Black Regiment Research Articles

Freedom For Themselves: North Carolina's Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom For Themselves: North Carolina's Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era Leonne M. Hudson Freedom For Themselves: North Carolina's Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era. By Richard M. Reid. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8078-3174-8. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvii, 440. $40.00. There has been a surge in the publication of studies on black soldiers in the Civil War in recent years. This renewed interest in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) has broadened our understanding of their place in America's most devastating war. Richard M. Reid's book Freedom for Themselves is informative, well-written, and has enriched the historical literature on African American men in the ranks of the Union army. This monograph is a detailed account of the war-time experiences of North Carolina's four African American regiments. The author provides a thorough discussion of the recruitment, organization, training, and combat service of those units. He follows the soldiers on a journey that was filled with pain and disappointment, bravery and cowardice, and victory and defeat. Reid notes that General Edward A. Wild, a staunch abolitionist from Massachusetts was the most prolific recruiter of black soldiers in North Carolina. The first, second, and third North Carolina Colored Volunteers were designated by the War Department as the 35th, 36th, and 37th USCT respectively, in early 1864. The fourth regiment raised in the state was the Fourteenth United States Colored Heavy Artillery. Several thousand slaves left North Carolina farms and plantations to join the Northern army. Liberation for their enslaved race was a powerful motivation for them to enlist. Reid maintains that the enlistment of black men almost always coincided with financial adversity for their families on the home front. [End Page 277] Against the backdrop of the last half of the nineteenth century, Reid makes it clear that whites believed that blacks were inferior to them in American life and the military. While all USCT had to contend with racial bias, southern black soldiers had the added burden of regional prejudice. Both white and black soldiers in the federal army discounted the military contributions of their black comrades from the slave states. Although racism was pervasive, Reid points out that "the army treated" black men "with a greater degree of equality than they could hope to experience in civilian society" (p. 15). The North Carolina regiments had to deal with many of the same problems that beset white units, such as desertion, internal dissension, and factionalism. The black army was also bedeviled by insufficient training, disease, excessive fatigue duty, and inadequate equipment. Reid presents a complete portrait of the military performance of the African Brigade. He does not hesitate to praise the regiments enthusiastically for heroism or exceptional valor when guided by the evidence. It should also be mentioned that he treats the poor performance or incompetence of black troops with the same vigor. The author succeeds brilliantly in telling the whole military story of the black North Carolinians by following them into small battles such as those at Honey Hill and Wilson's Wharf as well as their participation in major engagements and campaigns. The postwar years found black veterans struggling to affirm their freedom, to take care of their families, to earn a living, and to secure the benefits that their military service had earned them. They would, however, long remember their service in the army of liberation that brought freedom to millions of slaves who had languished in bondage for generations. This meticulously researched volume is illustrated with several photographs and maps. The biographical vignettes, combined with a substantial amount of anecdotal material, give this work a human quality. Reid concludes that African American soldiers from the southern states "through their actions and achievements, created images, symbols, and memories of black courage and commitment to the nation that could not easily be ignored" (p. 328). The Civil War was a transformative event in the lives of black American soldiers. This monograph reveals that the men of the four black regiments from North Carolina cherished their service to the United States during a difficult time in the...

"Black Troops" and Hierarchies of Color in the Portuguese Atlantic World:: The Case of Henrique Dias and His Black Regiment

Este artigo examina as carreiras de um pequeno número de homens de origem ou descendência africana que fizeram parte de uma elite militar do império português: comandantes da “Guerra Preta” e comandantes dos terços de tropas negras. O mais famoso deste grupo é o Marechal Henrique Dias, um “homem preto”, plenamente reconhecido como um comandante chave nas lutas para expulsar os holandeses do nordeste do Brasil no século XVII. A instabilidade apresentada pelas lutas dos portugueses contra os holandeses, quilombolas, e populações indígenas no Brasil e na África no século XVII e no começo de século XVIII abriram estreitos caminhos de mobilidade social para os comandantes de cor que prestaram serviços militares significantes à Coroa. Alguns conseguiram títulos de nobreza e entraram para as mais exclusivas Ordens Militares como recompensa por seus feitos. Mas no começo do século XVIII, esta porta de entrada para tais ordens militares se fechou para os comandantes negros. Este artigo explora como a cor destes oficiais virou um motivo em si para justificar sua exclusão destes redutos da mais alta nobreza portuguesa e contempla suas implicações para a história das hierarquias de cor no mundo atlântico.

Give Them Their Due: A Reassessment of African Americans and Union Military Service in Florida during the Civil War

