WHY WERE BLACK OFFICERS NOT ENLISTED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CIVIL WAR?

WHY WERE BLACK OFFICERS NOT ENLISTED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CIVIL WAR?

Historians have argued for over 150 years about why Black American officers were not immediately enlisted in The American Civil War.  We do have a wealth of well-preserved facts to frame our argument today, some of which are matter of fact and others that remain open to interpretation.  Without question it can be said that history is nothing if not for the grey areas it invariably leaves as theoretical residue between fragments of truth and fact deposited in the wake of progress and the great continuum of time.   We know that before The Emancipation Proclamation officially freed the slaves they were technically the property of their master’s and in a legal sense neither they nor any free Black men living on United States Soil were considered to be United States citizens.   But the lack of U.S. citizenship status or rather the denial of it was a manifestation of a much larger argument preventing enlistment of Black officers into either the Union or Confederate armies and this singular obstruction lay in the concept of divine right, a grey area if you will factual yet open to broad interpretation as a driving force behind the fateful events of its day.  The day, the time, the place and the era, was mid nineteenth century America poised at the brink of a civil war for which the south had openly prepared 10 years in defiance seeking to preserve the socioeconomic and political organism of slavery as a matter of divine right!

The question of divine right had been under fire since the beginning of the European Enlightenment nearly 200 years before the Confederate sedition took shape.   Many wealthy Confederate slave owners, some of which traced their ancestry to European nobility, romanticized themselves as the American Aristocracy affecting airs as of ancient Roman patricians or European nobility.   Ironically, the Europeans whom they courted as allies refused to aid them in their conflict with the north striking a heavy blow to their culturally obsolete notions of absolute oligarchy.  The spurned Confederates faced war with an industrial behemoth in the north who they had no hope of defeating.  By today’s standards they were reduced to a comic “Mini-Me” of the European Aristocracy they aspired to become but in spite of the global chagrin they wore and the lamentation authored by their misguided continental Cinderella complex the Confederates still offered a formidable fight in defense of a way of life that the luminary author, novelist Margaret Mitchell coined as forever, “Gone With The Wind”.   At length the confederates were forced out of pining by the grim reality of their plight beneath the hammer of the Union Army and doubly wounded by the realization that they must now fight against the very men whom they had viciously and perpetually enslaved.  The entire affair was a tough racial pill to swallow.  150 years after the war white and black Americans still have not processed the profound racial message proclaimed by the enslavement of Black men by white men nor have they sufficiently subdued the lingering hostility inspired by the concept of divine right as justification for the notion of white supremacy.   

The Confederate army declared war against the United States to conserve the notion of the divine right of white men to possess absolute control over the fate, including life and death, of Black men.   According to the Americanized theology of divine right, it was believed that Black men were divinely preordained to be slaves.  The philosophy of divine right held sacrosanct the absolute inferiority of Black men to white and could never permit a Black man to take the life of his superior, (a white man), since the power to make life and death decisions was believed to lay solely in the hands of white men.  This philosophy appears to be arcane by today’s standards but only 154 years ago when The American Civil War was igniting it would have been considered to be the status quot.  In 1860 it was unimaginable for a Black man to detain threaten or assault a white man with our without the aid of a weapon under any circumstance.   Enlisting and paying a Black man to fight and kill another white man breached the most protected covenant of divine right and reversed the process of operant conditioning established to render the Black man docile.  In short, after the United States government had fully invested in the enslavement of Black men locking them out of socioeconomic advancement it could not concede any power to a black man that might equal that of a white man having perverted the law to qualify the white male as divinely superior.    In order for Americans to comprehend the historical facts defining the practise of slavery we must be prepared for the reality that it will require us to occupy the ugly racial landscape of the mid nineteenth century.  History forces us to become men we cannot be and do not wish to become.  We must unfortunately attempt to think with the mindset of white men who hated black men and black men who hated white men in order to understand both sides of the mathematical inequality represented by racism and enslavement In America with the result that we are able to transform old hatreds into new bonds of love and brotherhood. 

