Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Preface
Edward L. Pierce was a special agent of the United States Treasury Department,
appointed in 1862 to supervise the federal government’s attempt at plantation management
on the South Carolina Sea Islands. The aim of this project was to grow and
market cotton to help defray the cost of waging the Civil War. Just as important in
the eyes of the occupiers was the need to organize and regulate the labor of the local
population, former slaves whose masters had fled the islands at the approach of a
Union naval and military expedition the previous fall. After a year on the job, Pierce
published his reflections in a magazine article. “Two questions are concerned in the
social problem of our time,” he wrote. “One is, Will the people of African descent
work for a living? and the other is, Will they fight for their freedom?” By the end of
the article, Pierce had answered both questions in the affirmative. 1
That anyone in 1863 would have asked “Will they fight for their freedom?”
shows how thoroughly white Americans had forgotten the service of black soldiers
during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Much the same thing happened
after 1865. Although more than two hundred thousand black men served the Union
as soldiers and sailors, and three contemporary black authors published books about
them, the fact that black Americans had fought for the nation slipped once again
from the public consciousness. Thus, by 1928 a biographer of Ulysses S. Grant could
write: “The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far
as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own.” In the twenty-five
years that followed, two historians devoted chapters of larger works to the black military
role in the Civil War, but not until Dudley T. Cornish’s The Sable Arm appeared
in 1956 did the U.S. Colored Troops receive book-length treatment. 2
Since then, historians have paid more attention to black troops’ service. James
M. McPherson’s The Negro’s Civil War (1965) and the massive documentary collection
compiled by Ira Berlin and his colleagues, The Black Military Experience
(1982), preceded Joseph T. Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle (1990). The years since
1998 have seen the publication of a battle narrative, a study of the Colored Troops’
1 Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (September 1863):
291–315 (quotation, p. 291).
2 Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military, pp.
10–26, gives a brief account of America’s black soldiers from 1775 to 1815. The three books by
nineteenth-century black authors are William W. Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion
(1867); George W. Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865
(1888); and Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx (1890). Bell I. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 1861–
1865 (1938), and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (1953), preceded Dudley T. Cornish,
The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865. William E. Woodward, Meet General
Grant (1928), p. 372 (quotation). David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory examines the process by which white Americans deleted black participation in the war
from the national narrative. See Bibliography for full citations.
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