During the Civil War in Florida, African American played a significant role in the Union victory. In sheer numbers alone, the African American units comprised a major Union presence within the state. Not allowed to enlist in regional regiments until 1862, the newly mustered black had to quickly prove their ability as soldiers. In the numerous skirmishes, raids, and larger conflicts that extended to every corner of Florida, African Americans often with bravery and distinction, despite the risk of slavery or execution if captured. Nevertheless, their aggregate roles in Union land and sea campaigns, their impact in driving home the magnitude of the war, and their own special cause of destroying slavery through force of arms in the southernmost Confederate state have often been ignored or underrepresented by early chroniclers and revisionist historical studies. Most wartime accounts of Confederate Florida seldom refer to the black units, except in tangential references to Colored troops appearing in the area. In 1865 Union and Provisional Governor of Florida, William Marvin, set the premise for this inaccurate assessment by declaring that African Americans in his state had fought in no battles; or if engaged at all in such, they were trifling affairs. (1) His comments served to obfuscate African Americans' contribution to the war for generations to come. William Watson Davis in The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, a seminal work on the conflict in Florida, observed that African Americans' most valuable services to the Union were as spy, and plunderers, [who] usually gave way under determined attack. Charlton Tebeau's standard work, A History of Florida, devotes but one sentence to African Americans' contributions to the Union effort. Tebeau limited his observations to the following: General Rufus Saxton, the Union commander of the Department of the South, toward the end of the war used refugee Negroes as guides and received permission to enroll them as soldiers ... mostly at the end of the conflict. (2) Indeed, a common thread running through Civil War literature is that African American servicemen, with the sometimes exception of their duty at the noteworthy Battle of Olustee, served only briefly and peripherally in Florida and that they and their actions lacked both individuality and agency. Consequently, the depth and breadth of the African Americans' military service in Florida during the Civil War has been missing in the literature for almost a century and a half. Indeed for much of this period, the rhetorical makeover of these events relegated African Americans to such minor and perhaps ignoble roles as guide, spy, and plunderer. (3) However, military records in the National Archives and elsewhere document clearly that African American fighting men added a deep and meaningful dimension to the Union efforts in the southernmost theater of Civil War military operations. This needs scrutinizing by those interested in an accurate synthesis of the Civil War because African Americans made a major contribution to the Union strategy and impact in remote southern states such as Florida, both on land and at sea. EAGER FOR THE FIGHT The black that served in Florida arrived from units created during the first wave of African American enlistment in Union military service. Although African Americans had flooded the War Department with petitions to serve from the fall of Fort Sumter in 1861, the federal government and War Department refused to allow mass African American enlistment until 1863. Some commanders, among them Adjutant Lorenzo Thomas, supported emancipation and recruited free African Americans in the South. In the spring of 1862, Department of the South commander, Major David (Black David) Hunter, had proclaimed that martial law liberated all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida (an order Lincoln later revoked), and sanctioned raising the initial black regiment, the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, which completed early action in Florida. …

The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry (review)

Reviewed by: The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Sean A. Scott The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Edited by Stewart Bennett and Barbara Tillery. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004. xxiv, 301 pp. Cloth $34.00, ISBN0-87338-785-6.) "Many generations must pass ere so great a civil strife will furnish such wonderful material for history" (229). More than 125 years later, Charles Dana Miller's postwar memoirs finally joined the ranks of that "wonderful material" that makes up the ever-expanding corpus of Civil War history. The reasons why this veteran of the western theater decided to pen a narrative of his service remain unclear, as does the exact dating of its writing. His great-granddaughter Barbara Tillery concludes from internal evidence that Miller composed his reminiscences between 1869 and 1881. Visiting with former comrades during the Great Re-Union of the Veteran Soldiers and Sailors of Ohio, for which Miller [End Page 165] served as secretary in the summer of 1878, might have provided the impetus for him to chronicle his experiences. Whatever the case, he presents an informative description of a soldier's three-year stint with the 76th Ohio Infantry. Because the war dragged on past the summer of 1861, Miller felt obliged to leave his grain business in Newark, Ohio, to share in "the struggle for the life of the Republic" (4). After training at Camp Sherman, the 76th Ohio saw action in 1862 at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth, shortly after which Miller began serving as adjutant. The grueling conditions throughout the siege of Vicksburg and the regiment's subsequent pursuit of General Joseph E. Johnston's army to Jackson, Mississippi, weakened Miller's constitution, and he contracted malaria in the fall of 1863. Even after a lengthy sick leave and thirty-day furlough for reenlisting, Miller still suffered from the effects of his illness, but he returned to the field with the rank of captain and fought commendably during the Atlanta campaign. Following a leave of absence to shore up his business affairs, Miller was unable to contact Sherman's army on its decisive march through Georgia, so he resigned his commission in November 1864. Besides skillfully recounting military maneuvers, Miller provides an interesting perspective on topics such as the unsanitary conditions of camp, the suffering of Southern civilians, and practical jokes played on contrabands. In 1863, he had the opportunity to become an officer in a black regiment being formed, but he declined, citing his preference to earn promotion in the 76th. Like many Union officers, Miller adopted a personal servant from among the liberated slaves. He took his fifteen-year-old mulatto north with him in 1864 and recalled that "Johnny" was "impressed" by the prosperity of Cincinnati and "the superiority of the great yankee people" (225). Although he often referred to African Americans in a condescending manner, Miller nonetheless affirmed their right to freedom. Editor Stewart Bennett superbly contextualizes the account, even inserting quotations from other members of the 76th to substantiate Miller's report. Instead of appending only three of Miller's personal letters written during the war, it would have been beneficial to include a broader sampling in order to compare his postwar views with his contemporary opinions. Despite this omission, Miller's reminiscences provide an excellent framework for rehearsing the exploits of the 76th Ohio. [End Page 166] Sean A. Scott Purdue University Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

Power and Glory

Augustus Saint‐Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial (1897) on Boston Common commemorates the sacrifice of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his Fifty‐fourth infantry. Consisting of white officers and black soldiers, the Massachusetts Fifty‐fourth became the first of several Northern black regiments to serve in the Civil War. It is best remembered for its doomed attack on Charleston’s Fort Wagner, during which Shaw himself and nearly half of his regiment died.Because of its realistic depiction of African‐American figures, the Shaw Memorial has recently become a subject of art‐historical debate. Scholars have turned their attention from aesthetic issues to social ones, focusing especially on the Shaw's representation of race. This essay aims to enrich the discussion by taking a fresh look at the worldview of the sculpture's commissioners. Boston’s “Brahmin caste,” to which Shaw belonged, operated within a milieu that did not recognize “race” as a permanent social category. In fact, Boston's Brahmins viewed environment and cultivation as productive of predestined social roles. And they viewed themselves as the natural leaders of a genuinely free, though organically stratified, society. Their ideals are embodied both in the form of the Shaw Memorial and in the rhetoric surrounding its commissioning and unveiling.