The slavery question had haunted America for 105 years at the outset of The Civil War.  A second draft of The Declaration of Independence had been drafted on July 3, 1776, the day before America Declared itself free from the tyranny of the English monarchy.  The Framers of the constitution knew full well that justice had not been delivered to Black men on that day and that the final draft had been crafted to bring wealthy southern planters on board with the revolution.  At the time it certainly must have appeared to have been and economic concession to the egalitarian ideals the framers intended to uphold.  It was a calculated risk that eventually the language encoded into the Declaration of Independence would eventually provide the legal argument needed to free the slaves but their grave foresight condemned millions of human beings over the period of 150 years to the cruelty of enslavement.   There was a second reason other than economics that the Emancipation of Black Slaves was delayed and that reason was most certainly to avoid having to answer the question of divine right.  White Americans knew full well, that slavery could not be justified as a matter of divine right; they knew it was an evil and immoral practise but they feared the extent to which its abolition would force them to share the economic wealth of this country.   Releasing millions of freed slaves and then adding them into the American economy should not have been any more of a concern than the waves of European immigrants just before and after The Civil War except for the matter of race.   America determined 85 years earlier in 1776 in The Declaration of Independence that the civil rights of white men were to be protected while those of Black men were to be denied.  It would not be until January 1, 1863 that the Emancipation Proclamation would deliver the death-blow to the first great challenge of the egalitarian ideals of the enlightenment manifested in the Confederate Movement.  One can only imagine the mixture of emotions that met on the battlefield so many years ago.  Confederate soldiers steeped in racism confronted their worst nightmare, a Black man armed and ready to fight for his freedom!  White northerners were challenged to embrace egalitarianism to fight as comrades with shared ideals beside those for whom they fought and would perhaps die to defend.  For the Black soldiers they were challenged to accept the white men they fought with as allies and to comprehend the revolutionary evolution from a slave to a soldier fighting for freedoms they might not live to enjoy!  At the end of the day the reasons why Black soldiers were not initially enlisted or utilised in The American Civil War could not outweigh the reasons why both Union Army enlisted them and the Confederate army employed them not as enlisted soldiers but as servile technicians.  The south did not enlist Black officers and send them to battle, its arcane philosophy of divine right had outlived its cultural usefulness and was put to rest on the bloody fields of the American Civil War.  In the end the north could only save face by living up to its own philosophy of racial equality and freedom which meant it had to discard the racially charged philosophy of divine right.  As the provocateur, the Confederate south accelerated its own inevitable demise but the northern Union Army forever erased the notion of the divine right of white men to enslave and order the destiny of Black men when it enlisted the first truly Black American soldiers in the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment…

Looking forward, we now see that while civilized white men and women from the Confederate and Union Fronts were sympathetic to the freedom of slaves from their oppression they still grappled with the issue of racial equality.  While they recognized that slavery was an evil institution and should be abolished they did not equate freeing the slaves with acknowledging them as equals. So the notion that white men were somehow divinely preordained to have been created as superior beings to Black men persisted as a remnant of the tenacious concept of divine right.  This is largely why racism has persisted to this very day.  Freeing the slaves got slavery off of America's conscience but white Americans still did not view Black men as equals in every dimension.  The Reconstruction set the stage for this revolutionary experiment.  For the first time in human history a peoples who had only months before been enslaved and denied every human and civil right common to man were unequivocally included as full-fledged American citizens and employed immediately as government officials and took offices in congress.  If this optimism could have been sustained we would be well rid of many of the racial inequities that plague our nation today.  But the fleetingly brilliant period of The American Reconstruction was ended with a terrible backlash of socio-economic and political repression. Nearly every freedom granted after emancipation and during The Reconstruction Era was reversed! America had been generous in its gifting of freedom but selfishly and greedily took back the lions share of its gift. Today white and black peoples still struggle with what has now been coined a sense of "Entitlement" of whites over blacks.  To make the soup even more complex, in the 150 or so years since The American Civil War the ethnic admixture of America has grown to include many other races who are largely oblivious to the history of racism between blacks and whites.  Black Americans now experience the phenomenon of other ethnic groups adopting the sense of entitlement over them as these groups assimilate the predominant culture of white Americans.

The lesson to be learned from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army and from the history of racism In America is that white and black people can come together in order to move history forward in positive ways but a great deal of thought and planning must be invested into the implementation of far reaching social reforms so that a climate is created which is responsive enough to guide these reforms through their infancy to maturity.  By no means can we discount the immense progress in the healing of race relations that black and white men diligently worked together to realize but every black man who has experienced the realness of racism understands that much more progress is needed and that it must be a combined effort.  Our American history which reveres the millions of men, women and children who died hopelessly under the pathological brutality of slavery demands that these inequities be balanced once and for all so that we can all move forward in brotherhood.  The American Civil War, the period of Reconstruction and the early years of The Civil Rights Movement are but flashes in the continuum of human history.  These social revolutions were driven by a dire human need to realize instantaneous results.  Because these movements absorbed the lives of those involved after they were achieved on paper everyone had to regroup emotionally, physically and intellectually to process what had really happened.  Building up momentum again after it has died to address critical fixes and implement evolutionary modifications  is much harder to achieve.  Many of the racial struggles of the twenty-first century between black and white men, including the presidency of the first Black American president, Barack Obama, can be attributed to the fact that the issue of freedom versus equality has never been effectively resolved and revisited as a continuing theme for the evolution of the American form of democracy.  As it was on the battlefield nearly 150 years ago we are challenged to solve the great issue of our day, that of "Freedom Versus Equality"!


FIN

Written by David Vollin

Admin: FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL SALON

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