“Anyhow, niggers won’t fight—the crack of his old master’s whip will send him scampering in terror from the field.”
They made jokes about it.
White men died at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, Big Bethel, and Fredericksburg. The Union Army needed more soldiers. They began drafting men—white men. In blind rage the whites turned on the helpless blacks.
“Why should we fight for you?” they screamed. On the streets of New York, black men and women were beaten, their workshops and stores destroyed, their homes burned. They burned the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. Not all the children could be dragged from the blazing building.
Douglass wrote letters to Congress and got up petitions. “Let us fight!” he pleaded. “Give us arms!”
He pointed out that the South was sustaining itself and its army with Negro labor. At last General Butler at Fort Monroe announced the policy of treating the slaves as “contrabands” to be made useful to the Union cause. General Phelps, in command at Carrollton, Louisiana, advocated the same plan. The story of how the slaves flocked into these camps, how they worked, how they were glad to sustain their half-starved bodies on scraps left over by the soldiers, how they endured any and all hardships for this opportunity to do something to “hep Massa Linkum win da war” cannot be told here. But it convinced the administration that the Negro could be useful.
The second step was to give Negroes a peculiar costume which should distinguish them from soldiers and yet mark them as part of the loyal force. Finally so many Negroes presented themselves that it was proposed to give the laborers something better than spades and shovels with which to defend themselves in case of emergency.
“Still later it was proposed to make them soldiers,” Douglass wrote, “but soldiers without blue uniform, soldiers with a mark upon them to show that they were inferior to other soldiers; soldiers with a badge of degradation upon them. However, once in the army as a laborer, once there with a red shirt on his back and a pistol in his belt, the Negro was not long in appearing on the field as a soldier. But still, he was not to be a soldier in the sense, and on an equal footing, with white soldiers. It was given out that he was not to be employed in the open field with white troops ... doing battle and winning victories for the Union cause ... in the teeth of his old masters; but that he should be made to garrison forts in yellow-fever and otherwise unhealthy localities of the South, to save the health of the white soldiers; and, in order to keep up the distinction further, the black soldiers were to have only half the wages of the white soldiers, and were to be commanded entirely by white commissioned officers.”
Negroes all over the North looked at each other with drawn faces.
Almost the cup was too bitter. But up from the South came stories of how black fugitives were offering themselves as slaves to the Union armies—of the terrible retaliation meted out to them if caught—of how the Northern armies were falling back.