Circa1865

In early 1863 Gen. Nathaniel Banks commanded occupied New Orleans and had to deal with problems between his New England troops and colored soldiers of the former Louisiana Native Guards – reconstituted as “Gen. Butler’s Native Guards.” The original Louisiana Native Guards of the city, officers and men, were all free, and in May 1861 were mustered into State service. They became the first black unit in the Civil War, serving a Confederate State. After conquering New Orleans Butler worked to change this during his tenure with most free blacks leaving the unit and replaced by contrabands.

Butler’s replacement, Gen. Banks, was a Waltham, Massachusetts native who shared the deep prejudices of his fellow New Englanders.

Colorphobia at New Orleans

“British-born Colonel Leonard Currie of the 133^rd New York Infantry told his men “to continue in the performance of their duty until such time as the regiment is brought in contact with [black soldiers] by guard duty, drills or otherwise.” If that happened, he promised to march them back to their camp so as not to cause “their self-confidence or manliness to be lowered by contact with an inferior race.” The colonel’s prejudices were shared by the post commander, Brigadier General Cuvier Grover, who refuse to recognize Butler’s Native Guards 3^rd Regiment as part of the Union army and would not allow it to draw clothing, blankets, or pay.

The volatile situation exploded within days of the 3^rd Regiment’s arrival when a black captain reported for duty as officer of the day. The guard was composed of white soldiers from the 13^th Maine Regiment of Colonel George Foster Shepley, a Saco, Maine native and Harvard graduate. When the black captain arrived to inspect the guard, the soldiers refused to recognize his authority. The white soldiers were willing to “obey every order consistent with their manhood,” a news correspondent reported, “but as to acknowledging a [black man] their superior, by any virtue of the shoulder straps he might wear, they would not.” The situation quickly turned ugly. The black officer pressed his authority; the white soldiers grounded their rifles in protest and threatened to kill him should he attempt to coerce their obedience.” (National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 28, 1863).

Gen. Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, the new department commander at New Orleans, soon heard of the episode but did not punish the mutinous white soldiers from the 13^th Maine. Banks called the black officers for an interview, listened to their grievances, then instructed them that it was not the government’s policy to commission blacks as officers in the US Army. Banks then recommended they all resign to avoid the embarrassment of being kicked out. Uncertain of their future, the black officers agreed and all sixteen resigned and to their surprise soon found that their white replacements had already been named to take their place.”

(Louisiana Native Guards, James G. Hollandsworth, LSU Press, 1995, pp. 44-45)

Tale of Two Black Seamen

In early 1864 Brigadier-General Robert F. Hoke was tasked with liberating the enemy-occupied and fortified town of Plymouth on the Roanoke River in northeastern North Carolina. He began formulating his attack with the naval assistance of the still-incomplete ironclad ram CSS Albemarle, which was literally built in a cornfield well upriver from Plymouth.

The unfinished ship had its steam up at early dawn on April 18^th and departed for Plymouth with final construction still ongoing. The Albemarle was instrumental in the enemy’s defeat as it bombarded forts with its 6.4-inch pivot-mounted Brooke guns while Hoke’s brave North Carolinians surrounded and rushed the enemy.

At least one of the black crewmembers on the ironclad was free-black teenager Benjamin H. Gray of Bertie County who was first assigned to the Wilmington Squadron warships and detached in the Spring of 1864 to the Albemarle. His position aboard was carrying bags of gunpowder to the two Brooke guns from the lower magazine. This was not unusual as free-black crewmen were common on Southern vessels; the CSS Chicora at least three black men serving aboard as well as the raider Alabama.

Ship’s carpenter Edward Walsh served on a long string of blockade runners operating between Wilmington and Bermuda. He was captured on the runner Elsie and sent to prison at Baltimore, and after his release made his way to Halifax where he signed aboard the runner Constance, then back to Wilmington where he joined the crew of the runner Annie. By the end of the war, he had run the blockade 16 times, had two ships sunk under him, and was aboard two captured by the enemy.

Dr. Edward Smith of American University has estimated that by February 1865, 1150 free-black seamen served aboard Southern warships, which amounted to about 20 percent of total naval personnel. A postwar resident of Bertie County, Gray was a Confederate pensioner; after his death in 1917 his widow Margaret received it.

Sources:

(Bermuda and the Civil War, C. Diechmann, Bermuda National Trust, 2003; NCDNR)

The passage below records Lincoln’s narrow, sectional view of the reason war came in 1861. The war came not because the black man was in America, but due to Lincoln raising an unconstitutional army with troops from equally guilty Republican governors and invading Virginia. Three months lapsed before Congress met to review what the new president had done without authority, with the latter approving his actions under threat of arrest and confinement by Lincoln’s private military.

