Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [356]
Lincoln was in full accord with this drive to build black regiments. Though he had initially resisted proposals to arm blacks, he was now totally dedicated. He urged Banks, Hunter, and Grant to speed the enlisting process and implored Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee to raise black troops. “The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,” Lincoln wrote. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.” Chase, who had argued more strongly than any other cabinet member for black soldiers, took great satisfaction in Lincoln’s newfound commitment. “The President is now thoroughly in earnest in this business,” he wrote a friend, “& sees it much as I saw it nearly two years ago.”
In his efforts to recruit black soldiers, Douglass encountered a series of obstacles forged by white prejudice: black soldiers received less pay than white soldiers, they were denied the enlistment bounty, and they were not allowed to be commissioned as officers. Still, Douglass insisted, “this is no time for hesitation…. Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket,” he told a mass audience in Philadelphia, “and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States. I say again, this is our chance, and woe betide us if we fail to embrace it.”
When the newly organized black troops went into battle—at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner—they earned great respect from white soldiers and civilians alike for their “bravery and steadiness.” If captured, however, they ran the risk of losing their freedom or their lives, for the Confederate Congress had passed an ordinance “dooming to death or slavery every negro taken in arms, and every white officer who commands negro troops.”
As word of the unique dangers they faced spread through the black community, Douglass found that the size and enthusiasm of his audiences were swiftly diminishing, as was the number of black enlistments. He blamed Lincoln for not speaking out against the Confederate ordinance. “What has Mr. Lincoln to say about this slavery and murder? What has he said?—Not one word. In the hearing of the nation he is as silent as an oyster on the whole subject.” The time for patience with the president had come and gone, he argued. Until he “shall interpose his power to prevent these atrocious assassinations of negro soldiers, the civilized world will hold him equally with Jefferson Davis responsible for them.”
Lincoln’s failure to speak out and protect the Union’s black soldiers convinced Douglass that he could no longer persuade men to enlist in good conscience. “When I plead for recruits, I want to do it with my heart, without qualification,” he explained to Major Stearns. “I cannot do that now. The impression settles upon me that colored men have much overrated the enlightenment, justice and generosity of our rulers at Washington.”
In fact, Lincoln was already formulating a response. During the last week of July 1863, he asked Halleck to prepare an Order of Retaliation, which was issued on July 30. The order made clear that “the law of nations and the usages and customs of war as carried on by civilized powers, permit no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war.” The Confederate ordinance represented “a relapse into barbarism” that required action on the part of the Union. “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor.”
The order was “well-written,” the antagonistic