Voices of the 55th: Letters from the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers, 1861-1865 (review)

2Ó2CIVIL WAR HISTORY Fleming chose to provide only a brief description of the military campaigns of the 9th Tennessee, preferring to allow Hall to enlighten posterity as to the contribution of Company C to the Confederate war effort. In a real sense, Band of Brothers is not so much a history of Company C as it is a chapter in the biography of Captain Hall. The rest of that biography has yet to be written. Thomas D. Matuasic Prestonsburg Community College Voices ofthe 55th: Lettersfrom the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers, 1861-1865. Edited by Noah Andre Trudeau. (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside House, 1996. Pp. 258. $24.95.) The 55th Massachusetts (Colored) Volunteers may not have the present-day name recognition of its famous brother regiment the 54th of Fort Wagner and Glory fame, but Noah Andre Trudeau's editorial efforts should certainly alert readers to its contributions to the Union war effort. The regiment began to take shape in May 1 863 when young black men primarily from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia began to assemble in Readville, Massachusetts. By July, the regiment found itself moving south. After a brief stay in North Carolina, the 55th spent most of its service in South Carolina, except for a foray into Florida and some garrison duty in Savannah, until its discharge in Massachusetts in September 1865. Along the way to victory, the African American soldiers of the 55th shared the hardships of the 54th and other black regiments while maintaining a sense of pride in its uniqueness as a fighting unit. Trudeau documents the experiences of the men of the 55th through letters gathered from manuscript collections, newspapers, and pension files. The editor includes a few letters that have already appeared elsewhere for the sake of presenting a complete chronological history of the 55th, but he also has turned up some documents that would otherwise remain unavailable to most readers.A small cache of letters from an Indiana farmer named John Posey who eventually sacrificed his life for the cause, letters written to Massachusetts governor John Andrew's friend Edward W. Kinsley, letters from James M. Trotter (the father of editor William Monroe Trotter), and postwar letters from unit veterans to Burt G. Wilder (a surgeon who was attempting to collect information for a regimental history) all add value to this collection. The men of the 55th wrote to family members, friends, and newspaper editors about their motivation, their training and camp life, their relationship with their white officers, and their pride in the regiment. Readers cannot help but be struck by the drain on morale that the controversies over equal pay, prisoner exchange, the use ofblack soldiers for fatigue duty instead ofcombat, the struggle to commission black officers, and racism in general caused within the regiment's ranks. After returning from a furlough, Sergeant Major Trotter wrote that his comrades were "so down-hearted and soul-crushed on account of the deep in- BOOK REVIEWS263 justice so long meted out to them by the Government" (155). He was not the only one to make such an observation. Importantly, the men of the 55th soldiered on because they were aware of the high stakes and the sacred nature of their cause. Again Trotter observed the spirit of his comrades, noting that they endured the ingratitude of their nation because they had a patience inspired "by the great Jehovah, who will not suffer this war to end until every trace of Slavery is gone" (72). Certainly, other authors and editors have covered these topics. Consequently, the general concerns ofthe letters presented here will be well-known to historians . Nevertheless, there is something to be said for having a volume that focuses its attention on one regiment's history. Furthermore, the editor has given the regiment a human face by including not only the letters of common farmers and tradesmen but also more than the usual number ofphotographic portraits of the men and their officers. In the end, a volume such as this one is worth reading because it clearly shows how the lives of ordinary individuals like John Posey intersected with the extraordinary events ofAmerica's great crisis. Paul A. Cimbala Fordham University Our Campaigns...