Lincoln’s colonization scheme for black “contrabands” who were not wanted in the north, revealed his true feeling toward the black race. This naïve plan ran into difficulty as speculators overextended themselves and as the existing countries of the region threatened war against what they saw as a clever scheme of Yankee imperialism. This scheme of colonization is well-covered in the recent book “Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here” (Thuersam) from Shotwell Publishing.

Lincoln’s Caribbean Colonization Plan

“In August 1862, a committee of free blacks headed by Edward M. Thomas, president of the Anglo-African Institution for the Encouragement of Industry and Art, was invited to the White House. Introduced to Lincoln by the Reverend James Mitchell, the federal Commissioner of Emigration, the committee was there to hear the president’s arguments for black colonization.

Waiving the question of right or wrong, and implying that blacks were as much at fault as whites, Lincoln pointed to the long-standing and apparently permanent antipathy between the races.  Each race, in his opinion, suffered from the presence of the other. Not only were the vast majority of blacks held as slaves, but even free blacks were not treated as equals by white men, not could they ever expect to be. “The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.”

Overlooking the inability of his own race to confront the reciprocal problems of slavery and equality, Lincoln then blamed the blacks for the fact that whites were “cutting one another’s throats” in a civil war. “But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or another.”

Physical removal seemed the best solution. Urging blacks to emulate George Washington’s sacrifices during the Revolution and asking for colonization leaders “capable of thinking as white men,” Lincoln painted a glowing picture of the attractions of founding a colony in Central America. The region Lincoln had in mind, a site on the Isthmus of Chiriqui in the Caribbean, was far closer to the United States than the original black colony of Liberia in Africa.

The site was thought to contain rich coal deposits to provide jobs for black settlers and profits for the Northern speculators who had an interest in these mines. In what he hoped would clinch his case, Lincoln told his black audience that there would be no color prejudice in racially-mixed Central America and that the climate would be beneficial to what Northerners assumed was the peculiar adaptability of blacks to the tropics.”

(Flawed Victory – A New Perspective on the Civil War. William L. Barney. University Press of America, 1980, pp. 60-62)

An honest appraisal of events leading up to the national convulsion of 1860-1865 begins with understanding the American mind of that era. The literature is clear that Northerners rid themselves of slaves in their midst by selling them southward and did not want the black man among them – but restricted to the South. Northern workingmen too feared black freedmen coming northward seeking employment at wages less than that which white men would accept. But war came and the black man solved Lincoln’s dwindling enlistment problem as refugee freedmen were put in the ranks; white veterans were showered with generous bounties after 1863 to reenlist and eventually muster out – if they lived – rather wealthy men.

The Americans of 1860

“There is no evidence to show that the American people of 1860, not only those living in slaveholding States, but also the vast majority of Americans living in the former slaveholding States of the north and others, thought the Negro capable of skipping over the tendencies which the white man had derived from thousands of years of his well-developed civilization, and passing with or without a few years training, from the mental condition and inheritance of barbarians and slaves into full equality with the free citizens of a self-governing republic, whose laws, traditions, habits and customs were totally alien, far more alien than those of the Japanese and Chinese.

The Americans of that day did not feel that a mere statute law permitting the Negro to equal the white man in autonomous government could enable him to do so. The slave system was considered fundamentally not as a matter of morals, of right and wrong, but merely as an economic arrangement which was essentially the outgrowth of an inequality and difference in inheritance between the average white and black man.

It is safe to say that all of the Southerners and most of the Northerners knew that the Negroes were not a race resembling angels in ability, to pass from one extreme to the other without passing through the middle.

Therefore, it cannot be said that there was a basic antagonism between the Northern and Southern people in regard to the slavery question in the Southern States. If there was any real vital difference between the North and South, it was on what constituted a sectional control of the federal government. And Northerners in 1860 failed to realize that the Republican party of 1860 answered perfectly to Washington’s definition of a geographical party against the formation of which he solemnly warned his fellow-countrymen in his Farewell Address.”

(The Peaceable Americans of 1860-1861: A Study in Public Opinion. Mary Scrugham, Columbia University, 1921, pp. 57-60)

The North’s use of generous bounties for paid volunteers and resorting to the of black slaves as troops was an unmistakable admission that popular support for the war against the American South was nearly extinct by 1863.  Once Lincoln allowed dislocated and captured slaves to be counted against States troop quotas, Northern State agents swarmed into the occupied South in search of (and arguing over) black recruits who would leave white Northern men safe from Lincoln’s threat of conscription.

