Deborah Willis. The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

Abstract

Readers interested in the Black freedom struggle of the nineteenth century will find Deborah Willis’s The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship a must read. While abolitionist portraiture and antislavery ephemera of the 1830s and 1840s have yielded some of the most iconic illustrations of the nineteenth century, this text reveals an equally robust image practice organized around Black soldiers, produced between 1860 and 1866, that continues to influence twenty-first century visualizations of Blacks in the military. Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Willis and Barbara Krauthammer (2013) might be the closest comparison to Black Civil War Soldier in terms of revelations about African American engagements with the camera around the question of freedom. However, Black Civil War Soldier contributes to a larger historiographic project that insists the abolition of slavery was the central motive for fighting the Civil War. Critical works such as Thavolia Glymph’s Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2019) rebuff a larger swath of secondary scholarship organized around ideas about who fought and for what reasons. Yet Black Civil War Soldier is distinct in using photographs to assert the primacy of African Americans in the Civil War and freedom as their particular motivation for taking up arms. Willis organizes archival sources in ways that reveal the Black freedom struggle in visual media produced in a wartime context. By presenting readers with a vast collection of photographs, letters, diary writings, pension records, newspapers and contemporary art, Willis shows us that vision and visibility were of central importance to Black Civil War soldiers who fought to free loved ones and end the system of enslavement.