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that gripped southern whites as Union troops neared their homes. Having expected little else, black soldiers grew accustomed to the cold stares and defiant looks on the faces of the defeated whites. “You cannot imagine, with what surprise the inhabitants of the South, gaze upon us,” a black sergeant remarked. “They are afraid to say anything to us; so they take it out in looking.” The sight of black troops patrolling the city streets and passing through the plantations, and the fact that many of their own slaves were among these regiments, constituted for many whites the ultimate humiliation of the Civil War. “There’s my Tom,” one planter muttered, his face reddening, as he viewed some passing soldiers. “How I’d like to cut the throat of the dirty, impudent good-for-nothing!” Some of the whites he observed, Henry M. Turner noted, appeared to be uncertain “as to whether they are actually in another world, or whether this one is turned wrong side out.”74 No matter how hard whites tried to keep their thoughts to themselves, the indignation they felt could not always be contained. They shook their fists at the passing troops, spit at them from behind the windows where they were standing, ordered them to stay out of their yards, and expressed rage and disbelief whenever any black regiment was kept in the town or neighborhood as an occupation force. “Those dreadful negro wretches, whose very looks betokened their brutal natures,” one white woman observed, “caused an indefinable thrill of horror and loathing.”75

Although the black soldier made few attempts to provoke the whites, he, too, had difficulty in containing his feelings. The position he now held, moreover, gave him a novel opportunity to demand obedience from whites and impress upon them how the old relationships had been rendered obsolete. When several “white ladies and slave oligarchs” came to Henry M. Turner at regimental headquarters to request government rations, they entered his office, he said, “in the same humiliating custom which they formerly would have expected from me.” And it gave him immense satisfaction, he confessed afterwards, to see them “crouching before me, and I a negro.” Several weeks later, Chaplain Turner accompanied his regiment as they crossed a river near Smithfield, North Carolina. Before wading through the stream, the men stripped off their clothes. “I was much amused,” Turner wrote, “to see the secesh women watching with the utmost intensity, thousands of our soldiers, in a state of nudity.”

I suppose they desired to see whether these audacious Yankees were really men, made like other men, or if they were a set of varmints. So they thronged the windows, porticos and yards, in the finest attire imaginable. Our brave boys would disrobe themselves, hang their garments upon their bayonets and through the water they would come, walk up the street, and seem to say to the feminine gazers, “Yes, though naked, we are your masters.”76

With obvious pride and satisfaction, some black soldiers chose to visit their old masters and mistresses. After the Battle of Nashville, a nineteen-year-old black youth from Tennessee used his furlough for this purpose. His former mistress seemed happy to see him. “You remember when you were sick and I had to bring you to the house and nurse you?” she asked him. He replied affirmatively. But now, she exclaimed, “you are fighting me!” “No’m, I ain’t fighting you,” he replied, “I’m fighting to get free.”77

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BY THE END of the Civil War, more than 186,000 black men, most of them (134,111) recruited or conscripted in the slave states, had served in the Union Army, comprising nearly 10 percent of the total enrollment. Almost as many blacks, men and women, mostly freedmen, were employed as teamsters, carpenters, cooks, nurses, laundresses, stevedores, blacksmiths, coopers, bridge builders, laborers, servants, spies, scouts, and guides. “This army would be like a one-handed man, without niggers,” a Union soldier conceded. “We have two rgts. of fighting nigs. and as many more of diggers.… The nigs. work all night,