Black Labor Won the War for The Union...

5fish

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I found this interesting article about the need for black labor during the Civil War and how the Union won the fight for Black Labor... Read the link it goes into more details and it end with a three-paragraph conclusion...

LINK: Article: https://academic.oup.com/maghis/article/26/2/25/1000927#17605739

Insisting that the war had one aim—the preservation of the Union—President Lincoln and the vast majority of white Northerners initially envisioned no place for free black people or slaves; certainly black men would not be called to fight for Union. In the face of military necessity and the determination of enslaved people to put their freedom on the war’s agenda, the North assented to the enlistment of black soldiers. Still, many Northerners hoped that black soldiers would either take the bullets before white men did or do the grunt work that would let white men do the manly work of fighting. Black soldiers would, indeed, spend more time digging and building fortifications than engaged in armed combat.

Snip...

White Southerners were far less naive about the significance of black labor from the start. As they contemplated the logistical requirements entailed in raising a nation state and an army simultaneously, white Southerners envisioned a central role for the enslaved. Slave labor would continue to grow the cash crops of cotton, sugar, and rice necessary to feed the people, fund the proslavery nation-state enterprise, and secure diplomatic alliances abroad. With slavery as its “tower of strength,” the Montgomery Advertiser boasted in 1861, the South could field an army of hundreds of thousands of white men, “and still not leave the material interests of the country in a suffering condition”.


Snip...

Rejected for command of a volunteer regiment on the grounds that his service as an engineer was needed more, Henry L. Abbot never forgot the perceived slight. Though constantly in the field and once wounded, he had been forced to “suffer for two years the hardship of remaining a subaltern,” he wrote years later. For Abbot, as for most Civil War soldiers, the gun not the shovel, represented the “ultimate of soldiering” (1). The inferior, dependent, and subordinate status that Abbot associated with noncombat military labor resonated in the complaints of black Union soldiers. “Instead of the musket,” they were forced to wield “the spad and the Wheelbarrow and the Axe” (2).

Snip...

Yet the defeat of the Confederacy was due in no small measure to the men and women who wielded spades, wheelbarrows, axes, pots, and needles. Though rarely acknowledged, much less celebrated, the work of hundreds of thousands of noncombatant military laborers—men and women who never or rarely picked up a rifle or fired a cannon—could make or break a campaign as Grant famously discovered in the Mississippi Valley.

Snip...

Soldiers, guns, and generals won battles but did so on the backs of thousands of noncombatant laborers. Behind the lines, in quartermaster, medical and commissary departments, they built forts, breastworks, and other fortifications and destroyed the enemy’s. They built long stretches of log roads and bridges over swamps, cane breaks, and lagoons; built and cleared canals to enable the movement of gunboats; dug ditches; dragged guns through stinking and infested bayous; washed and cooked for soldiers; nursed them; and buried their bodies when death came (Figure 1). They drove thousands of transport wagons, artillery carriages, and caissons to haul artillery, and cared for the hundreds of thousands of horses and mules that braced the movement of armies. Additional thousands of men loaded and unloaded millions of tons of quartermaster, ordnance, medical, and other supplies from boats and barges, mules and wagons. Some 410,000 horses and 125,000 mules were loaded and unloaded on rail lines in the last year of the war alone. An army of 800,000 could easily employ 100,000 such laborers (4). Their ranks included workers skilled in building and repairing wagons, saddles and caissons, and engineers for roads (5). And, like combat soldiers, many lost their lives on the battlefield.

READ THE LINK>>>>>!!!!!

 

Kirk's Raider's

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I found this interesting article about the need for black labor during the Civil War and how the Union won the fight for Black Labor... Read the link it goes into more details and it end with a three-paragraph conclusion...

LINK: Article: https://academic.oup.com/maghis/article/26/2/25/1000927#17605739

Insisting that the war had one aim—the preservation of the Union—President Lincoln and the vast majority of white Northerners initially envisioned no place for free black people or slaves; certainly black men would not be called to fight for Union. In the face of military necessity and the determination of enslaved people to put their freedom on the war’s agenda, the North assented to the enlistment of black soldiers. Still, many Northerners hoped that black soldiers would either take the bullets before white men did or do the grunt work that would let white men do the manly work of fighting. Black soldiers would, indeed, spend more time digging and building fortifications than engaged in armed combat.

Snip...

White Southerners were far less naive about the significance of black labor from the start. As they contemplated the logistical requirements entailed in raising a nation state and an army simultaneously, white Southerners envisioned a central role for the enslaved. Slave labor would continue to grow the cash crops of cotton, sugar, and rice necessary to feed the people, fund the proslavery nation-state enterprise, and secure diplomatic alliances abroad. With slavery as its “tower of strength,” the Montgomery Advertiser boasted in 1861, the South could field an army of hundreds of thousands of white men, “and still not leave the material interests of the country in a suffering condition”.


Snip...

Rejected for command of a volunteer regiment on the grounds that his service as an engineer was needed more, Henry L. Abbot never forgot the perceived slight. Though constantly in the field and once wounded, he had been forced to “suffer for two years the hardship of remaining a subaltern,” he wrote years later. For Abbot, as for most Civil War soldiers, the gun not the shovel, represented the “ultimate of soldiering” (1). The inferior, dependent, and subordinate status that Abbot associated with noncombat military labor resonated in the complaints of black Union soldiers. “Instead of the musket,” they were forced to wield “the spad and the Wheelbarrow and the Axe” (2).

Snip...

Yet the defeat of the Confederacy was due in no small measure to the men and women who wielded spades, wheelbarrows, axes, pots, and needles. Though rarely acknowledged, much less celebrated, the work of hundreds of thousands of noncombatant military laborers—men and women who never or rarely picked up a rifle or fired a cannon—could make or break a campaign as Grant famously discovered in the Mississippi Valley.

Snip...

Soldiers, guns, and generals won battles but did so on the backs of thousands of noncombatant laborers. Behind the lines, in quartermaster, medical and commissary departments, they built forts, breastworks, and other fortifications and destroyed the enemy’s. They built long stretches of log roads and bridges over swamps, cane breaks, and lagoons; built and cleared canals to enable the movement of gunboats; dug ditches; dragged guns through stinking and infested bayous; washed and cooked for soldiers; nursed them; and buried their bodies when death came (Figure 1). They drove thousands of transport wagons, artillery carriages, and caissons to haul artillery, and cared for the hundreds of thousands of horses and mules that braced the movement of armies. Additional thousands of men loaded and unloaded millions of tons of quartermaster, ordnance, medical, and other supplies from boats and barges, mules and wagons. Some 410,000 horses and 125,000 mules were loaded and unloaded on rail lines in the last year of the war alone. An army of 800,000 could easily employ 100,000 such laborers (4). Their ranks included workers skilled in building and repairing wagons, saddles and caissons, and engineers for roads (5). And, like combat soldiers, many lost their lives on the battlefield.

READ THE LINK>>>>>!!!!!
Lieutenant General Omar Bradley stated over seventy years ago "Amateurs study strategy professionals study logistics". Driving wagons and building roads and canals sounds a lot like logistics.
Logistics is a very unforgiving endeavor. Either an army gets what it needs and when it needs or it doesn't. There is no middle ground.
Also the USCT was used to guard supplies from Confederate guerrillas and Cavalry. That's not unimportant.
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