Historians remember George Washington Williams (1849–1891) as an enigmatic nineteenth-century black intellectual who wrote historical nonfiction that underscored African American accomplishment, humanity, manliness, and triumph over slavery and white racism, what Stephen G. Hall describes as a “reflective mediation on the Emancipation in the form of race history.”¹ “No other work in our language,” T. Thomas Fortune of theNew York Globesaid of Williams’sHistory of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, “has proceeded from the pen of a colored author which bears upon its face greater industry, greater love of race, greater learning.” Williams...

The Negro appears in the military history of Egypt for the first time in the Inscriptions of Una, who was crown-bearer, or Secretary of State, under King Pepi during the Sixth Dynasty.¹ Down to this time the Egyptian Empire had enjoyed comparative quiet, but the Sixth Dynasty clearly marks the beginning of the military epoch. A large army had always been in existence in Egypt, but it was seldom called into the field. The military class always ranked high, coming next in order to the priesthood,² and was divided into two distinct parts. Herodotus estimates the strength of the Egyptian...

It was about fifteen centuries from the time the Negro disappeared from the page of the world’s history until his reappearance. The Gospel of Peace had rendered the potent arms of his victorious warfare impotent and obsolete. The spirit of geography and discovery which thrilled the continents in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revived interest in the Negro. But it was interestforhim and not interestinhim. Spain and Portugal, France and Italy, Germany and England, either by discovery or conquest, had extended their landed domains. The great distances of the new possessions from the seat of these...

The two years immediately preceding the Rebellion were teeming with unprecedented events. Almost every question of public interest was directly or indirectly connected with one phase or another of the slavery problem. Thirty years of vigorous anti-slavery agitation had forced men into or out of parties; had made them declare for the restriction or extension of slavery—its nationalization or extinction. Slavery was like a dangerous coast with hidden reefs, where wild gales and stormy breakers blow and dash. It overshadowed every other question of national importance, and against its hidden reefs and treacherous currents the fierce gales of public...

At first the faintest intimation that Negroes should be employed as soldiers in the Union Army was met with derision. By many it was regarded as a joke. The idea of arming the ex-slaves seemed ridiculous to most civil and military officers. From the period of the introduction of this people into the British colonies in North America down to the breaking out of the Rebellion in the South, they had been subjected to a most rigorous system of bondage to the white race. Transported from his wild African home, the barbarian, without language, tradition, memorials, or monuments, was kept...

The South took the initiative in employing Negroes as soldiers; but they were free Negroes, and many of them owned large interests in Louisiana and South Carolina. During the latter part of April, 1861, a Negro company at Nashville, Tennessee, offered its services to the Confederate Government.¹ A recruiting-office was opened for free Negroes at Memphis, and the following notice was issued:

Attention, volunteers!

Resolved by the Committee of Safety, That C. Deloach, D. R. Cook, and William B. Greenlaw, be authorized to organize a volunteer company, composed of our patriotic free men of color, of the city of Memphis,...

The legal status of the Negro soldier ought never to have been a mooted question. Ancient and modern history furnished safe and noteworthy precedents for the guidance of the Government in the War of the Rebellion. Two distinct questions were forced upon the Government: First, the legal right to employ free persons of African descent in the military service; second, the Constitutional power of the Government to emancipate and arm the slaves of its enemies.

While the Constitutions of the several States excluded free Negroes from the militia establishment, there was, nevertheless, no inhibition against their enlistment in the Volunteer...

The Negro is a strong man physically; Nature has endowed him with marvellous strength of limb and constitution. The color of skin, texture of hair, solidity of cranium, and perfect teeth are his safeguards against the malignant forces of the climate of Africa. Transplanted; he bears well the semi-tropical climate of the Southern United States.

Generations of servitude did not impair his physical virtues, but rather enhanced them. He was proof against the intensest heat and most deadly fevers, and could endure the pangs of hunger and thirst with peerless fortitude. His teeth were representative of unusually sound bones throughout...

