In April 1863, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass published an essay titled “Why Should a Colored Man Enlist?” in which he urged African Americans to join the Union army. Of the nine reasons he outlined in favor of black military service, his final was perhaps his most persuasive. “You should enlist because the war for the Union, whether men so call it or not, is a war for Emancipation…. Enlist, therefore, enlist without delay, enlist now, and forever put an end to the human barter and butchery which have stained the whole South with the warm blood of your people, and loaded its air with their groans.”
As most students of the Civil War know, some 180,000 African Americans joined the Union armed forces by war’s end, providing much-needed manpower to the federal government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion—and helping deal, as Douglass urged, a fatal blow to the institution of slavery in the country.
But there is much more to the wartime story of America’s black population than the service of those who donned the Union blue. As Amy Murrell Taylor shows in this issue’s cover story, “The Refugees” (page 32), the path to freedom for the country’s approximately 4 million enslaved men, women, and children—who represented nearly 90 percent of the country’s total black population—was precarious and uncertain, even for those who reached the relative safety and security of Union army lines. Want to share your thoughts about this or other articles in this issue? Send your emails to [email protected].
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By the time you read this, our friends at The American Civil War Museum will have opened their new, state-of-the-art facility at Richmond’s historic Tredegar Iron Works. With 6,000 square feet of permanent gallery space, the new museum will be a place “to tell unforgettable human stories of real people forced to engage in a life-and-death struggle to define the very nature of the American people and its government,” as they note. We wish them all the best—and urge you to pay them a visit the next time you’re in Richmond.
