Emancipating Masculinity: Black Union Deserters and Their Families in the Civil War South

Abstract

In June 1863, James Smith fled slavery in Virginia and joined the Union ranks. Not six months later he deserted again—this time emancipating himself from the 36th United States Colored Infantry (Usci). Chaplain Henry McNeal Turner of the 1st Usci learned of the desertion and wrestled with why Smith would run from the army. To proponents of military service such as Turner, fighting would forcefully reclaim Black manhood in the wake of emasculating bondage. Deserters disrupted these aspirations, bewildering the chaplain. “I can neither hear nor imagine the reason why these men desert to the rebels,” Turner wrote to the Christian Recorder. “Perhaps it is mere wife-love,” he speculated, “some of them having wives South to whom they feel much endeared, and not knowing any thing concerning their condition, it seems to prey upon their minds, until all fear, dread and manhood is lost. And thus they desert.” The chaplain dismissed Smith as unmanly for shirking his duty. But the chaplain failed to consider that soldiers could also prove themselves men acting on “wife-love.” Indeed, Smith and many of the nearly 140,000 Black southerners who enlisted had escaped slavery and, while committed to service, yearned to care for their families in bondage or refugee camps. When Union pickets captured Smith and questioned him, Smith spoke of his wife behind enemy lines, showing he valued his responsibilities as a husband at least as much as his duties as a soldier. In his desertion, he enacted a masculine self that was distinct from the prescribed code of manhood Turner referenced.1