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic. By Jeffry H. Morrison. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. 240p.In his The Origins and Progress of the American Revolution, loyalist Peter Oliver spoke of the New England clergy as the “black regiment” of the Revolution who, “tinctured with republicanism,” supported the war for independence. John Witherspoon was a New Jersey Presbyterian, but he might well fit Oliver's description. He brought Princeton University to the side of the Revolution, mentored the first generation of the new regime's leadership, served in the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, and was an active supporter of the Constitution. Yet while Witherspoon was highly praised by his contemporaries, who predicted that he would be honored by later generations of Americans, he instead became a neglected figure with few memorials erected in his name. Somehow, despite credentials that compared favorably to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, fame deserted him. Jeffry H. Morrison's engaging and enthusiastic study of John Witherspoon attempts to redeem him as a “forgotten founder.”

Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (review)

Reviewed by: Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era Larry M. Logue Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era. Edited by John David Smith. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. 451. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.) Nearly a century and a half after African Americans served in the Civil War, we continue to ask the same questions about them as contemporaries did. Did black soldiers fight gallantly? Were they well led by their (mostly white) officers? Did Confederates massacre black troops? Several essays in this collection address these questions, while others pursue additional perspectives on African American service to the Union. Though the collection has no formal section designations, the essays fall into distinctive parts. In the first, John David Smith surveys the development of a policy on black soldiers. Smith joins those who question Abraham Lincoln's pragmatism in accepting African American troops; the decision, Smith argues, was part of Lincoln's "linear course" toward emancipation (9). Five essays focus on significant battles fought by African American soldiers. The authors center on the conventional battle narrative, adding details on the involvement of black troops and seeking answers to the traditional trio of questions. Agreeing with virtually every other study, these essays find that black soldiers fought bravely and effectively, winning whites' admiration in the process. The authors also agree with most predecessors that the attitude and military skills of commanders fell far short of those of their black troops. There were, of course, exceptions—William Glenn Robertson notes Benjamin Butler's steadfast support for African American troops, and Anne J. Bailey acknowledges Thomas J. Morgan's leadership skills—but mostly the authors point to mismanagement born of prejudice. Arthur W. Bergeron Jr. describes the misuse of black troops at Olustee, several authors note William T. Sherman's refusal to use black soldiers in combat, and Robertson recounts commanders' disastrous vacillation about black soldiers before the Battle of the Crater. [End Page 329] Most of the battles studied in these essays were free of systematic atrocities. To be sure, few engagements involving African Americans were without incident—Richard Lowe points to probable executions after Milliken's Bend, and Robertson reminds us of the spontaneous slaughter of black troops at the Crater—but most tales of black flags and calculated massacres are unsubstantiated. Other engagements of lesser military significance, however, did produce evidence of premeditated racial violence. Fort Pillow, examined by John Cimprich, and Saltville, described by Thomas D. Mays, differ from other engagements in the scale and nature of their atrocities. Cimprich finds, in the preponderance of the evidence, a partial verdict for the plaintiffs: a massacre occurred at Fort Pillow. But other allegations, such as that black soldiers were buried alive or that Nathan Bedford Forrest ordered the killing, are probably untrue. At Saltville, the scale of killing may have been smaller, but the nature of the barbarity—wounded black soldiers executed on the battlefield and in a hospital—was especially chilling. Several more essays take up topics usually overlooked in the focus on the traditional three questions. Michael T. Meier shows that even unsympathetic whites' careers could be transformed in a biracial army: Lorenzo Thomas went from a desk job to prominence as a dynamic organizer of black regiments. Noah Andre Trudeau introduces the lesser-known U.S. Colored Cavalry, whose most remarkable feature was its existence, given the additional prejudice against African Americans serving in the army's elite branch. Keith Wilson examines the worldview of three commanders of black soldiers, contrasting the paternalism of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Robert Gould Shaw with James Montgomery's evangelical devotion to warfare as punishment for slavery. Edwin S. Redkey profiles Henry M. Turner, a chaplain in the U.S. Colored Troops whose service developed his skills for and devotion to evangelism for black churches. Two final essays focus on black soldiers' experience after Appomattox. Robert J. Zalimas Jr. finds in 1865 an ominous precursor of Reconstruction in Charleston, South Carolina: black soldiers in the occupation force were relentlessly abused by white comrades, regardless of whether the latter were "praying men" recruited from churches or ex...

Memory and the Abolitionist Heritage: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the Uncertain Meaning of the Civil War

