Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Mustering In—Federal Policy on Emancipation and Recruitment 7
slaves are capable of bearing arms and performing efficient military service, it is
the right . . . of this Government to arm and equip them, and employ their services
against the rebels, under proper military regulations, discipline, and command,”
he wrote in a draft of his annual report, toward the end of a long passage in which
he compared slave property with other property that might be used in rebellion or
impounded by the government. Lincoln made Cameron rewrite the passage, eliminating
all reference to black military service, before its publication. 12
Still, the North was home to vocal abolitionists, although such radicals were
themselves the object of other whites’ suspicion and animosity. “Wicked acts of
abolitionists have done the Union cause more harm . . . than anything the Rebel
chief and his Congress could possibly have done,” one Indiana legislator remarked
while denouncing emancipation. Nevertheless, abolitionists thrived in Boston and
Philadelphia, cities that were home to major publishers and magazines with national
circulation. They campaigned untiringly to sway public opinion across the
North by means of lectures, sermons, speeches, and newspaper editorials while in
Congress men like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens wielded influence on
behalf of their ideas. 13
As Union armies began to penetrate Confederate territory in 1862, slaves fled
to take refuge with the invaders. A few Northern generals with profound antislavery
convictions tried to raise regiments of former slaves, but their efforts were
thwarted by worries at the highest levels of government that such moves would
alienate potentially loyal Southerners and drive the central border state, Kentucky,
into the Confederacy. A quip attributed to Lincoln, “I would like to have God on
my side, but I must have Kentucky,” remains apocryphal, but it sums up nicely the
predicament of Union strategists. What finally tipped the balance in favor of black
recruitment was the Union Army’s demand for men. 14
During the first summer of the war, Congress authorized a force of half a million
volunteers to suppress the rebellion. More than seven hundred thousand responded
by the end of 1861, but in late June 1862, only 432,609 officers and men
were present for duty—an attrition rate of almost 39 percent even before many
serious battles had been fought. Lincoln mentioned this in his call to the state governors
for another one hundred fifty thousand men on 30 June 1862. The governors
responded so cordially that the president doubled the call the next day, but this
12 OR, ser. 3, 1: 107 (“300 reliable”), 133 (“no intention”), 348; Edward McPherson, ed., The
Political History of the United States of America During the Great Rebellion (Washington, D.C.:
Philp & Solomons, 1864), p. 249 (“If it shall”). See OR, ser. 3, 1: 524, 609, for offers of enlistment
from New York and Michigan during the summer and fall. For instances in Ohio, see Versalle F.
Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons: A Black Infantry Regiment in the Civil War (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1999), pp. 2–3; for Pennsylvania, J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering
Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), p. 45. Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, pp. 53–55, outlines a view that
was common among antebellum whites that the innate savagery of black people required forcible
restraint.
13 James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil
War and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 75–93; Thornbrough,
Indiana in the Civil War Era, p. 197 (quotation).
14 Richard M. McMurry, The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002), p. 94 (quotation).