It is ironic that a Pennsylvania training camp for black recruits was named “Camp William Penn,” a slaveholder who founded the colony which bears his name.

Black Recruits Unwelcome in Philadelphia

“In spite of announcements assuring blacks of pay equal to that of the white soldier, actual practice belied this promise. White enlisted men received thirteen dollars a month with a clothing allowance of an additional three dollars and fifty cents. Black soldiers, however, were paid only ten dollars per month, three dollars of which might be deducted for clothing.

Blacks were also generally denied bounties. Bounties were cash bonuses paid to volunteers by federal, State, or local authorities as an incentive to enlist. These bounties often totaled more than five hundred dollars or more, a generous amount exceeding the average annual wages for a Northern worker.  The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania eventually contributed a token bounty of ten dollars to each black recruit.

The War Department had also refused to commission black officers. A manyfold rationale stood behind this decision. First, the concept of black troops would be more acceptable [in the North] if white men exclusively were permitted to become officers in such units. Organizing “colored” regiments would create thousands of new positions for regimental officers. The awarding of these commissions to whites could create more support for the program and could reward those who had already shown support.

The [black recruits] of Camp William Penn constantly experienced another reminder of their inferior status through the discriminatory policy of the streetcars of Philadelphia. Of the nineteen streetcar and suburban railroad companies that operated in and around Philadelphia, eleven outright refused to permit blacks to ride.  The other eight tolerated black riders but required them to stand on the front platform with the driver.”

The “Grand Review” and battalion drills had all been executed in the friendly confines of the training camp itself. Colonel Wagner and the other [white] commanders recognized the risks they would face when their units left their camp. Earlier in the year, on September 18, the 3^rd Regiment of US Colored Infantry marched through Philadelphia on its way to war. At that time the mayor and concerned officials compelled them to march unarmed and in civilian clothes.

[An] underlying tension still simmered because of the many residents who harbored deep prejudices.  This threatening situation had caused the mayor to delay an earlier planned parade of the 3^rd US Colored Troops even after it had been publicly advertised.  During the 6^th’s [US Colored Regiment] parade the fear of violence prompted marching officers to carry loaded revolvers to be used in an emergency. The enlisted [black] men, carrying musket and bayonet, “were not trusted with any ammunition.”

(Strike the Blow for Freedom, The 6^th US Colored Infantry in the Civil War, James M. Paradis, White Mane Books, 1998, pp. 17-29)

The newest federal holiday was to recognize the June 19, 1865, emancipation of enslaved black people in Texas. On that date northern Gen. Gordon Grainger of New York told black slaves who were not already aware of how to gain their freedom, of their new status in the US. These remaining slaves in Texas had not already taken advantage of the well-known “Mexican Caanan” a short distance southward.

South to the Promised Land

“Historian Alice Baumgartner states ‘After independence from Spain, in 1821, ‘Mexico passed these really radical antislavery laws, and Mexicans at all levels of society were serious about enforcing them. This was well-known to enslaved people on the US side of the border.’

In 1849, Mexico’s Congress decreed foreign slaves free “by the act of stepping on the national territory.” This soon became common knowledge among enslaved people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and what would later become Oklahoma.  They envisioned what historian calls a “Mexican Canaan” across the Rio Grande – a promised land where they could be free.

They made the arduous journey through Texas . . . In the 1850s a dozen slaves were reaching Matamoros, Mexico every month. Two-hundred seventy arrived in Laredo, in Tamaulipas, just across the border from Laredo, Texas.”

(South to the Promised Land, Richard Grant. Smithsonian Magazine, July/August 2022, pg. 82; 84-85)

Policemen in School Corridors?

The US News & World Report, December 6, 1957, pg. 94.

“Juvenile crime in New York public schools no becomes so serious that a grand jury wants to put police inside each school. “Blackboard jungles,” mostly in Negro and Puerto Rican areas, give most difficulty. Crime complaints exceed 2100 this year. Must schools be policed? A top official says, “We do not want Little Rock in New York City.” Yet trouble is mounting.”

NEW YORK CITY – Serious trouble in the public schools of the nation’s largest city broke into the open last week with a recommendation for drastic action.

Delinquency of all kinds had been growing with 1280 arrests made on New York City school grounds thus far this year. These had been for offenses ranging from petty thievery to rape and murder. A special grand jury investigating lawlessness in Brooklyn’s public schools came up on November 25 with this terse recommendation:

“This grand jury recommends that a uniformed New York City policeman be assigned to all schools throughout the city to patrol the corridors, the stairways and the recreation yards as a preventative measure.”

