| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Colored Infantry. By Edward A. Miller Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xiv, 267 pp. $29.95, isbn 1-57003-199-1.)

Analysis of the African American military impact on the American Civil War and scholarly investigation of the subject dates back to the centennial of that terrible conflict. In fact, studies have focused almost entirely on the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments. To date, historians have otherwise authored general accounts of the African American military contribution with scant attention, other than in a handful of scattered scholarly articles, to the role of individual military units. Professor Edward A. Miller Jr. attempts to fill that void with his study of the Twenty-ninth United States Colored Infantry. 1

Raised in Illinois in late 1863, the unit came to be involved in the battle of the crater at Petersburg, the siege of Richmond, and the surrender at Appomattox. Miller traces the unit and individual soldiers from enlistment through the immediate postwar years. Acknowledging that his choice of the regiment was more or less arbitrary, the author found his investigation prompted by archivists from Alexandria, Virginia, wanting to know more about the role of African American troops serving in that community during the war years. . . .

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