Remembering What Must be Remembered
I note there was an official ribbon cutting today at a new museum in Washington, DC. It will be on my next Washington, DC-new-museum tour, along with the not-so-new now Smithsonian Portrait Gallery. The ribbon cutting was held at noon for "The New African American Civil War Museum." Of course, since I haven't visited yet, I can't review it, but it brought to my mind the great, perhaps still unheralded and nation-saving role that African Americans played in the Civil War and the challenge black soldiers faced and conquered.
While the nation as a whole was busy in the relatively straight-forward fighting for or against the Union and for or against slavery, slaves were hoping and often fighting for freedom and struggling to prove to a disbelieving or at least skeptical country, government and military that they could be, when and if given the chance, the equal of any other group of soldiers. But it didn't stop there, those who successfully enlisted in the army were demeaned, ridiculed, abused, mocked, resented, sometimes unpaid and officially for a long time paid less than white soldiers. They were forced to do more menial work, especially in the early days, than white soldiers. Their families–as much as they could get official recognition of their families–suffered when the men tried to enlist, often at the hands of former slave owners, and sometimes at the hands of the very government they were trying to serve. Even in battle, their burden was more onerous as they learned early on that the anger of Confederates brought wrath and death sometimes even after the battles quieted down. "Remember Fort Pillow!" became a motivational cry for African American soldiers. The African American experience during the Civil War was different in different parts of the country, but the experience everywhere (whether among slaves, freed slaves, escaped slaves or freedmen; whether in loyal states, states in rebellion or border states) was always beyond difficult. And, they proved they could endure and prosper in "difficult." I doubt that we, pampered and proud as we have become thanks to the accomplishments of those who went before, would or could measure up to their accomplishments.
According to one of the classic books on the Civil War, Dudley Taylor Cornish's "The Sable Arm, Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865," 178,892 black men served as Union soldiers.(1) While African Americans fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, "The regular army was closed to him; state laws generally prevented his belonging to the militia because militiamen bore arms. It was during the Civil War that the [African American] permanently won the right to fight." Nearly 20 percent of all black men in both North and South ended up serving as Union soldiers, 36,000 of whom died in service.(2) At first they were excluded from the army, but recruiting and enlisting African Americans gradually grew in popularity, especially as the war dragged on and on and the draft threatened more and more lives—New York went from riots where African Americans were indiscriminately killed to cheering black soldiers who marched through the city. Later in the war, the Union even impressed unwilling blacks into service (sounds like just another form of slavery).
The Civil War was just one step toward legal and social equality for African Americans, and the post-war prejudice and politics destroyed some of its promise and probably made it of less interest to African Americans (see "Should African Americans Care About the Civil War?" by Allen C. Guelzo at www.theroot.com) But, the great progress in equality before the law and in society has come in the last half century or so only because of the huge step of sacrifice made by Americans of all races 150 years ago.
(1) The book was copyrighted in 1956, and while the title of the book has been modified, its text continues to use language accepted at the time, but that now may be offensive to some.
(2) "Free at Last: Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War", Edited by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. The book was produced by the Freedman and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland.
