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Besides, after observing the work of General Sherman’s armies, Chaplain Turner concluded that “we were all good fellows.”70

Had such scenes been imagined at the outset of the Civil War, the sensibilities of white Americans would no doubt have been shocked. Yet, but two years later, black soldiers of the United States Army, most of them freed slaves, engaged their former masters in combat, marched through the southern countryside, paraded and drilled in southern towns and villages, and brought the news of freedom to tens of thousands of slaves. “The change seems almost miraculous,” a black sergeant conceded. “The very people who, three years ago, crouched at their master’s feet, on the accursed soil of Virginia, now march in a victorious column of freedmen, over the same land.” When violating southern codes and customs, black soldiers appeared to be fully aware of the significance of their actions. “We march through these fine thoroughfares,” a soldier wrote from Wilmington, North Carolina, “where once the slave was forbid being out after nine P.M., or to puff a ‘regalia,’ or to walk with a cane, or to ride in a carriage! Negro soldiers!—with banners floating.” And with unconcealed delight, James F. Jones wrote from New Orleans how he had “walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of a southern city … without being required to take off his cap at every step, or to give all the sidewalks to those lordly princes of the sunny south, the planters’ sons!”71

Nor would any black soldier soon forget that exhilarating moment when he and his men marched into a southern city amidst crowds of cheering slaves who rushed out into the streets to embrace them and to clasp their hands. It seemed to one soldier that the slaves “look for more certain help, and a more speedy termination of the war, at the hands of the colored soldiers than from any other source; hence their delight at seeing us.” Although some slaves greeted them initially with suspicion and disbelief (“Are you the Yankees?”) or even with hostility (“wild Africans”), the restraints broke down quickly in most places and what ensued were celebrations that lasted far into the night. “I was indeed speechless,” a black sergeant wrote from Wilmington after the tumultuous reception given his regiment. “I could do nothing but cry to look at the poor creatures so overjoyed.” To the disgust of a white resident of Camden, South Carolina, the black troops staged a regular camp meeting to which local blacks were invited—“tremendous excitement prevailed, as they prayed their cause might prosper and their just freedom be obtained.”72

When black troops entered Charleston singing the John Brown song, they found themselves immediately surrounded by the black residents. Upon seeing the soldiers, one elderly slave woman threw down her crutch and shouted that the year of the Jubilee had finally arrived. Some of the soldiers and their officers, after what they had witnessed, confessed that “the glory and the triumph of this hour” simply defied description. “It was one of those occasions which happen but once in a lifetime.” Several weeks later, newly commissioned Major Martin R. Delany arrived in Charleston, still hoping to consummate his vision of a “corps d’Afrique.” He could barely restrain himself at the thought of entering the city “which, from earliest childhood and through life, I had learned to contemplate with feelings of the utmost abhorrence.” After pausing momentarily to view “the shattered walls of the once stately but now deserted edifices of the proud and supercilious occupants,” he found himself “dashing on in unmeasured strides through the city, as if under a forced march to attack the already crushed and fallen enemy.”73

After a Virginia planter heard from his father alarming reports of black occupation troops, he vowed to keep the letter for his children in order to aid him “in cultivating in their hearts an eternal hatred to Yankeedom.” The expression “What I most fear is not the Yankees, but the negroes” summed up the apprehensions