What to the Nation is the American Soldier? Shifting Conceptions of Service, Rights, and Belonging in the Civil War
Julie Novkov
On Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day in the United States, flags fly and appreciation flows. Veterans receive private recognition, but also state-mandated and -supported benefits, ranging from healthcare to preferential hiring practices. Veteran status also has political salience. The current House of Representatives has eighty veteran members (18.4%), and seventeen Senators served in the military. While this share is “near a record low,” veterans are still overrepresented. The Census Bureau estimated that about 6.4% of the civilian population over age eighteen were veterans in 2021. For more than 150 years, service members and veterans have had readier access to U.S. citizenship.
While a link between military service and citizenship dates back to the Revolutionary era, military service in the antebellum period was not so clearly linked to honor and civic membership. The Civil War was a key turning point in setting the United States firmly on a path toward valorizing service in the national armed forces. As the Army and Navy fought the nation’s largest existential war, important public figures discussed the meaning of military service, who should be required to serve, and—with regard to African Americans—who should be allowed to serve. As this Essay will illustrate, Frederick Douglass advocated for Black military service as a means of advancing Black political incorporation, and in doing so, he both confirmed the growing sense that military service was a key component of civic membership and that participation in military service marked one as a civic member entitled to rights. As the war continued, Abraham Lincoln increasingly recognized the need for more manpower and came to see that the incorporation of Black men into the military was a practical necessity. As the American military saved the Union, Lincoln and those around him embraced the soldier as a crucial contributor to national survival worthy of recognition for his service, regardless of race.
The military advanced state-building in the antebellum years, but not everyone who served had equal standing or worth. While volunteer state militias were respected as honorable civic service, “[t]he prevailing American view was that the man who chose service in the regular army was at best imprudent and at worst a shiftless person seeking only to benefit from a kind of welfare program.” This reflected republican distrust of the American army, although it was kept small, growing only to address immediate combat needs and shrinking in the aftermath, as Congress resisted building a professional standing army. People perceived the regular army as atomistic and transactional, and enlistees were not necessarily afforded honor and respect. Yet state militia service remained an important element of civic incorporation and conferred political benefits on its members throughout the antebellum era, reflecting republican virtue and incorporating patriotism.
During this period, states harboring free Black residents restricted the right and obligation of militia service to white men. While a few states initially enrolled Black men, explicit exclusion soon prevailed. As political struggles over slavery increased, Black men pressed Northern states to allow Black service, and when thwarted, organized their own militias in New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, as well as in Canada. The exclusion of Black state residents from the Army and state militias and Southern opposition to their naval service prevented potentially dangerous groups of individuals from obtaining weapons and military training. But it also barred access to the bargain of service for citizenship and civic belonging.
When the Civil War began, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln debated Black military service and its meaning. The debate addressed Black men’s incorporation in the U.S. military but also reflected how the meaning of military service and the rights associated with it were changing. Douglass advocated Black military service to extract citizenship for both free Black citizens in the North and those whom an abolitionist war would free. Lincoln entered the war holding conventional white views about Black unfitness for full civic membership in the nation, but ultimately endorsed Black military service and Douglass’s recommendation of votes for soldiers. The trajectory toward accepting Black volunteers was frustratingly slow for advocates, as several of Lincoln’s generals pressed for incorporation only to meet with refusal and silence. Not until the final Emancipation Proclamation was released in January 1863 was Lincoln fully on board, despite the strong advocacy of Douglass and others from the early days of the war.
Tracing Lincoln’s and Douglass’s positions on Black military service in the time between the war’s outbreak and emancipation illustrates how Black military incorporation shifted the meaning of the war and the rights associated with service. As the analysis to come will show, Douglass’s rhetoric framed Black military service as essential for national survival, thereby centering the military and its members as heroic figures worthy of respect and state-based civic recognition. Because he was pressing for Black incorporation into the national armed services, he necessarily elevated this form of service, flattening the previous distinction between state militias and the Army and appropriating the civic virtue attributed to militia service for Army membership in America’s most critical struggle.
The men only met three times. The first was in August 1863, six months after the Emancipation Proclamation. In August 1864, they met again, and “Lincoln asked Douglass to undertake covert efforts to free slaves if Lincoln lost re-election.” Their final meeting was shortly before Lincoln’s assassination. Douglass, initially critical of Lincoln, ultimately supported him, and Lincoln, who bridled at Douglass’s early criticisms, entrusted him with securing emancipation, even by extralegal means.