Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [65]
Confronted with growing resentment of discrimination and the still pressing need to attract more recruits to a war of liberation, black spokesmen on the home front pressed for equal rights in the Army while at the same time urging more enlistments. After assuring black recruits that the “magnanimity” of this nation would speedily grant them equal pay, Frederick Douglass suggested that some blacks might be overreacting to the issue. “Do you get as good wages now as white men get by staying out of the service? Don’t you work for less every day than white men get? You know you do.” Similarly, the influential Christian Recorder, which had wavered between protest and patriotic accommodation, lamented the inequality in pay but fully supported black enlistments and expressed the hope “that our men will not stand now on dollars and cents.” What greater inducement was necessary to fight, John S. Rock asked a black regiment, than “two centuries of outrage and oppression and the hope of a glorious future?” What greater inducement was necessary, a black newspaper in New York asked, than “a chance to drive a bayonet or bullet into the slaveholders’ hearts?” It was even possible to argue, as did a broadside calling for black volunteers, that the inequality in pay and bounties should, “rightly considered,” act as “a fresh incentive” to enlist. Here was the opportunity to demonstrate “that you are actuated not by love of gain but by promptings of patriotism.”47
That the refusal to accept unequal pay was essentially a northern protest is undeniable. This raised the inevitable charge that, not being slaves, northern blacks had less of a stake in the war and were more apt to be moved by such mundane matters as pay, bounties, and benefits. Disagreement prevailed among the various black regiments as to how they should respond to unequal treatment, whether this was the proper time or place for protests, and whether the grievances warranted any kind of protest. “Those few colored regiments from Massachusetts make more fuss, and complain more than all the rest of the colored troops in the nation,” observed Garland H. White, a former Virginia slave who had escaped to Ohio before the war. He regarded their protests as a disservice to the great mass of black people, whom he urged to rebuke the “spirit of dissatisfaction and insolence” and compel the “rebellious” troops “to be quiet and behave themselves like men and soldiers.”48
With an even greater sense of urgency, the regiments made up largely of former slaves questioned the protests of their northern brethren. After noting “some pretty hard grumbling” among the northern regiments in South Carolina, two soldiers with the 78th United States Colored Troops (recruited from slaves and free Negroes in Louisiana) conceded “that we are pretty much in the same boat with them” but thought they had “put it on a little too thick.” Although their own regiment had enlisted under the same expectations of full pay, the two soldiers suggested that southern blacks had entered military service with more compelling motives than those which moved the northern blacks.
They seem to be fighting for one thing, and we for another. They, for the money they are to get, and we, to secure our liberation. Tell them to hold up a little on grumbling. They say a great deal about the distress of their families at home. They don’t know any thing about distress, till they come to look at ours. There is not a man of them but knows where his family is; but hundreds of us don’t know where our families are. When they came away from home, they left their families in the care of their friends; but we left ours among their enemies, looking only to God to preserve them.49
When Congress finally acted in June 1864 to resolve the controversy