AfricanAmericans In The Civil War Essay Research

African-Americans In The Civil War Essay, Research Paper

The foundation for black participation in the Civil War began more than a hundred years

before the outbreak of the war. Blacks in America had been in bondage since early

colonial times. In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankind.s inalienable right to life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the institution of slavery had become firmly

established in America. Blacks worked in the tobacco fields of Virginia, in the rice fields

of South Carolina, and toiled in small farms and shops in the North. Foner and Mahoney

report in A House Divided, America in the Age of Lincoln that, .In 1776, slaves

composed forty percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia,

but well below ten percent in the colonies to the North.. The invention of the cotton gin

by Eli Whitney in 1793 provided a demand for cotton thus increasing the demand for

slaves. By the 1800.s slavery was an institution throughout the South, an institution in

which slaves had few rights, and could be sold or leased by their owners. They lacked any

voice in the government and lived a life of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the

slave population never abandoned the desire for freedom or the determination to resist

control by the slave owners. The slave’s reaction to this desire and determination

resulted in outright rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place

the strongest reaction in the enlisting of blacks in the war itself.

Batty in The Divided Union: The Story of the Great American War, 1861-65,

concur with Foner and Mahoney about the importance of outright rebellion in their

analysis of the Nat Turner Rebellion, which took place in 1831. This revolt demonstrated

that not all slaves were willing to accept this .institution of slavery. passively. Foner and

Mahoney note that the significance of this uprising is found in its aftermath because of the

numerous reports of .insubordinate. behavior by slaves.

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Individual acts of defiance ranged from the use of the Underground Railroad – a

secret, organized network of people who helped fugitive slaves reach the Northern states

and Canada – to the daily resistance or silent sabotage found on the plantations.

Stokesbury acknowledges in, A Short History of the Civil War, the existence of the

Underground Railroad but disagrees with other historians as to its importance. He notes

that it never became as well organized or as successful as the South believed.

Even with the groundwork having been laid for resistance, the prevalent racial

climate in America in 1860 found it unthinkable that blacks would bear arms against white

Americans. However, by 1865 these black soldiers had proven their value. Wilson writes

in great detail describing the struggles and achievements of the black soldiers in his book

The Black Phalanx. McPherson discusses in The Negro.s Civil War that widespread

opposition to the use of blacks as soldiers prevailed among northern whites. Whereas

McPherson relates the events cumulating in the passage of two laws that aided black

enlistment, Wilson focuses on the actual enlistment. He notes that the first regiment of

free blacks came into service at New Orleans in September 1862 through the efforts of

Butler. Wilson credits Butler.s three regiments of blacks as the first officially mustered

into Union ranks. North Carolina and Kansas also organized additional black units where

minor skirmishes proved to be successful. Wilson also notes that .Kansas has … the honor

of being the first State in the Union to begin the organization of Negroes as soldiers for

the Federal army.. McPherson believes that up to this point President Lincoln had

opposed the idea of blacks fighting for the Union but after the issuance of the

Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that slaves in states still in rebellion on

January 1, 1863, .shall be then, thence forward, and forever free,. he reversed his

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thinking. At the end of the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln announced that the freed

blacks .would be received into the armed service of the United States….. Lincoln

planned to tap into a new source of fighting individuals, .…the great available and as yet

unavailed of, force for the restoration of the Union... Lincoln thought this would both

weaken the enemy and strengthen the Union. The recruitment of the blacks took laborers

from the South and placed “these men in the Union army in places which otherwise must

be filled with so many white men.. Lincoln also felt that seeing the blacks fighting against

the Confederacy would have a psychological effect upon the South.

With the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves, the

North began recruiting black soldiers but, as reported by Batty and Parish, this was a slow

recruitment at first. In the Spring of 1863 only two black regiments existed, howe

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