In the land of the free and the home of the brave, the degree to which fundamental concepts like “liberty,” “rights,” “free speech,” “defiance,” and “self-defense” have been historically racialized is arguably nowhere more visible than in the Black military experience. Traditional attitudes toward African Americans in uniform have implications for our understanding of the ongoing policing of Black bodies across the nation. The fear and animus stoking law-enforcement violence against Black Americans can also be discerned at the root of earlier longstanding policies prohibiting outright, or radically restricting, African-American military service dating back to the Revolution, when the British cannily offered enslaved men their freedom in exchange for defending the rights of the king.
Several thousand Black men, enslaved and free, ended up serving in the Continental Army, for the most part in integrated units, but once the crisis was over, Congress passed the 1792 Militia Act limiting enrollment to “white male” citizens. It would not be amended for another 70 years, when emergency again compelled the enlistment of “persons of African descent” for “military or naval service” in 1862. By the end of the Civil War, approximately 180,000 Black soldiers had served in the Union Army, about 10 percent of the total force.
The connection between full political participation and the bearing of arms to defend the republic dates to antiquity. In the United States, especially during the early national and antebellum eras, the citizen-soldier’s obedience—a thinking, willing obedience—was routinely defined against both the blind obedience of the European conscript and the cringing, compelled obedience associated with the slave. That is why the Confederate congress refused until the desperate end of the Civil War to consider arming the enslaved: that action would have affirmed chattel to be human beings.
As the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded a regiment of newly freed slaves in South Carolina, wrote, “Till the blacks were armed, there was no guarantee of their freedom. It was their demeanor under arms that shamed the nation into recognizing them as men.” Confederate policy regarded Black Union soldiers as not enemy combatants but fugitives to be re-enslaved or otherwise “dealt with” by state authorities, while their captured white officers, “deemed as inciting servile insurrection,” were to “be put to death or be otherwise punished.”
In practice, Black soldiers were often given no quarter; at best, their fate was wildly uncertain. The April 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, which reminded one Confederate of a slaughterhouse awash in brains and blood, is only the most notorious example of the treatment received at enemy hands. Soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the war’s most celebrated Black regiment, participated in the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863, knowing full well that, in the words of Captain Luis F. Emilio, their enemy regarded them as “outlaws.”