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
moved beyond the still-loyal border states and reached well into the Confederacy,
public opinion in the North had matured enough to allow Congress to pass an act
that prohibited soldiers from returning escaped slaves to their masters. 2
By that summer, Lincoln had decided on a policy of Emancipation. He waited
to announce it until Union arms had turned back a Confederate thrust into Maryland.
Even then, he declined to alienate the white population in parts of the South
that federal troops had already occupied by freeing slaves there. The Emancipation
Proclamation applied only to those slaves who were beyond the reach of Union authority.
Nevertheless, the steady advance of federal armies assured that many more
of the thousands still enslaved would be free before another year ended. Vicksburg
and Port Hudson fell in July 1863, allowing Union control of the Mississippi River;
Chattanooga, a rail center on the upper Tennessee River, followed two months
later. In January 1864, federal soldiers crossed the state of Mississippi from west
to east and back again before boarding riverboats and railroad cars to join a Union
drive into northwestern Georgia. Each of these advances added thousands more
names to the rolls of freedpeople working for the Union, whether on plantations
growing food and cotton; as teamsters and longshoremen for Army staff officers;
or, finally, as soldiers themselves.
The question arose at once: what functions should these new troops perform?
Moving as cautiously as ever, Lincoln specified in the Emancipation Proclamation
that they were “to garrison forts . . . and other places.” Yet black soldiers in Kansas
and South Carolina had already undertaken duties of a different kind, escorting
wagon trains and conducting raids well outside the limits of federal garrisons. Several
times, they had exchanged shots with the enemy. As happened often during a
war in which federal policy evolved in reaction to events, practices in the field were
far in advance of pronouncements from Washington. 3
Assignment of new black regiments to stations in the wake of the federal advance
had sound precedents. Union generals had always taken great care to protect
their lines of communications. Even before the first shots were fired, Lt. Gen. Winfield
Scott thought that one-third of the force necessary to crush secession would
have to serve at garrisons in occupied territory. In December 1863, the Army of
the Potomac counted 94,151 officers and men present, while those assigned to the
Defenses of Washington numbered 33,905, including 12 white regiments of heavy
artillery—more than the number of black artillery regiments raised to protect river
ports from Paducah to New Orleans. Together with federal garrisons in Maryland
and along the line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia, soldiers
guarding the rear of the Army of the Potomac amounted to more than two-thirds the
strength of the offensive force. The situation was similar west of the Appalachians,
where the XVI Corps, at Memphis and other points in Tennessee, nearly equaled
in size to the rest of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army, camped at more advanced
posts in Alabama and Mississippi. Stationed around Nashville were more
2 On competition between military and civilian demands for black laborers, see above, Chapters
2, 5–8.
3 The text of the Emancipation Proclamation in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of
the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 3, 3: 2–3 (hereafter cited as OR).