In January 1865, shortly after his expedition to the sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman held an extraordinary meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Along with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Sherman spoke to a group of 20 Black ministers about slavery, the Civil War, and the world that would emerge from the ashes of both. Of the sentiments that Baptist Garrison Frazier expressed on behalf of the group, one in particular was repeated: the desire, as Frazier put it, “to help the Government maintain our freedom,” by which he meant serving in the military. From the beginning of the conflict, Black Americans had invested their hopes of freedom in the cause of the Union, through their military support and their service within its ranks. Explaining the surrender, Frazier told Sherman and Stanton that “if the prayers that have been made for the Union army are read, you will not get through these two weeks.”
On the night of June 11, a holiday celebrating the military order that confirmed emancipation in Texas, such connections are under stress. Pete Hegseth has taken Edwin M. Stanton’s title as “secretary of war” but not quite his mantle. As my colleague Clint Smith writes in July issue of AtlanticHegseth has been working to support the administration’s project to “legalize the success—and especially the presence—of Black people in the military.” In addition to Hegseth blocking the advancement of senior Black officers and overseeing the recovery of Confederate archives, the Department of Defense has removed honors to Black heroes in the Pentagon and on the department’s web pages.
Hegseth’s war on “awakening” and diversity is also a war against history itself. Black military service has existed since the Revolution. The close bonds described by Frazier were reinforced by the Civil War, when Black Americans saw the Union army as an instrument of liberation and full citizenship, as well as a means of serving the national cause. The Atlantic contributor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a white officer in one of the first Black regiments recognized by Stanton, he wrote in the newspaper in 1864 that Black soldiers had recreated “the destinies of two races on this continent.”
What Garrison Frazier told Stanton and Sherman in 1865—that there were “thousands who are willing to sacrifice themselves in any way to aid the United States Government”—was true from the beginning of the war. In May 1861, a man named Harry Jarvis escaped his captivity and presented himself to Confederate General Benjamin F. Butler at Fort Monroe, in Virginia, asking to enlist. But Army regulations, reflecting federal military policy that had largely excluded Black men from service since the 1790s, prevented him from doing so. According to Jarvis, when Butler said that “it was not a black man’s war,” Jarvis replied that would be be the black man’s war before they’re done.”
It didn’t take long before Jarvis proved himself right: He and tens of thousands of other enslaved Americans would change the nature of the war, first by escaping the Union army and working in military camps, then by officially enlisting when the law opened the ranks to them in the summer of 1862 “for any war service for which they may be found capable.” Opposition among northern whites was strong, and the Lincoln administration proceeded cautiously before fully embracing such service with the Emancipation Proclamation. Even then, conditions were not good. Black soldiers were initially underpaid, served in segregated units under white commanders, and many of them received poor quality equipment and medical care. If captured by Union soldiers, they also faced the possibility of execution or re-enslavement.
Still, the consequences of the war and the country as a whole were great. As Frederick Douglass said in an 1863 speech urging Black men to volunteer, “Events mightier than men, Eternal Providence, all wisdom, and all control, have placed us in new relations with the government, and the government with us.” The time had come not only to end slavery and demand freedom but also to fight for full property. “Once a negro gets the brass letters of the US,” Douglass famously said, “and takes an eagle on his button, and a basket on his shoulder, and a bullet in his pocket, and no power on earth or underground can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
For those who served, the mission of the Union ranged from the individual to the collective. A man named Spottswood Rice wrote from Missouri to a woman still holding her daughter captive in 1864, promising to come with his fellow soldiers and take her child: “I have no fear of taking Mary off your hands.” He added, “This whole government is encouraging me and you can’t help yourself.” But given the dangers and the stakes, the determination of the Black soldiers also extended to greater ways. One man, serving in the 55th Massachusetts volunteer infantry, said this briefly before entering danger: “If I fall in the expected battle, remember, I fall in defense of my community and country.”
The actions of these men helped change a conflict originally fought to preserve the Union into one that destroyed slavery as well. Black Americans turned “one rebellion into two,” historian Stephen Hahn wrote, by fleeing Confederate lines and bringing slavery to the forefront of the war. Their final service did not eliminate discrimination within the ranks, nor did it guarantee the promises of independence after the war. But the Union army in which approximately 180,000 Black men served was the most important national instrument in ending slavery and defining the possibility of freedom.
Lincoln himself recognized a certain kind of courage and determination in these stories. Writing to an opponent of Negro conscription in 1863, he asserted, “There will be negroes who can remember that with a silent tongue, with clenched teeth, with a steady eye, and a well-raised bayonet, they have helped mankind to this great accomplishment.” Their efforts, he realized, advanced not only their interests but also the course of America. “Right away, their part of history was written in black and white,” he said. “The work was a great national one; and no one should be banned who took part in that work.”
