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By Root 1840 0

Brownson early in 1864, “by arming the negroes, has made them our countrymen.” To be sure, black soldiers, organized into segregated regiments, often found themselves subjected to abuse from white officers. Even after proving themselves in battle, blacks could not advance into the ranks of commissioned officers until the final months of the war. Their pay, as established by the Militia Act of 1862, which anticipated blacks serving largely as military laborers, was considerably less than that of white soldiers. Black regiments also faced unique dangers. The Confederate government refused to recognize them as prisoners of war (to do so, one southern newspaper declared, would violate the premises of “the social system for which we contend”) and threatened them with enslavement, or execution as slave rebels. Some Confederate officers refused to take black prisoners; the murder of black soldiers after surrender occurred in every theater of the war.11

Nonetheless, black soldiers played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War but also in defining its consequences. Just as runaway slaves had forced the administration to begin to make policy about slavery in 1861, black military service put the question of postwar rights squarely on the national agenda. Its “logical result,” the Missouri Radical Charles D. Drake observed in 1864, was that “the black man is henceforth to assume a new status among us.” This transformation happened first in the army. For the first time in American history, large numbers of blacks were treated as equals before the law, if only military law. In army courts, they could testify against whites, something unknown in the South and much of the North. Demanding to be treated identically with other Union soldiers, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments refused to accept their monthly stipends and continued to do so after the state legislature voted to make up the difference in pay. Soldiers flooded black newspapers with complaints about the pay issue, dispatched petitions to Congress and the president, and enlisted Governor John Andrew to lobby Lincoln and the War Department on their behalf. The issue, declared a petition signed by seventy-four enlisted men, was not money, but “liberty, justice and equality.” The soldiers’ campaign persuaded Congress in June 1864 to enact a measure for equality in pay, enlistment bounties, and other compensation retroactive to the time of enlistment for free-born blacks and to the beginning of 1864 for former slaves. In March 1865, Congress provided for full retroactive pay equality. These were among the first federal statutes based on the principle of equal rights regardless of race.12

The issue of equal treatment came before Lincoln in 1863 and 1864, pressed by the black soldiers, their families, and white allies. From the outset, Lincoln worried about how Confederates would deal with captured black soldiers. He received numerous pleas to order retaliation if the Confederacy mistreated black prisoners of war, including a letter from Francis G. Shaw, whose son Robert had died with dozens of his soldiers in the assault on Fort Wagner. Another arrived from Hannah Johnson, the daughter of a fugitive slave and mother of a soldier in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts:

I have but poor edication but I never went to schol, but I know just as well as any what is right between man and man. Now I know it is right that a colored man should go and fight for his country, and so ought to a white man. I know that a colored man ought to run no greater risques…. So why should not our enemies be compelled to treat him the same, Made to do it…. I thought of this thing before I let my boy go but then they said Mr. Lincoln will never let them sell our colored soldiers for slaves.

Unbeknownst to Mrs. Johnson, on July 30, 1863, the day before she wrote, Lincoln had signed a military order condemning the enslavement of black soldiers as “a relapse into barbarism and a crime against the civilization of the age.” This was unusually emotional language for Lincoln. He went on