2.23 The Civil War and Black Communities

At first, Black men were barred from the Union Army. As the war dragged on and the Union needed more soldiers and laborers, that changed. Black regiments began forming in 1862, and the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) called for Black enlistment. Black sailors served in the Union Navy throughout the war.

Of the roughly 200,000 Black men who served, about a quarter (some 50,000) were free Northerners. The other three-quarters, about 150,000, had been freed during the war by Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation. Black men served as soldiers and builders. Black women served as cooks, nurses, laundresses and spies. The required photograph of a washerwoman for the Union Army in Richmond, Virginia, is a reminder of their essential labor.

Enslaved people in the South fled to Union lines whenever they could, weakening the Confederacy from inside. Free Black Northerners raised money for refugees and traveled south to open schools and give medical care.

For many Black men, military service proved they were US citizens who deserved full rights. Charles Remond Douglass, Frederick Douglass's son, enlisted in the famous 54th Massachusetts Infantry; his required portrait (about 1864) shows a soldier claiming that identity.

They served under unequal conditions. Black soldiers were paid about half what white soldiers earned until Congress approved equal pay in 1864; some regiments refused all pay in protest rather than accept less. Black soldiers usually served under white officers. If captured, they risked being enslaved or killed by Confederate forces, as at the Fort Pillow massacre in Tennessee in 1864.

Free Black communities in the North faced violence from people who opposed Black military service and Black equality. In July 1863, during the New York City draft riots, mobs made up largely of Irish immigrant workers, angry at being drafted, attacked Black people and burned an orphanage for Black children.

Black soldiers were proud of their role in saving the Union and ending slavery, but after the war the nation rarely celebrated them. Poetry and photographs preserved the record of their service. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem 'The Colored Soldiers' (1895), a required source, honored their courage and pushed back against accounts that left Black soldiers out of the war's story and ignored what was at stake for Black freedom and citizenship. Dunbar's own father had served in the Union Army.