William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15

Context

Southern slavery deteriorated as an institution during the Civil War as Union troops enveloped the Confederacy, forever changing the South’s economic and social landscape. Because of a lack of consistent reporting and conflicting or nonexistent sources, historians cannot compute accurately the number of African Americans set in motion by the federal invasion and occupation, but they know that by early 1865 as few as five hundred thousand and as many as a million fugitive slaves and free black refugees sought the protection of Union troops and resided within Union lines. Contemporaries termed these people “contrabands” or “freedmen.” They participated in large numbers in federally sponsored activities in occupied territory, toiling as soldiers, laborers, residents of contraband camps, and urban workers, and on farms and plantations under federal supervision. Based on the approximation of one million displaced persons, refugees are estimated to have numbered 13,000 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia; 70,000 throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region; 17,300 in North Carolina; 25,000 in South Carolina; 106,000 in Louisiana; and 770,000 in the Mississippi Valley.

In the late fall of 1864, as General Sherman and his sixty-two-thousand-man force marched southeastward from Atlanta to Savannah, the number of black refugees accompanying his army multiplied quickly. According to the historian Willie Lee Rose, “Behind his army followed an ever-increasing throng of liberated Negroes, seeking freedom and security somewhere beyond the confines of the home plantation, perhaps on the coastal islands, waiting quietly in the declining autumn sunlight.” Sherman discouraged the refugees, especially the old, young, and sick, from following his army, believing that caring for the indigent would slow his progress, prove deleterious to his soldiers’ morale, and compromise his soldiers’ effectiveness as a fighting force.

In correspondence dated January 11, 1865, the general lectured Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had chided Sherman for treating the freedpeople “as a set of pariahs, almost without rights.” Responding to this charge, Sherman explained that as he approached Savannah, his force was encumbered by “the crowds of helpless negros that flock after our armies.” He complained that “at least 20,000 negros” were “clogging my roads, and eating up our subsistence.” Sherman professed that he was unbiased toward blacks, asserting that he would treat white and black refugees equally in the case of their posing “a military weakness.”

No racial egalitarian, Sherman defined the role of the army as being to suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion and treason, not to emancipate slaves or to provide humanitarian relief to freedpeople. While he was not opposed to the freeing of the South’s slaves per se, Sherman nonetheless objected to what he considered the inordinate influence of political abolitionism and abolitionists on President Abraham Lincoln and his administration. Sherman also was among the most vocal of military men to oppose the employment of African Americans as armed soldiers. He reasoned that once black men served as soldiers they would demand full equality, a condition that Sherman considered a threat to white supremacy. At best he favored using black soldiers as “surplus” troops, in labor battalions. Like many whites of his day, the general perceived the freedmen and women as inferiors and as “problems,” as distractions who impeded his work and complicated his military objectives. Whenever possible, Sherman put tools, not weapons, in the hands of black men. He preferred having them work as baggage handlers, ditch diggers, fatigue laborers, fortification builders, lumbermen, servants, and stevedores—not as soldiers. Sherman employed black women as cooks, laundresses, nurses, and servants.

Although Sherman and his men shunned the role of “liberators,” the freedpeople of Georgia and South Carolina nonetheless considered the Yankees an army of liberation. They crowded the Union lines for protection from their Confederate masters and relief from fatigue, hunger, sickness, winter cold, and rain. In January the general boasted to Treasury Secretary Chase that far from viewing him as a devil, the freedmen and women “regard me as a second Moses or Aaron. I treat them as free, and have as much trouble to protect them against the avaricious recruiting agents of New England States as against their former masters.”

Through March almost one hundred new black refugees would reach the coast each day, adding ten thousand freedpeople to an already swollen and impoverished African American population requiring clothing, food, medicine, shelter, and firewood. Northern observers, largely abolitionists and missionaries, reported numerous cases of Sherman’s white soldiers abusing, cheating, and robbing the vulnerable freedpeople, whom they considered ignorant “niggers.” “Sherman and his men,” reported Arthur Sumner, a teacher-turned-plantation superintendent, “are impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them so pampered, petted, and spoiled, as they have been here.”

On January 11, 1865, responding to reports of the refugees’ destitution and the mistreatment of freedpeople by Sherman’s troops, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton arrived in Savannah to assess the situation for himself. Brusque, businesslike, and unawed by, if not resentful of, powerful military officers like Sherman, Stanton underscored the sovereignty of civilian authority over the army. The two men had tangled previously over Sherman’s opposition to the arming of blacks as soldiers. Upon arriving in Savannah, Stanton insisted on interviewing an array of black leaders to gain a clear sense of the social conditions and status of the coastal freedpeople, to assess Sherman’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of the freedpeople in his charge, and to gauge the degree to which Sherman protected the blacks’ rights. To accomplish this, the secretary of war spoke with African American clergymen, plantation foremen, barbers, pilots, and sailors to gain their perspectives on the conditions of the thousands of refugees who crowded coastal South Carolina and Georgia.

The black leaders shared their concerns candidly with Stanton, informing him that they preferred settling in black communities apart from whites. Sherman later recalled that the freedpeople claimed to favor living in black settlements, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that it will take years to get over.” The secretary of war also polled the blacks regarding their attitude toward Sherman, specifically whether or not the general had manifested “an almost criminal dislike” of people of color and had cruelly undermined their efforts to accompany his army’s trek across Georgia.

For his part, Sherman dismissed Stanton as an errand boy of the Lincoln administration, at best a political hack. Writing to his wife on January 15, a day before issuing his Special Field Order No. 15, the general remarked, “Stanton has been here and is cured of that Negro nonsense which arises not from a love of the negro but a desire to dodge Service.” Sherman opposed arming blacks, he wrote, because he wanted “soldiers made of the best bone & muscle in the land and wont attempt military feats with doubtful materials.” Sherman continued: “I have said that Slavery is dead and the Negro free and want him treated as free & not hunted & badgered to make a soldier of when his family is left back on the plantation. I am right & wont Change.”

In his Memoirs Sherman remarked,

It certainly was a strange fact that the great War Secretary should have catechized negroes concerning the character of a general who had commanded a hundred thousand men in battle, had captured cities, conducted sixty-five thousand men successfully across four hundred miles of hostile territory, and had just brought tens of thousand of freedmen to a place of security.

No doubt to Stanton’s great surprise and utter disappointment, the black leaders praised Sherman’s work with the freedpeople, stating their “inexpressible gratitude” for his efforts on their behalf. Soon after, on January 16, Sherman issued, with Stanton’s imprimatur, Special Field Order No. 15.