Christian Fleetwood was one of the Black soldiers in the U.S. Army to be given the Medal of Honor, the highest military honor in the U.S. military. He’s wearing the Medal of Honor on the left side of his uniform.
The women’s Suffrage movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The Gay Rights Movement of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
All owe a debt of gratitude to the Black soldiers who served in the U.S. military during the Civil War, according to Hugh Goffinet, a student of history and African American studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“The civil rights for really any large alliance group in this country can very much trace to their efforts,” said Goffinet during his Monday presentation in the webinar “U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War: A Living History Virtual Class,” hosted by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
The Suffrage movement to give women the right to vote, for instance, used the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from 1878 as a linchpin of their arguments, he noted. The amendment says anyone can vote without regard to “race, color or previous condition of servitude,” yet women still couldn’t vote in most states.
“They build their argument off of this. ‘Hey, African American men are given the right to vote. Why can’t we as women also be given that right to vote?'” Goffinet said.
During the Civil War, about 209,000 Black men enlisted in the U.S. Army and Navy during the last two years of the war after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, he said. At that point, President Abraham Lincoln declared that Blacks could join the U.S. military.
“African-Americans answer Abraham Lincoln’s call to arms. This is about 10% of the entire United States Army,” Goffinet said. “Keep in mind that African Americans come in the second half of the war, when all these white soldiers who’ve been in it since 1861, for 2 1/2 years, are ready to just kind of go home, right?”
Blacks, though, looked at the war as the possible end of slavery.
“Now you have 200,000 new soldiers with an actual cause they can believe in, that’s tangible, because about a half of these 209,000 black soldiers who served in this very uniform 160 years ago were enslaved people themselves,” said Goffinet, who was wearing the same blue uniform a U.S. Army sergeant would wear during the Civil War.
“People who were literally, physically feeling the benefits of this war being fought for the ideal of whether they will continue to be enslaved or not, to be held in chains, to be whipped, to be treated as property versus human beings.”
Blacks were still segregated from white Army and Navy service members in the Civil War, Goffinet said. They also were paid less than white soldiers, who received $13 month minus a $3 clothing charge while Blacks earned $10 a month minus the clothing charge.
The disparity wasn’t the immediate concern for most Black soldiers, Goffinet said, because they had a bigger goal.
“Most black people in this country are starting to realize, and the U.S. military also says that, ‘Hey, if any enslaved person can reach our lines after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is passed, you’ll have freedom from that point forward until the rest of your life.’ So it has new meanings. It has new weight.”
The weight can still be felt, Goffinet said.
“This story matters because the world that we live in today is very much created or very much benefited by these Black soldiers themselves and their freedom dreams, and their push for equality for new opportunities.”
