Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

caped slaves as Union armies moved south, and the development of federal policy
in regard to emancipation and military recruiting. The balance of the book
falls into five parts, arranged to correspond more or less with the advance of
federal armies into Confederate territory. The first section therefore deals with
the Department of the South, where a Union force secured a beachhead in November
1861. There, officers found more than thirty thousand black residents,
whom they first organized as civilian laborers and later recruited as soldiers.
The second section of the book treats the Department of the Gulf, where Union
troops landed at New Orleans in April 1862. The sugar plantations of southern
Louisiana furnished troops that eventually operated along the Gulf Coast, from
the mouth of the Rio Grande to central Florida. The focus of the third section is
on the rest of the Mississippi drainage basin. Four chapters cover the territory
between Fort Scott, Kansas, and northwestern Georgia. North Carolina and Virginia
are the subject of the fourth section. Most of the black regiments raised in
the free states served in these two states; in other parts of the South, black soldiers’
service seldom took them so far from home. The fifth section of the book
deals with the black regiments’ activities between the time of the Confederate
surrender and their muster out. One chapter sketches their efforts on the lower
Rio Grande in response to political turmoil in Mexico, while the other considers
their responsibilities while the last regiments of Civil War volunteers turned over
occupation duties in the defeated South to the Regular Army.
The narrative includes extensive quotations from contemporary documents,
diaries, and private letters. These appear with the original spelling and punctuation
as much as possible, with minimal use of bracketed explanation. Expressions
of racial bigotry occur frequently; they illustrate the prevailing moral climate of
nineteenth-century America and often shed light on the minds of the authors.
When referring to officers’ ranks, I use the rank that appears beneath the
writer’s signature on a letter—often a brevet, or acting, rank. In the case of
Winfield Scott, the commanding general in 1861, whose brevet as lieutenant
general dated from the Mexican War, I use “Lt. Gen.” Since the narrative describes
military operations rather than the careers of individual officers, there
is no attempt to distinguish between rank in the Regular Army and in the U.S.
Volunteers.
Research for the book required a fair amount of travel. Librarians and archivists
at the institutions named in the bibliography extended courteous and efficient
assistance. Staff members of the National Archives, at both College Park,
Maryland, and Washington, D.C., deserve special mention; without their expert
and energetic help, research for this book would not have been possible. Also
helpful were the staffs of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly
the Illinois State Historical Library), the Bowdoin College Library, the Houghton
and Widener Libraries at Harvard University, the Kansas State Historical
Society, the New Bedford Free Public Library, the Rhode Island Historical Society,
the libraries of the University of South Carolina and Syracuse University,
the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., and the Western Reserve Historical
Society. I visited all these sites, although the sources housed there do not appear
in the final version of the text. W. Bart Berger, Richard B. Booth Sr., Lucy B.
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