Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War

Available in paperback and suitable for classroom use, Freedom's Soldiers includes an interpretive essay, a portfolio of photographs and other images, and some fifty documents selected from among those previously published in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation. These moving letters, affidavits, and memorials reveal the variety and complexity of the black military experience during the era of emancipation. The volume concludes with suggestions for further reading.

Copies of Freedom's Soldiers may be purchased from your local bookstore or ordered from Cambridge University Press, 110 Midland Avenue, Port Chester, NY 10573. Credit card orders may be placed online, by telephone (1-800-872-7423), or by fax (1-914-937-4712). 192 pp.  Cloth ISBN 0-521-63258-7; paperback ISBN 0-521-63449-0.

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

Last revised 15 February 2007