![]() ![]() On August 25, 1862, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton authorized Saxton to recruit 5,000 volunteers at Port Royal, S.C., to form the first federally sanctioned black regiments. Rufus Saxton, a Medal of Honor recipient and abolitionist. In mid-August he replaced Hunter with Brig. Shortly thereafter, though, Lincoln had a change of heart. David Hunter began organizing a regiment drawn from freedmen on the Sea Islands of South Carolina in May, opposition from Washington as well as local resistance to his heavy-handed recruiting practices forced him to abandon his effort after three months. Abraham Lincoln meets Frederick DouglassĮarly in 1862, for example, the administration quashed efforts to recruit black troops by Union generals in Kansas and Louisiana.But Lincoln forced Cameron to excise this recommendation from his report, the first of the president’s many actions to rein in zealous administration officials or field commanders sympathetic to abolitionist aims and eager to enlist blacks. By the end of that year, the New York Tribune, a leading Republican newspaper, supported the use of black troops, and in his annual report to Congress, Cameron recommended arming the contrabands flooding into Union camps. ![]() Intentions began to shift in the wake of the Union debacle at Manassas in late July 1861. When Secretary of War Simon Cameron was offered 300 black volunteers to help defend the nation’s capital city during the conflict’s first weeks, he demurred, saying that “this Department has no intention at present to call into the services of the Government any colored soldiers.” Frederick Douglass’ sarcastic lament that “colored men were good enough to fight under Washington, but they are not good enough to fight under McClellan” was far less reflective of popular opinion than a New York Express editorial in late 1861 arguing that “putting arms into the slaves’ hands would result in turning the “sympathies of all mankind” against the Union. At the beginning of the war, few but the most ardent abolitionists advocated arming blacks to help quell the Southern rebellion. The evolution of a policy with such disruptive potential for the Union’s deployment of black troops reveals a presidential administration that was often scrambling to respond to military necessity while trying to balance conflicting pressures from Radical Republicans and Peace Democrats. ![]()
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