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
number of lynchings in one state, Kentucky, nearly doubled, from eleven in 1867
to twenty-one in 1868. 12
Programs to ensure the well-being of freedpeople also lost the forceful backing
of public opinion. As the attention of federal officials shifted from the South to the
West, so did that of many Quakers and New England intellectuals who had formed
the backbone of the abolitionist movement. The object of these philanthropists was
not economic expansion, but reform of the Office of Indian Affairs. Civil service
reform and other causes also attracted the attention of former abolitionists. During
1869, while the states went through the process of ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment
to the Constitution, intended to safeguard the voting rights of black men,
reformers engaged in acrimonious debates about the voting rights of women. In
1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, the American Anti-Slavery
Society announced its own dissolution. After the achievement of their main goal,
the society’s members may not have seen a clear road ahead. Indeed, regarding
“the Negro’s . . . position in the political arena,” the editor of The Nation could
write as early as July 1865, “everybody is heartily tired of discussing his condition
and his rights.” 13
How did black soldiers themselves fare after they received their discharges?
Most lived quietly as private citizens. By 1890, when the federal census counted
53,799 surviving black Civil War veterans, more than twelve thousand of them
were still working as common laborers, with nearly twice that many employed in
agriculture, either as hired hands or as farmers in their own right. More than seventeen
hundred were teamsters, and a like number domestic servants. Skilled laborers
included 1,250 carpenters, 596 masons, and 559 blacksmiths. 14
The census also recorded 844 surviving black soldiers as clergymen. A comparative
handful of veterans also went into politics at various levels. Of the men
named in this book, the only officeholder was Prince Rivers, one of the noncommissioned
officers who accepted the colors of the 1st South Carolina on New Year’s
Day 1863. The regimental surgeon described him as “black as the ace of spades
and a man of remarkable executive ability.” While in uniform, Rivers exerted his
influence off duty to encourage the men of his regiment to save their pay. After the
war, he was a delegate to South Carolina’s constitutional convention and served
three terms in the legislature. There, he was no more venal than other members, insisting
that he and other members from the Piedmont sold their votes only to keep
Low Country delegates from getting all the money. Rivers also was involved in
12 George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and
“Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 307–08.
13 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper
& Row, 1988), pp. 446–49; Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government
and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 496–500; Michael L.
Benedict, “Reform Republicans and the Retreat from Reconstruction,” in The Facts of Reconstruction:
Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, eds. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr. (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 53–77; The Nation quoted in David W. Blight, Race and
Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 53.
14 Report of the Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890, Part 2, 52d Cong., 1st sess., H.
Misc. Doc. 340, pt. 19 (serial 3,019), pp. 807–09.