Part 8 (1/2)
It seems proper, before attempting to record the achievements of the negro soldiers in the war of the Rebellion, that we should consider the state of public opinion regarding the negroes at the outbreak of the war; also, in connection therewith, to note the rapid change that took place during the early part of the struggle.
For some cause, unexplained in a general sense, the white people in the Colonies and in the States, came to entertain against the colored races therein a prejudice, that showed itself in a hostility to the latter's enjoying equal civil and political rights with themselves. Various reasons are alleged for it, but the difficulty of really solving the problem lies in the fact that the early settlers in this country came without prejudice against color. The Negro, Egyptian, Arab, and other colored races known to them, lived in European countries, where no prejudice, on account of color existed. How very strange then, that a feeling antagonistic to the negroes should become a prominent feature in the character of the European emigrants to these sh.o.r.es and their descendants. It has been held by some writers that the American prejudice against the negroes was occasioned by their docility and unresenting spirit. Surely no one acquainted with the Indian will agree that he is docile or wanting in spirit, yet occasionally there is manifested a prejudice against him; the recruiting officers in Ma.s.sachusetts refused to enlist Indians, as well as negroes, in regiments and companies made up of white citizens, though members of both races, could sometimes be found in white regiments. During the rebellion of 1861-5, some Western regiments had one or two negroes and Indians in them, but there was no general enlistment of either race in white regiments.[11] The objection was on account of color, or, as some writers claim, by the fact of the races--negro and Indian[12]--having been enslaved. Be the cause what it may, a prejudice, strong, unrelenting, barred the two races from enjoying with the white race equal civil and political rights in the United States. So very strong had that prejudice grown since the Revolution, enhanced it may be by slavery and docility, that when the rebellion of 1861 burst forth, a feeling stronger than law, like a Chinese wall only more impregnable, encircled the negro, and formed a barrier betwixt him and the army.
Doubtless peace--a long peace--lent its aid materially to this state of affairs. Wealth, chiefly, was the dream of the American from 1815 to 1860, nearly half a century; a period in which the negro was friendless, save in a few strong-minded, iron-hearted men like John Brown in Kansas, Wendell Philips in New England, Charles Sumner in the United States Senate, Horace Greeley in New York and a few others, who dared, in the face of strong public sentiment, to plead his cause, even from a humane platform. In many places he could not ride in a street car that was not inscribed, ”_Colored persons ride in this car_.” The deck of a steamboat, the box cars of the railroad, the pit of the theatre and the gallery of the church, were the locations accorded him. The church lent its influence to the rancor and bitterness of a prejudice as deadly as the sap of the Upas.
To describe public opinion respecting the negro a half a century ago, is no easy task. It was just budding into maturity when DeTocqueville visited the United States, and, as a result of that visit, he wrote, from observation, a pointed criticism upon the manners and customs, and the laws of the people of the United States. For fear that I might be thought over-doing--heightening--giving too much coloring to the strength, and extent and power of the prejudice against the negro I quote from that distinguished writer, as he clearly expressed himself under the heading, ”_Present and Future condition of the three races inhabiting the United States_.” He said of the negro:
”I see that in a certain portion of the United States at the present day, the legal barrier which separates the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country. Slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. Whosoever has inhabited the United States, must have perceived, that in those parts of the United States, in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in nowise drawn nearer the whites; on the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in those States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists. And, nowhere is it so intolerant as in the states where servitude has never been known. It is true, that in the North of the Union, marriages may be legally contracted between negroes and whites, but public opinion would stigmatize a man, who should content himself with a negress, as infamous. If oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites among their judges, and although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repulses them for that office. In theatres gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters, in hospitals they lie apart. They _are_ allowed to invoke the same divinity as the whites. The gates of heaven are not closed against those unhappy beings; but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of the other world. The negro is free, but he can share, neither the rights, nor the labor, nor the afflictions of him, whose equal he has been declared to be, and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or death.”
DeTocqueville, as is seen, wrote with much bitterness and sarcasm, and, it is but fair to state, makes no allusion to any exceptions to the various conditions of affairs that he mentions. In all cases matters might not have been exactly as bad as he pictures them, but as far as the deep-seated prejudice against the negroes, and indifference to their rights and elevation are concerned, the facts will freely sustain the views so forcibly presented.
The negro had no remembrance of the country of his ancestry, Africa, and he abjured their religion. In the South he had no family; women were merely the temporary sharer of his pleasures; his master's cabins were the homes of his children during their childhood. While the Indian perished in the struggle for the preservation of his home, his hunting grounds and his freedom, the negro entered into slavery as soon as he was born, in fact was often purchased in the womb, and was born to know, first, that he was a slave. If one became free, he found freedom harder to bear than slavery; half civilized, deprived of nearly all rights, in contact with his superiors in wealth and knowledge, exposed to the rigor of a tyrannical prejudice moulded into laws, he contented himself to be allowed to live.
The Negro race, however, it must be remembered, is the only race that has ever come in contact with the European race, and been able to withstand its atrocities and oppression; all others, like the Indian, whom they could not make subservient to their use, they have destroyed.
The Negro race, like the Israelites, multiplied so rapidly in bondage, that the oppressor became alarmed, and began discussing methods of safety to himself. The only people able to cope with the Anglo-American or Saxon, with any show of success, must be of _patient fort.i.tude, progressive intelligence, brave in resentment and earnest in endeavor_.
In spite of his surroundings and state of public opinion the African lived, and gave birth, largely through amalgamation with the representatives of the different races that inhabited the United States, to a new race,--the _American Negro_. Professor Sampson in his mixed races says:
”The Negro is a new race, and is not the direct descent of any people that have ever flourished. The glory of the negro race is yet to come.”
