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
Despite its limited scope though, the Proclamation was no empty gesture. In
February 1862, a Union force had entered and occupied Nashville; in April,
New Orleans; in May, Memphis. In October, a few weeks after defeated
Confederates retired from Maryland, a federal army in Kentucky turned back
another invasion attempt at Perryville. Despite Union reversals that December
in both Mississippi and Virginia, the zone of federal dominance was growing
steadily, and with it the zone of freedom. There was every reason to expect
further growth in the coming year. Moreover, the Proclamation finally admitted
black men “into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts . . .
and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.” It had been
nearly forty-three years since a War Department order, issued during John C.
Calhoun’s tenure as secretary of war, banned black enlistments in the Army
entirely. 12
Up and down the Atlantic Coast, from Boston and New York to Hampton
and Norfolk, in the free states and wherever Union troops occupied a southern
town, black people celebrated emancipation on New Year’s Day 1863. They
heard the Proclamation read; they attended prayer meetings; in some places,
they marched in processions. “Some thousands of people” attended a barbecue
and “Freedom Jubilee” at Beaufort, South Carolina, where Col. Thomas W.
Higginson was organizing a regiment of former slaves. At Norfolk, Virginia,
four thousand people followed a band through the streets. Union army bayonets
backed public celebrations like these. Residents of Philadelphia, a city
that had endured three anti-black riots a generation earlier, gave thanks behind
closed doors, in churches and private homes. In Brooklyn, an audience of
blacks and whites gathered at a Methodist church to hear three white speakers
and the black author and lecturer William Wells Brown. “Rejoicing meetings
were advertised . . . in nearly every city and large town,” Brown wrote, recalling
the occasion not long after the war. 13
The idea of black men donning military uniforms gained public support after the
summer of 1862. In April of that year, the Confederacy had begun conscription, and
the necessity for a draft in the North became plain when states took months to answer
the president’s call in July for three hundred thousand more volunteers. “Recruiting for
[three-year enlistments] is terribly hard,” the governor of Maine complained. He and
other Northern governors praised Lincoln’s September announcement of Emancipation
in the coming year and emphasized the direct connection to military manpower
needs. To have delayed Emancipation, twelve of the governors said in a letter to the
president, “would have discriminated against the wife who is compelled to surrender
12 OR, ser. 3, 3: 3. See also Richard M. McMurry, The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a
New Civil War Paradigm (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002), pp. 50–51.
13 New York Times, 3 January 1863; Baltimore Sun, 3 January 1863; William W. Brown,
The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2003 [1867]), p. 62 (“Rejoicing”); William Dusinberre, Civil War Issues in Philadelphia,
1856–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), pp. 152–53; Robert F. Engs,
Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 36; Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal and
Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
p. 255 (“Some thousands”).