Question

When the Civil War began, why did northern black men volunteer to serve in the Union army particularly, if the war had not yet become a war to end slavery?

Answer 1

Ans) The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. The event that triggered war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861.

- The soldiers are classified by the state where they were enrolled; Northern states often sent agents to enroll ex-slaves from the South. Note that many soldiers from Delaware, D.C., Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia were ex-slaves as well. Most of the troops credited to West Virginia, however, were not actually from that state.

- The emancipation offered, however, was reliant upon a master's consent; "no slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman."

- According to historian William C. Davis, President Davis felt that blacks would not fight unless they were guaranteed their freedom after the war.Gaining this consent from slaveholders, however, was an "unlikely prospect".