397Zwick exploited the dramatic potential of the latter
groups. How did slaves respond when, having just received
their freedom, they were placed under the absolute power of
white officers?
Glorydevelops the question chiefly through the character
of Trip (Denzel Washington), a former slave who hates all
whites, including Shaw. Shaw illuminates the other side of the
question. An inveterate abolitionist, he reluctantly decides that
former slaves must be whipped (literally) into shape. When Trip
sneaks off one night and is captured for desertion, Shaw orders
him flogged. When Trip’s back is bared, Shaw sees that it is laced
with scars from whippings by slave masters. During the flog-
ging, Trip fixes Shaw with a hateful stare, a powerful scene that
underscores the movie’s central irony: To end slavery, Shaw has
become Trip’s master while Trip has again become a slave.
Whatever its dramatic merits, the scene is ahistorical. In
1861 Congress had outlawed flogging in the military.
Disobedient soldiers were tied in a crouched position, or they
were suspended by their thumbs, toes just touching the ground.
Physical punishment was, in fact, one of the chief
sources of contention between ex-slave soldiers and white
officers.“I am no slave to be driven,” one black recruit
informed a brutish commander. When an officer of the
38th Colored Infantry tied a black recruit up by the thumbs,
his friends cut him down and forced the officers back with
bayonets:“No white son of a bitch can tie a man up here,”
they declared. The blacks were charged with mutiny and sev-
eral were executed, an incident that shows that former slaves
did not willingly submit to army discipline tainted with
racism. Though African Americans constituted only 8 percent
of the Union army, 80 percent of those executed for mutiny
were black. Many white officers, as the movie suggests, did
assert that former slaves must be treated as slaves.“I no
longer wonder why slave drivers were cruel. I am,” one white
officer confided in a letter to his brother.
Could such soldiers—black recruits and white officers
alike—have been good ones? The movie answers the ques-
tion by recreating the actual attack on Fort Wagner, the first
step in the offensive on Charleston. It shows the blacks of the
Massachusetts 54th marching to the front of the line, and
forming up along a narrow beach. On Shaw’s command, they
charge forward. Unlike the white troops in the opening
scene, the blacks follow him to the ramparts; when he falls,
they continue onward until they are wiped out.
Were the actual soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th as
courageous as those in the movie? Shortly after the battle,
Lieutenant Iredell Jones, a Confederate officer, reported,
“The negroes fought gallantly, and were headed by as
brave a colonel as ever lived.” Of the 600 members of the
54th Massachusetts, 40 percent were casualties on that
day, an extraordinarily high ratio. But did ex-slaves fight as
courageously as the free blacks of the 54th? The answer to
this question came not at Fort Wagner, but at other, less
publicized battles. A few weeks earlier, for example, sev-
eral companies of the Louisiana (Colored) Infantry, com-
posed of former slaves who had been in the army only for
several weeks, fought off a furious Confederate assault at
Milliken’s Bend near Vicksburg. The Confederate general
was astonished when whites in the Union army fled but
the blacks held their ground despite sustaining stagger-
ing casualties—45 percent—the highest of any single bat-
tle in the war.
Thus while Gloryis a fictional composite—of free
black and ex-slave recruits, and of the assault on Fort
Wagner and Milliken’s Bend—it conveys a broader truth
about black soldiers. Howell Cobb, a Confederate senator
from Georgia, declared, “If the black can make a good sol-
dier, our whole system of government is wrong.”Glory
shows that although white officers and black recruits did
not form a harmonious team, they together proved that
slavery was doomed.Robert Gould Shaw, Commander of the Massachusetts 54th, and private Charles Arnum, a free black volunteer from Springfield, Massachusetts.
Questions for Discussion
■Was conscription during the Civil War a form of slavery?
■Would free blacks or former slaves more likely have
been the better soldiers?