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By Root 7200 0

offer themselves, like Cailloux had done, martyrs to the cause of justice, freedom and good government. It was a death the proudest might envy.” The Union, newspaper of the free black community, concluded that Captain Cailloux’s death had “vindicated his race from the opprobrium with which it was charged.” Certainly, his death became a symbol for the northern antislavery cause and particularly for black abolitionists. The flag Cailloux had carried at Port Hudson was prominently displayed at the National Negro Convention presided over by Frederick Douglass in October 1864. Cailloux’s death—configured as heroic sacrifice—made a powerful case for blacks’ right to citizenship in the nation they had given so much to save.30

“Funeral of the Late Captain Cailloux.” Harper’s Weekly, August 29, 1863.

But in the eyes of many African Americans, the focus on death and Christian sacrifice only seemed to combine with widespread military atrocities to perpetuate a disturbing tradition of black victimhood. From the front in Virginia, reporter George Stephens hastened to assure his readers at the New York Weekly Anglo-African that “we do not wish to make…[them] think that we are anxious to meet death on the battlefield…or to use the language of a contemporary, ‘go out gaily to meet death as to our bride.’” The suffering of bondage sufficed; now justice required that others be the objects of violence. Part of establishing equality would be evening this score. Vengeance and retribution played a prominent place in blacks’ understanding of the rationale for war’s destructiveness, as well as for the violent acts of individual men.31

A popular poem that appeared in several versions in the black press illustrated this conception of achieving equity through equivalent suffering. A “brave Confederate chief” is killed in battle and is carried home to his mother, who greets the death of her only son with “frantic sorrow.” Her “aged slave” comes to offer not consolation but justice. “Missus,” she declares, “we is even, now.” The white mother had sold all ten of her slave’s children, so now neither woman has any remaining offspring; the two mothers are alone together in their common loss. The mistress must now, in the words of her slave, “to the just Avenger bow.” The war is God’s instrument for balancing the accounts of righteousness:

Yea! although it tarry long,

Payment shall be made for wrong!32

This notion of fitting retribution also lay at the heart of Frederick Douglass’s view of the war and of black soldiers’ role within it. The most prominent voice of the northern black community, Douglass understood the centrality of violence to slavery from his own experience in bondage. He had been beaten, he had fought back, and he had fled; he retained few illusions about the likelihood of white southerners giving up their peculiar institution without a desperate struggle. Douglass believed he had reclaimed his own “manly independence” by fighting and overcoming the brutal white overseer Covey. In Douglass’s view, slaves had the absolute right to rise up and kill their masters, and his sympathy for John Brown had arisen from this premise. Douglass embraced a redemptive as well as an instrumental view of bloodshed; violence was not simply effective but instructive and liberating. The war’s brutality, he wrote, served as a “blazing illustration” of the fundamental truth that “there is no more exemption for nations than for individuals from the just retribution due to flagrant and persistent transgression.” But the Civil War’s “tears and blood,” he believed, “may at last bring us to our senses.”33

Black soldiers entered battle not just deeply invested in the war’s outcome but strongly motivated to kill in service of their cause. Already victims of generations of cruelty in slavery, they saw themselves to be simply balancing accounts as they struggled for the freedom that would equalize their condition. They were fighting, they repeated again and again, for “God, race and country”—for righteousness, equality, and citizenship. But as the war