Just before James K. Polk became president in 1845, Texas was admitted to the Union. Polk was an “expansionist,” an enthusiastic supporter of Texas annexation. In order to balance the new southern territories, he also looked for a way to bring northern territories into the Union.

As a result, in 1846 the U.S. signed the Oregon Treaty with Britain, essentially settling, as U.S. territory, the land south of the 49th parallel (and as British territory, the land north of it). This extended the northern continental U.S. boundary to the Pacific as it stands today, including the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally ended the Mexican War, was signed in February 1848. It ceded the formerly Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México to the U.S. By this treaty, Mexico also recognized the U.S.'s annexation of Texas, and recognized the Rio Grande as its border with the U.S.

Out of this territory, much of the present-day states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and California, as well as large portions of Wyoming and Colorado, were eventually created. When Polk submitted the treaty to the Senate for approval, opposition came equally from Southern Democrats who wished even more land from Mexico and from Northern Whigs, who did not wish for any land from Mexico whatsoever. U.S. politicians clearly saw that the accession of land in the South would have consequences for the political balance of power in Congress on the issue of slavery. Nevertheless, the Senate ratified the treaty.

Five years later, in 1853, with the Gadsden Purchase (during President Franklin Pierce’s administration), the U.S. added the land south of the Gila River and West of the Rio Grande. Today, that area comprises the southern portions of the states of Arizona and New Mexico.

It may seem ironic today (as it did to some even at the time), but Polk was often praised as a “great champion of liberty” because his territorial acquisitions pushed outward the “boundaries of democracy.”

I have not found a map of it either, but that may be partly because the field order itself was ambiguous about the area as well as about what exactly it authorized.

General William Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 from his temporary headquarters in Savannah on January 16, 1865. It defined an area along the coast north and south of where he had encamped his army: “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea and the country bordering the St. John River, Florida.” A broad interpretation of this would take it to include a continuous 30-mile-wide swath of land extending along the coast south from Charleston, South Carolina, as far as Jacksonville, Florida, and including all the Sea Islands. I have cropped a section of an 1854 map from Wells’ McNally’s System of Geography and tinted this area light red.

This is the region of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida that is known as the “low country.” You can show your students why it is called that by looking at the satellite version of the Google map for the region, which shows that it is a deep shade of green.

It is flat and almost entirely just above sea level. It was an area where large rice plantations flourished. Growing rice was an extremely labor intensive occupation and the plantation owners owned many slaves. The slave population of the area therefore far exceeded the white population, which, of course, constituted the landholders.

From the North’s point of view, it was not only the epicenter of the most egregious form of the unjust slave system, wherein a large number of black slaves labored entirely for the profit of white slave owners, but it was also (not coincidentally) the epicenter of the secession movement that precipitated the beginning of the war at Fort Sumter.

The purpose of Sherman’s order was to set aside a large area within which freed blacks could be settled. The area came to be popularly known as the “Sherman Reservation.”

Sherman had defined a general area, but his wording was somewhat ambiguous. He clearly set aside all the Sea Islands, but within the coastal swath of land, he appears to have been aiming to confiscate—and make available for settlement—only the plantations along the rivers and other “abandoned” lands. Nevertheless, Congress had earlier decided that all land and property of men who were fighting for the Confederacy (or even the property of others who had supported or conducted business with Confederate forces or authorities) had been technically “abandoned,” even if their families were still on the land, making it eligible for confiscation by the Federal government. This would have vastly expanded the land reckoned to be available for settling freed blacks, even if Sherman’s order was originally interpreted to apply only to the islands and the land along the rivers (rather than the entire 30-mile-wide swath of land).

