A conservative, Democrat paper reprinted an article maintaining that the black troops that fought for the North at Port Hudson were not the super warriors and/or super savages that some initial reports indicated.
From a Seneca County, New York newspaper in August 1863:
Our readers will remember the extraordinary stories which were scattered all over the country touching the valor of the negro soldiers who participated in the first assault upon Port Hudson. It was claimed that six hundred out of one thousand were killed, and the terrible blacks fought with their teeth when their muskets and arms failed them. All the abolition papers [joined?] in the chorus of praise for the negroes; the poet BAKER celebrated their deeds in verse; while General BANKS himself, in his dispatches, extolled the negro troops and said not a word in favor of the white. But the truth is out at last. The whole story was a falsehood from beginning to end, and was prepared beforehand to reconcile the North to the arming of the slaves. The New Orleans Era, General BANK’s personal organ, gives an official return of the losses during the whole siege in the negro regiments from which it appears that.
There were engaged in the siege of Port Hudson two regiments of colored troops, the First and the Third, both together numbering 1,245 men. Of these 28 were killed 123 wounded by gunshots, and 46 by falling trees making the total casualties 197. many of the wounds were slight, from which the sufferers have since recovered.
And so ends the romance of negro valor at Port Hudson. – World.
Maybe the black troops were like other soldiers – some braver, some less brave. That might be a pretty liberating idea for all of us.
The June 20, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly at Son of the South says that the black troops did well at Port Hudson and blames slavery for the recalcitrance of the Northern public to support black recruiting earlier:
NEGRO TROOPS.
THE magnificent behavior of the Second Louisiana colored regiment at Port Hudson recalls the fact that it is just two years since a warning, uttered in the columns of this journal, that if this war lasted we should arm the negroes, and use them to fight the rebels, was received with shrieks of indignation, not only at the South and in such semi-neutral States as Maryland and Kentucky, but throughout the loyal North and even in the heart of New England. At that time the bulk of the people of the United States entertained a notion that it was unworthy of a civilized or a Christian nation to use in war soldiers whose skin was not white. How so singular a notion could have originated, and how men should have clung to it in the face of the example of foreign nations and our own experience in the wars of 1776 and 1812, can only be explained by referring to the extraordinary manner in which for forty years slavery had been warping the heart and mind of the American people. A generation of men had grown up in awe of slavery, and in unchristian contempt of the blacks. And that generation declared that it would not have negro soldiers. …
