11 - The Black Military Experience

Summary

The service of more than 200,000 African American men under arms helped tip the balance decisively in favor of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. In sheer numbers alone, they helped to resolve the potential need for soldiers that federal strategists foresaw as early as 1862. But numbers tell only part of the story. Most of these men entered the ranks after the Emancipation Proclamation signaled the Union’s emerging war against slavery. Their staunch support for the new policy and its chief spokesperson – President Abraham Lincoln – helped to bolster popular acceptance of abolition; even more important, their steadfast service both in camp and on the battlefield helped to recreate the nation, to envision and enact more inclusive notions of citizenship and suffrage after the war. Some present-day observers might see these outcomes as a logical outgrowth of ideals present since the founding of the country and of the decades-long struggle against slavery, but few who witnessed events during the 1850s would have considered such a result inevitable. Black people in the North and South viewed the war as an opportunity to advance the causes of freedom and equality but held no illusions that ending slavery – no small feat in itself – would resolve the challenges freedpeople faced to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.