This Republic of Suffering (8 page)

It was not just African American soldiers who were at risk of southern retribution. A Texas officer described with some amazement his unit's engagement with a black regiment near Monroe, Louisiana: “I never saw so many dead negroes in my life. We took no prisoners, except the white officers, fourteen in number; these were lined up and shot after the negroes were finished. Next day they were thrown into a wagon, hauled to the Ouchita river and thrown in. Some were hardly dead—that made no difference—in they went.”
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Even black teamsters or servants working for the federals were at risk, and male slaves suspected of fleeing to join the Union army were more than fair game for Confederate rage. A Confederate major described an incident in which black civilians accompanying Union troops were slaughtered. “The battle-field was sickening…no orders, threats or commands could restrain the men from vengeance on the negroes, and they were piled in great heaps about the wagons, in the tangled brushwood, and upon the muddy and trampled road.” All too often, however, orders and commanders encouraged rather than restrained such atrocities. Private Harry Bird reported that Confederates after the Battle of the Crater in 1864 quieted wounded black soldiers begging for water “by a bayonet thrust.” Bird welcomed the subsequent order “to kill them all” it was a command “well and willingly…obeyed.” General Robert E. Lee, only a few hundred yards away, did nothing to intervene.
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“The War in Tennessee—Rebel Massacre of the Union Troops After the Surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12.”
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
May 7, 1864
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Jefferson Davis himself had approved the execution of four captured black soldiers in the fall of 1862, and Secretary of War James Seddon declared in April 1863 that “the Department has determined that negroes captured will not be regarded as prisoners of war.” General Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans Mississippi Department, even admonished an officer who had shown himself too merciful to black combatants. “I have been unofficially informed,” he wrote, “that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms. I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers.”
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In the case of black soldiers and the officers who surrendered the privileges of whiteness by consenting to lead them, “propriety” seemed all too often to dictate murder. Killing was not simply justified but almost required, even when such action demanded suspension of fundamental rules of war and humanity. In practice, it would prove impossible for Confederates to maintain a policy of killing all black prisoners, at least in part because of threatened Union reprisals. Some African Americans were treated as prisoners of war, as were, for example, the approximately one hundred men incarcerated at Andersonville. But violence against black soldiers and their white officers was extensive and widely discussed among northern soldiers and civilians alike.
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Well before white atrocities stoked an intensified desire for vengeance, black soldiers approached war's violence differently from white Americans. Their understanding of why the war was righteous and why their fighting was justified grew out of their knowledge of centuries of suffering under slavery, as well as from their own personal experiences of cruelty and oppression. As T. Strother explained in a letter to the
Christian Recorder,
the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,

To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped to death, run to death, burned to death, lied to death, kicked and cuffed to death, and grieved to death; and, worst of all, after having made prostitutes of a majority of the best women of a whole nation of people…would be the greatest ignorance under the sun.

Slavery manufactured death, Strother charged; it was itself a kind of warfare perpetrated against blacks; to take arms against it was by definition an act of self-defense, an assertion of manhood and a claim for personal liberation. “Those who would be free must strike the blow,” a young soldier explained in 1863. Blacks fought to define and claim their humanity, which seemed to many inseparable from avenging the wrongs of a slave system that had rendered them property rather than men.
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It would come to seem ironic to many observers, both during the war and later, that manhood should be defined and achieved by killing. Writing the history of the black experience in war and Reconstruction in 1935, W. E. B. DuBois found it “extraordinary…that in the minds of most people…only murder makes men. The slave…was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!” In fact, like other Civil War soldiers, African Americans wrote often of dying and of Christian sacrifice as fundamental purposes of their military service. “Wounded Colored Soldiers in Hospital” after the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner cast themselves as “soldiers for Jesus” and assured the readers of the northern black press that “if all our people get their freedom, we can afford to die.” Black soldiers did die in dramatic numbers; one-fifth of the approximately 180,000 who served did not survive the war, although disease proved a far more deadly killer than combat. (Overall, twice as many soldiers died of disease as from battle wounds; ten times as many black soldiers did.) But these deaths promised political as well as spiritual redemption. Black soldiers sought to win a place in the polity, as citizens and as men, through their willingness to give up their lives. “When you hear of a white family that has lost father, husband or brother,” wrote a corporal from the Third U.S. Colored Troops reporting the loss of ten comrades in South Carolina, “you can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden.” Black and white northerners could honor heroic black deaths, even if, as historian Alice Fahs points out, the racist assumptions of many whites made them “only too willing to celebrate the manhood of black soldiers who no longer had any manhood to exercise.”
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“Unidentified Sergeant, U.S. Colored Troops.” Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

