A Classic Work on African American Civil War Soldiers

When originally published some three decades ago, A Grand Army of Black Men was the first collection of letters by African American men who had served as soldiers or sailors during the Civil War. Found mostly in Black or Abolitionist newspapers, the letters offer a unique perspective on the war, military life, and American society in the mid-nineteenth century.

Prof. Redkey grouped the letters into ten chapters, each with a particular theme.

  1. Black Soldiers in White Regiments.

  2. South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

  3. Virginia and North Carolina.

  4. The Gulf States.

  5. Occupation Duty.

  6. For the Rights of Citizens.

  7. The Struggle for Equal Pay.

  8. Racism in the Army.

  9. The Navy.

10. War’s End.

In putting the book together, Redkey made several important observations. While the overwhelming majority of the Black men who served were newly liberated from enslavement, their general lack of literacy means that most of the letters were by men who were free before the war, and most of them were from the North. Redkey was also one of the first scholars to take note of the unknown number of Black men who served in white regiments, a subject only recently gaining some scholarly attention.

Despite its age, A Grand Army of Black Men, is an important resource on the service of African Americans in the Civil War.

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Note: A Grand Army of Black men is also available in e-editions ; the original hard cover edition is out-of-print. 

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium