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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis Christopher Hager (bio) The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. Deborah Willis. New York: New York University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1479809004, 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. In the visual culture of the Civil War era, images of Black men most often evoke slavery. The figure of a kneeling, half-naked slave persisted from Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist icon of the 1780s—Am I Not a Man and a Brother?— to the 1876 Emancipation Memorial in Washington DC, in which Abraham Lincoln extends his hand over Archer Alexander’s barely lifted head. At the height of the Civil War, in 1863, a fugitive named Gordon was photographed in multiple poses, but only the shot of the whipping scars on his back became a widely circulated carte de visite. The image of him in a new private’s army uniform appeared, smaller, to one side of the picture of his bared back, near the end of an issue of Harper’s Weekly. (See Bruce Laurie’s “Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image, reviewed by Anne Strachan Cross, pages 323–325 of this issue, for an investigation of this image.) On a Black man’s body, a soldier’s uniform not only signified freedom rather than enslavement. It also suggested equality—it was, after all, the same [End Page 327] one white soldiers wore (even if Black soldiers alone got their pay docked for it)—and citizenship. The eagerness with which newly enlisted men had their photographs taken in uniform suggests they understood very well what Frederick Douglass expressed: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., . . . and there is no power on the earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” The Black Civil War Soldier presents an unmatched array of such photographs—enough to ensure their place in any canon of wartime imagery and to make Black citizens, more than Black slaves, an essential part of the visual record of the Civil War. The quality of the physical book is no small part of this project. Generous in size, on glossy paper, it features scores of high-resolution images, mostly in color, to capture what a visitor to an archive would see: sepia tones, hand-coloring, gilt bindings on carte-de-visite albums, metal clasps on ornately decorated tintype frames. With production values that rival the kinds of commemorative and coffee-table books from which, for many years, young people in a certain class of American homes formed their initial impressions of the conflict (remember the companion volume to Ken Burns’s The Civil War?), Deborah Willis’s new book claims a place as a definitive reference—one that puts African Americans’ roles at the center of the story. The book’s text, organized into five chronological chapters, consists primarily of excerpts from primary sources. Civil War historians will be familiar with many of these, drawn from notable figures such as Charlotte Forten, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Robert Gould Shaw. Some of the richest material—letters by Black soldiers and their families—will likewise be familiar to scholars of “The Black Military Experience,” to borrow the title of a key volume of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom series, which is among several published anthologies Willis draws from. Connections between these sources and the images that accompany them can sometimes be gnomic or elusive. A photograph of Sojourner Truth appears without comment below a Massachusetts soldier’s letter about pay inequity; the images of the enslaved man Gordon are reproduced without discussion in the text; and Martha Glover’s letter to her husband dangles unremarked at the end of a chapter, despite being a widely cited source in scholarship on family structure (Amy Murrell Taylor), congressional abolition (Amy Dru Stanley), and Black women’s abuse by enslavers (Sharon Romeo). Readers of this journal may be frustrated by the book’s lack of historiography or its reticence about some complicated textual material, but its aim is not...