One of the jobs of the modern green berets is to go into a foreign nation and train insurgency groups. I know during the Civil War towards the end ten percent of northern soldiers were black. But it took a long time before the north let them fight rather than just perform service work. But with the slave population in the south almost as big as the free white population there would be incentive to train freed slaves in things like sabotage, militias, disinformation etc. Was anything like this done by the north during the war?
Very little, if at all. That sort of thing was Just Not Done, and the logistics of setting it up made it pretty daunting.
Did slaves have a lot of unsupervised free time where they could meet with strangers and practice military drills?
What would stop a green beret style team from either helping healthy motivated young men escape from plantations or recruiting them from areas where society (police, military, etc) had broken down in the south.
You could set up training in a safe zone somewhere. Then again a bunch of young black males walking around in the south would seem suspicious. But if you had a white guy with them and they had forged paperwork it could be believed that he was transporting them.
It wasn’t really necessary. In general, as Union lines drew near and Southern society started to break down, slaves would flee to freedom on their own.
As for training insurgents, once a slave had escaped, it was difficult to infiltrate him or her back into slavery. It’s not as if you could knock on a person’s door applying to be their slave. I suppose a white person could have posed as a slave trader and sold insurgents back into slavery. But, it would have been a lot to ask of the escapee; going back from freedom to slavery was a hell of a risk–you might get beaten, starved, sold down the river, who knows. It just made more sense to train escaped slaves as conventional soldiers.
As a practical matter there were all sort of escaped slaves actually serving with the national armies during the war, mostly as civilian laborers, wagon drivers, mechanics on military railroads, stevedores and what have you. For the last couple years of the war there were Blacks actually serving a gun toting soldiers. The racism of the time had a real problem with Black soldiers for the very reason that Frederick Douglas expressed as "Once a man has a musket on his shoulder, bullets in his pocket and brass buttons with the letters US on his person you cannot deny that he is a citizen. It was hard enough to get African-Americans into the army, it would have been politically impossible for the national government to have actively encouraged slave insurrection.
John Brown believed he could touch off a slave revolt, like setting a match to tinder. Yet, even after the south was in total collapse that never really happened. The slaves were too isolated and too ignorant for that sort of thing to work. How could they organize when most of them had zero education and zero knowledge of the the world outside their own farm (by design?) I doubt most of them even knew a war was going on until it visited them.
I don’t want to touch off a debate but the North was not on a grand crusade to end slavery by any means necessary. In fact, the question of what would happen to slavery wasn’t clear cut at all during the war. The notion of servile insurrection would have been abhorred by almost every white person, even in the northern states.
Insurgency groups come from a regular civilian population. It is possible to have secret meetings with civilians, train them, set up communications and supply lines, etc. You couldn’t do this with southern slaves without the slaveholders knowing about it. The slaves had no freedom of travel or association, so how could the meetings take place? How could northerners get weapons to the slaves?
A slave who could sneak away and not be noticed for long enough to hold a clandestine meeting would just keep going until he reached the Union lines. :smack:
Beyond his/her obvious self-interest, a slave would do more for the Union war effort by denying his labor to the Confederacy than by playing “Hogan’s Heroes” against an enemy who definitely ain’t Col. Klink. Escaped POW = returned to camp w. minor punishment, unless suspected of sabotage or the like (or a bunch escape together and Hitler throws a hissy fit :rolleyes:). Escaped slave = severely punished, sent farther south, etc., even absent a hint of suspicion of sabotage. :eek: