Frederick Douglass -- Recruiting Black Soldiers

 

Frederick Douglass began to campaign for the use of black soldiers in what was now to be a war of liberation.  In a speech in New York City in February 1863 he criticized those who opposed the use of Negro soldiers because they believed that black men would not fight or that they would be dangerous if armed.  He said nothing about Northern racists who favored their use.  “Every black man who joins the army enables a white man to stay home” was one slogan that was commonly uttered, now that the war was recognized for what it did to those who fought it.  A popular jingle of the day announced that

 

            In battle’s wild commotion

                        I shouldn’t at all object

            If Sambo’s body should stop a ball

                        That was coming for me direct (Bontemps 230).

 

On July 17, 1863, President Lincoln had signed into law a bill that authorized the use of black soldiers at “garrison forts, positions, stations and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”  Governor John A. Andrews of Massachusetts petitioned the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, to permit him to raise two regiments of Negro soldiers; and, after some delay, the petition was granted.  Frederick Douglass was asked to help recruit volunteers.  Enthusiastically, he set about doing so.  Two of his sons, Charles and Lewis, were signed up.  Eventually, he raised enough volunteers to comprise two companies.  Commanding the black regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, to which their two companies belonged, was Robert Gould Shaw, a young Harvard graduate and member of an influential Massachusetts family.  General David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, requested that the regiment be sent to South Carolina.  Douglass was on the dock in Boston May 28, 1863, to watch his companies, and his two sons, embark.

 

Back in Rochester, Douglass began to urge other states to follow Massachusetts’s example.  Almost immediately the citizens of Philadelphia authorized the raising of Negro troops.  To their surprise, few blacks volunteered.  Douglass was asked to come to Philadelphia to help.

 

The problem was discrimination within the service.  The solicitor of the War Department had taken the position that blacks should be paid as laborers, not as soldiers.  Later, Douglass learned that only white soldiers were given enlistment bounties.  And, once enlisted, only they could advance in rank.  Additionally, the Confederacy had formally declared that black soldiers captured in battle would be treated as insurrectionary slaves rather than prisoners of war, a death sentence in actuality.  Yet Douglass continued to try to enter black citizens, insisted that despite the unequal treatment, being a soldier gave the black man the best opportunity to better himself.

 

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S..; let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth … which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States (Bontemps 233).

 

In mid-July the Fifty-Fourth Regiment fought bravely in their unsuccessful frontal assault upon Fort Wagner.  Casualties were heavy.  1,515 Union soldiers fell; the Confederate force had only 174 casualties.  Douglass’s two sons were spared, however.  Illness had prevented Charles’s participation.  Lewis wrote,

 

… Men fell all around me.  A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking.  How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here (McFeely 226).

 

Afterwards, the Confederates buried the Union dead, with the black soldiers and their white commander, Robert Gould Shaw, all in a common grave.

 

The Regiment had proved false the argument that black soldiers would not fight.  Encouraged, Douglass crossed and re-crossed the Northern states to recruit more black companies.  However, contempt for and palpable hatred of the black soldier made his work even more difficult.  Douglass was in Philadelphia in July when ugly race riots broke out in New York City and other Northern cities.

 

… Poor white men and women, furious about the federal government’s new conscription of troops, from which rich men could exempt themselves by paying a substitute, took out their anger not on the rich but on scapegoats: the niggers had caused the war; they could suffer for it.  As not-so-poor haters of blacks joined in, houses were burned and scores of people killed.  Brains were dashed out against lampposts; a crippled black man was tortured and hanged; a colored orphanage was burned (McFeely 227).

 

Later in the summer, accompanied by Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas, Douglass visited the War Department and talked to Secretary Stanton about the inequity of pay received by black soldiers.  Stanton replied that he had always advocated equal pay, and a bill establishing it had passed the House only to be defeated in the Senate.  Stanton pledged that equal pay would become an eventuality as would the promotion of black soldiers into officer ranks.  He urged Douglass to place himself under the authority of General Lorenzo Thomas, who was actively organizing colored troops along the Mississippi River.  Black enlistment was needed more in the South than it was in the North, Stanton declared.  Douglass took the invitation to mean that if he accepted the offer, Stanton would have him commissioned an officer in the army.

 

Then Douglass was directed to the White House.  The President had asked to speak to him.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontempts, Arna, Free at Last, the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971.  Print

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.