Sherman wrote a letter to President Andrew Johnson on February 2, 1866, explaining the origin of his field order. It was published in The New York Times the following day and was undoubtedly meant for public consumption:

The Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, came to Savannah soon after its occupation by the forces under my command, and conferred freely with me as to the best methods to provide for the vast number of negroes who had followed the army from the interior of Georgia, as also for those who had already congregated on the islands near Hilton Head, and were still coming into our lines. We agreed perfectly that the young and able-bodied men should be enlisted as soldiers, or employed by the Quartermaster in the necessary work of unloading ships, and for other army purposes. But this left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children, who had necessarily to be fed by the United States. Mr. Stanton summoned a large number of the old negroes mostly preachers with whom he had long conference, of which he took down notes. After the conference he was satisfied the negroes could, with some little aid from the United States, by means of the abandoned plantations on the Sea Islands and along the navigable waters take care of themselves. He requested me to draw up a plan that would be uniform and practicable. I made the rough draft and we went over it very carefully. Mr. Stanton making many changes, and the present Orders No. 15 resulted and were made public.

I know of course we could not convey title to land and merely provided “possessory” titles to be good so long as war and military power lasted. I merely aimed to make provision for the negroes who were absolutely dependent on us, leaving the value of their possessions to be determined by after events or legislation.

At that time, January, 1865, it will be remembered that the tone of the people of the South was very defiant, and no one could foretell when the period of war would cease. Therefore I did not contemplate that event as being so near at hand.

President Johnson was about to begin pardoning ex-Confederates and restoring the property the Federal government had confiscated from them, provided that they took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. The whites who had original title to land in “Sherman’s Reservation” petitioned the President to recognize their titles and give them back full possession. Sherman’s letter emphasized that he had had no authority to give full title to the land covered in his field order, but only a temporary or “possessory” title to it, under his wartime military authority, and he implied that he would not have issued the order if he had known that the war was about to end.

Sherman’s explanation provided justification for Johnson’s order to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been liberally setting up black settlements in the area, with each family receiving “forty acres and a (leased army) mule.” Much to the dismay of the Freedmen’s Bureau, of the military officer General Rufus Saxton who Sherman had put in place to implement his order—and of course to the African Americans who had been resettled into the area—Johnson ordered the restoration of the land to the original owners.

Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, had traveled to Savannah to meet with Sherman at the time the General had issued his order, and appears to have approved it orally, but not formally, in the sense that he did nothing to countermand it. Stanton’s biographer, Frank Abial Flower, wrote, of the order:

Stanton, on reading it, said to Sherman: “It seems to me, General, that this is contrary to law.” Sherman’s response was: “There is no law here except mine, Mr. Secretary.” Stanton smiled and the order was issued a day or two after he left for the North. General Saxton says Stanton was opposed to the order, but acquiesced in its promulgation in deference to the positive wishes of General Sherman.

On the face of it, Stanton's implied reluctance seems unlikely, because, as Sherman explained, the plan had suggested itself to Stanton and Sherman after they met in Savannah with a group of African American clergy who had asked for relief from the government for the many thousands of ex-slaves who were then in the area, either because they had originally resided there or because they had followed Sherman’s army across the South.

When the notion of establishing them on abandoned or confiscated lands came up for discussion, almost all of these clergy urged that military forces be used to settle them in areas in which all whites would be prohibited from entering, as a way to protect the settlements from white encroachments. Militarily, this could be most efficiently accomplished by designating the Sea Islands and the low lands along the rivers as the places to settle.

Some of the most radical members of Congress were delighted by this. Indeed, several had expressed their desire as the war ended to hang everyone who had been in the Confederate armies, to confiscate all their property, including their land, and to redistribute it all permanently to ex-slaves, recreating the South as a kind of African American preserve from which Southern whites would be barred—a plan that today would be called “ethnic cleansing.”

After the war ended, the contentious results of Sherman’s field order arose as the Federal government sorted out how it would deal permanently with what Sherman had instituted primarily as a military expedient—to free his forces from the burden of caring for refugees as he moved his armies north into the Carolinas. Historian Jacqueline Jones, in Saving Savannah, summed up Sherman’s original goal:

Ultimately, then, Special Field Order No. 15 grew out of the refugee problem, which, in the words of one Union officer, “left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children,” too many hungry mouths to feed in the city of Savannah. … The order made explicit the connection between military service for men and homesteads for their families, and it provided not for fee-simple titles, outright ownership of the land, but rather possessory titles that remained contingent on future political developments. The order itself remained “subject to the approval of the President.” What came to be called the Sherman Reservation, then, was a means of draining Savannah of women, children, and the elderly while providing for enforced service among young men. This initial goal foreshadowed the order’s troubled future.

