This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [146]
The division in which the Ohio soldier had reported so much discontent was drawn up in hollow square and addressed by Thomas. Men who left the army because of the recruiting of Negroes, he warned, would be considered guilty of treason and would be shot, and there would be courts-martial for all who interfered with the program. The boys talked it over around campfires afterward and concluded finally that “a Negro could stop a bullet just as well as a white man,” and that “for everyone so sacrificed there would be just that many more white soldiers to return north to their families and friends.”6
Undeniably the Negro could stop a bullet. He could also help meet a draft quota back home, and northern state officials who were finding it increasingly hard to raise troops began to look his way optimistically. The only trouble seemed to be that most northern states did not, after all, contain so very many colored folk; the source of supply, untapped though it was, did seem to be limited. In Massachusetts the state authorities sent agents far afield, recruiting Negroes wherever they could find them, and forming two whole regiments of them. This led Governor John A. Andrew into trouble. He had promised the Negro recruits that they would be treated precisely as white soldiers were treated, and he presently learned that by a War Department ruling the colored soldiers could be paid no more than ten dollars a month, of which three dollars would stand for a clothing allowance. Since white troops got thirteen dollars a month in addition to their clothing, this represented a substantial difference. Andrew stormed down to Washington to get the ruling changed, failed, and then went back to Boston and got the legislature to agree to make up the difference with state funds.7
Negroes could stop bullets and meet draft quotas; they could also open the avenue for promotion to white soldiers. The new colored regiments would need officers. The officers, except in the rarest cases, would not be colored; they would be white men, combat veterans, selected from the ranks of the line regiments, given a quick course of sprouts in an officer-training school, and then commissioned as lieutenants, captains, or even better. The veterans perked up their ears at this news. Some of those who had been most bitter about the new program became reconciled to it when they considered that they themselves, as a result of it, might wear shoulder straps. There was no lack of candidates for the training schools. (A veteran in the Army of the Potomac complained that the selection board was biased; soldiers who might have won commissions in their own regiments if vacancies existed, he asserted, were passed over, while the young sprigs fresh out of college who had never seen gun smoke got in with ease.) In one way or another, colored regiments were called into being, officered, and put to work.8
There was a great deal of self-interest in the decision to turn Negroes into soldiers, but there was also the pressure of sheer necessity. The contraband slave was becoming uncommonly numerous; simply by his presence — by his insistence on fleeing from bondage and by his mute faith that the nearest Federal army would be his sure protector — he was compelling the authorities to do something with him, and very often the easiest thing to do was to put him into uniform.
In Virginia in 1863 this problem was not quite so acute. The Army of the Potomac had not penetrated very deeply into Confederate territory; it was living in a war-ravaged area in which there were not very many slaves, and the contrabands who did come in could easily be shipped back to Washington — where, for