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Book Review
| Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers during the Civil War. By Keith P. Wilson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002. xviii, 336 pp. $39.00, ISBN 0-87338-709-0.)Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era. Ed. by John David Smith. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xxvi, 451 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2741-X.)
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| The Civil War continues to engage historians and nonhistorians alike as they attempt to comprehend the meaning of slavery, race, and violence in our nation's past. While much has been written, there is still much to be done. We know a lot about specific battles and the officers involved; we also know much about the average soldier. We do not know enough about the role of those unusual soldiers, mostly former slaves numbering nearly 180,000, who took up arms to liberate themselves, their families, and their fellow slaves from bondage. Thanks to the authors of the books reviewed below, we are learning more about African American soldiers in the Civil War. |
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Keith P. Wilson's study focuses on the actions and activities of African American soldiers in military camps. He argues that a social reconstruction occurred in the Southern states during the war; a no less meaningful "intra-military reconstruction" (p. xii) occurred within the black regiments. Black Civil War soldiers drew upon and adjusted established African American cultural resources to test the limits of freedom, claim citizenship, and "confront racism ... hardship, injury and wounds, and death" (p. 15). In the camps during the soldiers' leisure hours, blacks revealed, according to Wilson, the "culture texture" (p. xvii) of their lives and how they made the transition from slavery to freedom. |
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Camp life for black soldiers serving in the Union army was fraught with contradictions. Providing a helpful prologue that explains the process of black recruitment, Wilson demonstrates that, though the soldiers were ostensibly free men in the military, they quickly learned that northern freedom, like southern freedom, was conditioned by race. The visions of the few abolitionist officers were as informed by the pervasive racial ideology of the times as were those of the non-abolitionist officers. Believing that slavery had completely dehumanized the slaves, abolitionist officers sought to make the training and discipline of the army a means not only of making the former slaves good soldiers but also of preparing them for citizenship and manhood. At the same time, non-abolitionist officers of black troops, the majority, commanded black men generally as a means of career advancement, and consequently some officers engaged in often sadistic and inhuman behavior that was conditioned not only by race but also by class and gender. Indeed, we learn as much if not more of white officers' thoughts and attitudes toward blacks from Wilson as we do the thoughts of black soldiers. |
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Yet we also learn much about the soldiers' experiences and activities during their leisure hours and how they were forced to cope with a different kind of oppression in the Union army. Demonstrating the degree to which the soldiers and other blacks in the camps were agents, not merely passive victims, Wilson shows how newly freed soldiers adapted or adjusted ideas and aspects of their previous slave culture to meet the new realities of fighting in a war under officers who embraced a racial ideology that was often shared and manifested in inhuman ways. Thus, religious values that provided purpose, meaning, and affirmation accommodated the military experience in subtle ways. Literacy became as important to the men in their commitment to freedom as solidifying their marriages. Wilson astutely explains that soldiers were able to retain crucial aspects of their culture mainly because the noncommissioned black officers acted as cultural mediators with white officers and also because of the white officers' high turnover rate and their distance from soldiers' tents. A strong esprit de corps developed among soldiers who were often from the same regional area, but class conflict and regional differences arose in those camps that constituted northern soldiers who believed they were superior to the new freedmen. |
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