Down to our own time, the confused and conflicted intentions and authorities that informed the issuance of Field Order No. 15 and its later implementation and revocation, have been the focus of the claim of precedent for government reparations to ex-slaves and then to their descendants.

The original of this handbill is in the Boston Public Library’s Rare Book collection. It is part of the papers, manuscripts, and diaries of abolitionist and controversial Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker, who composed it and had it printed and distributed.

At the time he posted it around Boston, Parker was the head of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of white and black abolitionists, eventually numbering more than 200, who agitated in various legal and extra-legal ways to frustrate slaveholding. The committee set up a secret network of operators on the Underground Railroad, who transported escaped slaves through the area. The committee also looked for slave-catchers in Boston who had come north to search for fugitive slaves. Parker and his fellow committee members alerted the sympathetic white and black community in the area, and sometimes threatened the slave-catchers and scared them off, and even rushed the jail to free captured slaves.

The committee’s semi-secretive efforts increased in intensity after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850), which specifically required Northern states to remit or return fugitive slaves to their Southern owners. The committee’s collective outrage peaked during the 1851 trial and return to Georgia of escaped slave Thomas Sims (the handbill is from this period), the capture and freeing of fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins in 1851, and the riots during the capture and return under Federal guard of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to Virginia in 1854.

Having or keeping your top eye open simply meant keeping a careful watch, no matter what else you were doing. It most often carried the idea that you had to keep a lookout for threatening intruders, enemies, or competitors.

The phrase appears to be an Americanism. I see written evidence for its use, among both uneducated and educated and among both whites and African Americans, as early as 1828 and as late as 1911. Those who used it probably felt it to be a bit unusual because it often appeared with quotation marks around it, as if they understood it as slang.

Today, we would say something like “keep your eyes peeled” or “keep one eye open” or “sleep with one eye open.” When you lie down to sleep, one eye is uppermost and is therefore your “top eye,” the one with the slightly better vantage point. “Top” probably also connoted “best,” so that your “top eye” was the one that could see farther and clearer.

John S. Skinner, for example, in an 1828 issue of The American Farmer, counseled his readers, “So that as small sands form the mountain, and economy is said to be wealth, perhaps it would be as well to keep our top-eye open a little sharper towards those smaller items of family expenses.” The satirist John S. Robb, in a backwoods story he published in an 1845 issue of The Spirit of the Times, had one of his rustic characters say: “You, Mike, keep your eye skinned for Ingins, ‘cause ef we git deep in a yard here, without a top eye open, the cussed varmints ‘ll pop on us unawars, and be stickin’ some of thur quills in us—nothing’ like havin’ your eye open and insterments ready."

The phrase was a warning to keep your guard up, but also simply to pay close attention to what was happening so that you could forestall a threat as it arose and even shrewdly turn the situation into a favorable opportunity for your own success or profit.

Theodore Parker certainly understood the phrase in this way. In a speech he gave to the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, he said, “I am glad that a ‘top eye’ is open to scrutinize the acts of public men—an eye that never slumbers nor sleeps—an eye that does not spare a friend when he falters more than a foe when he is false; I am glad of that.” And in a letter he wrote in 1854, Parker facetiously chided fellow abolitionist Samuel J. May for having tried to argue that the Bible was a pacifist tract, when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary: “But all this, O father! is a delusion of Satan, who will deceive the very elect if they do not keep a top-eye open and a bright look-out.”

The phrase also had currency among other abolitionists, who used it to describe slaves who carried on with their normal activities, but constantly watched for the moment when they could act by making their escape. The Provincial Freeman in its issue of April 21, 1855, for example, used the phrase:

The cook (a colored man) having his “top eye open,” kept quiet till the steamer had fairly reached New York, then quietly procured a carriage, and apprised the property [that is, a slave onboard] that it was at liberty to assume a more independent air; consequently, it was not unconscious of the value of time; and lo! to the utter amazement of the Mate, it was seen making quick paces in the direction of the carriage.

