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By Root 1249 0

over unequal pay, the resulting legislation only partially satisfied black demands. Although racial distinctions in pay were abolished, the new law made a curious distinction in retroactive payments between free Negroes (those free before April 19, 1861), who would be paid from the date of their enlistment, and freedmen, whose retroactive payments would begin on January 1, 1864. This posed a considerable problem in the regiments which included both free Negroes and ex-slaves. It “divides the colored soldiers into two grades,” one abolitionist charged, and “does honor to injustice with a vengeance.” In the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Colonel E. N. Hallowell worked out a rather ingenious solution. Since the commanders of black regiments were to determine which of their men were free Negroes, he simply had them all take an oath that on or before April 19, 1861, they “owed no man unrequited labor.” This was satisfactory for the 54th, which included very few former slaves, but such a solution was deemed unacceptable in the regiments made up almost exclusively of freedmen. “If a year’s discussion … has at length secured the arrears of pay for the Northern colored regiment,” an irate Colonel Higginson remarked, “possibly two years may secure it for the Southern.” Still, the action of Congress placated the northern regiments, and the first payday (October 1864) under the new law took on a festive air. “Two days have changed the face of things,” an officer with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment observed. “The fiddle and other music long neglected enlivens the tents day and night. Songs burst out everywhere; dancing is incessant; boisterous shouts are heard, mimicry, burlesque, and carnival; pompous salutations are heard on all sides.”50

Perhaps, though, the real struggle had only begun. Despite the equalization of pay, black soldiers had not yet been accorded the same rights and recognition as whites. The question of equal protection for black prisoners of war persisted, as did the absence of black representation in court-martial proceedings, the exclusion of blacks from the military academies, and the small number of black commissioned officers. Both race pride and the brutal conduct of some white officers prompted increasing demands for the appointment of blacks to command black troops. But even some of the firmest advocates of black recruitment found the idea of black officers difficult to accept, violating as it did the white man’s sensibilities and racial stereotypes in ways that enlisting blacks as common soldiers had not. Since childhood, blacks had been trained “to obey implicitly the dictates of the white man” and to believe that they belonged to an inferior race. This might still make them good soldiers but hardly leaders of men. “Now, when organized into troops,” a Union officer observed, “they carry this habit of obedience with them, and their officers being entirely white men, the negro promptly obeys his orders.” The impression that blacks would naturally serve white officers more loyally was difficult to dispel, and some observers seriously questioned if black troops would be willing to serve under black officers. In the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, “the universal feeling among the soldiers,” a regimental officer told an antislavery meeting, was that they did not want “a colored man to play the white man over them.” But many blacks denied these inferences, charged that the relative absence of black officers helped to perpetuate the idea of racial inferiority, and insisted that blacks be judged for promotions and commissions on the same basis as whites. “We want black commissioned officers,” one soldier argued, “because we want men we can understand, and who can understand us.… We want to demonstrate our ability to rule, as we have demonstrated our willingness to obey.”51

Shortly after the Civil War broke out, Martin R. Delany, still reflecting the racial pride that had made him an emigrationist and black nationalist in the 1850s, contemplated “a corps d’Afrique” modeled after the black Zouaves who had served the