For Frederick Douglass On His 200th Birthday- Blacks Experiences in the American Civil War-A Book Review

February is Black History Month

Book Review

The Negros's Civil War, James McPherson, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1965

In his introduction to this volume of documentary evidence gleaned from black sources concerning the role of blacks in the American Civil War James McPherson notes that up until the 1920’s the common historical wisdom was that blacks played merely a passive role in their liberation from slavery. Sound familiar. After that point serious historical studies by black and white scholars, John Hope Franklin, Carter Woodson and C. Vann Woodward among others, have attempted to and generally have redressed that wrong. McPherson’s little volume originally written in 1965 long before he became dean of American Civil War studies represents something of a halfway point in that appreciation. Although this is not the last place to go to find out about the black contribution to the end of slavery it is a worthy first place.

Let me reemphasize that point made above about the older notion of the role of blacks in the liberation struggle by giving a personal example. As late as the early 1960’s my American History textbook had no reference to the role blacks played in their own struggles for freedom. The prevailing line at that time was that the Union Army, that is the white Union Army composed of yeoman and city proletarians, was solely responsible for those results. And the later post-war Freedmen’s Bureau merely sorted out the rest, an early welfare agency if you will. And here is where my personal example comes into play. As a student almost every day I had to pass the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Street in Boston. In a prominent place in front of that building stands the famous work of Saint Gauden's commemorating the role of the Robert Gould Shaw- led Massachusetts 54th Regiment that has since been written about extensively and has been the subject of several film treatments. I did not find out about the heroic role of this regiment until much later, when I, independently, seriously started to study black history. That, my friends, pretty much says it all.

McPherson’s little volume goes into this question of armed black participation in the war and other questions that inflamed the country and the black community during this time. This work, moreover, shows that there was not a unified black response, particularly among better-educated blacks, to the unfolding events. McPherson thus takes care to catalogue the range of black responses to the conflict between preservation of the union and abolition of slavery that were fought out politically in the initial period of the war. He also deals with the question of the white racist response, North and South, as epitomized by the anti-draft riots in New York City, the status of Southern blacks in the military struggle as ‘contraband’ and the fight for some kind of just economic program (the famous forty acres and a mule) to give teeth to physical emancipation.

McPherson also details some incipient black nationalist trends in black thought as he does for black responses to colonization schemes, self-help and political expectations as a result of the civil war. In the 40 plus year period since this work was written a minor academic industry in black studies has gone into greater depth or looked at the subject from other angles but for a basic primer this is not a bad place to start. I might add that the bibliography provided is invaluable for the then available sources.