The Black Union Army

The claim that Lincoln saved the Union is accurate but incomplete. Roughly 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army after the Emancipation Proclamation, providing crucial manpower at a point when white enlistment was declining.

Frederick Douglass personally lobbied Lincoln to allow Black enlistment and argued that military service would make full citizenship impossible to deny. The 54th Massachusetts Infantry became the most famous Black unit of the war — its doomed assault on Fort Wagner in 1863 proved to skeptical commanders that Black soldiers would fight, and die, as bravely as anyone.