Week 18 – MILITARY SERVICE – Fighting For Freedom
Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia November 1775
I do require every person capable of bearing arms to report to his Majesty’s STANDARD, or be looked upon as traitors …And I do herby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (pertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty, to his Majesty’s crown and dignity.
Royal Admiral Alexander Cochrane, April 2, 1814
That all those who may be disposed to emigrate from the United States will, with their Families, be received on board of His Majesty’s Ships or Vessels of War, or at the Military Posts that may be established, upon or near the Coast of the United States, when they will have their choice of either entering into His Majesty’s Sea or Land Forces, or being sent as FREE Settlers to the British possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they will meet with all due encouragement.
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, January 1, 1863
That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free…
And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons…
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
The reward, or lure, of freedom was used by Tories, Patriots, Loyalists, British, Yankees, and Rebels when either side needed more troops or more laborers. The thousands of Negro slaves were their trump card — a way to weaken their opponents’ economy and at the same time bolster the number of laborers and fighting men needed to replace their dead.
Revolutionary War and War of 1812
Near the end of the Revolutionary War, the British carried away some four thousand Blacks from Savannah to Jamaica and St. Augustine. Consequently, the price of slaves doubled and rice production suffered for years due to the labor shortage. In 1814 over a hundred former coastal Georgia enslaved men belonging to the Coupers, Hamilton, McNish, Grant, and Spalding escaped to Cumberland Island and took up the British offer to join the Colonial Militia or West India Regiments. Later the British removed them and their families to Trinidad, Jamaica or Nova Scotia where they established free villages.
The Civil War
During the Civil War, a Yankee captain recalled, “As soon as we took a slave from his claimant, we placed a musket in his hand and he began to fight for the freedom of the others.” Often, however, a newly freed or escaped slave was recaptured and resold to raise more funds for either the North or the South.
African Americans on St. Simons Island did not wait for Yankees to arrive to fight for their freedom. A company from 1st South Carolina Colored Volunteers under the command of Captain Trowbridge expected to encounter “a party of rebel guerillas” when they arrived on St. Simons Island in August 1862. Instead, Colonel Higginson wrote in his book Army Life in a Black Regiment, they “found that the local colored men of the island had already undertaken the enterprise. Twenty- five of them had armed themselves, under the command of one of their own number, whose name was John Brown. The second command was Edward Gould who afterwards was a corporal in my own regiment….The men were not soldiers, nor in uniform, though some of them afterwards enlisted in Trowbridge’s company.”
While public sentiment was opposed to black soldiers their white commanders Higginson and Trowbridge found that they “seemed better material” for soldiers perhaps because “they had home and household and freedom to fight for, besides that abstraction of ‘the Union.’” Even the government was not enthusiastic about arming African Americans , or as Higginson put it “the government was shy about this experiment” and stalled paying the troops.
Susie King Taylor explained the impact. Born a slave in Liberty County and raised in Savannah Susie King Taylor and her family came to St. Simons Island from Darien and St. Catherine’s Island in April 1862 “under the protection of the Union fleet.” She was put in charge of a school for about forty children on the island, and “a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” King stayed with the 33rd USCT as laundress, nurse, and teacher until the end of the war. Looking back in her book A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs she criticized the government: “The first colored troops did not receive pay for eighteen months…, A great many of these men had large families, and as they had no money to give them, their wives were obliged to support themselves and children by washing for the officers of the gunboats and soldiers, making cakes and pies which they sold to the boys in camp. Finally, in 1863, the government decided to give them half pay, but the men would not accept this.” King wrote in her memoirs, “They wanted “full pay” or nothing. They preferred rather to give their services to the state, which they did until 1864, when the government granted them full pay, with all back pay due.” King stated that she also had given “my service willingly for four years and three months without receiving a dollar. I was glad…to care for the sick and afflicted comrades.”
Commanding Officers Higginson and Trowbridge steamed over the bureaucratic prejudice and delay in paying colored troops. In 1864 Higginson complained to Congress that sales of confiscated land “were beginning, and there is danger of every foot of land being sold from beneath my [colored] soldier’s feet, because they have not the petty sum which the Government first promised, and then refused to pay.” Later that year Higginson wrote “It is not a matter of dollars and cents only; it is a question of common honesty, — whether the United State Government has sufficient integrity for the fulfillment of an explicit business contract.”
Sources: Thomas W. Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1870,1997 Penguin Classic; Susie King Taylor, A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs, 1902, 1988 Markus Wiener Publishers; www.brambleman.com; John McNish Weiss, misc articles about Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad.