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By Root 1808 0

” But during the next few weeks, Congress engaged in rancorous debate over black military service. “No such strife has been produced by any other measure during this Congress,” remarked one member. Democrats and border Unionists denounced black enlistment as the “despairing cry” of a discredited administration, part of a Radical plan to “exterminate” the white people of the South or, at the very least, elevate blacks to full equality. They predicted that white soldiers would find themselves taking orders from “Colonel Sambo,” an intolerable insult. They used innumerable quorum calls and motions for adjournment to delay a vote. Amended to bar the enlistment of the slaves of loyal owners in the border states and Tennessee, Stevens’s bill finally passed the House. But in the Senate, it ran into further difficulty. Finally, Henry Wilson, chair of the Committee on Military Affairs, withdrew the measure, declaring it redundant since the Militia Act of July 1862 had already empowered the president to employ black men in any military capacity he saw fit.4

Having previously opposed black recruitment and doubted blacks’ military capacity, Lincoln in 1863 became an avid proponent. In January, he authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to organize a black regiment. With Robert Gould Shaw, the son of a prominent Boston abolitionist, as its commanding officer, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts infantry enlisted black volunteers from throughout the North. Abolitionists urged blacks to enlist. “A century may elapse,” wrote the Weekly Anglo-African, “before another opportunity shall be afforded of reclaiming and holding our withheld rights…. Freedom is ours. And its fruit, equality, hangs temptingly on the tree beckoning our own brave arms to rise and clutch it.”5

Shortly after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune reported that the president still planned to use black troops primarily in noncombat roles, not “to put arms in their hands.” But Lincoln soon changed his mind. Early in March 1863, he received a long letter from Thomas Richmond, a former member of the Illinois legislature, urging him to press forward immediately with enrolling “the muscle and sinew of the slave population.” Unless the government speedily armed the slaves, Richmond warned, “the Confederates will.” On the envelope in which the letter arrived, Lincoln wrote, “Good advice.” That month, the War Department authorized a massive recruiting effort in the occupied South. This decision may have been influenced by the success on the battlefield of the First and Second South Carolina Volunteers, nearly all of them former slaves, who occupied Jacksonville, Florida, early that month. Lincoln sent a congratulatory message to General David Hunter, noting the importance of black units: “The enemy will make extra efforts to destroy them; and we should do the same to preserve and increase them.” Shortly after the battle, Lincoln dispatched a letter to Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, urging him to begin enrolling black troops. “The colored population,” Lincoln wrote, “is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union. The mere sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.”6

Lincoln also instructed Secretary of War Stanton to have Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas move forward with recruiting in the Mississippi Valley. In April 1863, Thomas delivered a speech to Ulysses S. Grant’s army, then in northern Louisiana. Stating that he spoke “with full authority from the president,” Thomas declared that the Union army must enforce emancipation and recruit black troops. Any soldier, whatever his rank, who mistreated the freedmen would be dismissed. The performance of black soldiers that spring and summer at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend in Louisiana and Fort Wagner in South Carolina dispelled lingering doubts about their abilities. Only the operation at Milliken’s Bend (where black soldiers rescued beleaguered