“A Man But Not a Brother” — Black Civil War Heroes and the Persistence of White Supremacy
Chapter Eight of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
The Civil War produced many heroes, some remembered and revered and others unsung and neglected. The loss of life in the war was staggering. Casualty estimates for the war range from about 620,000 to more than double that number dead.[i]
In choosing Civil War heroes and in recalling them we should consider not only how bravely they fought but also what they were fighting for. What did they win with their heroic sacrifice and bravery? What were the end results of all the killing, dying, and suffering?
The Civil War shook the foundations of the racial hierarchy in America, but it did not succeed in toppling the edifice of White supremacy.
Among the undeniable outcomes of the Civil War are the following: The Confederacy was defeated militarily and surrendered to the United States in the spring of 1865. Secession failed. In 1866, the 13th Amendment abolished legal slavery and involuntary servitude (except as a punishment for crime). In 1868, the 14th Amendment extended citizenship and “equal protection under the law” to formerly enslaved people and to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States.” In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote.
Without a doubt, the Civil War and its aftermath transformed the nation. The institution of chattel slavery was ended and “slave power” — the economic and political might of the slave-owning class — was crushed. These changes were substantial and permanent. And yet, the transformation was incomplete.
Despite all the bloodshed, deaths, and sacrifices of the Civil War, the promise of a “new birth of freedom” which Abraham Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address remains “unfinished business” even now, more than a century and a half later.[ii]
I grew up in central Illinois surrounded by memorials to Lincoln. When I was born, ninety years after the war’s end, the Civil War was still very much on people’s minds. When people in my small hometown talked about Lincoln — as they often did — they told tales of his homespun wit and wisdom. They depicted him as a man of the people, as one of us. They also extolled his greatness. Lincoln was not just our local hero, he was held up as the savior of the nation and “the Great Emancipator.”
It’s little wonder that I grew up in awe of Abraham Lincoln as the hero of the Civil War — in a sense, the only hero. Of course, I knew he had not fought and won the war single-handedly. In fact, I was taught to recognize many other Civil War heroes, heroic White people on both sides of the conflict. Strangely, I was taught to respect the honor and bravery of soldiers of the Confederacy even as I was told the cause they fought for was wrong.
I was certainly not taught as a child to think of Black Americans as heroes of the Civil War. I was led to believe Black Americans had no active part in the war. I was given the impression that Black people had been, at best, passive observers and beneficiaries of the war. At worst, enslaved Black people were portrayed as the source of the conflict, their presence in America causing White men to enter a deadly conflict that pitted cousin against cousin, brother against brother. I know better now.
Looking back, I am appalled by the thoroughness of the Whitewashing of memories of the Civil War among the people of my childhood hometown in central Illinois. You might think it excusable for a virtually all-White small town to focus all of its attention on White Civil War heroes and neglect others. But beyond Lincoln, the two men who most clearly deserve to be remembered as local heroes of the Civil War in my hometown have never been acknowledged as such, in large part because they were not counted as White men at the time they demonstrated extreme bravery fighting for the Union.
Private John O’Dea, an Irish immigrant, earned the Medal of Honor for heroic actions in May 1863 in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Irish and other Catholic immigrants, people like O’Dea, were widely vilified in the mid-nineteenth century as an alien and pernicious presence in America.
Corporal Andrew Jackson Smith, a Black man who escaped slavery in 1862, earned the Medal of Honor for heroic actions in May 1864 at the Battle of Honey Hill, South Carolina. Several years ago, I wrote an essay about Smith and his long wait to receive the Medal of Honor. The award was made posthumously, in 2001, as one of the last acts of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
O’Dea and Smith are the only two Medal of Honor winners in my childhood hometown’s entire history. I think their heroism has been neglected because the two men were never truly considered members of the community. Neither man spent many years as a resident of the community. After the war, they were not welcomed back as returning heroes. Both moved away from my hometown before 1870.