After 1877, the American North worked assiduously to forget the deeper meanings of the American Civil War. The practice of "Decorations Day" became, ironically, a ritual of forgetfulness in many Northern communities. An annual decoration of the graves of the Civil War dead, Decoration Day would eventually become known as "Memorial Day," which, by 1890, had become a legal holiday in every Northern state. Speeches and parades marked the day from its beginning, with much of the emphasis falling on the bravery of the Union soldier rather than the legacy of emancipation. As early as the 1870s, celebrants sometimes even commemorated the bravery of the Confederate soldier.1 A typical turn-of-the-century Decoration Day was celebrated at Harvard University on May 29, 1904. Appropriately, the event was held at Sanders Theater in Memorial Hall, an imposing Gothic edifice built as an architectural memorial to the loyal sons of Harvard who fell in the Civil War. Themes of reconciliation, themes that had become especially pungent since the outbreak of popular patriotism in the Spanish-American War, reverberated through the keynote speaker's rhetoric. "Each of the contesting parties," he proclaimed of the Blue and the Gray, "now recognize the qualities, the faculties and the daring of its opponents." Going beyond a recognition of the martial prowess of the Union's enemies, the Decoration Day speaker further insisted that Yankees and Rebels had not been separated "by an institution, not even that of slavery, but by two principles of government on which men [End Page 202] might honestly differ in opinion—the difference between states rights and the sovereignty of the nation." The keynote went on to suggest the possibility that Harvard honor its Confederate dead as a gesture to "those who had fought bravely on the other side."2 Nothing about such rhetoric will surprise those familiar with the language of postbellum reconciliation sentiment. By 1904, a sentimentalized view of the enemy and of the causes of the conflict had become de rigueur in public ruminations about the war. What is surprising about this event is that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, radical abolitionist, supporter of John Brown, and colonel of the first federally authorized black regiment, the 1st South Carolina of African Descent, was the man who delivered these sentiments to the Union veterans of Harvard. If any white Northerner had refused to accept conciliation, one would have imagined it to be Higginson. Yet he did not, choosing to participate in the conspiracy of forgetfulness that fell over so many Union veterans. Or did he? The way that Higginson and other radical abolitionists chose to remember the war for the Union suggests a profound cynicism among these American radicals, not a cynicism about their progressive ideals but about the possibility of fulfilling them within the American national experiment. In a bitter irony, Higginson came to collaborate unknowingly and unwittingly with their former secessionist foes.3 If the Decoration Day speech represents an abandonment of the "abolitionist memory" of the war, it is not an isolated case. The birth of the Grand Army of the Republic veteran's organization, the runaway popularity of the Century magazine's Battles and Leaders series, and the building of public monuments to the Union soldier all underscore the willingness of white Americans to celebrate the memory of martial glory at the expense of reflecting on the war's social and political consequences. Simultaneously, the increasing conservatism of the Northern public regarding issues of racial equality, a conservatism that extended even to the Republicans, signaled the willingness of the North to abandon the freedpeople to the tender mercies of their former masters and to ignore the possibilities of revolutionary social change that the war created. [End Page 203] A number of scholars, David Blight being the most important, have examined this revised Northern memory of the war. In Race and Reunion...

The magnificent activist: the writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson is little known today, but during his own lifetime his remarkable activism put him at the very heart of the pivotal social movements reshaping America for the nineteenth century and beyond. Born in Cambridge, he was a fervent abolitionist, running guns to anti-slavery settlers and financing John Brown's raid. During the Civil War, he commanded the first black unit to fight for the Union, and their achievements (publicized in his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment ) opened the way for further black enlistment. He also championed women's rights for sixty years, lecturing and agitating for suffrage. His lifelong correspondence with Emily Dickinson led to his editing her verse for publication, which some have called his greatest literary legacy. But in fact that legacy is here, in the essays he wrote about the many causes to which he dedicated his life. With this volume Meyer has guaranteed the rediscovery of a major American figure whose ideas made him a radical in his society but a visionary in ours.

Sculpting and Lynching: The Making and Unmaking of the Black Citizen in Late Nineteenth-Century America

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.: Cambridge, Mass., 1885), p. 110. On Memorial Day 1897, amidst much pomp and ceremony, Augustus SaintGaudens's memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers was unveiled in Boston (Fig. 1). The story of the 54th is well known. One of the first black regiments to be raised during the Civil War, and certainly the most famous, they marched off to the South where they and their young colonel died tragic and heroic deaths. SaintGaudens' relief panel depicts the moment of their departure, presenting an image of considerable pathos, a pathos created by the distance between the ambitions of the regiment in 1863 and the spectator's knowledge of their fate, embodied in the allegorical figure of Death floating above them. The monument is often viewed as a breakthrough in the public representation of the African American. Here is an image that steers a course between the generic body of the classicized nude, and the grotesque stereotype of popular imagery, an image that neither suppresses blackness in the canonical ideal, nor pathologizes it in reductive caricature. The visual evidence is overwhelmingly supportive of this view. There are sound historical reasons, too, why one should take this approach and celebrate the image as positive. The Shaw Memorial is usually read, not incorrectly, as a monument to the black soldiers. While Shaw is the focus, the work was designed to celebrate the glorious feats of Shaw's men as well as those of the colonel, a position that would seem to appeal to the anti-slavery temperament of Boston. Similarly the motto: Omnia Relinquit Servare Republicam; he gives up everything to serve the Republic. While this refers principally to Shaw, it could also apply to the black soldiers who served under him since many of them also gave up everything in service to the Union.

The complete Civil War journal and selected letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a politically engaged intellectual at the forefront of antislavery, labour and feminist causes. Born in 1823 to a formerly wealthy but still prominent Brahmin family, he became one of America's foremost social activists and a leading writer, minister and reformer. With the publication in 1869 of his Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson became an important chronicler of the American Civil War. This work is a comprehensive edition of his journal. Annotated by Christopher Looby and including a selection of Higginson's wartime letters, the volume offers a picture of the radical interracial solidarity brought about by the transformative experience of the army camp and of Civil War life.

