This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [145]
This decision to use the Negro as a soldier did not necessarily grow out of any broad humanitarian resolve; it seems to have come largely out of the dawning realization that, since the Confederates were going to kill a great many more Union soldiers before the war was over, a good many white men would escape death if a considerable percentage of those soldiers were colored.
Halleck put the thing quite bluntly in a message to Grant in March. It was good policy, he said, to withdraw as many slaves from the South as possible; equally good policy, having withdrawn them, to use them to help win the war. They could certainly be used as teamsters and as laborers, and some people believed they could be used as combat soldiers. Grant must try, and if he found — as he undoubtedly would — that many of the people in his army objected to it, he must ride their objections down and see that this new policy was carried out.
“There can be no peace,” wrote Halleck, “but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the Rebels or be conquered by them.… This is the phase which the rebellion has now assumed. We must take things as they are.”3
This new phase of the rebellion was a good deal broader than Halleck dreamed. To accept the Negro as a soldier was to state, in a back-handed but decisive way, that the base of membership in the American community had been immeasurably widened. Once widened, it could not again be narrowed. The war henceforth would be fought for this, even though some of the men who were most effectively fighting it had no idea that the base was not already quite wide enough. For the war had become a breaking up of the foundations of the great deep, and to “take things as they are” meant to change things to their fundamentals.
Grant dutifully went to work — this chore came upon him while the various mud-and-water expedients were being tried above Vicksburg — and he instructed corps, division, and post commanders to speed the organization of the Negro regiments. He warned dissenters: “It is expected that all commanders will especially exert themselves in carrying out the policy of the administration, not only in organizing colored regiments and rendering them effective, but also in removing prejudice against them.”4
Removing the prejudice would not be easy. Soldiers who disliked slavery very often looked upon the slaves themselves as subhuman creatures who belonged neither in the army nor in America itself. An Illinois veteran wrote from Tennessee that he and many others would be emancipationists “if the brutes could be shipped out of the country,” but that did not seem to be possible. Slavery, he admitted, was “an awful sin,” but if Negroes had to remain in America they ought to remain as slaves; the only suggestion he could make was that they be transferred from Confederate masters to masters thoroughly loyal to the Union.5
An Ohio soldier reported that there was intense opposition in his division to the recruiting of Negro troops, which at times “assumed the character of anarchy,” with officers and enlisted men vowing that they would throw down their arms and go home if Negroes became soldiers.
This anarchic opposition was quickly tamped down, partly because of Grant’s orders and partly because of the unexpected intervention of a rather unlikely hero — lanky, dry-as-dust Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army, the paper-shuffler from Washington who had been sent to the Mississippi Valley on a mixed mission that seems vaguely to have included the task of telling the War Department just what Grant was up to out there. Part of Thomas’s job was to speed the raising of Negro regiments, and he took to this with crusty