A Call to Arms: The Realities of Military Service for African Americans During the Civil War

Black Soldiers, North and South

Northerners, southerners, slaves, freedmen, free-born men, Union men, Confederates, men who wanted to fight but were not allowed, men forced to fight unwillingly, and everyone in-between. Everything that you ever wanted to know about African-American combat soldiers in the American Civil War, in one low-priced volume.

Learn the social, cultural, and educational differences between African-American northerners and southerners, which most histories treat as one ethnicity. See their differences in the light of military recruitment. The Army quickly learned that the motivations and hopes of middle-class African Americans from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia differed from those of freedmen or slaves in the South.

Northern men of color saw the benefits of American citizenship that lay potentially within their grasp. Patriotic service was key to attaining their goal, but disputes over type of service, commissions, and pay kept many out of the ranks. Southern Blacks did not have such grandiose ideals. Recruitment in the occupied South relied on their dream of basic freedom, desire for vengeance against former masters, and the chance to improve their standing and self-respect through education and government service. The main obstacle in the South was threat of lethal reprisal by civilians.

"A deeply important study of how African Americans’ daily lives affected their perception of military service and, in turn, how their treatment (or mistreatment) by the Army ricocheted back on their day-to-day lives." -- Frank W. Sweet, author of Legal History of the Color Line