Brian Taylor. Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War.

Abstract

In May 2021, the National Park Service unveiled the newly restored Shaw Memorial across from the Massachusetts statehouse in Boston. It commemorates the service and ultimate sacrifice of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, one of the first regiments of African Americans raised in the North during the Civil War. On its face, the monument shows the marching Black infantry, alongside white officer Robert Gould Shaw on horseback. Today the monument is viewed by many passersby as a solemn celebration of Black military service and sacrifice. As Brian Taylor’s Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War tells us, however, it is also a reminder of the legacies of enslavement and oppression. Taylor explores not only the circumstance under which the men of the Fifty-Fourth and other units like it fought and died, but why the soldiers fought in the first place. Rather than a linear story of triumph over adversity and an inevitable march toward enlistment, Taylor uncovers the complex motives of Black soldiers, but also those who refused to enlist. In doing so, he recasts debates over Black enlistment as a “politics of service,” the battles that ultimately drove definitions of US citizenship forward and whose echoes continue today.