Originally aired on July 19, 1996 - In part 99 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson argues that just as the black man played a central part in causing the war, so did he play a major role in determining its outcome. One of many major contributions the black soldier made occurred on July 18, 1863 at Fort Wagner.
#99 – The Black Soldier
On July 18, 1863, black Americans showed the world that they were deserving of freedom. The place was Fort Wagner, a strong Confederate earthwork protecting the entrance to the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. Two Union brigades had moved into position to attack the fort. In that force was the 54th Massachusetts, the first black regiment from the North to go to war. Its colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, a son of Boston aristocracy.
The 54th Massachusetts had been organized only two months when it was sent to coastal duty in South Carolina. On July 16, the unit fought a heavy skirmish; then, for the next two days, black soldiers struggled through tangled marshlands, in pouring rain and without food. The afternoon of July 18 found the Massachusetts recruits in the center of the Union line as two brigades charged across three-quarters of a mile of level beach toward the earthen fortification.
It was a perfect field of fire for the Southern defenders. Confederate musketry and cannon fire literally shredded the Union lines. Fort Wagner was a near-massacre of the Union army. The 54th Massachusetts took the highest casualties: 345 men. Colonel Shaw was killed early in the battle. Confederates buried him with his black troops – either out of respect or out of contempt.
A New Hampshire officer who witnessed the action of the blacks at Fort Wagner stated that “language is too tame to convey the horrors and the meaning of it all”.
Just as the black man played a central part in causing the Civil War, so did he play a major role in determining the war’s outcome. The opportunity began with the Emancipation Proclamation, which announced freedom in January, 1863, for all slaves in those states still in rebellion. Since Abraham Lincoln justified this announcement on the basis of military necessity, it was appropriate that the definitive proclamation at the beginning of 1863 officially authorized the enrollment of black soldiers. From that moment, ostensibly, they were given the chance to fight for their freedom.
The path to that goal was stormy and bloody, but glorious. Throughout the last two years of the war, blacks weathered a host of discriminations. All-black units had all-white officers. Former slaves received only half the pay of white Billy Yanks. They were assigned the worst duties and given the poorest equipment and medical facilities. Confederates initially refused to recognize them as soldiers entitled to all the rules of war. White Northern soldiers abused them constantly.
Be that as it may, no one could overlook the factor that ultimately won them a place in American society: namely, their participation in battle. Talk, propaganda, idealistic appeals could not award the black soldier his place in the Union army. He had to claim that place himself, soldier-fashion, by fighting and dying in battle.
At Fort Hudson, Fort Wagner, Fort Pillow, Petersburg, Fort Harrison, and three dozen other major engagements, blacks fought as gallantly, and suffered as fully, as their compatriots and their opponents. Close to 180,000 blacks served as Union soldiers. Their numbers constituted 12% of the Federal armies. One-third of them died in service, mostly from illness.
One point is incontestable: when the black man at last put on his country’s uniform, it followed logically that the black man at last had a country he could call his own. More to the credit of those former slaves, a Union colonel noted many years after the war: “We called upon them in the day of our trial, when volunteering had ceased…Fortunate it is for us, as well as for them, that they were equal to the crisis; that the grand historic moment which comes to a race only once in many centuries, came to them, and they recognized it…”