My childhood hometown in central Illinois takes a lot of pride in being one of Abraham Lincoln’s regular stops during his time as a young circuit lawyer. Having grown up on Lincoln’s home turf, it seems only natural that I should have developed a deep and enduring fascination with the legacies of the Civil War and its aftermath. Filling in my ancestral family’s experiences during the war has been a big part of my critical family history research.
At the time of the Civil War, all but one branch of my ancestral family were farming in Illinois, not far from where I was born and raised a century later. My Stites ancestors were the exception. They were homesteading in Kansas at the start of the war and moved to Illinois after. I wrote about their experience in “Bleeding Kansas” in the last chapter.
The Civil War had a profound impact on all of my ancestors who were alive to experience it, though very few were involved directly in the fighting. Five of my great great grandfathers registered for the draft but were never called to active military service. Two great great grandfathers were too young to serve. The last one, William Stites (1838–1885), enlisted in the 8th Kansas Volunteer Infantry in October 1861.
Among my three-times great grandfathers, most were too old to serve, though several registered for the draft. One of my third great grandfathers did serve, but only briefly. James D. Culbertson was born in Tennessee in 1828 and moved to Illinois sometime before 1850. In August 1862, James enlisted in the 116th Illinois Infantry. He was not a hero. He was executed as a deserter near Memphis on November 26, 1862.
In late February, 2020, just before Covid-19 took work-related travel off the table, I added a couple of personal days to a business trip to Washington, D.C. so that I could visit some museums and the National Archives where I hoped to have a look at the Civil War pension files of my great great grandfather, William Stites. My trip uncovered far more than I expected.
From the files in the archives, I learned William Stites was not a deserter but also not exactly a hero. William completed three years of military service and was discharged in October 1864 after spending the last half of his enlistment period in Army hospitals. Like so many others, William was not wounded in battle, he succumbed to disease. He survived the war but never fully recovered. After the war he complained of constant pain and weakness. He died of heart failure in 1885 two months before his forty-sixth birthday.
In preparation for my visit to the National Archives I did a search on my last name (“Stites”) in the Civil War era soldiers database maintained by the National Park Service. The search yielded 135 hits, 123 on the Union side, and 12 on the side of the Confederacy. Filtering by state, I found Great Great Grandfather William Stites among the listings for Kansas.
The filter also yielded some other intriguing results— six hits for “Stites” in the United States Colored Troops (USCT). The first two listings were for one man, Benjamin Stites, who had served in two different USCT regiments. The final four were all listed as members of the 118th Regiment: Edward Stites, Jim Stites, John Stites, and Lemon Stites. These four men, I would learn from their pension files, had all been enslaved by distant cousins of mine, father and son, Sam and Richard Stites of Henderson County, Kentucky, owners of tobacco plantations.
All four of the men formerly enslaved by Sam and Richard Stites enlisted in the 118th Regiment of U.S. Colored Infantry in mid-September 1864 and all four survived the war. John Stites, Lemon Stites, and Edward Stites were assigned to Company H. Jim Stites was in Company F. At the time of their enlistment, John gave his age as 22, Lemon reported his age as 21, and Edward and Jim both claimed to be 18.[iii]
Lemon Stites was Edward’s older brother. After the war, both dropped the slave surname Stites and took on their father’s last name to become, respectively, James Lemon Brown and Edward Brown. Jim Stites became James Floyd after the war. John Stites kept the last name.
The bravery and competence of the USCT made a strong impression on White people of the time, including Lincoln and Grant, who each praised the USCT and credited them with playing a major role in winning the war. Near the end of his life, Lincoln said:
Without the military help of the black freedmen, the war against the South could not have been won.[iv]
Free men of color were first permitted to join the U.S. military in July 1862. The first United States Colored Troop (USCT) regiment was formed in September 1862 with Black volunteers and Black officers. Two more regiments were formed before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. After the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, the War Department was free to recruit formerly enslaved men into the military.
In the final two years of the war, USCT units comprised 15 percent of the Union’s total land force. About 140,000 men were recruited from slave states. The USCT was at the forefront of many campaigns and suffered higher casualty rates than White Union troops.