As evidence of its capacity to acquire glory, the record made in the late struggle furnishes abundant proof. At the sound of the tocsin at the North, negro waiter, cook, barber, boot-black, groom, porter and laborer stood ready at the enlisting office; and though the recruiting officer refused to list his name, he waited like the ”patient ox” for the part.i.tion--_prejudice_--to be removed. He waited two years before even the door of the part.i.tion was opened; then he did not hesitate, but walked in, and with what effect the world knows.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT SMALLS, (pilot). WILLIAM MORRISON, (sailor). A.
GRADINE, (Engineer). JOHN SMALLS, (sailor).
Four of the crew who, while the white officers were ash.o.r.e in Charleston. S. C., ran off with the Confederate war steamer, ”Planter,”
pa.s.sed Fort Sumter and delivered the vessel to the United States authorities. On account of the daring exploit a special act of Congress was pa.s.sed ordering one-half the value of the captured vessel to be invested in U. S. bonds, and the interest thereof to be annually paid them or their heirs. Robert Smalls joined the Union army, and after the war became active and prominent in politics.]
The war cloud of 1860 still more aroused the bitter prejudice against the negro at both the North and South; but he was safer in South Carolina than in New York, in Richmond than in Boston.
It is a natural consequence, when war is waged between two nations, for those on either side to forget local feuds and unite against the common enemy, as was done in the Revolutionary war. How different was the situation now when the threatened war was not one between nations, but between states of the same nation. The feeling of hostility toward the negro was not put aside and forgotten as other troublesome matters were, but the bitterness became intensified and more marked.
The Confederate Government though organized for the perpetual enslavement of the negro, fostered the idea that the docility of the negroes would allow them to be used for any purpose, without their having the least idea of becoming freemen. Some idea may be formed of public opinion at the South at the beginning of the war by what Mr.
Pollard, in his history, gives as the feeling at the South at the close of the second year of the struggle:
”Indeed, the war had shown the system of slavery in the South to the world in some new and striking aspects, and had removed much of that cloud of prejudice, defamation, falsehood, romance and perverse sentimentalism through which our peculiar inst.i.tution had been formerly known to Europe.
It had given a better vindication of our system of slavery than all the books that could be written in a generation. It had shown that slavery was an element of strength to us; that it had a.s.sisted us in our struggle; that no servile insurrections had taken place in the South, in spite of the allurements of our enemy; that the slave had tilled the soil while his master had fought; that in large districts, unprotected by our troops, and with a white population, consisting almost exclusively of women and children, the slave had continued his work, quiet, faithful, and cheerful; and that, as a conservative element in our social system, the inst.i.tution of slavery had withstood the shocks of war, and been a faithful ally of our army, although instigated to revolution by every art of the enemy, and prompted to the work of a.s.sa.s.sination and pillage by the most brutal examples of the Yankee soldiers.”
With this view, the whole slave population was brought to the a.s.sistance of the Confederate Government, and thereby caught the very first hope of freedom. An innate reasoning taught the negro that slaves could not be relied upon to fight for their own enslavement. To get to the breastworks was but to get a chance to run to the Yankees; and thousands of those whose elastic step kept time with the martial strains of the drum and fife, as they marched on through city and town, enroute to the front, were not elated with the hope of Southern success, but were buoyant with the prospects of reaching the North. The confederates found it no easy task to watch the negroes and the Yankees too; their attention could be given to but one at a time; as a slave expressed it, ”when marsa watch the Yankee, n.i.g.g.e.r go; when marsa watch the n.i.g.g.e.r, Yankee come.” But the Yankees did not always receive him kindly during the first year of the war.
In his first inaugural, Mr. Lincoln declared ”that the property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the new incoming administration.” The Union generals, except Fremont and Phelps and a few subordinates, accepted this as public opinion, and as their guide in dealing with the slavery question. That opinion is better expressed in the doggerel, sung in after months by the negro troops as they marched along through Dixie:
”McClellan went to Richmond with two hundred thousand braves, He said, '_keep back the n.i.g.g.e.rs and the Union he would save_.'
Little Mac. he had his way, still the Union is in tears, And they call for the help of the colored volunteers.”
The first two lines expressed the sentiment at the time, not only of the Army of the Potomoc, but the army commanders everywhere, with the exceptions named. The administration winked at the enforcement of the fugitive slave bill by the soldiers engaged in capturing and returning the negroes coming into the Union lines.[13] Undoubtedly it was the idea of the Government to turn the course of the war from its rightful channel, or in other words,--in the restoration of the Union,--to eliminate the anti-slavery sentiment, which demanded the freedom of the slaves.
[Ill.u.s.tration: QUARTERS PROVIDED FOR CONTRABANDS.]
Hon. Elisha R. Potter, of Rhode Island,--”who may,” said Mr. Greeley, ”be fairly styled the hereditary chief of the Democratic party of that State,”--made a speech on the war in the State Senate, on the 10th of August 1861, in which he remarked:
”I have said that the war may a.s.sume another aspect, and be a short and b.l.o.o.d.y one. And to such a war--_an anti-slavery war_--it seems to me we are _inevitably_ drifting. It seems to me hardly in the power of human wisdom to prevent it. We may commence the war without meaning to interfere with slavery; but let us have one or two battles, and get our blood excited, and we shall not only not restore any more slaves, but shall proclaim freedom wherever we go. And it seems to me almost judicial blindness on the part of the South that they do not see that this must be the inevitable result, if the contest is prolonged.”