Abolitionist activist and writer William Still, in his 1872 history, The Underground Rail Road, described the rescue of a slave, Jane Johnson, and her children, using the phrase—“Jane had her ‘top eye open,’ and in that brief space had appealed to the sympathies of a person whom she ventured to trust, saying, ‘I and my children are slaves, and we want liberty!’”

The phrase “keep (or have) your top eye open” had this meaning all during the time it was current, through the first decade of the 20th century.

For about 15 years, from about 1885 to 1900, long after Parker had written his handbill, the phrase briefly developed another meaning before it dropped out of currency altogether. Liberal reformers and spiritual progressives, especially from New England, used it to refer to cultivating a new and higher angle of vision on the world. To keep or have your top eye open meant to look a little deeper into the reasons of things or to look behind the surface of everyday things, to take your eyes off the ground and look into the air, up to heaven, to look there for subtle signs and omens, to be high-minded, to be spiritual rather than materialistic, to be focused on the true and lasting rather than the false, the sensual, and the transitory, on the intuitive rather than the calculating.

Parker’s use of the phrase in 1851 has nothing in it, even implicitly, that connects it to this later meaning. However, the distant origins of the image that this later meaning captures probably lay in Parker’s friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” written in 1836, where he described an “exaltation” he experienced one day at twilight staring into snow puddles: "Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

The “top eye” was the “skylight of the soul,” like the oculus at the top of the Pantheon in Rome. It saw, not the waves, but “Him who walks upon the waves,” in the words of ex-Quaker, Temperance worker and suffragist Hannah Whitall Smith. For her, opening one’s top eye was a mystical experience, a religious conversion, a reception of holiness and sanctification into one’s life. In 1883, Smith’s coworker and friend, Frances Elizabeth Willard, the President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, described Mrs. Smith’s home and family:

There is no fear of the “next thing,” because it is the next and not the last. There is no looking back, after the puerile fashion of Lot’s wife, but, with earnest gaze forward and upward, this family group moves forward, blessing and blessed. “Keep your top eye open,” is the mother’s constant motto for her children.

About the same time, Congregationalist lecturer, Joseph Cook, at one of his weekly prayer meetings at Boston’s Tremont Temple, told his audience:

British advanced thought believes in its frontal eye, but not in its coronal eye. This is a defect of the English mind and of the American. When you reach India, in your tour of the globe, you will find people who believe in their coronal eye; who see God in an intuitive way, as Emerson did. … The Scotch have an eye in the dome of their souls; but they have such an immense front window that they are chiefly occupied in gazing out of it. Rarely, except in periods of mighty religious fervor, do they look aloft through the dome. … In general, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Americans believe in experience, observation, definition, induction, the scientific method, and nothing else. You notice thus one of the defects of Anglo-Saxon advanced thought, that it sees with its front eye, and not with its top eye.

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

After the War of 1812, the northern, free states' members in the House of Representatives exceeded those from slave states. The slave states reckoned then that Congress could try to outlaw slavery in the South. Their representatives in the House had tried to stave off attempts by that chamber to legislate the abolition of slavery by instituting a "gag rule" which, for years, had blocked abolitionist petitions from reaching the floor of the House, but which had been rescinded in 1844. The South therefore worked out a strategy to ensure that they would not be outnumbered in the Senate. If they maintained a balance in the Senate, they figured, attempts to force the end of slavery on the southern states could be blocked.

To maintain this balance as new territories were admitted into the Union, slave states and free states were admitted, roughly speaking, in pairs: Mississippi and Indiana, Alabama and Illinois, Missouri and Maine, Arkansas and Michigan, and Florida and Iowa. In some cases, the admission of a state was slowed or sped up in order to pair it with another. This practice was the outcome of a strategy that the South considered essentially defensive. The South's primary aim in this was not so much to spread slavery as it was to protect slavery where it already existed. To do that, it had to protect its strength in the Senate, and for that to happen as northern territories were brought into the Union, the South had to find southern territories to balance them. Eventually, this even led some in the South to look for possible ways to annex Cuba and Nicaragua and bring them into the Union as slave states.