The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Colored Infantry (review)

256CIVIL WAR HISTORY In the portion of the book dealing with the period following his leaving office , the renditions of his various speeches are again good examples of his tendency to stick to his convictions. In constantly harping on the rectitude of his intentions, the outrageous way in which he was allegedly treated, and his happiness of having been released from the trammels of office, he appears as a true Cincinnatus willing to retire from politics. Of course he never ceased plotting for a return to office, an effort which finally succeeded in 1 875, when he was elected to the Senate. The typically self-centered speeches of the ex-president reveal him as unwilling ever to recede from previously formed opinions and go far to explain his unpopularity. As usual, these problems are clarified by a well-written introduction—perhaps a bit too brief, but very informative. Bergeron has once again done an excellent job in making available these papers of Andrew Johnson. Hans L. Trefousse City University of New York The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of (he Twenty-ninth U.S. ColoredInfantry. By EdwardA. Miller Jr. (Columbia: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 267. $29.95.) Interest in all aspects of the Civil War continues to grow. Still, relatively little attention has been given to the African American experience in the war. Most concern remains fixed on Massachusetts's black regiments, especially the famed 54th. Thus, Edward A. Miller's study of Illinois's black regiment is welcomed and needed. , With the kind of thorough research that suffuses all his books, Miller immersed himselfin the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry's (USCT) disturbing, but honorable history. The 29th, like the other USCT units (not to be confused with the Connecticut 29th), was comprised predominately of former Missouri slaves. Its experience in the war—the unit's social composition, lack of training, neglect by the Union army's command structure, and the amount of racial venom hurled at it—made the 29th far more typical of the African American war experience than that of the 54th Massachusetts. Miller explores the appalling levels of racial antipathy in Illinois that formed the backdrop for the unit's creation and the ugly opportunism that underpinned state support for a black regiment. There was scant white support for black rights in the state, which, after all, sold into slavery blacks who illegally settled there and which had repudiated the Emancipation Proclamation. Petersburg's Battle of the Crater represented the regiment's major engagement . Although this reader would have preferred more comparative detail on the experiences of the other USCT regiments that participated in this Union disaster, Miller tells a riveting story ofblack bravery and inept Union generalship. BOOK REVIEWS257 The Confederate slaughter of black prisoners should have made this engagement one of the most criminal in the war's annals. Astonishingly, the Northern white press tried to blame black cowardice for the monumental defeat, and none spoke of the white Yankees who killed their comrades to save their skins. A conspiracy of silence descended on the press when it came to what was indisputable evidence for rampant murder. In several episodic chapters, Miller presents the details of the lives of many individual black soldiers that he uncovered from compiled service and pension records. A laborious method, but the collective evidence—especially for the men in their postwar years—is compelling. "The overwhelming majority" of the black soldiers, Miller concluded, "died as they had lived, desperately poor" (201). Although the government failed to meet its obligation to the black troops during the war, Miller found that the pension office offered black veterans generally fair andjudicious treatment. Indeed, Miller discovered that without government support the veterans ofthe 29th and their families could not have endured in the postwar world. This reader was also struck by a thread ofcynicism that wound its way through much of the book. The author appears to believe that most of the men who joined the 29th USCT sought only pay and bonuses, not equality and freedom. But the work of the Freedom history project, the Black Abolitionist Papers, Edwin Redkey, and this reviewer should have...

Garland H. White, Black Army Chaplain

Garland H. White, Black Army Chaplain EdwardA. Miller, Jr. It is well known that not many African Americans were commissioned as officers in the Union army during the Civil War. About seventy-five Louisiana blacks were appointed to company grade positions in Native Guard regiments raised by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler in New Orleans. Nearly every one of those officers not killed in action or discharged for wounds was forced out of the service by Butler's successor, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. He wished to see none but whites wearing officers' shoulder straps—even in black regiments.' Apart from the Louisiana officers, only thirty-two other blacks were commissioned in the 149 black regiments (and artillery batteries) raised in the war. Of these men, eight were surgeons and fourteen chaplains, the remaining ten serving mostly in company officer positions and then only late in the war orjust after it. Generally, chaplains in the black units were, like the other officers, white men. There were 133 of them during the war, so the fourteen black chaplains were rare.2 Just what duties chaplains were supposed to do was a matter of some debate, the army leaving it up to regimental commanders to decide. General orders early in the war authorized one chaplain in each regiment, the candidate to be "appointed by the regimental commander, on the vote of the field officers and company commanders on duty with the regiment at the time the appointment is 1 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance ofBlack Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), 176, 180. Banks thought black officers "detrimental to the service" and "a source ofembarrassment and annoyance"; letter, Banks toAdjutant Genera] Lorenzo Thomas, Feb. 1 2, 1 863, U.S. Department of War, The War ofthe Rebellion: A Compilation ofthe Official Records ofthe Union and ConfederateArmies, 127 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1889— 1902], ser. 3, vol. 3:46 (hereafter cited as OR). 2 Edwin S. Redkey, "Black Chaplains in the Union Army," OVi/ War History 33 (Dec. 1987): 332, 350; John W. Blassingame, "Negro Chaplains in the Civil War," Negro History Bulletin 27 (Oct. 1963): 23-24. The black chaplain was rarer still in the Confederate service, only one—in a white Tennessee regiment—was appointed and served from the Battle of Shiloh until war's end. Charles Frank Pitts, Chaplains in Gray: The Confederate Chaplains' Story (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1957), 48-49· Civil War History, Vol. xliii. No. 3 © 1997 by The Kent State University Press 202CIVIL WAR HISTORY made." As for qualifications, there was but one: to be "a regularly ordained minister of some Christian denomination." The chaplain was to report to his colonel quarterly on "the moral and religious condition of the regiment, and such suggestions as may conduce to the social happiness and moral improvement of the troops."3 Apparently, this vagueness led to abuses, the army's paymaster general, Benjamin F. Larnard, writing that many chaplains "are utterly unworthy," adding, "It is said that one regiment employs a French cook, and musters him as chaplain to meetthe expense."4This sort ofreport led to congressional action changing the qualification requirement to include certification by five other ministers before appointment. Not until a year before the end of the war did any mention of duties appear in law or regulation. Even then it was simply that the chaplain should hold religious services "at least once each Sabbath," with a "when practicable " qualifier.5 The first black minister accepted into Federal service as chaplain was appointed in mid-1 863 to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Colored) at the insistence of the state's abolitionist governor, John A. Andrew. Of course, apart from actions by individual Union generals acting without authority, blacks could not enlist in the army early in the war. It was not until January 1 , 1 863, under a provision of the executive order implementing the Emancipation Proclamation , that black recruits were accepted on the same basis as whites. Acceptance did not mean equality, however, because blacks received no Federal enlistment bounty and were paid less than whites. Pay issues damaged morale and caused friction until rectified later in...

