black military officers matter

BLACK MILITARY OFFICERS MATTER Looking back, over history, I can see now, as I read BUT ONE RACE THE LIFE OF ROBERT PURVIS by Margaret Hope Bacon (2007), where our then-black leaders' compromise agreements to allow black troops to be led into battle in the Civil War only by white officers, not by blacks, as a condition of their recruitment of these soldiers, set the form and the stage, for much of the discrimination and disparate treatment of blacks that followed our people over the next 150 years, till today! "Military necessity " --his words--compelled President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. This Executive Order enabled the recruiting of black troops in the all except designated portions of the South, and all of the North, although not in the border states, like Missouri , Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware . https://www.google.com/search… That document "freed" no slaves in the South, who were all under the actual political jurisdiction of the Confederate States of America, not the USA. Black men had sought to fight from the start, in their self-named, "Freedom War," but were refused. Claims like it was "A white man's war;" and other equally absurd claims about the blacks' ability to fight and their courage in battle --despite their well-known Revolutionary War and War of 1812 heroism--were also claimed by "Copperheads," Southern sympathizers in and out of the North and Republican Party, like Lincoln's awful Vice President, the villainous Andrew Johnson, from Tennessee. But, after the destructive battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1863, when Robert E. Lee invaded the North and later retreated in defeat into Maryland, without his victory; Antietam in August--which gave Lincoln very scant political cover to issue his preliminary proclamation-did it finally occur to Lincoln that the nation could be lost, without the help of the blacks, who were the work-horses of the South, as two of his generals had demonstrated in August 1861 (Fremont, Missouri ) and May 1862 (Hunter, South Carolina). Robert Purvis, the preeminent Philadelphia freedom fighter and philanthropist of African descent himself had such reservations and expressed them in a letter to Wendell Phillips, Congressman from Massachusetts : "Yet notwithstanding the advance made by the government in forming regiments of colored men--it argues a sad misapprehension of character, aspirations, and self-respect of colored men, to suppose that they would submit to the degrading limit which the government imposed in regard to the officering of said regiments. From that position and error, the government must recede or else I opine that failure to secure the right kind of men will be the result." (P.147) That "sad misapprehension" mentioned by Purvis was borne out in the unequal pay and benefits conferred upon black troops, until Congress finally equalized the pay and benefits of black troops in June 1864, following a boycott of receipt of any pay by black troops, until they got the same as the white troops, as originally promised and as declared in statutory law. Still, however , though pay was finally equalized, there were no line of duty officers of African descent with regular command of troops, as "the fear of arming blacks remained widespread..." (Ibid., p. 147) One such would-be officer who had actively raised black troops in Ohio, and who had relentlessly yet unsuccessfully sought their command, was John Mercer Langston , an attorney, Oberlin graduate , and later founder of the Howard University School of Law in 1869. The war ended too soon for black command to be implemented. But, had it been, history would be very different!