Perhaps the most dramatic such celebration, one that became for many African Americans emblematic of the meaning of black service and sacrifice, was the New Orleans funeral of Captain André Cailloux in August 1863. The
Christian Recorder
judged the event “one of the most extraordinary exhibitions brought forth by this rebellion.” And exhibition it was: of black courage, accomplishment, and solidarity, as well as the strength of a black claim to citizenship in a restored American nation.

Cailloux was one of approximately 11,000 free people of color in antebellum New Orleans. A literate artisan and a property owner, he served as secretary of one of the city's many Afro-Creole mutual benefit societies. After the fall of New Orleans to federal forces in the spring of 1862, Cailloux helped recruit a company for the Union army. Founded upon a long tradition of military service by New Orleans's free people of color, including a critical role in aiding Andrew Jackson against the British in 1815, the Louisiana Native Guards claimed distinctions denied other units of nonwhite soldiers, such as the right to serve under company officers from their own community. Killed as he led his men in a charge at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, Cailloux was the first of only a few black officers to die in the war. For all his courage and respectability, André Cailloux was in the eyes of the Confederates simply a man who deserved not just death but dishonor for his presumption in taking up arms against a superior race. Despite a truce called to permit the removal of the dead and wounded, rebel sharpshooters prevented Union troops from retrieving the bodies of black soldiers. Cailloux lay on the field until July 8, when Port Hudson surrendered. After forty-one days exposed to the elements, his body could be identified only because of a ring he still wore.
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Cailloux's funeral in New Orleans later in the month was intended to compensate for this humiliation. One wonders too if it was in some sense understood—at least by the northern press—as a counterpoint to the elaborate ceremonies that had surrounded the burial of Confederate hero Stonewall Jackson, who had died just days before Cailloux was killed. In New Orleans “immense crowds of colored people” made the streets “almost impassable,” the newspapers reported. Benevolent societies lined Esplanade Street for more than a mile. A parade of fellow soldiers and civic society members accompanied the coffin, draped in an American flag and borne by a hearse pulled by a team of fine horses, to St. Louis Cemetery. A Catholic priest, who had been censured and suspended by the Louisiana archbishop because of his antislavery sympathies, performed the service and “called upon all to offer themselves, like Cailloux had done, martyrs to the cause of justice, freedom and good government. It was a death the proudest might envy.” The
Union,
newspaper of the free black community, concluded that Captain Cailloux's death had “vindicated his race from the opprobrium with which it was charged.” Certainly, his death became a symbol for the northern antislavery cause and particularly for black abolitionists. The flag Cailloux had carried at Port Hudson was prominently displayed at the National Negro Convention presided over by Frederick Douglass in October 1864. Cailloux's death—configured as heroic sacrifice—made a powerful case for blacks' right to citizenship in the nation they had given so much to save.
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“Funeral of the Late Captain Cailloux.”
Harper's Weekly,
August 29, 1863
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But in the eyes of many African Americans, the focus on death and Christian sacrifice only seemed to combine with widespread military atrocities to perpetuate a disturbing tradition of black victimhood. From the front in Virginia, reporter George Stephens hastened to assure his readers at the New York
Weekly Anglo-African
that “we do not wish to make…[them] think that we are anxious to meet death on the battlefield…or to use the language of a contemporary, ‘go out gaily to meet death as to our bride.'” The suffering of bondage sufficed; now justice required that others be the objects of violence. Part of establishing equality would be evening this score. Vengeance and retribution played a prominent place in blacks' understanding of the rationale for war's destructiveness, as well as for the violent acts of individual men.
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A popular poem that appeared in several versions in the black press illustrated this conception of achieving equity through equivalent suffering. A “brave Confederate chief” is killed in battle and is carried home to his mother, who greets the death of her only son with “frantic sorrow.” Her “aged slave” comes to offer not consolation but justice. “Missus,” she declares, “we is even, now.” The white mother had sold all ten of her slave's children, so now neither woman has any remaining offspring; the two mothers are alone together in their common loss. The mistress must now, in the words of her slave, “to the just Avenger bow.” The war is God's instrument for balancing the accounts of righteousness: