Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
struction. “The colored population is the great available . . . force for restoring
the Union,” the president told Johnson in March 1863. “The bare sight of 50,000
armed and drilled black soldiers upon the banks of the Mississippi would end the
rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight if we but take
hold in earnest?” There is no record of Johnson’s reply, but he was among the least
likely of Union officials to implement a policy of arming black people. Two days
after the president’s note of 26 March, the secretary of war gave Johnson authority
to raise twenty regiments of cavalry and infantry and ten batteries of artillery, but
apart from those General Thomas organized west of the Tennessee River, the state
did not contribute any new regiments to the Union cause until summer. All six of
them were white. 42
In Missouri and Kentucky, which had not seceded and therefore lay outside
the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation, efforts to recruit black soldiers barely
existed. The question of slavery caused bitter divisions among Missouri’s population.
Raids and counterraids by pro-Confederate guerrillas and pro-Union (but also
largely pro-slavery) state militia characterized the war there. During four years of
fighting, the opposing sides met in 1,162 armed clashes, the third largest total of
any state. Only Tennessee and Virginia, which suffered campaigns by the main
armies of both sides, endured more. As a result, even a staunch Republican like
General Samuel Curtis, who commanded the Department of the Missouri in the
spring of 1863, moved cautiously. “We must not throw away any of our Union
strength,” he wrote to a Union sympathizer in St. Joseph. “Bona fide Union men
must be treasured as friends, although they may be pro-slavery. . . . Slavery exists
in Missouri, and it may continue for some time, in spite of all our emancipation
friends can do. While it exists we must tolerate it, and we must allow the civil authorities
to dispose of the question.” 43
Since Missouri lay north and west of most major military operations, scarce
federal resources were stretched to the limit there. Kentucky, on the other hand, lay
squarely between the Northern states and the main Union armies invading the central
South. In order to secure their supply routes, federal officials tried not to annoy
the state’s Unionist slaveholders unless it was to draft slave labor for military
construction projects. Efforts to enlist black Kentuckians for the Army remained
entirely out of the question in the spring of 1863. 44
In the seceded states along the Mississippi River, recruiting was slow during
early spring because much of the country was under water. John L. Mathews,
an Iowa infantryman who would accept a lieutenancy in the 8th Louisiana (AD),
awoke one March morning to find himself surrounded by the river’s overflow.
Mathews, like many Union soldiers, was bemused by the southern climate, flora,
and fauna and wrote that the Mississippi “had made an island of our little camp and
42 OR, ser. 3, 3: 103 (quotations), 105–06; Leroy P. Graf et al., eds., The Papers of Andrew
Johnson, 16 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967–2000), 3: 195, 213; Peter
Maslowski, Treason Must Be Made Odious: Military Occupation and Wartime Reconstruction
in Nashville, Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Millbrook, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1978), pp. 19–26; Dyer,
Compendium, pp. 1639–41.
43 OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 2, pp. 134–35 (quotation); Dyer, Compendium, p. 582. Virginia was
the scene of 2,154 engagements; Tennessee, 1,462. Mississippi (772) and Arkansas (771) were next.
44 WGFL: US, pp. 627–28.