Context-1861-1865

Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his book Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African-American History 1513-2008, draws a line from African-American involvement in the American Revolutionary War to the Civil War, starting with Crispus Attucks, a sailor thought to be of Black, Indian, and white ancestry, who was the first colonist to be killed in the series of volatile events that led to the American Revolution.

Harriet Tubman, while best known for her legendary exploits leading enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad, played a less known but similarly remarkable role during the Civil War. In 1862, she traveled to Union-occupied South Carolina and tended to wounded soldiers and freed people; she also cooked and sold food to local residents. She roamed the region, acting as a spy, gathering information on Confederate supplies and troop dispositions, which she shared with the Union command. She became well acquainted with Colonel James Montgomery of the Second South Carolina volunteers, an African-American infantry regiment, and provided him with invaluable military intelligence. One of her missions up the Combahee River resulted in the seizure of Confederate supplies and the liberation of 756 enslaved people. At war’s end she traveled to Virginia, where she nursed Black patients at the James River Contraband hospital. She then became the matron of the Black hospital at Fortress Monroe, which had housed “contraband” (self-emancipated enslaved people loyal to Union troops) since the beginning of the war.

Among other African Americans to serve during the Civil War was Martin R. Delany, who is best known for his book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. He served in the Union army and reached the rank of major, the highest rank achieved by an African American during the Civil War.

But the role of African Americans in this war was not clear-cut. The Lincoln administration and state governors across the North repeated countless times that “this is a white man’s war.” White soldiers recoiled at the prospect of uniformed Black men. Yankee soldiers wrote home asking that Blacks be sent as diggers or laborers but never as soldiers; real men used weapons of war, they said, while Blacks used shovels.

Still, many Blacks volunteered for service in any way they could. A few, such as H. Ford Douglas, Joseph T. Wilson, and the mixed-blood Connecticut soldier Meunomennie L. Maimi, served in white units. Others, such as journalist William H. Johnson, became officers’ attendants or teamsters—anything to get into the fight and help enslaved people escape.

Until January 1863, the U.S. government refused to recruit Blacks for the army. Although it publicly rejected countless Black requests to volunteer for service, the Lincoln administration responded inconsistently to individual efforts by a few Union officers determined to enlist Black soldiers.

In August 1862, General James H. Lane, who was also a U.S. senator, organized the First Kansas Colored Infantry. A fiery abolitionist, Lane had been battling proslavery forces since the days of John Brown. He made no secret of his raids across the Kansas border into Missouri to liberate enslaved people and continued the practice after the start of the war, saving hundreds, if not thousands of them. Refusing to allow any source of Union manpower to go untapped, he placed the liberated “property” in his regiment, which at the time operated under state, rather than federal authority.

Sources

Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 29-30, 90-91, 102-103, 122-123.

Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. (Hard Press, 2006; originally published in 1852.)