A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (review)

256CIVIL WAR HISTORY and speaking with them, few believed in racial equality and many were vehemently racist. George M. Turner of the 3d Rhode Island Artillery expressed a common viewpoint: "The plan of having negro soldiers is very well in some cases; but ... I am not willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with a black dirty nigger" (87). New England soldiers also commented disparagingly about white Southerners , their crude homes, drinking habits, and alleged tendency toward sloth. Chapter4, "Politics on the Home Front," contains letters on a range of topics, from Abraham Lincoln's policies to Copperhead philosophy, to the war's blurring ofgender roles. In several letters, women demonstrated their political awareness by commenting on the Emancipation Proclamation. In another, a Connecticut doctor expressed his belief that women might influence voters to reject peace candidates. In chapter 5, "The Personal Sacrifices ofWar," soldiers and their families discussed the economic benefits that the war created for some Northern businesses and the economic dislocation families endured due to uneven and inadequate military pay. The final chapter, "The Morse Family Correspondence ," includes letters ofaVermont family with two men atthe front. While it reveals the family and financial tensions caused by the war, this brief chapter is somewhat difficult to follow because of a complicated family tree. Yankee Correspondence will assist students and scholars in their continuing efforts to interpretthe war's role in shaping the lives and views ofaverageAmericans . If, as Walt Whitman believed, "the real war will never get in the books," volumes such as this one at least make it possible to bring it closer to home. Wendy Hamand Venet Georgia State University A Voice ofThunder: The Civil WarLetters ofGeorge E. Stephens. Edited by Donald Yacovone. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. xxi, 351. $26.95.) The first third of this remarkable books contains Donald Yacovone's incisive biography of George E. Stephens ( 1 832-1 888), complete with twelve pages of illustrations and four of maps. Stephens's parents were free African Americans who fled to Philadelphia from Northampton County on the eastern shore of Virginia in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion and the persecutions of black Virginians that were its immediate sequel. Supporting himselfas a cabinetmaker and then as a seaman on the USS Walker (of the Coast Survey, not the Navy), George E. Stephens was first and foremost an abolitionist, a reformer, and an intellectual. All the letters reproduced in this book were written for publication in the Weekly Anglo-African, published by Thomas and Robert Hamilton in New York City. Stephens wrote his first four letters in Philadelphia between November 1859 and January 1861. He then wrote a much larger and, for the historian of the Civil War, more original group of letters from Maryland and Virginia between October 1 861 and December 1862. Attached as cook and helper to Col. Benjamin C.Tilghman of Pennsylvania's 26th Regiment, Stephens both BOOK REVIEWS257 acted in and reported on local struggles involving Unionists, Confederates, the defenders of slavery, abolitionists, slaves, and freedmen. Once the Union had finally decided to arm blacks, Stephens traveled to Massachusetts to enroll in the most visible, and certainly most discussed, black regiment in the Civil War, the Massachusetts 54th. His remaining letters detail the training of the 54th and its campaigns against Charleston and in Florida. Stephens vividly testifies to the regiment's heroism in usually ill-conceived and unnecessarily dangerous battles and its political heroism in refusing to accept inferior pay for fighting the Union's war. Unfortunately the letters end after August 1864. Yacovone's biography tells of the triumphant return of the fate 54th to Massachusetts and of Stephens's initially promising career as a schoolmaster and politician in Tappahannock, Virginia. His later years were spent in Brooklyn, where he helped organize the William Lloyd Garrison Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. Briefdescriptions can scarcelydojustice to the qualities ofGeorge E. Stephens as a writer. In choosing the phrase "A voice of thunder" from an ultra-militant speech of Henry Highland Garnet, Yacovone testifies to Stephens's mastery of the prophetic style so richly developed by the abolitionists. But there is much more to Stephens...

The Last Black Regiment

Reviews in American History has few occasions to consider a book so controversial that its publication has been object of attempted suppression. Black Soldier, White Army is an exception. The book originated as an effort by United States Army Center of Military History to allay charges by veterans and friends of Korean War's 24th Regimental Combat Team that Army's initial official history of war displayed a racist bias in its account of that unit, which was all African American except for some white officers. Black Soldier, White Army itself, however, ran afoul of similar criticism as soon as a draft of it was circulated during 1996. Black veterans have maintained that new book also perpetuates unfair stereotypes of African-American units and soldiers as unsatisfactory, and they sought legal grounds to prevent publication. David K. Carlisle, in 1950 a second lieutenant just graduated from United States Military Academy and serving with 77th Engineer Combat Company, one of supporting units of 24th RCT, has been quoted by The Washington Post as saying: After all of stuff these soldiers [of 24th] went through, here we are years later and Army publishes this crap about them.' Carlisle and Charles M. Bussey, first lieutenant commanding 77th ECC in 1950, have together written their own manuscript history of 24th and 77th in In a Higher Tradition, which Carlisle lent to Clay Blair, and which Blair used in writing The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950-1953 (1987). One of Blair's principal purposes in his volume was to probe the performance of troops in combat, because the Army officially and categorically condemned performance of units in Korea, while black activists have countercharged that alleged poor showing of many units in Korea did not occur because blacks were cowardly or incompetent, as Army implied, but because many of white officers who led units were cowardly or incompetent racists.2 With a reassessment of

