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 Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. (bio) The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. By Deborah Willis. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 243. Cloth, $35.00.) Modern Civil War–era scholarship on United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiering has greatly benefited from academics across various disciplines, who have examined the profound and expansive impacts of African American military service on American history. Deborah Willis, a scholar of photography and imaging, provides a new and refreshing contribution to investigating African Americans’ complex lives in connection with military service. The Black Civil War Soldier is one of the most unique studies on the USCT in years. Willis’s research focuses on visual imagery to uncover the lives of historically marginalized people, who were critical to the Civil War in a multitude of ways. As the subtitle denotes, Willis acknowledges that citizenship was (for African Americans) never statically defined or limited to suffrage rights or aspirations for holding political office. Instead, she shows that every time Black soldiers or veterans—especially those in uniform—and their kin were photographed, they were forcefully demanding the recognition of their cultural citizenship. As a result, each image provides evidence of African [End Page 292] Americans—freeborn and freed, men and women—methodically fighting for inclusion within the United States’ national identity by controlling and displaying their images. Willis applies an intersectional approach of race, gender, and class to understand African Americans’ personal and public images’ actions. In doing so, he furthers ongoing academic and public conversations about memory and the Civil War in meaningful ways that a text-based study cannot always do effectively. Willis’s study seeks to empower African Americans by using their photographs and personal correspondences to speak for themselves while interweaving historical analysis throughout the project to give more context to each document. Taking this approach is a masterful way to give agency to the historical figures over 150 years removed from the Civil War. Moreover, their stances, clothes, facial expressions, and accessories collectively illustrate a carefully crafted image, highlighting that these African Americans saw military service as an avenue to reframe how the United States visualized and remembered them. Since racial discrimination and slavery negatively limited educational opportunities for many African Americans to document their lives, some people claim that it is difficult, if not impossible, to examine those lives. However, Willis urges people to reconsider analyzing photographs as an ideal source to investigate the USCT, as any African American, with the financial resources, could get their picture taken (even those who were illiterate). For African Americans, having a photograph taken was an expensive endeavor. The cost ranged from $0.25 to $2.50. This meant that wartime photographs potentially took 2.5 to 25 percent of a Black soldier’s monthly salary (before the 1864 pay equalization bill to rectify pay inequality among U.S. army soldiers). Therefore, while undeniably empowering, the pictures had the potential to have a direct and noticeable impact on the soldier’s wages (which often went to his kin). While the central focus of the book is on the USCT, they are not the entire story. By including the women’s voices and images—usually wives and mothers—connected to Black soldiers, Willis demonstrates how these women actively participated in and discussed the war. Each carefully posed picture of an African American woman is an example of her demand to have white society and the nation recognize African American womanhood on similar terms with white womanhood. Thus it is critical to recognize how African American women used their connections to military service and photographs to display, literally and figuratively, their agency to a broad audience. The book’s structure follows a chronological order. Each chapter focuses on a crucial moment of the war and its impact on African Americans, either [End Page 293] in the United States or the Confederacy. The images and letters that Willis uses for each chapter reveal that many African Americans were well aware of the war’s significance and their place within it. As a result, it...