BY ROBERT MULLEN  
The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which freed all slaves in the rebel states and stipulated that freed slaves should be received into the armed forces of the United States, indicated that Lincoln had accepted the proposition that the North could only win the war by destroying the slave base of the Confederate States. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued for another reason as well. The British ruling class had been virtually unanimous in its support for the Confederacy, seeing the war as a war between the Southern agricultural free-traders and the Northern industrial high-tariff forces. Free-trade Britain, wanting access for its industrial goods in the American market, naturally sided with the South against its Northern rival in this conflict and, in 1862, seemed about to recognize the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation, however, changed the situation considerably. With its promulgation, massive pro-Northern demonstrations and meetings took place among English workers, making it politically inexpedient for the British government to recognize the South.

Once the decision was made to permit the enlistment of Blacks in the army, Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany began to act as recruiting agents for the Union army in the North, holding rallies to enlist Afro-Americans. Doug–lass urged his fellow Blacks to "fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave." It was better to die free than to live as slaves, he said....

In January 1863 [the War Department] authorized Massachusetts to raise two Black regiments, the first officially authorized Black units. Eventually nearly 200,000 Black troops were to serve in the Union army, and another 300,000 served as army laborers, spies, servants, and helpers. Lincoln admitted that their participation was essential to the victory in the war.

Eventually there were 154 Black regiments in the army, including 140 infantry units. They saw action in 198 battles and skirmishes and suffered 68,178 fatalities on the battlefield in the course of the war.

Of the nearly 200,000 Black troops to take part, 93,000 came from the slave states that had seceded, about 40,000 came from the border slave states, and the remainder from the North.

By the end of the war there was scarcely a battle in which Black troops had not participated. Perhaps their outstanding achievement was the charge of the Third Brigade of the Eighteenth Division on the Confederate fortifications on New Market Heights near Richmond, Virginia. For their gallantry in that engagement Black soldiers received thirteen Congressional Medals of Honor in one day. In all, twenty Blacks received the medal in recognition of "gallantry and intrepidity" in combat during the Civil War.

John Hope Franklin estimates that the Black mortality rate in the Army was nearly 40 percent higher than among white soldiers. This was partially due to unfavorable conditions, poor equipment, bad medical care, and the rapidity with which the Blacks were sent into battle. But Black troops were also, as W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out, "repeatedly and deliberately used as shock troops, when there was little or no hope of success."  
 
Integration in navy during war
Black seamen comprised one-quarter of the sailors in the Union fleet. Of the 118,044 enlistments during the Civil War, 29,511 were Blacks. Some of the ships in the fleet were manned by predominantly Black crews, and there was scarcely a ship that didn’t have some Afro-American crew members.

Because of the close quarters on warships, it was never practical to segregate the Blacks within the crews, the same way the army did in all-Black units, and for that reason the navy was not only integrated as a service, but also was integrated within each ship....

With the Civil War over, Black soldiers found that they had achieved the legal status of freemen and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution had given them the legal rights of citizenship. Once again, as in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, wartime manpower shortages had forced some kind of tolerance.

But with the war over, the need for Black support diminished and with no jobs, no money, and no training, Blacks found that they had exchanged legal slavery for economic slavery. When the government reneged on its promise of forty acres and a mule, Blacks found themselves without the economic resources to begin as small farmers and were forced into the status of agricultural laborers or sharecroppers. Displaced and deserted by the very Union forces they had aided, Blacks found, as Addison Gayle points out, that their fight for liberty was in the final analysis no more than a fight for reenslavement, this time by the Black Code laws that swept the South after the abandonment of Reconstruction by the Federal government.

When the army was reorganized in 1866 and put on a peacetime basis, six Black regiments were established by law as a part of the regular army and as recognition and reward for valor. By an act of Congress in 1866, four regiments--the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry--were organized as permanent army units and stationed west of the Mississippi River. Most of the officers in these units were white. The best-known graduate of these regiments was Gen. John Pershing, who earned the nickname "Black Jack" because of his service with Black soldiers.  
 
 
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