The 118th U.S. Colored Infantry, the unit in which John Stites, Lemon Stites, Edward Stites, and Jim Stites served, was active from October 1864 to February 1866. They participated in the Union campaign to take the Confederate capital, Richmond, and thus were among the first to experience the particular horrors of trench warfare. All but Edward also took part in the bloody campaign to take Charleston, South Carolina.
There is evidence that Abraham Lincoln’s attitudes toward racial equality were changing in the last years of his life and that the USCT was much on his mind. Yet, judging from what Lincoln said and what he did (or planned to do) in the final decade of his life, it seems he never abandoned his lifelong belief in the inherent superiority of the White race.
Lincoln spoke often and at length on his views on slavery and racial equality. In his Senate campaign of 1858 and in his 1860 Presidential campaign he made it clear he was an opponent of the extension of slavery but not an abolitionist. He also plainly stated his opinion that Black people were entitled to equality with White people under the law, even though, in his view, Black people could never be the social equals of White people.[v]
Very few White people of Lincoln’s time believed otherwise. But Lincoln developed a deep respect for the men of the USCT and he worried about how they would fare after the war was over. He knew they would be treated badly and feared they would resort to armed resistance to White domination.
In the early years of the war, Lincoln retained his long-held belief that free Black people should be separated from White Americans. He advocated voluntary colonization outside the United States and included a plan for government funding for the out-migration of Black people in the preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Emancipation Proclamation was announced in September 1862, but it did not take effect immediately. Lincoln delayed implementation for several months, perhaps hoping the interim would give the Confederate states time to consider ending the war and rejoining the Union with slavery preserved. However, by the time the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863, political impracticality and strong opposition to colonization from Black leaders, notably Frederick Douglass, had led to removal of all references to colonization from the document.[vi]
By the final year of the war and his life, Lincoln had accepted the necessity of finding a way to integrate emancipated Black people as full citizens of the United States. He knew it would be a long and difficult struggle, as it has proven to be.
I respect Lincoln’s ability to change over the course of his life. We will never know how far that change would have taken him if he had lived long enough to oversee Reconstruction. But Lincoln does not need my praise. He has not suffered from neglect. His place in American history and mythology is secure.
Unlike Lincoln, the men of the USCT have been neglected. They also deserve to be recalled as heroes. John Stites, James Floyd (aka, Jim Stites), James Lemon Brown (aka, Lemon Stites), and Edward Brown (aka, Edward Stites) put their lives on the line — as did nearly 200,000 other Black men — in the cause of liberty and justice for all Americans. We must never forget their heroism.
NOTES
[i] Many sources use death toll figures for the Civil War that were calculated in the nineteenth century. Those early estimates do not capture accurately the number of casualties among enslaved Black people. See https://blog.oup.com/2012/04/black-white-demographic-death-toll-civil-war/
[ii] The phrase “unfinished business” was used in the 1968 Kerner Commission Report. In the summary introduction, the report states: “The deepening racial division is not inevitable…Segregation and poverty in the racial ghetto have created a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans…White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it…It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of the Nation…It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens — urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.” A full copy of the report can be downloaded at https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/national-advisory-commission-civil-disorders-report
[iii] Chances are good that none of the men were certain about their ages at the time they enlisted and it appears Edward was not nearly as old as he claimed. In the field in Virginia in March 1865, Edward was discharged by an officer who noted for the record: “Said Private Edmon [sic] Stites is in my opinion too young and small to perform the duties of a soldier.” Edward’s enlistment record show his height as five feet eleven inches, but the discharge papers say he was just four eleven. The latter seems closer to the truth. Edward might actually have been as young as twelve when he enlisted.
[iv] See https://afroamcivilwar.org/united-states-colored-troops-history/
[v] The historian George M. Frederickson has explored Lincoln’s views on racial equality in detail in, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and RacialEquality,” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 39–58 and in Big Enough to be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Cambridge: 2008).
[vi] See J. Blaine Hudson, “Abraham Lincoln: An African-American Perspective,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 106: No. 3/4, (Abraham Lincoln and Kentucky), Summer/Autumn 2008, pp. 513–535.
