The Black Soldiers Who Changed the Meaning of the Civil War

In January 1865, not long after his march had reached the sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman held a remarkable meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Along with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Sherman spoke with a group of 20 Black ministers about slavery, the Civil War, and the world that was to rise from the ashes of both. Of the sentiments the Baptist Garrison Frazier voiced on behalf of the group, one in particular was repeated: the desire, as Frazier put it, “to assist the Government in maintaining our freedom,” by which he meant serving in the military. Since the beginning of the conflict, Black Americans had invested their hopes for freedom in the Union cause, through both their support of the military and their service within its ranks. Expressing that devotion, Frazier told Sherman and Stanton that “if the prayers that have gone up for the Union army could be read out, you would not get through them these two weeks.”On the eve of Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the military order that affirmed emancipation in Texas, such connections are under strain. Pete Hegseth has taken up Edwin M. Stanton’s title as “secretary of war” but not quite his mantle. As my colleague Clint Smith writes in the July issue of The Atlantic, Hegseth has been at work supporting the administration’s project of “delegitimizing the accomplishments—and the very presence—of Black people in the military.” In addition to Hegseth blocking the advancement of Black senior officers and presiding over the restoration of Confederate memorials, the Department of Defense has removed tributes to Black heroes in the Pentagon and on department webpages.Hegseth’s war on “wokeness” and diversity is also a war on history itself. Black military service has existed since the Revolution. The close bonds Frazier described were cemented with the Civil War, when Black Americans saw the Union army as an instrument of emancipation and full citizenship, as well as a way to serve the national cause. The Atlantic co