Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner. Jean LeeCole, Editor. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner. Jean Lee Cole, Editor. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2013.Freedom's Witness is a valuable addition to contemporary accounts of the Civil War. Cole's book draws exclusively on Henry McNeal Turner's contributions to The Christian Recorder, the denominational newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the longest-lived African American newspaper of its day. In choosing to focus on a religious newspaper, Cole at once enlarges and expands the notion of texts from which to glean black perspectives on what was an event with profound implications for individuals on both sides of racial divide. Unlike slave narratives, which had to operate within the constraints of a white abolitionist audience, the Recorder provided a blank slate on which to represent black experience because it was a newspaper written by and for black readers exclusively. In addition to supplying its readers with news about church events and his life as a soldier, Turner's pieces also engaged larger questions about how to create and position blacks inside the new world order that followed upon emancipation. In doing so, the Recorder performed important cultural work for its readers.The text Cole assembles here focuses on the years 1862-1865, when Turner served as a chaplain to the First Regiment of the United States Colored Troopsthe USCT. From his position, Turner was able to provide firsthand accounts not only of specific battles, but additionally, of the performance on the battlefield of the newly commissioned black troops to whom he ministered. However, as Cole notes, white soldiers, from General Sherman on down, were reluctant to use blacks as soldiers, Turner enters into the record a counter narrative detailing their fierce fighting at battles like Wilson's Landing (1864) and a few months later, in the assault on St. Petersburg, Virginia. He documents the growing esteem of whites for black troops, whose tenacity in fighting and skill in marksmanship frequently surpassed those of white soldiers. At the same time, Turner was astute enough to recognize that the support of whites for black soldiers was contingent on Union victories.It is clear from what Cole gathers for us here that Turner used his platform as a leading figure in the AME church to influence his black readership's views not only on the war effort but also on policy decisions which impacted them directly. …