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By Root 1801 0

for 300,000 volunteers in July produced disappointing results; on August 4 it asked for another 300,000 and threatened to draft members of state militias if necessary. Leading members of Congress had been advocating black enlistment for months, and the militia and confiscation acts had opened the door, should Lincoln desire to cross the threshold. But for the time being, he authorized the employment of blacks only as “laborers.” Lincoln had long resisted calls to enroll black soldiers. He knew the border states, most of the officer corps, and many white soldiers bitterly opposed such a move. He remained unsure of blacks’ military capacity. “If we were to arm them,” he told the Chicago clergymen, “I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.”55

The beginnings of a change in policy came in August 1862. Lincoln preferred to let local commanders lead the way, so long as they did so quietly. The irrepressible General John W. Phelps requested arms from Benjamin F. Butler for black units he had been drilling in Louisiana without permission. Butler refused and Phelps resigned. But Secretary of the Treasury Chase warned Butler that the enlistment of blacks was inevitable. “Phelps’s policy prevails instead of yours,” Butler’s politically astute wife, Sarah, wrote him on August 8. Sensing a shift in the political winds, Butler informed Stanton that he was enlisting into Union service the First Native Guards, the free black militia units of Louisiana that had previously served the Confederacy. But not all the enrollees were free, since, as a Treasury official in New Orleans noted, “nobody inquires whether the recruit is (or has been) a slave.”

Ironically, the first blacks to take part in Civil War battles did so in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. In November and December 1861, Unionists from the Creek and Seminole nations who repudiated treaties of alliance their tribal leaders had signed with the Confederacy fought pitched battles against pro-southern forces, after which they retreated into Kansas. In these encounters, some three hundred black men—former slaves and free men who lived with the Indians—fought on the Union side. Senator James H. Lane of Kansas immediately advocated the enlistment of Indians into the Union army, but fearing an adverse reaction among white residents of the West, the War Department held back. But in May 1862, the First Indian Home Guard was mustered into the Union army. Despite its name this was a triracial unit. Whites from Kansas, Indians, and blacks fought side by side when the unit invaded Indian Territory in July 1862 in an unsuccessful effort to wrest it from Confederate control.56

Meanwhile, Lane, without explicit permission, was also recruiting soldiers in Kansas for a black unit. According to the New York Tribune’s Washington correspondent, both Secretary of War Stanton and Lincoln told Lane they would not interfere, although for months Lane felt obliged to “keep [the soldiers] from public view.” On August 25, Stanton authorized General Rufus Saxton in South Carolina to recruit up to 5,000 black soldiers. Stanton attached a note to his order: “This must never see daylight, because it is so much in advance of public opinion.” These steps were meant to ease manpower shortages in specific areas, not to initiate a general policy of black enlistment. But the military’s ever-increasing need for men suggested that the widespread recruitment of black troops could not be postponed forever.57

III

“FROM THE TENOR of his remarks,” one reporter commented on Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley, “if the next battle in Virginia results in a decided victory for our army,” an emancipation proclamation “will be forthwith issued.” A few days later, Union forces suffered a humiliating defeat at Second Bull Run. Not until September 17 at Antietam, where George B. McClellan turned back the Confederate invasion of Maryland in the bloodiest day of fighting of the entire war, did the Union achieve the success for which Lincoln had been waiting. On September 22, 1862, he informed his