After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (review)

Donald R. Shaffer's After the Glory examines a topic that has long deserved full-scale treatment, namely, the post–Civil War experiences of African American veterans. Based largely on a sample of applicants for federal pension benefits, the book offers a composite portrait of the men and focuses especially on their interactions with family members and fellow veterans, their activities in the political arena, and their efforts to preserve the meaning of the war during the late nineteenth century.

Shaffer's demographic profile of the veterans reveals that as of 1890 they "were overrepresented in the North and underrepresented in the South" (p. 46). Whereas only 7 percent of the entire African American population resided in the northern states at that time, 27 percent of the veterans did. Conversely, the cotton-plantation states of the Deep South accounted for only 35 percent of the surviving veterans but 60 percent of the total black population in 1890. And the proportion of veterans who lived in cities of 25,000 or more was more than double that of the general African American population. Clearly, veterans living in the urban North enjoyed greater access to the pension process than did their counterparts in the rural South.

Shaffer deftly analyzes the numerous challenges that pension applicants faced in receiving benefits. No statistic demonstrates this better than the uneven success rate among black and white applicants: 75 percent versus 92 percent. Former slaves experienced the greatest obstacles, given their comparatively high levels of poverty and illiteracy. The biases in the pension process and in the wider culture guaranteed that "black veterans and their families had a greater burden of proof than white persons had" (p. 130).

Shaffer provides insight into several lively topics in the recent historical literature. For example, he explores the veterans' participation in the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) as a vehicle for negotiating the increasingly hostile racial climate of the late nineteenth century and not just for accessing the federal pension system. He also credits the veterans with reaffirming the emancipationist legacy of the Civil War and the African American contribution to the Union's victory. Black veterans Joseph T. Wilson and George W. Williams published books in the late 1880s, arguing among other things that they and their comrades "had fought like men" (p. 184). These works refuted popular stereotypes and established a foundation for later scholarship on the black military experience.

Shaffer may overemphasize the extent of the veterans' preoccupation with "asserting their manhood" (p. 97), an undeniably important impulse but one that did not necessarily affect every aspect of their lives, as he sometimes suggests. Moreover, claims that purchasing land enabled veterans "to achieve greater manhood" (p. 135) and that veterans "enjoyed more manhood" than did their civilian counterparts are at once awkwardly phrased and impossible to prove in any case (p. 142). For all its insight into the men and their actions, gender does not explain everything.

On balance, After the Glory makes a strong contribution to the literature on African American soldiers in the era of the Civil War. The book is tightly organized, nicely written, and brimming with fascinating details about the men's experiences during and after the war. Shaffer has served the veterans and their enduring legacy well.