Lincoln eventually relented. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in all the seceded states except specified areas of Louisiana and Virginia. The proclamation also stated that former slaves would be “received into armed service of the United States to garrison forts” and “to man vessels of all sorts.” Black enlistment had arrived. By March, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to organize regiments of African American soldiers in the Mississippi Valley. Other army camps sprang up near Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., where thousands of Black Americans enlisted.
Black soldiers fought and died under the Union flag. In doing so, they didn’t just help win the war and abolish slavery, they also set the terms for the aftermath. Frederick Douglass recognized this: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket,” declared Douglass in 1863, “and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
Service to the nation gave Black Americans a claim on freedom and citizenship. Lincoln recognized this, too, in an 1863 letter. “If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”
And then there were the soldiers. In fighting for the freedom of themselves and their families, many of the men of the U.S. Colored Troops came to understand themselves as political actors, committed to the Union cause, to republican government, and to the values of American democracy.
You could see this on the ground when African American soldiers interacted with freed people. As part of the federal occupying force in the South, notes the historian Eric Foner, Black soldiers emerged as “apostles of black equality,” spreading “ideas of land ownership and political equality” among the former slaves.
Indeed, the first years of Reconstruction saw intense struggle and rapid social change across the South. But the most dramatic transformations were in those towns and cities and villages where Black troops and Black veterans inspired local confidence and sparked political mobilization. Historian Steven Hahn notes how, in one district of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1867, hundreds of Black laborers had assembled as a military company, wearing “old army uniforms,” marching and drilling, for the sake of protecting themselves and negotiating better prices with landowning planters.
It’s too much to say that Black soldiers and veterans were the driving force behind the political organization of freed people. Black men, women, and children of all ages played important and critical roles in shaping and sustaining communities as they embarked on new paths forged by freedom. But Black soldiers and veterans had an important role in particular forms of mobilization. By 1868, most Union-occupied areas of the former Confederate South had vibrant Union Leagues, formed to “protect, strengthen, and defend all loyal men without regard to sect, condition, or race” as well as to sponsor political events and provide forums for discussion among freed people.
Black veterans of the Civil War were among the key organizers for Union Leagues, traveling throughout the South to help mobilize rural Blacks into organizations that quickly became tools for collective empowerment and defense. Working through Union Leagues, freed people established schools, opened cooperative stores, and mobilized to challenge white political power at a local level.
Black soldiers and veterans were also at the forefront of the monumental effort in 1867 and 1868 to craft new constitutions for the former Confederate states. A substantial number of delegates to these constitutional conventions had been enslaved themselves. And many had come to prominence and leadership through their activities in the Union Army, their participation in the Union Leagues, and their efforts to organize their communities for mutual benefit. The importance of these new constitutions cannot be overstated. They were the foundation for a new kind of democracy, one rooted in equal citizenship and full civil standing, one with new opportunities, and new possibilities, for freed people throughout the South.
The 1868 election was the first one where African Americans had a say in the nation’s next president. Not surprisingly, prospective Black voters in the South faced vigilante violence from whites who wanted to reestablish the hierarchies and relations of the antebellum past. It was against this violence that Black soldiers and veterans, again, stepped into the fray. In New Orleans, for example, “several republican clubs of colored men, in uniform, with torches and a drum corps, paraded through the streets” to the county courthouse to cast their ballot.
The second half of the 1860s, from the late years of the Civil War to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and the start of Radical Reconstruction, was one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, a time of rapid, unprecedented change across the entire society. African Americans, free and freed, played a critical, world-historical part in driving that change.
It’s in that fulcrum of transformation that Black soldiers were a revolutionary force. By joining the conflict, they turned a war for union into a war for emancipation. In the wake of the fighting, as millions worked to build a new society in the South, they helped guide, organize, and defend. In doing so, they established a tradition: not just of military service, but of using the fruits of that service to help secure rights for the community at large. It’s why, when Black Americans mobilized themselves to challenge racism and race hierarchy in the twentieth century, Black soldiers would again be at the forefront of the struggle, urging “double victory,” against tyranny both abroad and at home.
1869–1874
RECONSTRUCTION
Michael Harriot
What you are about to read is the story of the first war on terror.
No…wait.
This is actually the origin story of second-wave white supremacy known as “Jim Crow laws.”
This is a war narrative. This is a horror story, but it’s also a suspense thriller that ends in triumph. It also ends in tragedy. It’s a true story about a fantastic myth. This is a narrative, nonfiction account of the all-American fairy tale of liberty and justice for all.
Behold, the untold story of the Great American Race War.
Before we begin, we shall introduce our hero.
The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black people. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure.
Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die.
Ever.
This hero is long-suffering but unkillable. Bloody and unbowed. In this story—and in all the subsequent sequels, now and forever—this hero almost never wins. But we still get to be the heroes of all true American stories simply because we are indestructible. Try as they might, we will never be extinguished.