The Plight of the Black P.O.W.

On May 1, 1863, the Confederate congress passed a resolution to allow the killing of black Union soldiers. From the article:

"The Plight of the Black P.O.W.
By Thomas J. Ward Jr.
August 27, 2013 11:46 am

"Disunion
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Anyone who saw the film “Glory” remembers the powerful closing scene in which, after failing to take Fort Wagner, members of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and their white officers are buried together on the South Carolina beach. While the film leaves the viewer with a powerful image of the sacrifice of African-American soldiers and their white officers, it does not address the fate of those members of the 54th Massachusetts who were captured that July day in 1863. The entrance of black troops into the Civil War following the Emancipation Proclamation placed the Confederate authorities in a difficult dilemma: what to do with African-Americans in Union blues taken prisoner on the battlefield?

In his almost two-year battle to convince the government to allow African-Americans to fight, Frederick Douglass stated: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”

Douglass’s assertion, equating military service with manhood and citizenship, was not lost on Confederate authorities. The Confederacy could not treat captured black soldiers in the same way that it treated whites, for to do so would be to legitimize them as both soldiers and men, and to implicitly accept the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, eight days before the Emancipation Proclamation was to go into effect, Jefferson Davis stated: “All negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong.” A resolution later adopted by the Confederate Congress provided that all “negroes or mulattoes,” slave or free, taken in arms should be tried for inciting servile insurrection and be subject to the death penalty.

Confederate policy highlighted one of President Lincoln’s many concerns about enlisting black men as combat soldiers. Lincoln initially planned to station black troops in areas where they would not likely see combat, but black soldiers sought to get into the fight, resulting in the assault on Fort Wagner. Following the Confederate Congress’ resolution declaring that captured black soldiers “be put to death or be otherwise punished” rather than be held as prisoners of war, Lincoln declared that “the law of nations … permit no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war.” And if the Confederacy executed a Union soldier, he said, the Union would retaliate in kind; if the Confederacy enslaved a Union soldier, a Confederate prisoner would be placed at hard labor.

Davis publicly denounced Lincoln’s order, but it did, for the most part, have the desired effect, as most black prisoners were not treated with the harsh justice mandated by Confederate policy, even though the Confederacy never officially acknowledged African-Americans as P.O.W.’s. Instead, what emerged were inconsistent practices in dealing with captured black troops, depending on the time, place and the commander into whose hands they fell. Indeed, some Confederate officers encouraged the killing of African-American soldiers rather than taking them prisoner, and the atrocities committed against surrendering black soldiers at Poison Spring, Fort Pillow and Petersburg are now well known.

If not executed, captured black soldiers often found themselves treated very differently from white prisoners. Instead of being confined to camps, many African-American prisoners were put to forced labor. As Robert Jones, a black soldier captured at Milliken’s Bend, La., recalled, “They took me to … Rust, Tex., where they … had me at work doing every kind of work, loading steamboats, rebuilding breastworks, while I was in captivity.” Near Fort Gilmer, Va., captured black troops were forced to work under enemy fire in the trenches. In retaliation, the Union general Benjamin F. Butler placed an equal number of Confederate P.O.W.’s on forward trenches. Within a week, the black prisoners were removed from the front lines.

Slave owners were also encouraged to retrieve their former slaves or receive restitution for those in service to the Confederacy. In October 1864, The Mobile Advertiser and Register listed the names of 575 black prisoners who “are employed by engineer corps at Mobile, Ala. The owners are notified in order to receive the pay due them.” It is unknown if anyone answered the newspaper’s call, but there were instances where soldiers were returned to their former owners. William Rann was captured at Athens, Ala., in October 1864. “They started with us to Mobile,” he recalled, but “at Tuscumbia my old master found me and took me away from the soldiers and took me home and kept me there.” The historian Walter Williams recounts a number of instances in which black prisoners were enslaved, stating that “one Confederate colonel …. ordered the sale of black captives, with the proceeds to be divided among the soldiers.”

While an unknown number of black prisoners were either pressed into Confederate service or returned to slavery, records mention African-American troops being held in at least nine Confederate prison camps, often segregated from white prisoners. At Andersonville, about 100 black prisoners and their white officers established the “Negro Squad,” segregated from the rest of the prisoners. Guards at Andersonville were notoriously hard on the black prisoners. “The rebels refused to do anything for them; they received no medicine or medical treatment,” recalled one white P.O.W. “They were compelled to load and unload the dead who died daily in the stockade.”

Black prisoners at Andersonville and other camps also faced the scorn of many of their white compatriots. This animosity was rooted in both racial attitudes and the belief that African-American prisoners were the reason for the Union’s refusal to conduct prisoner exchanges, a belief that had merit and was propagated by their captors. During the first two years of the war, captured soldiers were paroled and exchanged regularly, and there was no P.O.W. crisis. However, because the Confederacy refused to acknowledge African-Americans as prisoners of war, it would not exchange them. Confederate leaders argued that they were under no more obligation to return slaves than captured cannons or mules. Indeed, to exchange a black prisoner for a white one would imply a racial equality that was anathema to the Confederacy.

Confederate unwillingness to exchange black prisoners played into Union hands, allowing the Lincoln administration to suspend prisoner exchanges until the Confederacy agreed to exchange black prisoners equally with whites. As the government in Richmond refused to negotiate on this basis, the numbers held in both Union and Confederate prison camps grew rapidly. Because of the Union’s manpower advantage, the Union did not need P.O.W. swaps to replenish its ranks, but the Confederacy did. Lincoln, of course, could not state that it was military policy to leave tens of thousands of Union soldiers starving in Southern prison camps, but by refusing to exchange black prisoners, the Confederate government, in effect, gave Lincoln political cover to bleed the Confederate army dry.

With the demise of the Confederacy, black P.O.W.’s were either paroled from the remaining Southern prison camps or simply walked away as their guards abandoned them. While it is unknown how many black troops may have been executed after they surrendered, according to a Congressional committee report (which undoubtedly underestimates the number of captured black soldiers), 79 black Union soldiers died in Confederate prisons, 77 escaped, 384 were recaptured by Union forces, 236 were paroled at the end of the war – and 'not one enlisted in the service of the enemy, or deserted the flag of the country.'"