Reaction to the proposal was swift. New York City Superintendent of Schools William Jansen called it “unthinkable.”

Nevertheless, there was agreement that the situation was serious and close to being out of hand. The judge presiding over the grand jury, Samuel Leibowitz stated that “conditions were alarming and that school authorities have been utterly incapable of coping with the situation.”

Most of the “difficult” schools as listed by the city’s Board of Education are situated in predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Student achievement levels there are generally below the average for the city and discipline is a major problem. Teachers are reported to be frequently defied by pupils and, in some instances, to be threatened with physical harm by gang members who invade the classrooms.

The at-school crime that finally touched off the grand jury probe occurred in September at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. There, a 17-year-old Negro boy hurled a bottle of lye into a classroom, partially blinding one boy and splattering 18 other pupils and the teacher.

Fear of being assigned to a difficult school has hurt teacher recruiting efforts although the extent of the damage cannot be measured. The facts now coming to light about New York’s school problem indicate that troubles here run deep, and serious school problems, it appears, are not confined to the American South.”

The antebellum idea of compensated emancipation for slaves never gained traction as the North would not agree to help fund the repatriation of Africans’ they themselves had grown wealthy importing to the Americas for 100 years or more. Abraham Lincoln was an avid proponent of colonization once his armies overran the South and created refugees, knowing the North would not accept them flooding northward. Lincoln’s Caribbean colonization schemes are mentioned below and further detailed in the soon-to-be-released “Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here: Key West’s Civil War,” by Bernhard Thuersam.  www.shotwellpublishing.com.

Emancipation and Colonization

Hugh Talmadge Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome well-explained antebellum views toward slavery in their History of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1954). They wrote that slavery was the most serious antebellum controversy between North and South with people in both sections criticizing it as a moral, economic and social evil. But importantly, the United States Constitution recognized those held to labor and left the States with complete authority over the question within their own borders. Though every Northern State took action to begin gradual emancipation by 1804 – with many selling their slaves southward – no Southern State followed suit because of economic, social and racial considerations.

Lefler and Newsome wrote that “Many Southerners opposed slavery and realized its dangerous possibilities, but most of the early Southern opposition to the slavery was conditioned upon the “antislavery” idea of gradual emancipation to owners, and colonization to Africa or elsewhere. The colonization plan, sponsored by various manumission societies, proved impractical, though Liberia on the African coast was begun as a result of a few thousand Negroes being colonized there by the joint efforts of these societies and acts of Congress.”

The question of colonization was on the mind of Abraham Lincoln once his 1861 invasion destroyed Upper South plantations and produced numerous black refugees.  It was Lincoln’s early intention to emancipate by decree through constitutional amendments and compensating owners – but this failed to gain support in his fractious party.

Author Michael J. Douma has written extensively of Lincoln’s colonization plans and noting that “Historians have long known that in the summer of 1862 Lincoln announced his intention to negotiate with foreign powers concerning the colonization of freedmen abroad.” For the next two years federally-funded initiatives arose to settle freedmen in Chiriqui [Panama] and Haiti – in addition to the British Honduras, Guiana and Dutch Surinam. These talks were quite serious and continued even after the war, anticipating the transport of freedmen to these islands as laborers.

The Danes also expressed interest in colonizing unwanted contrabands to work their plantations on St. Croix, now the US Virgin Islands. In 1862 Seward signed an agreement with the Danes to take all captured aboard slave ships in the Atlantic to St. Croix to work as plantation labor despite Danish acknowledgement that workers on the island would not find conditions much different from previous slavery, but they would be technically “free.” To facilitate the process of removal the Lincoln authorized Danish ships to sail down the US east coast to recruit freedmen. The Danish minister viewed South Carolina as a highly fertile recruiting ground which was seconded by Secretary of State Seward. The Dutch were also fascinated with freedmen and actively sought them as labor for their colony of Suriname on South America’s northeast coast.

Lincoln and Seward were not the only proponents of colonization as they were ably supported by leading Republicans Charles Sumner, Francis Blair, Preston King and Benjamin Wade. Though supportive before 1863, all became aware of the value of black troops used to invade the South as white volunteers became hard to find or had to be paid astronomical financial bounties to enlist. Few black men stepped forward and many had to be coerced, but by war’s end the colonization to the Caribbean regained speed.

