Honor in Command: Lt. Freeman S. Bowley's Civil War Service in the 30th United States Colored Infantry (review)

In early 1864, in Worcester, Massachusetts, teenager Freeman S. Bowley, aged eighteen and a member of the Highland Military Academy cadet company, participated in a celebration for veteran soldiers of the 21st and 25th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, who were returning from the war. Bowley got caught up in the moment, seeing not only his opportunity to prove his manhood and serve his country but also the chance to make a lot of bonus money, and fast, to support his parents after his father had been wounded and sent home from the army. His application letter to the War Department was followed by an officer's examination and placement at the rank of first lieutenant in a Maryland regiment of free blacks and ex-slaves, the 30th United States Colored Infantry.

In 1899, in San Francisco, Bowley, aged fifty-three and at the end of a thirty-year career as a fireman for the Southern Pacific Railroad, published his memoirs. "A Boy Lieutenant in a Black Regiment" appeared in weekly installments in the Grand Army of the Republic veteran's newspaper, the National Tribune (three years after his death, these articles were made into a children's book, A Boy Lieutenant [1906]). The question of whether or not Bowley was encouraged to write his remembrances by the publication of Luis Emilio's A Brave Black Regiment (1894), the widely publicized dedication of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw on Boston Common (1897), or the articles and short stories by San Francisco newspaper editor Ambrose Bierce (publishing continuously from 1875) is answered neither in the text nor in editor Keith Wilson's introduction.

In fact, Wilson tells us very little of Bowley's life story outside his memoirs of the war years, not even the possible influence of and comparison with Worcester's famous Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869) provided a model narrative for subsequent autobiographies. A few of Bowley's stories seem clearly drawn from Bierce's recollections, particularly "Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General" (1893) and "What I Saw of Shiloh" (1881): both authors use stories of a mule stampede, African American dialect, and realistic, if horrific, scenes of soldiers in agony, dying, unburied or unearthed where "the rain had washed the soil away that had been thrown over the bodies, and from every side grinning skulls peeped out at you; skeleton hands stretched out on all sides" (73).

And yet, Bowley's narrative is informative on many levels, adding to our understanding of the Battle of the Crater and life as a POW. Keith Wilson, a specialist in Civil War history at Monash University in Australia, uses a long introduction to set Bowley's often juvenile style into the important themes of honor, duty, manhood, memory, reconciliation, and white officer / black soldier interaction. Wilson brings Bowley's clouded memories and exaggerations into focus while providing a good synthesis and application of the works of Gerald Linderman, David Blight, James McPherson, and Joseph Glatthaar, among others. For Bowley often stretched the truth, forgot exact details, constructed and reconstructed history, and promoted himself above his men. As Wilson notes, Bowley wrote several self-promoting, self-congratulatory letters to the War Department asking to be given the Medal of Honor for his service among black soldiers. His letters—and his stories—failed to get him the decoration he craved.

Honor in Command is a coming of age narrative. Bowley never rids himself of his racism but, echoing the published letters of Robert Gould Shaw, is educated by his men through contact with them: "They did not seem so black, nor so much alike as they did at first" (64). Scholars who are looking for new information about black soldiers will be disappointed by this book. Those looking for how memory, fiction, and history intertwine during the Gilded Age...