The Confederate government approved the enlistment of slaves as soldiers in mid-March 1865, much too late to make any difference to the outcome of the war. They simply could not imagine how to assign Black men to a role that most people believed was appropriate for white men only.
While it may sound strange to say, the United States operated under similar circumstances. The problem wasn’t slavery, though four Border slave states remained in the Union and Lincoln had to do everything he could to maintain their loyalty. That, of course, included refusing to enlist Black men as soldiers in 1861.
But it wasn’t simply the Border states that presented a challenge to such a project. A large percentage of the loyal white citizenry of the United States believed that the war should be fought by white men and the war’s goal should be limited to the preservation of the Union.
Neither side sought to recruit Black men into their respective armies in 1861. The United States and Confederacy followed different trajectories forward, based on a different set of wartime circumstances, but the racial attitudes of their white citizenry overlapped in significant ways.
Consider this cartoon that appeared in the popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on October 26 1861.
By then, thousands of escaped slaves or freedom seekers had crossed into Union lines forcing the Lincoln administration and Congress to respond. In 1861, the United States began classifying all escaped slaves who had made their way to Union lines as “contrabands”—a murky status somewhere between freedom and slavery.
Frank Leslie highlighted the complexity of the contraband issue and the fact that the Union Army forced African Americans into service as domestic workers, field laborers, and construction workers—reinforcing the continued inferior status of African-Americans.
Of course, African Americans were not yet welcomed into the army as soldiers and this cartoon helps to explain why. While Lincoln had made a political calculation about the impact of opening recruitment to Black Americans, a pervasive racism made it next to impossible for most white Americans to imagine these men in uniform and carrying rifles.
Leslie’s Black “contraband” capture a spectrum of racist tropes from the mid-nineteenth century, from their exaggerated physical features to their bare feet. Their smiles indicate that they are oblivious to the dangers that surround them. Most telling, they are depicted as disposable in their use as ‘cannon fodder.’