The idea of some States using military force to coerce another into remaining in the political union against its will, and ”reconstructing” if it dared exercise independence, would have bewildered the Founders. The Tenth Amendment itself, inserted for the express purpose of stating that any authority or power not specifically delineated in the Constitution as a power of the federal government, was reserved to the States.

Fielding its first presidential candidate in 1854, it required only 6 years for the new Republican party to drive one State out of the Union, and one month more for several others to depart as well. Its first presidential candidate gained victory through a plurality of 39% and more votes cast against rather than for him. Thus installed in the White House, this new President waged war upon the States, which is treason as defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution he was sworn to uphold.

Subjugated Hostile and Belligerent Enemies

“In April, 1862, [Michigan] Congressman Fernando Beaman claimed that as a consequence of rebellion a Southern State “ceased to be a member of the Union . . . as a State.” Therefore, Beaman reasoned, Congress must establish a provisional or territorial government in each of the seceding States, before it could again exercise full power. One of the first to take “an advanced and correct position on the question of reconstruction,” Beaman was congratulated by Charles Sumner for his views.

Because of its emphasis on the presidential role in Reconstruction, Lincoln’s 10% plan inspired scant respect among Michigan congressmen. John Longyear claimed that . . . only Congress had the authority to admit new States. The Southerners, stated Longyear, should be treated as subjugated enemies. Until a majority became loyal, [Senator Jacob] Howard advocated keeping the South out of the Union and in “tutelage” up to twenty years.” Howard reasoned that a hostile and belligerent community could not claim the right to elect members of Congress. “Are public enemies,” he asked, “entitled to be represented in the Legislature of the United States?”

[Senator Zachariah Chandler growled], “a secessionist traitor is beneath a Negro. I would let a loyal Negro vote. I would let him testify; I would let him fight; I would let him do any other good thing, and I would exclude a secession traitor.”

[Like other Radicals who disliked Lincoln], Senator Chandler reacted [to his death] in a calculating manner. “I believe that the Almighty continued Mr. Lincoln in office as long as he was useful . . .” Had Lincoln’s policy been carried out, he believed that Jefferson Davis and his followers would be back in the Senate; “but now, gloated the Senator, “their chance to stretch hemp [is] better than for the Senate . . .”

Radical Republican Motivation: A Case History, George M. Blackburn, Journal of Negro History, Vol. LIV, No. 2, April 1969, pp. 111-113)

Northern Capt. John William DeForest of Connecticut was employed in the postwar as an officer in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Greenville, South Carolina.  A man fully unsuited to his task and condescending to his charges, he referred to his district as “his satrapy” and fully-acknowledged his “native infamy as a Yankee” among South Carolinians who understandably despised he and his government. Nonetheless, he did recognize those at the top of the South’s social scale — “chivalrous Southrons.” He knew that this aristocracy – not unlike this own aristocracy in Connecticut – enjoyed the advantages of tradition and breeding. He appreciated their sense of noblesse oblige, consideration of others, grace of bearing, genuine courtesy, and personal courage. And he did not miss the hot tempers which he termed “pugnacity,” and emphasis on virility.

A Triton Among Minnows

“Southern chivalry, you see, Madame,” said Mr. Calhoun Burden of Greenville, South Carolina to the wife of a United States surgeon.

Mr. Burden, a stoutish, middle-aged gentleman, richly flavored with Durham tobacco and Pickens whiskey, and as proud of himself in his suit of homespun as if it were broadcloth, had called in a reconstructing spirit on the Yankee family and in the course of conversation had found it desirable to put a question to the colored servant-girl.

Making a solemn bow to the mistress of the house, he said, “With your permission, Madame”; then added, in an impressive parenthesis, “Southern chivalry, you see, Madame”; then delivered his query.

That no such delicate behavior was known among the Vandals north of Mason and Dixon’s line; that it could not easily be matched in Europe except among the loftiest nobility; that it was especially and eminently Southern chivalry – such was the faith of Mr. Calhoun Burden.

It was a grotesque and yet not a very exaggerated exhibition of the ancient sectional and personal pride of the Southerner. He never forgot that he represented a high-type of humanity and that it was his duty not to let that type suffer by his representation. In the company of Yankees and foreigners he always bore in mind that he was a triton among minnows, and he endeavored to so carry himself as that the minnows should take note of the superiority of the triton character.

In men of native intelligence and high breeding this self-respect produces a very pleasing manner, an ease which is not assumption, a dignity which is not hauteur, consideration for the vanity of others, grace of bearing, and fluency of speech.”

(A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, J. Croushore/David Potter, Archon Books, 1968, pp. 173-174)