Black soldiers waged wars on two fronts

Stories, videos, cold cases. Once in uniform, black recruits faced a range of prejudicial treatment, including low pay, inferior weapons, inadequate medical care and relegation to fatigue duty. With blacks in camp, white soldiers were spared from degrading manual tasks such as digging ditches for latrines.

Black soldiers understood that only on the battlefield could they earn the respect of whites. Although black regiments participated in 39 major battles and 449 minor engagements, it was their remarkable valor in several battles in 1863 and 1864 that assuaged Northern prejudices, impressing naysayers enough to give serious consideration to the widespread use of black soldiers.

Learning that the North was arming slaves, the Davis administration threatened to re-enslave captured blacks and execute white officers for aiding servile insurrection. When Lincoln vowed to retaliate by executing Rebel officers taken prisoner, Davis backed down. But the Confederate president could do little to slake the racial animosity of many rebel commands, which adopted a no-prisoners policy signified by carrying the "black flag" into battle.

When blacks responded with terror tactics of their own, the war descended into a vicious cycle of atrocity and reprisal that has somehow faded from the American memory. The war may have been a chivalrous contest for some combatants, but not for the Rebels who shot surrendering blacks at Fort Pillow, Tenn., or the blacks who murdered wounded Confederates at Jenkins' Ferry, Ark.

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