His Home Guard unit, alongside others formed in cities throughout the North, were meant to lead the way.Ī number of black abolitionists, however, refused to partake in such efforts. Through their sacrifices on behalf of the nation, Green believed, African Americans could turn a war for Union into one for freedom. Black enlistment, he hoped, would change things for the better. “Our injuries in many respects are great,” Green summed up. Racial prejudices remained rife, and slavery itself continued in the four Border States that had remained in the Union. Emancipation, not to mention black rights, was not on its agenda. The Lincoln Administration, he knew, fought solely to preserve the Union, bent on restoring rebellious Confederate states to the nation intact. In doing so, Green stressed that he was not settling for the Union war as it was. In Philadelphia, Green led the way in organizing a volunteer regiment, which would then offer its services to military authorities. To that end, black reformers organized community meetings encouraging the formation of drilling regiments and reserve guard militias. “Our men are ready and eager to play some honorable part in the great drama,” Douglass declared. Such inroads, she hoped, would benefit not only her male counterparts, but her entire race as well.įollowing the outbreak of the Civil War, Douglass, Green and other likeminded black abolitionists pressed for African Americans to offer their immediate services to the Union. Charlotte Forten, a young educator and the scion of a famed Philadelphia activist family, recognized that “regiments of freedmen” could demonstrate to the nation that “true manhood has no limitations of color,” thereby helping create a more egalitarian future. Black abolitionist women, however, also joined in the campaign. “Let the black man get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder,” Douglass concluded, and none could deny him the “right of citizenship in the United States.” Military service, he made clear, was a male enterprise that would earn black men the right to vote. It would also prove their value in the eyes of the nation at large. Soldiering in defense of the Union would provide black men with an ennobling sense of dignity and self-worth. “The speediest way open to us to manhood, equal rights and elevation, is this service,” he declared later in the war. Frederick Douglass, perhaps the leading proponent of black enlistment, framed the endeavor in terms of masculine glory. The time had come, they implied, to redress this wrong.īlack proponents of military service, most of them men, made their cases in deeply gendered terms. The current generation would “create anew our claim upon the justice and honor of the Republic,” reminding the nation that African Americans had fought for its freedom from the very beginning, with little recognition and reward for their patriotism. Green noted in May 1861, African Americans would follow the examples of their forefathers who had fought in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. By enlisting, the prominent black Philadelphian Alfred M. Through martial prowess, blacks hoped to prove to the skeptical, prejudiced white majority that they were worthy for inclusion into the American polity as free and equal citizens. As historians have discussed at length, African Americans viewed military service as a means to citizenship and equality. Only through their strenuous efforts, alongside the exigencies and political calculations of the larger conflict, did their dream of military service eventually become a reality.įrom the start of the Civil War, many black abolitionists clamored for the Union military to allow African Americans into its ranks. Over the first two years of the war, African American abolitionists fought an uphill battle against a reluctant Lincoln administration and a prejudiced Northern public to allow black enlistment. When the Civil War began in April 1861, it was far from a foregone conclusion that Albemarle County natives like Jesse Cowles and Mathew Gardner would end up serving in the Union military.
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