Massachusetts and the Recruitment of Southern Negroes, 1863-1865

Abstract

MASSACHUSETTS AND THE RECRUITMENT OF SOUTHERN NEGROES, 1863-1865 Richard H. Abbott Early in 1863, Frederick Douglass, militant Negro abolitionist, embarked upon a tour throughout the North seeking volunteers to fill the ranks of the 54th Massachusetts, the first Negro regiment organized in the North to fight for the Union. Douglass told Negroes who came to hear him that they owed a special debt to Massachusetts : "She was the first ... to break the chains of her slaves; first to make the black man equal before the law; first to admit colored children in her common schools." And now, he declared, Massachusetts "welcomes you as her soldiers."1 Douglass, bent on exhorting his audience to enlist in the battle for Union and freedom, did not choose to examine carefully the motives of Massachusetts leaders in organizing Negro troops. Had he done so, he would have discovered that while Bay State spokesmen agreed with him that Negroes serving in the army would win the approval of northern white men, as well as win a large measure of self-respect, they were perhaps even more interested in obtaining recruits to fill the state's quotas and keep its white working men out of the draft. At the opening of the Civil War Massachusetts was the most highly industrialized state in the Union. Twenty-five per cent of its entire male population worked in manufacturing establishments in 1860, compared to 13 per cent in Pennsylvania and 9 per cent in New York. Although the state's cotton industry suffered during the war, its woolen and shoe manufacturers prospered.2 When the War Department began calling on Massachusetts for volunteers, the state's businessmen faced the prospect of losing their labor force to the Union 1 Douglass quoted in Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Amu Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (New York, 1956), pp. 109-110. I am grateful to Richard D. Goff for a critical reading of this paper. * United States Census, 1860: Manufactures (Washington, 1865), p. 729; ibid., Population (Washington, 1864), pp. 592-593; Emerson D. Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North During the CioU War (New York, 1910), pp. 84, 86, 91. 197 198civil war history Army. Governor John A. Andrew, hoping to ease the distress of the Massachusetts business community while still meeting the state's military quotas, called upon John Murray Forbes to assist him in organizing his recruiting efforts on a more effective and productive basis. Forbes, one of Boston's leading entrepreneurs, had demonstrated his business talents by accumulating a fortune in the China trade at the age of twenty-four. By the time of the Civil War he had accumulated a number of investments on land and sea, and was busy building railroads into the Mississippi Valley. He was quite sensitive to the economic needs of the Bay State, and willingly turned his efforts to finding recruits for Massachusetts regiments.3 Forbes and his agents eventually managed to entice approximately one thousand Europeans to migrate to Massachusetts and enlist in the war effort there. Forbes quickly decided, however, that the largest and most accessible source of recruits for Massachusetts could be found among the Negro population, both slave and free, in the United States. Governor Andrew and a number of other abolitionists in the state had been urging the Federal government to permit them to raise ft Negro regiment, and in January, 1863, the War Department provided the necessary authorization. Discovering that only 1,973 Negro men of military age lived in the state, Andrew decided he would have to look elsewhere for large numbers of volunteers. Acting quickly, he sent agents into Canada and as far west as the Mississippi River, seeking Negroes to fill the Massachusetts regiments . The chief agent in charge of this recruitment later reported that he had obtained some 1,300 Negroes from Pennsylvania and the West.4 This small harvest of northern Negroes was not enough to suit Andrew's needs, especially after March, 1863, when Congress passed a conscription act creating a national draft. Renewed demands upon Massachusetts for troops under new draft quotas produced great anxiety among the state's businessmen. Edward Atkinson, one...