ABSTRACT
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation announced that black soldiers could enlist in the Union Army. The subject of numerous historical works, from Dudley Taylor Cornish’s The Sable Arm to James McPherson’s The Negro’s Civil War and beyond, and one major motion picture, Glory (1989), black military service during the Civil War remains a fertile field of historical inquiry. 1 Perhaps less well known and examined are the debates black men conducted about enlistment, or that black enlistment was the result of debate among black men at all. Large-scale African American service to the Union seems like a foregone conclusion, as it makes logical sense that black men would leap at the opportunity to battle Confederate forces determined to protect the peculiar institution. From the war’s outset, however, black Northerners debated whether and under what conditions they should fight if the Union eventually sought their enlistment, as many believed it would. 2 In their debates, black Northerners-who, unlike enslaved Southerners, could freely and publicly discuss the war and their place in it-drew on their historical assessments of the republic’s failure to reward past generations of African American veterans to articulate a “politics of service” that predicated black enlistment on expanded black rights and citizenship. This political position did not ultimately govern black men’s decisions to enlist, but it influenced and aided their continued pursuit of racial justice throughout the nation’s bloodiest conflict, and remains critical to understanding how black enlistment in the Union Army happened. 3
The African American soldiers who fought in the Civil War were not the first black men to fight for the United States. They had fought in the American Revolution and War of 1812, and did so while the expansion of Southern slavery continued. Though free thanks to slavery’s post-Revolutionary Northern demise, Northern blacks faced disenfranchisement and a myriad of discriminatory laws throughout much of the region. 4 Antebellum black Northerners venerated their ancestors’ service, frequently invoking it when they met publicly to demand rights and citizenship, and they fumed over the fact that the government had not rewarded that service properly. 5 Delegates to an 1851 Ohio black convention asked pointedly whether their ancestors’ Revolutionary service had not given them “a just claim to the same rights with [whites]?” 6 Black abolitionist Robert Purvis framed the question even more starkly: was it African Americans’ permanent fate, he asked, “to be looked for in the ‘hour of danger,’ [only to] be trampled under foot in the time of peace?” 7 Antebellum black activists also challenged white Americans by identifying as their goal the achievement of ideals that had animated the nation’s founding
struggle. Black Americans agitated to create, said an 1835 national convention of black leaders, a nation “purified from those iniquitous inconsistencies into which she has fallen by her aberration from first principles” whose laws “cease[d] to conflict with the spirit of that sacred instrument, the Declaration of American Independence.” 8 Appeals to black service and American founding principles remained staples of Northern blacks’ antebellum protest rhetoric, but did little to win racial justice. In the 1850s, new federal legislation expanded slavery’s security and potential scope, and the Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott decision, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that African Americans were not American citizens. When the Civil War began, discrimination reigned in the North as did slavery in the South. 9
In the 1850s, with slavery and discrimination ascendant, some Northern blacks began to wonder what the United States meant to them, and questioned their allegiance to the nation. 10 In 1857, Robert Purvis “rejoice[d]” at the possibility of the nation’s destruction and replacement by a more just polity, calling the United States “one of the basest, meanest, most atrocious despotisms that ever saw the face of the sun . . .” 11 By 1859, Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned orator, had concluded that the United States could not legally charge him with treason for his association with John Brown, as his non-citizenship absolved him of any allegiance he might owe the nation. 12 Five years earlier, Illinois’ H. Ford Douglas had reached a similar conclusion, saying that his non-citizenship allowed him to fight for a foreign army without violating U.S. law. 13 Delegates to an 1858 Ohio black convention absolved themselves of allegiance to the United States, and representatives at a similar 1856 California gathering debated vigorously their proper response were the nation to become involved in a foreign war. 14 At the California convention, a W.H. Newby virulently opposed a resolution pledging black service in a future war, declaring that he would welcome an invading army that “provided liberty to me and my people in bondage.” 15 Newby and other black Californians’ revulsion at the prospect of fighting for the United States killed the resolution.
