Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Mustering In—Federal Policy on Emancipation and Recruitment 9
black men and well over eight hundred thousand slaves who would be of military
age by 1863—potentially a formidable addition to the Union’s manpower pool.
Most of the slave population lived in parts of the South still under Confederate
control; but federal armies in 1862 had gained beachheads on the Atlantic Coast,
seized New Orleans, marched through Arkansas, and ensconced themselves firmly
in Nashville and Memphis. The new year was likely to bring further advances by
Union armies and freedom to many more Southern slaves, opening up fertile fields
for recruiters. On 1 January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared free
all slaves in the seceded states, except for those in seven Virginia counties occupied
by Union troops, thirteen occupied Louisiana parishes, and the newly formed
state of West Virginia. The proclamation omitted Tennessee entirely, exempting
slaves there from its provisions. Toward the end of the document, the president announced
cautiously that former slaves would “be received into the armed service
of the United States to garrison forts . . . and other places, and to man vessels of all
sorts in said service.” 18
Among troops who were already in the field, opinions of the government’s plans
to enlist black soldiers varied from unfavorable to cautious. “I am willing to let them
fight and dig if they will; it saves so many white men,” wrote a New York soldier.
Lt. Col. Charles G. Halpine, a Union staff officer in South Carolina, published some
verses in Irish dialect entitled “Sambo’s Right to Be Kilt.” The burden of the poem
was what an Iowa infantry soldier expressed in one sentence of his diary: “If any
African will stand between me and a rebel bullet he is welcome to the honor and the
bullet too.” Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman took a different view: “I thought a soldier
was to be an active machine, a fighter,” he told his brother John, a U.S. senator from
Ohio. “Dirt or cotton will stop a bullet better than a man’s body.” 19
Sherman is often cited as an exemplar of racial bigots who occupied high places
in the Union Army, and with good cause: “I won’t trust niggers to fight yet,” he told
his brother the senator. “I have no confidence in them & don’t want them mixed up
with our white soldiers.” Even so, Sherman had sound military reasons for his disinclination
to raise black regiments. He was the only Union general who had seen
untried soldiers stampede both at Bull Run in July 1861 and, nine months later, on
the first day at Shiloh. Two years’ experience in the field had bred in him a distrust of
new formations. In 1863, he implored both his brother John and Maj. Gen. Ulysses
S. Grant, his immediate superior, to warn the president against creating new, all-conscript
regiments. Drafted men should go to fill up depleted regiments that had been
in the field since 1861, Sherman urged. “All who deal with troops in fact instead of
theory,” he told Grant, “know that the knowledge of the little details of Camp Life is
18 OR, ser. 3, 3: 2–3; James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 50–52; U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of
the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1975), 1: 18.
19 Harry F. Jackson and Thomas F. O’Donnell, Back Home in Oneida: Hermon Clarke and His
Letters (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1965), p. 100. Halpine’s poem is printed in Cornish,
Sable Arm, pp. 229–30. Mildred Throne, ed., The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd, Fifteenth
Iowa Infantry, 1861–1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), p. 119; Brooks
D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William
Tecumseh Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 628.