In his interesting The South vs. The South, William Freehling noted that:
To entice 50,000 black soldiers (or as
it turned out, 178,000), the president molded his army into the world’s most
powerful antislavery bureaucracy. When the commander in chief issued
antislavery orders, the command to step lively to the president’s new tune went
straight down to enforcing military hierarchy. (William W. Freehling, The
South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the
Civil War [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 121)
This
figure is collaborated by Dr. Paul-Thomas Ferguson:
By the end of the Civil War, there were
175 USCT regiments, containing 178,000 soldiers, approximately 10% of the Union
Army. The mortality rate for these units was exceeding high. One of every five
black soldiers in the conflict died, a 35% higher rate than other troops. In
the process, sixteen USCT soldiers earned the Medal of Honor for their Civil
War service. (Paul-Thomas Ferguson, “A
History of African American Regiments in the U.S. Army,” February 11, 2021)
This
could be seen as a partial fulfillment of D&C 87:4 vis-à-vis slaves “ris[ing]
up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war.”
Elsewhere,
Freehling also wrote the following:
. . . without southern
anti-Confederates’ Unionism, Yankees’ other army would have been sorely tested.
If all the South’s inhabitants, white and black, Lower South and Border South,
had been solidly pro-Confederate, the North would have had to conquer the
defense-friendly Ohio River, the guerrilla-friendly West Virginia mountain
passes, and Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, just to reach the latitude where
the Civil War in fact began. Free labor states would have had to replace over
half a million Union soldiers and military workers who came from slave labor
states. Federals would have had to find substitutes for the borderland’s
industrial plants, especially Baltimore’s railroad hospitals. The Union would
have had to conscript many more Northerners despite much more Yankee draft
resistance. One southern anti-Confederate lost to the Union and empowering the
Confederacy would have required two more Yankees fully enlisted to the war
effort.
That arithmetic, Lincoln believed, would
have defeated the Union. My guess: He was right. The North’s other arm was not that
strong. All historians must guess about the potential outcome, for no one
can write the definitive history of what never happened. But one conclusion is
no guess: If the North had won without anti-Confederate Southerners’
reinforcements, victory would have come harder and taken longer, producing a
very different Civil War narrative. (William W. Freehling, The South vs. The
South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001], 202)
With few new Southerners and many new
Northerners arriving, the North’s manpower plurality soared. At the beginning
of the national republic, future slave labor and free labor states contained
approximately equal shares of the nation’s population (with future free labor
states containing 61 percent of the whites). By 1860, the North possessed 61
percent of all American people (and 70 percent of whites). During the war,
175,000 immigrants arrived in the Union and almost none of the Confederacy.
From wartime newcomers, the Union recruited an estimated 75,000 soldiers (and
the Confederacy almost none). (Ibid., 203)
Further
Reading:
Resources
on Joseph Smith’s Prophecies
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