Texas and Wisconsin were considered to be a pair. Partly due to objections of northern abolitionists who feared that the admission of Texas by itself would tilt the Senate balance in favor of the South, the Lone Star State's entrance into the Union was delayed until December 29, 1845, and only happened then because of the successful Democratic campaign of 1844 that succeeded in electing James Polk to the White House on a platform that combined a call for admitting Texas into the Union with an expansionist stance on the question of setting the northern territorial claims of Oregon as far as possible. The northern vote was split in that election, between Whig candidate Henry Clay, Liberty Party candidate James Birney, and James Polk (partly because of his party's position on Oregon), giving the election to Polk.

There was a strong effort to bring Wisconsin into the Union in 1846, along with Iowa, but Wisconsin was not admitted until May 29, 1848. Did that make the Senate balanced in the South's favor between the time of the admission of Texas and the admission of Wisconsin? Not really. For one thing, the balance in fact was volatile.

For example, although Iowa had been admitted to the Union as a free state on December 28, 1846, political turmoil in its state legislature, almost evenly divided on party lines, and spiced by accusations of bribery, resulted in the state's inability at first to elect U.S. Senators to send to Congress. In addition, party politics factored into votes, with northern Democrats, for example, sometimes voting with their southern colleagues. Nevertheless, a rough parity existed in the Senate, although the South recognized it as tenuous.

South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun's speech in the Senate on February 19, 1847, described the situation in which the South perceived itself at the time:

Sir, already we are in a minority—I use the word 'we' for brevity sake—already we are in a minority in the other House, in the electoral college, and, I may say, in every department of this government, except at present, in the Senate of the United States—there, for the present, we have an equality. Of the twenty-eight States, fourteen are non-slaveholding and fourteen are slaveholding, counting Delaware, which is doubtful, as one of the non-slaveholding States. But this equality of strength exists only in the Senate. … We, Mr. President, have at present, only one position in the government, by which we may make any resistance to this aggressive policy which has been declared against the South; or any other, that the non-slaveholding States may choose to take. And this equality in this body is of the most transient character. Already, Iowa is a State; but, owing to some domestic calamity, is not yet represented in this body. When she appears here, there will be an addition of two Senators to the Representatives here, of the non-slaveholding States. Already, Wisconsin has passed the initiatory stage, and will be here at next session. This will add two more, making a clear majority of four in this body on the side of the non-slaveholding States, who will thus be enable to sway every branch of this government at their will and pleasure. But, sir, if this aggressive policy be followed—if the determination of the non-slaveholding States is to be adhered to hereafter, and we are to be entirely excluded from the territories which we already possess, or may possess—if this is to be the fixed policy of the government, I ask what will be our situation hereafter?

Calhoun was reacting here to the introduction of the "Wilmot Proviso," an attempt by northern anti-slavery congressmen to ban slavery in all territories that would enter U.S. possession in the future. Far from seeing itself at this point as capable of taking advantage of its senatorial strength, the South—as is clear from Calhoun's speech—saw itself as barely able to hold its defenses against an aggressive North intent on outlawing slavery everywhere. In his speech, Calhoun calculated that if all the territories were thenceforth brought into the Union as free states, the slave states would be outnumbered in the Senate by two to one.

The Wilmot Proviso was defeated in the Senate—that was as close as one could say that the South was able to "take advantage of" its strength there—but the battle over it served to turn opposing political forces further into sectional differences, North versus South, free state versus slave state. By doing this, it also helped to redefine the politics of the time away from party affiliation and loyalty to sectional affiliation. Both the Whigs and the Democrats underwent fragmentation and inner realignments during this period.

When California was admitted on September 9, 1850, its formal admission came only five days after the passage of the bills that formed the Compromise of 1850. As part of the Compromise, California came in as a single free state, rather than divided into two parts, one free and one slave, but Utah and New Mexico territories were organized to allow popular votes in the territories to decide later whether slavery would be permitted. In point of fact, the admission of California did not immediately change the balance of anti- vs. pro-slavery votes in the Senate because California, although a free state, sent one anti-slavery senator and one pro-slavery senator to Washington.

