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

by Ira Berlin, Leslie S. Rowland

When nearly 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, entered the Union army and navy, they transformed the Civil War into a struggle for liberty and changed the course of American history.

Genres: History, Civil War, War

212 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 1998

About the author

A historian of American slavery, Ira Berlin earned his BA in chemistry, and an MA and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and Federal City College in Washington, DC before moving to the University of Maryland in 1974, where he was Distinguished University Professor of History. A former president of the Organization of American Historians, Berlin was the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991.

Reviews

[Christoph]

Freedom’s Soldiers, published in 1998, is an excerpt of the greater project Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, led by Ira Berlin. This slim book includes an essay on the experience of Black soldiers during the US Civil War and in the Union army, and the implications:

“The successes of Black soldiers in the war against discriminarion within the army, however limited, politicized them and their families, preparing all black people for the larger struggle they would face at war’s end.”

Perhaps most interesting, the second half of the book is a collection of images, letters, petitions and other documentary evidence.