Status Updates From The Negro's Civil War

In 1902 Susie King Taylor, who had escaped from slavery in 1862, wrote…

…when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not make [sic] our condition more hopeless?”

From the New Orleans newspaper, L’Union:…How does one explain, then, the hesitancy of the American people to grant the right to vote to these black men, who have as much intelligence, energy, and vigor as the average white man and much more patriotism than the traitors who have dared to place their bloodstained hands on the federal Constitution?

Their education aggravates their suffering…The educated colored man meets on the one hand, the embittered prejudices of the whites, and on...the jealousies of his own race…You can hardly imagine the humiliation and contempt a colored lad must feel by graduating the first in his class, and then being rejected everywhere else because of his color…No where in the United States is the colored man of talent appreciated.

On March 28, 1863, The New York Tribune stated editorially:

Facts are beginning to dispel prejudices. Enemies of the negro race, who have persistently denied the capacity and doubted the courage of the Blacks, are unanswerably confuted by the good conduct and gallant deeds of the men whom they persecute and slander.

Union officers frequently took advantage of the contraband’s ignorance and inexperience…there has been, and is still, meanness of every conceivable grade practised upon them. Officers…torment them like fiends, while the government retains them on its highways and public works, and the quartermaster refuses to pay them.

If the colored people, under all the social and legal disabilities by which they are environed, are ever ready to defend the government that despoils them of their rights, it may be concluded that it is quite safe to oppress them.