"We are ready and would go." - Part 2

During the early part of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln opposed accepting blacks into the Union Army. He believed it would push Border States to join the Confederacy. However, in the second year of the war, Congress passed a law permitting Black men to enlist at a pay rate of $10 per month ($3 less than the pay of a White private). But Congress left it up to the President to determine the duties of Black volunteers. Lincoln decided that Black volunteers would not be trained as combat soldiers, only used as laborers. 

By the end of 1862, it was clear that the war was not going to end quickly, and there was a significant drop in the number of White volunteers. At the same time, Lincoln realized that once the war ended and the Union was restored, slavery could not continue. On January 1, 1863 he announced the Emancipation Proclamation and a change in war policy.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation liberated the slaves but also announced that Free Black volunteers would now be trained as combat soldiers. A Black regiment of escaped slaves serving on Union-occupied islands off the coast of South Carolina celebrated by spontaneously singing, "My Country 'tis of Thee.” The field commander of these troops, Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, later wrote, "Just think of it!—the first day they had ever had a country."

In the spring of 1863, the War Department organized the Bureau of Colored Troops. The bureau began a massive Army recruitment program aimed at free Blacks in the North and emancipated slaves in Union-held Southern territory. 

Coming next: Famous battles fought by regiments of Black soldiers.