Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 by William A. Dobak (review)

William A. Dobak's Freedom by the Sword is a valuable resource for students of military history, particularly undergraduates. Experienced scholars may not be surprised by most of Dobak's conclusions. Nonetheless, his work presents those conclusions in a useful way accessible to new students in the field. Dobak's operational history of the African Americans who wore Union blue, the first such general military history of the USCT, shows how black soldiers overcame significant handicaps to their military service: a lack of education that kept many from rising to Army rank, discrimination and prejudice from their superiors, violence from both civilian whites and those who were their purported brothers in arms, and bloody reprisals by Confederates to become a key part of the American military experience of the Civil War.

Dobak, the former chief historian for the United States Army, goes beyond traditional depictions of nineteenth-century black soldiers to show a black military experience surprisingly similar to that of white soldiers. He shows both the good and the bad in his subjects: heroes and villains both wore Union blue, and the reader encounters black criminals and cowards alongside black heroes and martyrs. This makes the book a valuable antidote to traditional histories of African Americans in the Civil War, which have (as Dobak shows) either dismissed black soldiers entirely or blandly valorized their accomplishments without much analysis. Dobak argues that this historiographic phenomenon originated during the war itself, with commanders and journalists alternatively playing down or exaggerating the competence of black troops to serve their personal and political agendas.

Dobak relies heavily on both military documents and the personal correspondence of soldiers, which as he notes, given the literacy rates of African Americans in the period, means he must largely use sources produced by whites. This is a problem faced by many historians of the period, and one Dobak counters when possible by using what black sources are available. In particular, he relies heavily on the correspondence (primarily from chaplains) published in the African Methodist Episcopal Church's newspaper, the Christian Recorder. While educated professionals were less common in the black community, even in the North, in the 1860s, their narrative of bourgeois military heroism and personal character helps shed light onto how black political and social leaders hoped to integrate themselves into white society during and after the war. Dobak uses his white sources to argue that all but the most venal white commanders came to respect their subordinates as soldiers, with even skeptical officers eventually persuaded by the valor of their troops that blacks would "fight for their freedom" (505).

While Dobak's organizational strategy, following the black military experience by chronicling the campaigns in which African American soldiers fought, generally works for his narrative, this leads to campaigns like the occupations of the South Atlantic coast and southern Louisiana, neither of which saw significant combat, receiving short shrift. While this neglect of occupation duty is an artifact of the "operational" nature of his scholarship, more could have been done here to explore the nature of southern cities under black occupation, particularly since Dobak examines elsewhere (such as in his compelling look at Texas in 1865-67) the way race relations changed in settings under even limited African American control.

Despite the above criticisms, Dobak is ultimately successful in his efforts at laying out a general military history of black soldiers in the U.S. Civil War. It will be for subsequent scholars to examine the social, cultural, and political implications of his work.