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The Role of African Americans in the Civil War
Contributing teacher:
Bruce Baskind
Time period: 1861–65
Point
One of the most important reasons that Eric Foner sees the Emancipation Proclamation—proclaimed in September 1862 but not in effect until January 1, 1863—as the turning point of the Civil War (1861–65) is that it is with this Proclamation that enlistment and use of African American soldiers began in earnest. The war had not been going well for the North, and war weariness was becoming a factor. The introduction of some 200,000 black troops—about ten percent of the total Union force—injected life, purpose, and enthusiasm into the Union war effort, enough for Foner to see them as crucial in the winning of the war.
The role African Americans played in the war and the heroism they displayed on the battlefield "placed the question of black citizenship on the national agenda," pointing the nation in the direction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Black participation in the war also changed President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65), who insisted that the Confederacy treat black and white prisoners of war equally.
Counterpoint
Although there has been no major attack on the view that African Americans played a decisive role in winning the war, it is also true that, with the exception of W. E. B. DuBois in Black Reconstruction (Philadelphia: Saifer, 1935), there were no historians writing prior to 1960 who would have agreed with Foner. Prior to the rise of the civil-rights movement in the mid-1950s, professional historians simply had been uninterested in the behavior of African Americans, either as slaves or as soldiers. So when Dudley Taylor Cornish wrote The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 1966), he was a bit astonished that "the history of the Negro soldier in the Union Army has remained an obscure chapter in American history." Although Cornish wrote what he considered to be the first comprehensive, professional history of African American soldiers in the Civil War, he stopped short of calling their participation decisive.
Various other culprits for the Southern defeat have been espoused. Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (New York: Collier Books, 1960), is an elegant collection of essays that captures the state of historical thinking at that time. Richard N. Current, for example, argues that the fundamental economic superiority of the North was the decisive factor. T. Harry Williams focuses on the deficiencies of Southern military leadership. Norman A. Graebner explains why the South could not take advantage of help by either Great Britain or France, which was so desperately needed for victory. David Donald sees an excess of democracy and a lack of military discipline in the South as the causes for her defeat. David M. Potter argues that the deficiencies of Jefferson Davis as a civil and military leader were crucial.
An interpretation that would find African American soldiers playing a decisive role in the outcome of the war, regard the ideas and behavior of black soldiers as being important, and consider the consequences of their role would await the 1980s with the publication of the work of Ira Berlin and others in The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), series 2 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. This argument can also be found in very accessible essay form in another book by Ira Berlin and others, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). One can find further confirmation of this point of view, as well as an excellent selection of- documents and teaching strategies, in a book by William Friedheim, with Ronald Jackson, Joshua Brown, et al. Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: The New Press, 1996).
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