Essay: African Americans role in the Union cause

When South Carolina bombarded federal troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston on April 12, 1861, Lincoln issued a call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to help put down what northern politicians called the southern rebellion. During the next four years, while the American Civil War raged on, African Americans played an increasingly important role in the Union cause. Initially forbidden to serve in the Union army, black men waited until the summer of 1862, when Lincoln finally heeded the council of advisers like Frederick Douglass and permitted free blacks in liberated portions of Louisiana and South Carolina to form regiments. When two South Carolina regiments, combining both free blacks and former slaves, captured and occupied Jacksonville, Florida, in March 1863, Lincoln decided to engage in the full-scale recruitment of black soldiers for the army. By the war’s end, more than 186,000 blacks had served in the artillery, cavalry, engineers, and infantry as well as in the U. S. Navy. Black troops left a notable record of valor in major battles throughout the South in the last two years of the war even though they were routinely paid less than the wages white soldiers received. More than 38,000 African Americans gave their lives for the Union cause.
Although northern whites joined the Union army for many reasons, blacks fought for one overriding purpose – to bring an end to slavery. For more than two years after the outbreak of hostilities, African Americans waited for their president to link the Union cause with the extinction of slavery. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1862, which declared all slaves in the rebellious states to be free as of January 1, 1863, blacks in the North felt that, at long last, their country had committed itself to an ideal worth dying for.
Few African Americans criticized Lincoln for failing to declare freedom for the slaves in the Border States, such as Kentucky and Maryland, which had not joined the southern confederacy. Charlotte Forten, daughter of an influential Philadelphia civil rights activist and author of the most widely read African American diary of the nineteenth century, probably spoke for most in the black American leadership class when she entered in her diary on January 1, 1863: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this has been.
The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely come, and sooner, I believe, than we have ever dared hope before.” When the final surrender came at Appomatox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, African Americans pressed for the enactment of laws ensuring a new era of freedom and opportunity for every black American.  On December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, which abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude” throughout the country, was ratified by the newly united states of America, including eight from the former Confederacy. But the long-anticipated era of freedom, equality, and opportunity for all would prove much more difficult to bring into reality.
Certainly the first important young writers birthed by the movement accepted Toomer and his implicit challenge to them as an artist in this fashion. These writers were Cullen, who had grown up in the city, and Hughes, who had spent most of his youth in Kansas but had come to Columbia University as a student in 1921, ostensibly to be a student there but really, he later insisted, to be in Harlem. Cullen’s Color (1925) revealed an often dazzling lyrical facility that admitted racial feeling while preserving its author’s commitment to conservative poetic forms born of his passion for English Romantic writers such as Keats and Shelley. Hughes, starting with his collection The Weary Blues (1926), sometimes matched Cullen’s lyrical intensity but opened up a new front by advertising his worship of the blues and jazz, musical forms seldom seen as compatible with formal poetry but that Hughes accepted as perhaps the most authentic and moving expression in art of African American cultural feeling. The 1920s, it should be remembered, saw the rise of surpassingly accomplished musicians such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, whose artistry had a greater influence on the nation as a whole than the work of any of the renaissance writers.