The Ewing Family Civil War Letters (review)

book reviews167 cruel war is over, set type as well as ever" (1 10). In sprite of Robert T. Cole's caveat " I have come to the conclusion that history is nothing more than a 'Blue Book' of lies anyhow," he is determined to correct a number of published conclusions he knows to be wrong because he realized that "there will soon be none of us left to contradict the many errors committed." Cole himself discounts the full quota of "exaggeration" by Gen. Joseph Hooker about the Confederate losses at the battle of Wauhatchie in the Chattanooga campaign. Hooker claimed enemy losses of 1,500, whereas Cole states that the losses of all categories in the four Confederate brigades involved was 418. Cole's book is extremely readable and is very useful in evoking the daily life of the soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia. This work should be included in college and university libraries. The most disappointing part of the book is its maps. Not only are the two maps inadequate for this type of book, but they are placed inconveniently at the beginning. More maps should have been included and near the appropriate text. Detailed maps of the Second Manassas/Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville/ Gettysburg, and theWildemess/Petersburg/Appomattox campaigns would have been helpful to the reader. Patrick B. Harris, Jr. Troy State University The Ewing Family Civil War Letters. Edited by John T. Greene. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994. Pp. xxxiii, 239. $24.95.) John T. Greene obtained these letters from his elderly neighbors, Gladys Milner and James Harvey Sackett, descendants of two Civil War soldiers, George H. Ewing and his cousin James Ewing, of Stockbridge, Michigan. These men, who served in different Michigan regiments, mainly in the West, met up once, during the siege of Vicksburg, when their two regiments temporarily joined U. S. Grant's enlarged army. A few months later, on November 29, 1 863, George, the author of the bulk of these letters, was killed when a Confederate shell fell directly on his rifle pit; James survived, making it to second lieutenant during a year-long postwar encampment at Camden, Arkansas. On the whole the letters are unremarkable. George Ewing hated Copperheads and hoped they would get drafted and perhaps killed, and he rather relished shooting at "the Graybacks," often counting the number of shots he had gotten off during a skirmish, divided into blind shots and those made at a specific target. As was true of most of his comrades, he was always hungry and therefore enjoyed foraging for enemy livestock. He was devoid ofboth religion and much in the way of political ideology. George Ewing's civil war remained local in conception. He relayed information about other Stockbridge boys in his units, and he was quite interested in hearing gossip from home, although he was something of a prude concerning l68CIVIL WAR HISTORY the girls. He also shared the time-honored foot soldier's resentment for the brass, in fact noting in one letter, "I saw Gen Grant to day he loocks no smarter then eny other man" (82). Although James considered the possibility of advancing his career by serving as an officer in a black regiment when such units were created in 1863, George remained a committed aversive racist. Referring to an abolitionist back in Stockbridge, George insisted, "i wish Baker was down her. he wood get sick ofthe Niger. ... I hate them wors that I do a rebel a good deal. I all moste want to shoot them when I see them darn them, they are the free men now and we are the slaves" (55). Negrophobia was George's only ideological obsession— mainly he wanted to survive and to go back to farming in Michigan, where he had his parents invest his army pay in acreage. Generally speaking, the content ofthese letters is quite thin, comprising enough, perhaps, for part of a scholarly article. The phonetic spelling, as always, is intriguing for what it reveals about the sounds of spoken language in rural midwestem America 130 years ago. Retaining the original spellings was a useful editorial decision, particularly as they are accompanied by an extensive glossary. John...

Charles E. Heller. Portrait of an Abolitionist: A Biography of George Luther Stearns, 1809-1867 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Charles E. Heller. Portrait ofan Abolitionist: A Biography of George Luther Steams, 1809-1867. (Westport, Conn: GreenwoodPress, 1996. Pp. xii,248. $59.95.) Drawing from widely scattered manuscript collections, Charles Heller reconstructs the public life of George Luther Stearns, an influential Boston manufacturer , a generous philanthropist, and a radical reform organizer. Stearns emerges as an articulate exponent of free labor ideology, particularly that aspect of it which insisted that the organizing principles of industrial capitalism created the means by which slavery could be destroyed, equal rights established, and Northern men and methods exalted in the land. Stearns was eleven when his father died and fifteen when his family's financial needs required that he enter the world of business as a clerk. With a keen eye for business opportunities in New England's expanding economy, Stearns soon emerged as a successful manufacturer, first of unseed oil and later of lead pipe. By the 1840s, Stearns was one of the wealthiest men in New England. He also enjoyed social prominence and formed close personal relationships with reform-minded intellectuals, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and Lydia Maria Child (his wife's aunt). By 1859 Stearns's circle of friends included the wealthy paper manufacturer Francis W. Bird and the politically powerful members of the "Bird Club." Stearns gained entry into this elite group through his work with the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, procuring supplies and weapons for free-state settlers in Kansas. This work also brought Stearns into close and friendly contact with John Brown. With Howe and other friends, Stearns became one of the "Secret Six" conspirators who helped to plan Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. During the Civil War Stearns turned his organizing talents to the recruitment of black troops. He traveled across the North to find the men needed to fill the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the black regiment that fought with stunning heroism in the failed federal assault on FortWagner, South Carolina, in July 1 863. Commissioned a major in the United States Army, Stearns went on to recruit over thirteen thousand black men for the Union cause. For reasons that Heller does not explore, Stearns's two draft-aged sons never entered military service. With the destruction of slavery, Stearns believed that the lessons and experiences of the free-state struggle in Kansas could be applied to the entire South. Northern capital would revive the cultivation of Southern cotton on free labor I58CIVIL WAR HISTORY principles. Stearns himself invested in a plantation near Murfreesboro, Tennessee . To promote a radical reconstruction of the South, Stearns joined in the founding of the Nation (1865) as the largest single investor. When it became clear that the journal's editor, E. L. Godkin, opposed radical reform, Stearns launched the Right Way to challenge him. By then, however, failing health and declining financial fortunes soon brought his reform career to an end. Heller's biography is thorough, competent, and welcome. However, the author does little to connect his subject with the substantial body of secondary literature on antebellum reform and emancipation. Readers are left on their own to locate Stearns in the larger antislavery cause. Louis S. Gerteis University of Missouri-St. Louis Rebel Storehouse: Florida in the Confederate Economy. By Robert A. Taylor. (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1955, Pp. 232. $29.95.) Few battles of significance were fought in Florida, and Tallahassee, the capital, was so remote that it was the only southerly capital not to fall to Union forces. Even so, the state was crucial as a place ofConfederate supply. As armies clashed elsewhere, important efforts in Florida were underway on behalf of the South. Those activities are the subject of this generally sound study. The author maintains that the production and export of salt represents Florida 's greatest economic contribution to the Southern cause. Accounts of its production and distribution provide arguably the strongest chapter in the book. So much salt was shipped out that Florida residents had difficulty keeping the item. Across the South, patriotic-minded (and neither were they blind to profits) citizens provided what the Confederacy required to prosecute the war. It was no different in Florida, where opportunity and...

