In the beginning of the struggle few believed that the liberation of the slaves would be the outcome. And if it had not been for the obstinate perversity of the South the two sections of the country might have reached an agreement perpetuating slavery in the states in which it then existed and simply forbidding its extension into new territory. The North was perfectly willing that there should be a rehabilitation of the country with southern laws and southern institutions reacknowledged in their old form. But God was in this contest as well as man. He willed it otherwise. The war became so desperate that President Lincoln was forced to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as an imperative measure of self-defense. He did what he had always desired to do, but what he had been kept from doing by northern public opinion—an opinion which the exigencies of the situation had now revolutionized.
This act was soon followed by the arming of colored men for duty as soldiers. No men ever sought more eagerly to fight for any cause than did the black men for the freedom which the Emancipation Proclamation promised. When the opportunity was given them to enlist, they joyfully accepted it, and as the loyal white men had cried two years before, so cried they,
“We are coming, Father Abraham,
Six hundred thousand strong.”
On the brightest pages of the history of the Civil War are written the accounts of their splendid deeds of valor. Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, Olustee and Fort Wagner are names that will always be inseparably connected with their glorious achievements in battle. The records tell us that 178,975 colored soldiers took part in 213 battles and skirmishes, and that 36,847 of them lost their lives. Among the men honored by the Congress of the United States with medals for distinguished service in action during the Civil War are seventeen Negroes.
The courage and the spirit of these men are shown in an occurrence which took place immediately after the desperate charge at Fort Wagner, where the sainted Shaw fell at the head of his black regiment. One of the officers went about among the wounded after the battle speaking to them words of encouragement. He finally came upon a large group of men and asked them: “If out of it and at home, how many of you would enlist again?” Every man replied, even the wounded, that he would, and that he would fight until the last brother should break his chains. “For if all our people get their freedom, we can afford to die”.
The good and just Abraham Lincoln speaking of the part Negro soldiers bore in the war, paid them this tribute: “There are some Negroes living who can remember, and the children of some who are dead, who will not forget that some black men with steady eye and well poised bayonet helped mankind to save liberty in America.”
The condition that faced the country at the close of the Civil War was a sad and serious illustration of the proverb that it is easier to destroy than to create, easier to pull down than to build up. To weld again the states into an harmonious union was a great task, made more difficult by the injection of a problem that was new, grave and without precedent. No nation had ever before been called upon to meet such a situation. Here were four millions of Negroes, recently emancipated, to be in some way absorbed in the body politic. How this could be done to the advantage of the freedmen, their former owners and the country, became a question of national proportions. The situation, too, presented a political phase, complicated by race antagonism, which made the work of the restoration and the reconstruction of the southern states not only difficult, but extremely uncertain. “It was most emphatically untrodden ground, an unexplored sea; and there were neither land-marks nor chart.” It was inevitable that whatever was done would be experimental and tentative. And, as if to paralyze and destroy any effort that might be made to adjust conditions so that a permanent peace and prosperity and happiness might follow, fell assassination came and struck down the great emancipator—the man best prepared to guide the ship of state through such difficulties and dangers.
It is easy enough for the men of our time to criticise, to find fault with and to underrate the efforts of the statesmen of forty years ago who devised the plan for the reconstruction of the states which had been in rebellion. But when one considers the intrinsic difficulties of the situation, he cannot but be impressed with the patriotism, the justice and the earnestness of purpose of such men as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens and Oliver P. Morton. The splendid legislation which their giant intellects matured and their indefatigable efforts helped to enact is the best evidence of their power of perception, foresight and judgment. The whole country owes a debt of gratitude to the superb statesmanship of these men, but the Negro race is preeminently the beneficiary of their mighty thoughts and prodigious labors. For out of the conflicts of purposes and plans for rebuilding a shattered nation, there were evolved with their aid the three great war amendments, guaranteeing to the Negro freedom, citizenship and the elective franchise. To weave into the organic law these marks of manhood for the black man was a fit return of a grateful country for the support he had given it in time of its distress. He had protected the government with the bayonet, it was right he should be granted the privilege of serving it with the ballot.
The 13th amendment legally abolished slavery, and, strange as it may seem, this provision of the organic law, brought the word “slavery” into the constitution for the first time. The 14th amendment prescribed citizenship for the Negro, and the 15th amendment put into his hands the ballot as a weapon of defense against those who were cruelly persecuting him. For it is a part of the history of the period immediately following the Civil War that “Black codes” were enacted in some of the southern states, so awful in their effect that the poor freedmen were reduced to a condition not far removed from slavery itself.