| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips. The Black Regulars, 1866–1898. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xviii, 360. $34.95.
Black Americans fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and in the volunteer United States Colored Troops in the Civil War. Prior to Appomattox, however, African Americans were never part of the regular army. In 1866, for the first time in American history, Congress incorporated black soldiers in the U.S. regulars, creating six black regiments officered by whites. The army reorganization of 1869 reduced the number of black regiments to four, two of cavalry (the Ninth and Tenth), and two of infantry (the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth). Over the next thirty years until the Spanish-American War, blacks participated in the civic life of the United States as regular army soldiers. They manned outposts from Canada to Texas and as far west as Arizona. Indians called them "buffalo soldiers" because of their woolly hair, and the press popularized the term. Black soldiers themselves, however, regarded the buffalo epithet as insulting.	1
This book by William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips examines the "everyday lives" of the less than 20,000 black men who served in the post-Civil War army. For the most part, it is a story of daily existence on isolated frontier outposts. It is not campaign history. This "first generation" of black regulars left little in the way of manuscripts, and Dobak and Phillips rely mainly on court-martial testimony and pension records in reconstructing black soldier life. Valuable though they are, these sources have obvious limitations, and there is much that we will never know about this fascinating black legion.	. . .

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