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BOOK REVIEWS 187 Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series 2, The Black Military Experience. Edited by Ira Berlin with Joseph R. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. xxxv, 852. $37.50.) This work, the first of five volumes projected by Ira Berlin and his associates of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, is an achievement of extraordinary significance. Composed of 267 documents including letters, petitions, reports, and testimony selected from twenty-two record groups in the National Archives, this volume focuses on the black military experience at a revolutionary juncture in American history when thousands of blacks, by enlisting in the Union army, abandoned the status of slave for that of liberator. The documentary record of their experience, in a real sense, constitutes a literature of liberation. Divided into five parts, beginning with the earliest black enlistments in 1862 and ending with blacks as soldiers in the occupation army or as discharged veterans in 1867, the work not only points up the rich diversity of black life and the labyrinthine processes of emancipation but also conveys in a way that few if any other volumes have the nature of the struggle by blacks themselves to lay claim to freedom. Throughout the focus is on the freedpeople, their aspirations, perceptions, and frustrations, rather than on the institutions that surrounded them. In every respect, from the selection and organization of the documents to the annotations and commentaries, Professor Berlin and his colleagues have demonstrated sound scholarship, superb editorial craftsmanship , and a profound appreciation for social history. Because they wisely decided to leave the original manuscripts intact and avoided obscuring the pecularities of syntax, spelling, and capitalization by the use ofsic, the immediacy and passion of the documents, especially those by illiterate or barely literate correspondents, are all the more evident. Their essays and headnotes are models of sophisticated historical writing altogether worthy of being published separately in a brief interpretive volume. Initially slaves and free blacks who rushed to join the Union army encountered the opposition of policy makers whose racial ideology assumed black inferiority. Although critical manpower shortages ultimately eroded this opposition and blacks entered military service in increasing numbers from 1863until the end of the war, enlistment proved to be only the first of numerous obstacles in their quest for liberty and equality. Once in the army, blacks had to wage war on diverse forms of discrimination, ranging from the denial of commissions and equal pay to being consigned to the role of military menials, "diggers and drudges." Their excessive fatigue duties, unbalanced diets, and inadequate shelter and medical treatment produced a 'health crisis" of serious proportions. Among the more poignant—and pathetic—documents in this collection are the letters from the relatives of black soldiers, especially wives left 188civil war history under the control of slaveowners. "I have had nothing but trouble since you left," wrote a black soldier's wife from Missouri (p. 244). Even worse was the plight of a black soldier's widow in Kentucky who suffered incredibly brutal physical abuse at the hands of her owner. But despite the emotional strains and the pervasive forms of discrimination practiced by the miUtary hierarchy, black soldiers dispelled all doubts about their miUtary prowess. In the battles of Fort Wagner, Millikens Bend, Port Hudson, and elsewhere they performed as "true Union soldiers , the Grandsons of Mother Africa Never to Fhnch from Duty" (p. 681). For blacks, military service during the Civil War was ofprofound and lasting significance. It enlarged their confidence, provided them with skills, education, and a degree of sophistication they had not previously possessed, and shaped their lives after the war. More than any other postbellum figure, perhaps, the black soldier in the occupation army represented just how completely the world had been turned upside down. If some black veterans served as targets of white abuse and violence , others assumed positions ofleadership in their local communities, and a few even rose to national prominence. Whatever one's criteria for assessing this volume, the final judgment can scarcely be expressed in other than the most flattering superlatives. Nowhere else has the social history of emancipation been more vividly and...

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