits, “and can speak with authority. More than twenty years unswerving devotion to our common cause, may give me some humble claim to be trusted at this momentous crisis.”37

The promises seemed sufficiently clear, and Douglass and other recruiters no doubt believed in them, but the equal treatment they insisted upon never came to pass. And since such promises had comprised a considerable element of the recruitment appeals, initial disappointments had a way of turning into a sense of betrayal. Substantial numbers of black soldiers, mostly those recruited in the North, charged that they had been deceived. “We were promised three hundred dollars bounty and thirteen dollars a month, or whatever the white soldiers got,” a Pennsylvania soldier declared; “but, God help their poor lying souls! Now that they have us where they want us, they have forgotten all their promises.” His complaint was well grounded. Whatever the assurances upon enlisting, the experience of the black soldier revealed a double standard in enlistment bounties, benefits for dependents, promotions, pay, and time spent in fatigue duty. And since blacks were called upon to perform the same duties as white soldiers, these distinctions made no sense at all. “Do we not fill the same ranks?” asked one soldier. “Do we not cover the same space of ground? Do we not take up the same length of ground in the grave-yard that others do? The ball does not miss the black man and strike the white, nor the white and strike the black.… [A]t that time there is no distinction made.”38

Who had betrayed them? Although the Federal government obviously reneged on its promises, dissatisfied soldiers tended to place much of the responsibility on the recruitment agents who had beguiled them with visions of patriotic service, handsome bounties, and equal rights. “They made us a great many sweet and charming promises just to get us into the service,” one soldier charged, “which they were very anxious to do, as it saved them from going themselves.” The active role played by black leaders in their recruitment only compounded the bitterness. Before the 14th Rhode Island Regiment had even left for the South, Martin R. Delany, the principal recruitment officer, stood accused of having betrayed young men “taught to hold his name sacred.” Of those who had participated in organizing the regiment, one soldier observed, Delany was “the most heartily despised.” The complaints of the soldiers were legitimate, but the charges leveled at the black recruitment agents were, most likely, closer to half-truths. “Some unprincipled agents” acting “under me” or “even in my name,” Delany conceded, may have been guilty of deceiving black recruits, but he vigorously defended his own record as “the