The Black Military Experience

The service of nearly 180,000 black soldiers in the Union army sped the transformation of the Civil War into a war against slavery. This volume of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation examines the meaning of military service for slave and free-black men, their families and communities, and the nation. It details the recruitment of black Union soldiers in the Northern free states, the border slave states, and the Union-occupied Confederacy, as well as the eleventh-hour attempt by the Confederacy to enlist black soldiers. The documents in The Black Military Experience, many of them written by black soldiers and their loved ones, open a window on the lives of the men both on duty and off. Revealing the triumphs and tragedies of wartime service, they show black soldiers braving the test of combat, enduring the drudgery of fatigue duty, interacting with white officers, protesting inequality within the Union army, facing the dangers of capture by the enemy, confronting the complexities of military justice, liberating and protecting their families, serving in the postwar army of occupation, and returning to civilian life.

The Black Military Experience received the J. Franklin Jameson Prize for Distinguished Editorial Achievement of the American Historical Association.

The Black Military Experience is out of print, though copies can be obtained from used booksellers. 896 pp. ISBN 0-521-22984-7. Readers may be interested in Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War, an abridgment that includes many of the documents originally published in The Black Military Experience.

Sample Documents from the Volume

Commander of the District of Northeastern Louisiana to the Headquarters of the Department of the Tennessee, June 12, 1863
A Union general described to his superiors the bloody battle of Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, the first test of combat for a brigade of newly enlisted black soldiers.
Mother of a Northern Black Soldier to the President, July 31, 1863
Shortly after the battle of Fort Wagner, S.C., a free-black woman whose son was in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry advised President Abraham Lincoln of his responsibility to prevent the Confederates from enslaving captured black soldiers.
[image of manuscript (75K)]
Massachusetts Black Corporal to the President, September 28, 1863
On behalf of the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, Corporal James Henry Gooding protested the injustice of the Union's paying its black soldiers—in this case, Northern free men rather than Southern ex-slaves—less than their white comrades.
Marriage Certificate of a Black Soldier and His Wife, December 3, 1863 [image (125K)]
The marriage of two former slaves, Private Rufus Wright and Elisabeth Turner, was presided over by a black army chaplain, the Reverend Henry M. Turner.
Missouri Black Soldier to His Enslaved Daughters, and to the Owner of One of His Daughters, September 3, 1864
Private Spotswood Rice promised his daughters—and warned the woman who owned one of them—that their liberation was at hand.
Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention, January 9, 1865
In a petition to a convention of white unionists that was considering reorganization of the state government and the abolition of slavery, black Tennesseans argued that black men were fit to exercise the privileges of citizenship.
North Carolina Black Soldiers to the Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner, May or June 1865
At the end of the war, black soldiers stationed near Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau to protest the suffering of their wives, children, and parents at a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina.

Publications of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project
Other Sample Documents
Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War
Freedmen and Southern Society Project Home Page

Last revised 15 February 2007

Maintained by Steven F. Miller (sfmiller@umd.edu)