In the fall of 1857, the Kansas Territory's proslavery legislature met in the town of Lecompton and worked out a constitution, which it proposed to put up for a vote. The vote, however, was only between "the constitution with slavery" or "the constitution without slavery."

The proposed constitution was written in such a way that a vote "for the constitution without slavery" still allowed the residents of Kansas to keep the slaves they owned, while preventing new slaves from entering the territory.

Anti-slavery voters boycotted the referendum and consequently the "constitution with slavery" passed by a large margin. Kansas voters, however, eventually elected a new legislature and defeated the Lecompton Constitution. In 1859, they ratified the Wyandotte Constitution that outlawed slavery.

Article 7, Section 1, of the Lecompton Constitution stated that "… the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever." The slave's "increase" meant the children of the slave, so they would still have been considered slaves, as would those slaves' children into the future.

While there are isolated instances of African Americans serving in the Confederate ranks, there is overwhelming evidence that this small number represents rare and exceptional cases: historian David Blight estimates that the number of black soldiers in the Confederate ranks was fewer than 200. That small number represents some partial companies of slaves training as soldiers discovered by Union forces after the fall of Richmond. One reason that only a handful of blacks fought for the Confederacy is that until the last weeks of the war, the Confederate Congress expressly forbade arming enslaved African Americans, who made up the vast majority of the black population in the South. Given white southerners' longstanding fears of a slave uprising (fears intensified by a few abortive attempts in the first half of the 19th century and exacerbated to the point of hysteria by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859), the acute resistance of Confederates to arming blacks is understandable. Putting muskets in the hands of enslaved African Americans presented more than simply a concrete threat—embracing the notion that blacks could serve as soldiers in the same fashion as whites threatened deeply-held Southern ideas of race-based honor and masculinity. As Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs put it, "The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers, they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced."

Northerners were scarcely more enthusiastic about arming African Americans than their Southern counterparts. For the first year and a half of the war, Abraham Lincoln's administration eschewed the enlistment of black troops, fearful of a public backlash. Not until Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did the Union Army begin to enroll African Americans in its ranks; even then, the decision proved deeply controversial, particularly among Northern Democrats. The Confederacy did not seriously entertain the idea of arming enslaved African Americans until a full year later, when the war situation in the South had grown much more desperate. In January 1864, months after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Patrick Cleburne (one of the most successful combat commanders in the Confederate Army) circulated a proposal to arm the slaves. Northern successes on the battlefield, Cleburne argued, threatened the South with "the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood." Sacrificing the first, Cleburne held, could save the rest; the Confederacy could check Union advances by recruiting an army of slaves and guaranteeing freedom "within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy." A dozen of Cleburne's subordinates backed his proposal.

To most Southerners, however, Cleburne's plan was appalling. The prospect of arming the slaves struck one division commander as "revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor." A brigade commander suggested that accepting enslaved African Americans as soldiers would "contravene the principles upon which we fight." Sensing the potential for the debate to cause dangerous dissension within the ranks, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the generals to cease the discussion. Debate over the decision to arm enslaved African Americans resurfaced many months later, as the Confederacy's situation grew progressively more dire both on and off the battlefield. When another similar proposal reemerged it carried the imprimatur of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and perhaps the most revered figure in the South. In February 1865, Lee wrote a letter to a Confederate congressman characterizing the plan as "not only expedient but necessary." Even with Lee's support, though, the bill proved deeply divisive. It was not until March 13, 1865, just weeks before Lee's surrender, that the Confederate Congress passed legislation allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers. The two companies discovered by Union troops after the fall of Richmond never went into battle. Opposition to African American soldiers was passionate on both sides. The notion of fighting alongside blacks violated many deeply-held beliefs of white Northerners and Southerners alike. In the Union army, African Americans served in segregated regiments under white officers; many were used for menial tasks rather than fighting, and those that went into combat suffered abuse from their white comrades and were often singled out as targets by their Confederate foes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of African American troops fought bravely and with distinction, and by the end of the war, their actions in combat had begun to change the assumptions of at least some of their comrades regarding the fitness of blacks for battle. Despite their demonstrated fighting ability, it was nearly another full century before the United States Army finally desegregated individual units.