Even after the Negro had obtained the uniform and musket of a Union soldier he was persistently denied public confidence. His enslavement by the dominant race for centuries furnished no illustration of racial valor. A few irascible Negroes had inaugurated puny insurrections, but they were destitute of that element of enlightened courage which invests revolutions for liberty with invincible power. It was asked if the Negro have courage why has he not shown it during the last two centuries? There was no room for defence, little for apology. It was true that their numbers were inconsiderable and their leaders few....

South Carolina had set the other States a dangerous example in her attempts at nullification under President Jackson’s administration, and was not only first in seceding, but fired the first shot of the slave-holders’ rebellion against the laws and authority of the United States Government. It was eminently fitting, then, that the first shot fired at slavery by Negro soldiers should be aimed by the ex-slaves of the haughty South Carolina rebels. It was poetic justice that South Carolina Negroes should have the priority of obtaining the Union uniform, and enjoy the distinction of being the first Negro soldiers to...

By some fateful fortuitous circumstance the first fighting of Negro troops in the Mississippi Valley was as severe and fruitless as that of their brethren and comrades in the Department of the South. Port Hudson and Fort Wagner, where the Negro soldier earned his reputation for valor, were much alike. Both were strongly fortified; one was protected by a bayou under its very guns, the other had made captive the ocean in its treacherous trenches; and in each instance the service to be performed demanded the highest qualities of courage, steadiness, endurance, and prompt obedience.

General Grant was busy with...

Virginia, the mother of Presidents, was the mother of slavery, and within the limits of this ancient commonwealth the principal battles of the war were fought. Its history, traditions, institutions, topography, its water-ways and magnificent resources, furnished inspiration to the embattled armies that met upon its soil. Richmond was the capital of the Confederate Government, and Petersburg was the base of supplies and the real gate-way to the heart of the rebel Civil Government. After the Mississippi had been opened to the Gulf, the next most important military move was the reduction of Petersburg. General George B. McClellan had menaced...

Fort Pillow was in Tennessee, about forty miles from Memphis. It occupied a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, flanked by two deep and precipitous ravines slightly fringed with light timber. The garrison consisted of two hundred and ninety-five men of the Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry, under command of Major W. F. Bradford, and two hundred and sixty-two men of the Sixth United States Heavy Artillery (Negroes), making five hundred and fifty-seven men, all under the command of Major L. F. Booth, of the Artillery. The slave system made the entire South brutal, and many soldiers of the Confederate army...

Although the recruitment of Negro soldiers began in the early autumn of 1863, at Nashville, Tennessee, there was little disposition to bring them into conflict with the enemy in the Department of the Cumberland. The great battles, with but few exceptions, had been fought while the effort to arm Negroes in this Department was in a tentative form. The entire effective force of this army was in the field, and most of the troops were from the Border States, with strong prejudices against the Negro. The officers had little or no time to discuss the fighting qualities of Negro soldiers,...

During the winter of 1864–65 twenty-five regiments of Negro troops were concentrated on the James River, confronting the Confederate capital. With but few exceptions, those troops had seen severe service in the field. Many of them had been in spirited conflicts with the enemy in Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia, while quite all of them had attained proficiency in drill and field manoeuvres.

The presence of so large a force of Negro troops in front of Richmond had a most salutary effect upon the Confederate authorities, both civil and military. The reputation won by Negro troops was respected in...

The capture and treatment of Negro soldiers by the enemy is a subject that demands dispassionate and judicial scrutiny. No just judge of historical events would seek to tear a single chaplet from the brow of any brave soldier, it matters not what uniform he wore or what flag he fought under. Valor is valor the world over. But whatever may be said of the gallantry of Confederate soldiers or the chivalry of the South, it remains true that the treatment bestowed upon Union prisoners of war in general, and upon Negroes in particular, has no parallel in the annals...

Testimony to the martial valor of the Negro soldier comes from the lips of friend and foe alike. He disappointed his enemies and surprised his friends. He was not only impetuous in the onset, but cool and stubborn in repelling an assault. He exhibited the highest qualities of soldiership at Port Hudson in repeatedly assaulting the enemy in strong works with great physical obstructions to contend with. It was true he had the inspiration and poetry of numbers to incite him to deeds of valor; but at Milliken’s Bend he was a raw recruit, and yet he did his fighting...