Fig. 22. Battle of Milliken’s Bend ( Frank Leslie’s ‘The Negro in The War’)
White Southerners believed that their slaves would not fight them. Brown wrote,“The planters had boasted, that, should they meet their former slaves, a single look from them would cause the negroes to throw down their weapons, and run.”Milliken’s Bend would test their belief.
Similar to white planters, most white officers and Union troops also initially did not welcome black troops onto the battle field. The belief that black troops would not fight was deeply rooted. On June 7, 1863, the first regular battle was fought between the blacks and whites in the valley of the Mississippi. At Milliken’s Bend, Illinois cavalrymen encountered colored troops and some of them sneered, “A man ud be a dam fool to try to make soldiers out ah niggers…Any one ough to know a nigger won’t fight: they’r running now before they seen a reb…We will show them how it is done if we find any of them. ”[1] A few minutes later, the Illinois cavalrymen encountered a group of Confederate cavalrymen. Without firing a shot the Illinois group retreated and raced past the black troops. The black troops formed a firing line and fired a volley into the charging Confederates, halting their charge.
W. W. Brown described the battle from an account of an eyewitness:
“My information states that a force of about five hundred negroes, and two hundredmen of the Twenty=third Iowa, belonging to the second brigade, Carr’s division (twenty-third Iowa had been up the river with prisoners, and was on its way back to this place), was surprised in camp by a rebel force of about two thousand men. …the rebels drove our force towards the gunboats, taking colored men prisoners and murdering them. This so in raged them that they rallied, and charged the enemy more heroically and desperately than has been recorded during the war. It was a genuine bayonet charge, a hand-to-hand fight, that has never occurred to any extent during this prolonged conflict. Upon both sides men were killed with the butts of muskets. White and black men were lying side by side, pierced by bayonets, and in some instances transfixed to the earth….If facts prove to be what they are now represented, this engagement of Sunday morning will be recorded as the most desperate of this war.
This battle satisfied the slave-masters of the South that their charm was gone; and that the negro, as a slave, was lost forever.” [2]
[1] Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, 131–35.
[2] Brown, Negro in the American Rebellion, 137–9.