This Republic of Suffering [29]
Cordelia Harvey, sent south by the governor of Wisconsin to provide aid to the state’s wounded, wrote from Mississippi late in April 1864 to describe the anger and determination of black soldiers. “Since the Fort Pillow tragedy,” she explained, “our colored troops & their officers are awaiting in breathless anxiety the action of Government…Our officers of negro regiments declare they will take no more prisoners—& there is death to the rebel in every black mans eyes. They are still but terrible. They will fight…The negroes know what they are doing.” A black regiment, she reported, had already hanged a Chicago cotton merchant who had dared to say that he believed the rebels “did right” in killing the blacks on a nearby plantation during a recent raid.35
News of Fort Pillow prompted cries for vengeance from northern blacks. Soldiers should not cease fighting “until they shall have made a rebel to bite the dust for every hair of those…of our brethren massacred at Fort Pillow…give no quarter; take no prisoners…then, they will respect your manhood,” wrote one correspondent to the Christian Recorder. But Henry M. Turner, the black chaplain of the First U.S. Colored Infantry, worried about the position “highly endorsed by an immense number of both white and colored people, which I am sternly opposed to, and that is, the killing of all the rebel prisoners taken by our soldiers.” Even if the rebels had “set the example,” such actions represented an “outrage upon civilization and…Christianity.” Turner urged black soldiers to disappoint those who expected them to behave brutally; they should instead claim a moral superiority to their enemies. Vengeance, as another black chaplain emphasized, belonged to the Lord.36
In March 1865 the ringing cadences of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural would echo the widespread black understanding of the war’s carnage as divine punishment for the sin of slavery. Advocating “malice toward none,” urging that Americans “judge not that we be not judged,” Lincoln nevertheless suggested the possibility that in the Civil War God himself had judged—not in designating a victor but in exacting the lives of so many Americans. The deaths brought about by the Civil War were less a Christian sacrifice than an atonement. “If God wills that it continue,” Lincoln proclaimed just a little more than a month before the end of the war, “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”37
Lincoln’s eloquence was perhaps matched by the passion of an elderly woman slave who saw in the work of death and killing the conflict’s fundamental purpose. Mary Livermore, Union nurse, described a wartime encounter with an African American woman she had known years before during Livermore’s service as a governess on a southern plantation. Aunt Aggy had waited through decades of cruelty to see “white folks’ blood…a-runnin’ on the ground like a riber.” But she had always had faith “it was a-comin. I allers ’spected to see white folks heaped up dead. An’ de Lor’, He’s keept His promise, an’ ’venged His people, jes’ as I knowed He would. I seed ’em dead on de field, Massa Linkum’s sojers an’ de Virginny sojers, all heaped togedder…Oh, de Lor’ He do jes’ right, if you only gib Him time enough to turn Hisself.”38
Slavery gave the war’s killing and dying a special meaning for black Americans; the conflict was a moment for both divine and human retribution, as well as an opportunity