Were there any differences between the way northern Union soldiers and African- American soldiers reacted to killing?
There’s a considerable body of evidence that shows African-American soldiers recognizing the Civil War as a continuation of the violence of slavery. This was not so much a break in a peacetime world but rather an exacerbation of a world in which they had long found themselves, so that violence was at the heart of their prewar existence. There is a lot of expression of violence in war as an opportunity of vengeance, for repaying debts, for an instrument of liberation and an instrument of revenge. It’s sometimes criticized by African-American leaders. For example, Bishop Henry Turner was very nervous about calls for vengeance. He said we must not submit to this kind of definition, but one finds in numbers of letters from African-American soldiers the notion that this is a “just desserts” for the horrors of slavery. Abraham Lincoln phrased it a little bit differently, but he alludes to something of the same message in the second inaugural, where he sees the killing in the war as in some s
