Pay discrimination
From June 1863 the army began paying all black soldiers, regardless of rank, in line with the Militia Act of July 1862, “a decision which according to historian Ira Berlin and colleagues, “ignited a firestorm of protest that raged for a full year.” For Berlin et.al “no transgression caused as much hardship or so blatantly insulted the dignity of black soldiers as the policy of discriminatory pay.” What it also proved, Berlin et al. argue, is that “racial prejudice pervaded Northern as well as Southern society.” As few newly emancipated slaves “escaped bondage with more than the clothes on their backs…a few extra dollars a month could mean the difference between subsistence and destitution.”
Prior to the decision, all Union privates, black and white, were paid $13 per month, plus an allotment of clothing or its equivalent cash value of $3.50, with non-commissioned and commissioned officers receiving higher wages.” The decision made in June reduced all black soldiers pay to $10 per month, a sum that had been originally thought specific only to former fugitive slaves now labouring for the army. To add insult to injury, black soldiers also had to pay for their own clothing, which reduced their pay by a further $3 per month, effectively almost halving their pay in one foul swoop. The decision ensured that the highest-ranking black sergeant earned less than a white private.
Some evidence regarding the struggle for equal pay comes from the diary and other writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who served as colonel of the first slave regiment federally authorised in the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers. Higginson tells of how Sergeant William Walker of the Third South Carolina regiment was “shot by order of court-martial” for leading his company to stack arms before their captain’s tent” in protest of unequal pay.
In a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune dated the 22nd January 1864, Higginson says that “it is not a matter of dollars and cents only; it is a question of common honesty – whether the United States Government has sufficient integrity for the fulfilment of an explicit business contract.” Higginson was referring to Secretary of War Stanton’s authorisation on the 25th of August, 1862, which permitted General Rufus Saxton to enlist 5,000 black troops who “were to receive the same pay and rations as are allowed by law to volunteers in the service.”
Higginson also points out that equal pay is only half the issue for his men, with arrears making up the other half. He adds that black soldiers “understand the matter thoroughly,” that each had “volunteered under an explicit written assurance from the War Department that he should have the pay of a white soldier,” and that for “five months the regiment received that pay” before it was cut for some “inscrutable” reason. “What they do not know,” Higginson says, is that their pay is not only to be cut by a further three dollars to $7 dollars a month, but all previous “overpay” will also be deducted, “leaving them a little more than a dollar a month for six months to come, unless Congress interfere!”
Higginson adds that his men also have to suffer the indignity of “seeing white soldiers beside them, whom they knew to be in no way their superiors for any military service, receiving hundreds of dollars for re-enlisting from this impoverished Government.” The men also see, Higginson adds, “other colored men who refused to volunteer as soldiers” working for “more honest paymasters than the United States Government,” and who were now “exulting in well-filled pockets, and able to buy the little homesteads that the soldiers need” for their families.
Higginson concludes his letter by highlighting that the “mere delay in the fulfilment of this contract has already inflicted untold suffering, has impaired discipline, has relaxed loyalty, and has begun to implant a feeling of sullen distrust in the very regiments whose early career solved the problem of the nation, created a new army, and made peaceful emancipation possible.”