Extra post today. Happy holidays!
[The following is in regards to Union forces recruiting African Americans – usually runaway or liberated former slaves – during the American Civil War. As in military recruitments today, these volunteers had to undergo inspections and physical exams before they were mustered, and as one could well imagine, more often than not these men revealed horrible scars and disfigurements which were found during the physical exams.]
Evidence of abuse – from whipping and branding scars to cropped ears – packed the examiners’ reports, beating “all the antislavery sermons ever preached.” Most recruits spoke of their punishments casually, as if recounting “a tooth ache, an accident to existence unpleasant enough – but to be endured as best they may.”
One examiner reported that half of the recruits he examined were scarred on their backs, some so badly that the flesh had grown back in ridges and ropes “as large as my little finger.”
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “We Soldiers Are Men.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 62. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, p. 77.
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