Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

knife of liberty” to “the throat of slavery” and “deal a death-blow to the monster evil of the nineteenth century”:

Friends of freedom! be up and doing;—now is your time. The tyrant’s extremity is your opportunity! Let the long crushed bondman arise! and in this auspicious moment, snatch back the liberty of which he has been so long robbed and despoiled. Now is the day, and now is the hour!94

Three days after Lincoln’s April 15, 1861, militia proclamation was issued, a company of “Hannibal Guards” from Pittsburgh offered its services, declaring that “although deprived of all political rights, we yet wish the government of the United States to be sustained against the tyranny of slavery, and are willing to assist in any honorable way or manner to sustain the present administration.” One hundred and fifteen black students from Wilberforce University offered themselves as a company to Ohio governor William Dennison in 1861, and when Federal forces occupied New Orleans in the spring of 1862, three regiments of black and Creole Louisianans who made up the Louisiana Native Guards proposed to volunteer as entire units for Federal service.

In every case, the black volunteers were turned away. “My belief is that any attempt to make soldiers of negroes will prove an ignominious failure and should they get into battle the officers who command them will be sacrificed,” reflected the artist turned cavalry colonel David Hunter Strother in May 1862. A Pennsylvania sergeant was more blunt: “We don’t want to fight side and side by the nigger. We think we are too superior a race for that.”95

Not until Congress amended the Militia Act in July 1862 did Lincoln have the presidential discretion to begin enlisting black soldiers as he saw fit, and only after the Emancipation Proclamation became official was black recruitment begun in earnest. At first black recruits were mustered into state volunteer regiments such as the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry, and the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry, and they limited blacks to service in the ranks (as a result of border state opposition in Congress, commissions as officers were reserved for whites). In May 1863 the War Department created a Bureau of Colored Troops to organize and muster black troops directly into Federal service as the 1st through the 138th United States Colored Troops (USCT), along with six regiments of U.S. Colored Cavalry, fourteen of heavy artillery, and ten batteries of light artillery. The USCT units remained racially segregated ones, and not until the end of the war did the War Department agree to pay them on an equal plane with white soldiers. All the same, they promised to treat the disease of rebellion “in the shape of warm lead and cold steel, duly administered by two hundred thousand black doctors.”96

In the process, they shocked a number of white Union soldiers out of their smug bigotry. “I never believed in niggers before,” wrote one Wisconsin cavalryman, “but by Jesus, they are hell in fighting.” Lincoln was confident that the biggest surprise would be the one experienced by the rebels. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once,” Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson, the Unionist military governor of Tennessee. “And who doubts that we can present that sight if we but take hold in earnest.”97 Eventually 178,000 African Americans enlisted in the Union army, and almost 10,000 served in the navy.

Lincoln was fully conscious, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that he was sending the war and the country down a very different road than people had thought they would go. If he seems to have taken an unconscionably long time about taking that turn, and if he made a number of ambiguous utterances about the relationship of the war and slavery beforehand, it was largely because all of Lincoln’s instincts led him to avoid tumultuous challenges over issues and seek evasions or compromises that would allow him to get the decision he wanted without paying the costs. He had yet to confront for himself the full implications of some of the issues of black freedom and black equality, and he knew that the North was even further from having come to grips with them. Nevertheless, “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done,” Lincoln realized. To bring African Americans out of slavery and into the war to save the Union meant that the Union, if victorious, had an immense obligation to grant them full political equality as Americans. In his mind, it had become “a religious duty” to see that “these people, who have so heroically… demonstrated in blood their right to the ballot,” get the “humane protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended.”98

The problem Lincoln would now face would be finding a general for the Army of the Potomac with a similar vision for the war. And when he finally dismissed George B. McClellan in November 1862, he had no idea that it would take two more bloody years before he would find one.

CHAPTER FIVE

ELUSIVE VICTORIES

EAST AND WEST, 1862–1863

The Mississippi is well worth reading about,” wrote Mark Twain in the opening lines of Life on the Mississippi. “It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.” For Twain, who was born beside it and worked upon it, most of that remarkableness was a matter of the colorful characters who populated the river, the clusters of peculiar towns along its banks, and the eccentricities of the broad, slow-winding river itself. For foreign travelers in the South, it was the sheer dimensions of the river and the vast cross section of life it contained that regularly left their mouths agape. When British war correspondent William Howard Russell arrived in Memphis in 1861, he was bewildered by how the river embraced “this strange kaleidoscope of Negroes and whites, of extremes of civilisation in its American