Strike the Blow for Freedom: The 6th United States Colored Infantry in the Civil War (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY women's wartime experience. Unfortunately, this three-paragraph discussion quickly mentions women as factory workers, as company cooks, nurses, seanstresses, and as prostitutes, while ignoring women's less traditional roles. Confederate and Union female spies appear nowhere, and, although at least four hundred women disguised themselves as men to fight, the authors judge them unimportant because "their number was too small to effect any advantage or disadvantage to the troops." This belies the authors' claim to direct attention away from the miUtary. Similarly, the Vblos only mention female nurses as camp followers, neglecting the thousands who set up hospitals across the South and those who worked for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The realities ofciviUan life and everyday experiences will continue to attract the attention of scholars for years to come. Unfortunately, Daily Life in Civil War America contributes Utile to the field. Lisa Tendrich Frank University of Florida Strike the Blowfor Freedom: The 6? UnitedStates ColoredInfantry in the Civil War. By James M. Paradis. (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 1998. Pp. Vu, 203. $29.95.) To the student ofblack military engagement in the Civil War, there is much that is familiar in James Paradis's history of the 6th U.S. Colored Infantry. Though wilUngness among black Pennsylvanians to serve in the Union army was great, recruitment was hampered by ambivalent acceptance of black soldiers by local whites. The black soldiers ofthe 6th were paid less than their white counterparts, denied bonuses and office commissions, and yet performed more laborious support tasks—in this case, digging the Dutch Gap Canal near Richmond. When called to battle, the 6th performed bravely and suffered heavy casualties. The book is very factual; the prose is terse and clear; the organization is tight, proceeding from chapter to chapter within a logical framework. The author describes the recruitment, training, demographic profile, active and front-line duty, and mustering out of the 6th Regiment in chronological turn. One learns that recruitment began after the Emancipation Proclamation, especially during the summer of 1 863 following the invasion of Pennsylvania at Chambersburg by the Confederate Army ofNorthern Virginia and agitation for a black Pennsylvania regiment by Philadelphia's Union League and its African American supporters . Significantly, recruits were trained at Camp William Penn, a site outside of Philadelphia, as a precautionary move to minimize the expression of hostilities by white opponents within that city to the use of black soldiers. Even so, taunting by local whites from the countryside led to a serious shooting incident. The men of the 6th Regiment were young, with an average age of twenty-three; they were mainly from Pennsylvania and the surrounding region; and most had worked chiefly as laborers and farmers in civiUan life. A plurality of43 percent book reviews177 were volunteers, nearly a third were drafted, and a quarter were substitutes. They trained from June through October of 1863. They served "on the fringes of war" by performing support services—carrying wounded, carrying rations, receiving prisoners, doing picket duty—until July 1964, when they began to see combat. Desertions were more likely to take place when soldiers were near home and/or in training camp. Thus the soldiers who marched out of training camp to serve, those who the author considers "the heart of the union," showed "great unit cohesion" and courage in serving during the Civil War. As military history, this is a thorough, technically precise monograph. The names ofall commanding officers, their attutudes towards their charges and the duties they performed are chronicled in detail as sources permit. The chapter on Camp William Penn informs the reader of the daily schedule of recruits. The data on soldiers' ages, desertion rates, birthplaces, losses, and occupations are summarized in several charts, tables, and graphs in a long appendix. Moreover, more than half of the book provides a blow-by-blow narrative of the various campaigns in which the 6th Regiment was involved. The social historian, however, will find this book disappointing in its failure to contextualize much of the data presented within a larger national or northern context. How did the demographic profile of the men of the 6th Regiment, for instance, compare with what we...