Black Soldiers and Union War Victories (1864—1865)
Black Soldiers and Union War Victories (1864—1865)
Following the victory at Vicksburg, President Abraham Lincoln wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant, encouraging him to expand recruit of freed slaves into the Union Army. Lincoln now recognized that black soldiers were critical to eventual Union victory. He told Grant that they were “a resource which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest. It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us.” Grant agreed. He conveyed his “hearty support” for “arming the negro” to Lincoln.
This, with emancipation of the negro, is the heavyest [sic] blow yet given the Confederacy…. By arming the negro we have added a powerful ally.(McPherson, “Tried by War” 202)
In May of 1864 African American soldiers accompanied Union General William Tecumseh Sherman as he fought to take Atlanta, Georgia from Confederate forces and then began his march through the heart of Georgia and to the Atlantic coast where he captured Savannah and eventually Charleston, South Carolina in the winter of 1864 and 1865. Sherman and his troops burned and destroyed nearly everything in their path and freed thousands of slaves in the process. Further to the west, a black soldier from a Rhode Island regiment wrote about the fury he saw in the eyes of the white population of another occupied Southern city, New Orleans, Louisiana, when they saw black troops. At the same time, he expressed the pride he felt as he walked the streets of the occupied city:
In the city of New Orleans, we could see signs of smothered hate and prejudice to both our color and present character as Union soldiers. But, for once in his life, your humble correspondent walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of a southern city! And he did this without being required to take off his cap at every step, or to give all the side–walks to those lordly princes of the sunny south, the planters’ sons! (McPherson, “Negro’s Civil War”: 213–14; Carson et al. 226)
In early April 1865, the Confederacy was in its death throes. The President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, evacuated Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital on Sunday, April 2 as Union forces approached. Two days later, President Abraham Lincoln walked through the streets of the vanquished city. Black slaves celebrated the arrival of the President and the Union army. Black Union soldiers, many of them former slaves, joined the slaves near a former slave auction site and jail. While the crowd listened to a black army chaplain preach a message of universal freedom, they suddenly heard the shouts of imprisoned slaves who were left behind when the Confederates evacuated. The black soldiers released the men and women who praised God or “master Abe” as they walked the streets of Richmond as free people.(Davis, 298)(1)
Soon after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865, black soldiers return