Civil War regarding African Americans
Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him "no"…
But, if anyone asks you, will a Negro fight? Tell him YES!
-Abolitionist Wendell Phillips
But, if anyone asks you, will a Negro fight? Tell him YES!
-Abolitionist Wendell Phillips
In 1865 African Americans were signing up in record numbers, prompted in part by 1863's Second Battle of Fort Wagner.Ad
The history of the Civil War is marked by 7,122 officers, 178,975 enlisted. African Americans taking up 163 units who served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and many more African Americans who served in the Union Navy. Both free African Americans and runaway slaves joined the fight. On the Confederate side, both free and slave blacks were used for labor, but the issue of whether to arm them, and under what terms, became a major source of debate, and no significant numbers were ever raised or recruited.
For four years between 1861 and 1865 the United States engaged in a civil war. Divisions between the free North and the slaveholding South erupted into a full-scale conflict after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860. Eleven southern states seceded from the Union, collectively turning their back on the idea of a single American nation. Lincoln, who had been in office for only six weeks, declared these acts of secession illegal, and asked Congress for 500,000 soldiers to crush what threatened to be an aggressive rebellion. In April 1861, the first shots were fired and what followed became a national tragedy ofunimaginable proportions. More than 600,000 soldiers were killed and millions more wounded; large sections of the South were ravaged by violent battles; and the Union nearly collapsed under determined Confederate forces.
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Jordan Fitzgerald
Cleydir Andrade