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  3. In 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very s

In 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very s

游客2024-11-21  0
问题     In 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very special monument to that war was erected opposite the Statehouse in Boston. Designed by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it depicted in profile the figure of Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-year-old white officer of the North’s showcase black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, leading his men through Boston on their way to South Carolina in 1863. An unusual piece of sculpture, Saint-Gaudens had worked hard to avoid representing the black troops in any kind of stereotypical manner, portraying them instead as noble patriot soldiers of the American nation. Both in its novelty and in its sentiment the monument remains impressive according to the art critic Robert Hughes, " the most intensely felt image of military commemoration made by an American."
    However, the Saint-Gaudens monument in no way reflected the general mood of the American people towards those black troops who had fought in the conflict. The exclusion of black troops from the national memory of the Civil War began long before the 1890s. In the Grand Review of the Armed Forces, which followed the cessation of hostilities, very few blacks were represented. Relegated to the end of the procession in "pitch and shovel" brigades or intended only as a form of comic relief, neither the free black soldier nor the former slave was accorded his deserved role in this poignant national pageant. Rather than a war fought for liberty, in which the role of the African-American soldier was pivotal, the image of the American Civil War as a "white man’s fight" became the norm almost as soon as the last shot was fired.
    The relationship between the black soldier and the " land of the free" has always been ambiguous. The involvement of black troops in America’s wars from colonial times onwards followed a depressing pattern. Encouraged to enlist in times of crisis, the African-American soldier’s services were clearly unwelcome in time of peace. Despite this, the link between fighting and freedom for African-Americans was forged in the earliest days of the American nation, and once forged proved resilient. During the colonial era, South Carolina enacted legislation that offered freedom to slaves in return for their military services. By the conclusion of the American Revolution military service was regarded as a valid and successful method of achieving freedom for the slave, as well as an important expression of patriotism and loyalty to the nation.
    It was unsurprising, therefore, that when hostilities commenced between North and South in 1861 blacks throughout the North, and some in the South too, sought to enlist. However, free blacks who responded to Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers found that their services were not required by a North in which slavery had been abolished but racist assumptions still prevailed. Instead they were told that the war was a "white man’s fight," and offered no role for them.
    However, unless the issues of arming free blacks and of freeing the slaves were addressed, the Union stood a slim chance of success. The Union, however, showed little sign of freeing the black slaves. In the early months of the conflict the National Intelligencer reinforced the view that the war "has no direct relation to slavery. It is a war for the restoration of the Union under the existing constitution." Yet under the pressures of conflict it became increasingly difficult to maintain such a limited policy. This was particularly true for those generals in the field who found themselves having to deal with both the free black population and a growing number of slaves who, dislocated by the war, were making their way to Union lines. Whilst the Federal Government prevaricated on the question of arming blacks for a variety of mainly political reasons, the Union generals found themselves faced with a problem that required immediate resolution. Consequently, the first moves towards both arming blacks and freeing slaves during the American Civil War came not from Washington but from the front line.
    Initial steps in this direction proved clumsy, though an important precedent as far as the slaves were concerned was set early on in the conflict. In 1861 Benjamin A. Butler, in charge of Fortress Monroe in Virginia, declared that all slaves who escaped to Union lines were " contraband of war" and refused to uphold the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law, which bound him to return them to their owners. Butler’s policy did not have much of an impact on attitudes in Washington, but it did reinforce the views of those who felt that slavery was of great military use to the Confederacy and ought to be attacked on those grounds alone. In Missouri in 1861, John C. Fremont, commander of the Department of the West, declared all slaves owned by Confederate sympathisers to be free. Lincoln insisted that Fremont modify his announcement to bring it into line with the 1861 Confiscation Act, which removed slaves only from those actively engaged in hostilities against the Union.
    In late March 1862, Major General David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, emancipated all slaves held in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, and forced as many escaped male slaves as he could find into military service. Not only was Hunter’s announcement rejected by Lincoln, but the aggressive manner in which he went about recruiting blacks for the Union army served only to alienate the very people he was attempting to help. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the white officer in charge of what became the First South Carolina Volunteers, was in no doubt that the suspicion his troops expressed towards the Federal Government was the natural " legacy of bitter distrust bequeathed by the abortive regiment of General Hunter." More successful were the efforts of Jim Lane in Kansas. A former US Senator and a brigadier general in the Union army, Lane chose simply to ignore the War Department and raised a black regiment, the First Kansas Colored Volunteers, in 1862. This regiment was finally recognised the following year, by which time it had already seen active service against the Confederacy.
    Thanks in part to the bravery of the Massachusetts 54th, therefore, by the end of 1863 the Union army had recruited some 50,000 African-Americans — both free blacks and former slaves — to its ranks. By the end of the war this number had risen to around 186,000, of which 134,111 were recruited in the slave states. African-American troops comprised 10 per cent of the total Union fighting force, and some 3,000 of them died on the battlefield plus many more in the prisoner of war camps, if they made it that far. Overall, one-third of all African-Americans who fought were casualties of the Civil War. [br] The author’s attitude towards the blacks in the American Civil War is______.
选项 A、appreciative
B、ambiguous
C、critical
D、reserved
答案 A
解析 综合题。从全文看，作者驳斥了美国民众低估黑人在内战中的巨大贡献的传统观点，以事实证明黑人在联邦政府最终获得战争胜利进程中的重要作用，故A正确。
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