The Union of Music and Text in Whitman's Drum-Taps and Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment

Explores the similarities and differences between Whitman's Drum-Taps and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment, describing how beneath the "veneer of dislike and disgust" between the two men, "both authors use music to unite communities against a war of national dissolution" and how both "successfully bridge the gap between written and aural modes of communication."

Hiram Rhodes Revels, 1827-1901: A Reappraisal

Among the over two hundred significant national black Reconstruction figures in America during the period 1860-1880, that of Hiram Rhodes Revels (1827-1901) continues to hold a special interest for laymen and scholars. In fact, scholars have generally noted four major contributions made by Revels to Afro-American life. A survey of sixteen writers, equally divided between blacks and whites, indicates that (1) he was an effective Methodist, religious, and educational leader during and after the slavery period; (2) that he served the Union Army during the Civil War as a chaplain for black troops; (3) that he was the first black American elected to the Senate of the United States; and (4) that he was the first president of Alcorn University in Mississippi.(1) Thus, the prevailing public conception of Revels has been a positive one, even though some scholars, such as E. L. Thornbrough, Gerald E. Wheeler, and Donald L. Singer, have noted that Revels was often too timid and conservative on many of the economic, political, and social questions of his day.(2) Yet, in spite of his negative stances, Revels has continued to hold a major position in black history. Largely because he was such an important first, and because of that fact, he has been guaranteed a seat in the first row of black historical memories in this country. In spite of this unique position, however, much about Revels' life and work remains a puzzle and a disappointment. This essay seeks to explore this lesser-known image of Revels during his early life, his middle years, and the concluding decades of his career. Revels was born a free black of mixed blood in Fayetteville, Cumberland County, North Carolina. He notes in his Autobiography that his ancestors . . as far back as my knowledge extends, were free.(3) Little is known of his early childhood or of his parents, but he was educated in Fayetteville at a school run by a free black woman. Perhaps her influences as a Southern black educator helped to shape his lifelong interest and commitment to teaching and promoting the educational affairs of Afro-Americans in the North during the 1840s and 1850s, and in the South from the 1860s through the 1890s. As a young man he worked as a barber, taught school, and advanced his education by attending, in 1844, a Quaker seminary in Libery, Union County, Indiana. He may have received the support of North Carolina Quakers in his efforts to leave the state. He later attended the Drake County Seminary for blacks at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.(4) It was during the mid 1840s that he developed an interest in the Christian ministry, and in 1845 he was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal [A.M.E.] Church in Baltimore, Maryland, a city which contained a large and prosperous free black population before the Civil War. During this period, Revels' brother, Willis Revels, was also an A.M.E. religious leader in Maryland. Due to the nature of his educational and religious work, Revels traveled through over eight states - teaching, lecturing, and serving the religious needs of black congregations in Maryland, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Kansas.(5) During the Civil War years, 1861-1865, he is given credit for helping to organize the first two black regiments in Maryland, and later one in Missouri, where he also established a school for black youth. During the war, he served as a Union chaplain for black troops and aided the Freedmen's Bureau in the establishment of schools in Mississippi. After the war he also lived in Kansas, Missouri, and Louisiana. After this period he served as a presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Natchez, Mississippi, where in 1868 he was elected alderman, and from there he went to the Mississippi State Senate in 1869.(6) Revels' earlier educational advantages and opportunities to become a leader played an important part in his activities in Mississippi. …

Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy.

Though much has been written about the southern black regiments organized by the Union during the Civil War, very little has been written about the white Southerners who risked their lives to fight the Confederacy in opposition to seccession. Over 100,000 men - ten per cent of General Lee's fighting force originally enlisted in the Confederate ranks - fought in the service of North. The majority of these men - over seventy per cent - came from Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, but every state in the Confederacy (except South Carolina) provided at least one battalion of white troops for the Union Army. Meticulously exploring the history of loyalists (known as tories to their enemies) in each Confederate State, Current provides an original and comprehensive account of this seldom examined topic. He examines why these soldiers fought for the Union, how they fared in battle, and the considerable personal risks endured by both themselves and their families. This book is intended for those interested in the American Civil War.