• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1162 0

French in the Algerine War. Characteristically, he stressed that the origin, dress, and tactics of the Zouaves d’Afrique were uniquely African. Along similar lines, Henry M. Turner, whose racial pride matched that of Delany but whose advocacy of emigration still lay in the future, expressed the hope that there would be no racial intermingling in the newly organized black regiments. “If we do go in the field, let us have our own soldiers, captains, colonels, and generals, and then an entire separation from soldiers of every other color, and then bid us strike for our liberty, and if we deserve any merit it will stand out beyond contradiction.” But Turner’s proposal, like Delany’s, was premature. Having made the decision to use blacks as soldiers, the government was not prepared to flaunt numbers of black officers before an already apprehensive white public.52

No sooner had Congress equalized the pay of white and black soldiers than various schemes for a black army were revived, the most ambitious plan remaining Martin Delany’s “corps d’Afrique.” This time he took his idea directly to President Lincoln. What he proposed was a black army commanded by black officers that would operate essentially as a guerrilla-type force in the interior, emancipating and arming the slaves wherever they went. “They would require but little,” Delany assured the President, “as they could subsist on the country as they went along.” President Lincoln, as Delany described his reaction, could barely contain his enthusiasm. “This is the very thing I have been looking and hoping for,” he told Delany, “but nobody offered it.” Having agreed to command and raise such an army, Delany was commissioned a major and ordered to South Carolina. The war ended before he could put his plan into operation, but Delany remained in South Carolina and subsequently embraced and acted upon still another vision—political power in a state where blacks comprised a majority of the population.53

5

WHEN 1,100 UNION PRISONERS OF WAR were marched through Petersburg, Virginia, in August 1864, the spectators who lined the streets viewed with particular curiosity and mixed emotions the 200 black soldiers. To the whites in the crowd, few sights could have been more distasteful. At the very least, a Richmond newspaper observed, the black prisoners should have been separated from the white Yankees and driven “into a pen” until their status was determined and their owners located. “Two hundred genuine Eboshins sprinkled among the crowd of prisoners, and placed on the same footing, was a sight, the moral effect of which upon the slaves of Petersburg could not be wholesome.” Equally concerned, Emma Holmes of South Carolina wondered how Confederate authorities would deal with the black prisoners recently brought in—“barefoot, hatless and coatless and tied in a gang like common runaways.” To have them treated like other prisoners, she confessed, was not only “revolting to our feelings” but “injurious in its effects upon our negroes.”54

The Confederacy faced a real dilemma. When the North chose to enlist blacks as soldiers, the white South immediately conjured up visions of thousands of armed black men descending upon defenseless families. To contemplate one rebellious Nat Turner was sufficient cause for alarm, but to think that the same government which had been empowered by the Constitution to help suppress insurrections was now arming slaves and using them to fight white men provoked cries of disbelief. “Great God, what a state of helpless degradation,” a Virginia slaveholder exclaimed, “our own negros—bought by our own ancestors from the Yankees, the purchase money & interest now in their pockets, who first rob us of the negros themselves, & then arm them to rob us of every thing else—even our lives.” Although the white South kept insisting that the Negro would fail as a soldier, fears were expressed that he might succeed. There was an obvious urgency, then, about the question of how to dispose of captured black soldiers. What was said to be at stake was not only the security