Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era (review)

A book-length history of four regiments must have seemed an especially daunting task for Richard M. Reid in the early stages of his research for Freedom for Themselves. Nonetheless, in his preface to the work, Reid tells the reader that he hoped to move beyond traditional regimental studies. His intention was to compare and contrast units that formed under different circumstances and that took on a variety of tasks, some of which were non-combat-oriented. Reid also wanted to examine the units he studied within the context of conditions in eastern North Carolina, from which most of the regiments’ soldiers were recruited (xiii–xv). The result of Reid’s efforts is a thorough social and military history of four African American Union regiments.

Necessarily lengthy for a scholarly book, Freedom for Themselves includes a preface, an introduction, eight chapters, and a brief conclusion. The work covers the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteers, and the 1st North Carolina Colored Heavy Artillery. Reid sets up his study by explaining that Ambrose Burnside’s amphibious invasion of North Carolina in 1862 helped give the United States a fertile recruiting ground among African Americans in the coastal plain. The origins of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd (later redesignated the 35th, 36th, and 37th U.S. Colored Troops) lay in Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild’s attempts in 1863 to organize an “African Brigade” from regiments recruited in North Carolina. Wild, an abolitionist, had worked with Massachusetts Governor John Andrew to find officers for the famous 54th Massachusetts. The African Brigade was originally planned to contain four regiments, and Wild hoped that the brigade would become a showpiece of African Americans’ abilities to serve as soldiers. The 1^st NCCHA (later redesignated the 14th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery) was not part of Wild’s effort but came about in the winter of 1864 as a response to brief Confederate successes in eastern North Carolina.

By culling letters, muster rolls, and census data, Reid was able to come up with numerous specific examples of problems faced by recruits for the regiments he studied. His descriptions of soldiers’ wartime activities are always good, but equally informative is his coverage of soldiers’ family members, who faced poverty and disapproval from the white North Carolina populace.

The book is strongest in its final chapters, in which Reid covers the Reconstruction service of the four regiments and the return of regiment veterans to civilian life. In tracing hundreds of veterans as far as 1890, Reid is able to challenge arguments in recent scholarship that armed service provided African Americans with paths to political leadership and financial independence. The final pages of the book show that despite their achievements, many of the soldiers in the regiments Reid treated returned to lives after the war that were limited in economic mobility. A few tables related to the samples of veterans Reid used are left to footnotes, perhaps a wise decision given the complications he faced in pulling together the often concurrent activities of four separate regiments. The final chapters bring home Reid’s argument that the experiences of whites in white Union regiments sometimes seemed like “someone else’s war” from the viewpoint of the African American veterans he studied (323).

Freedom for Themselves is quite well researched and generally well written, meeting Reid’s own objectives for the work extremely well. His framework makes straight narrative impossible, and he is good at moving from regiment to regiment while keeping the reader in tune with his chronology. Reid’s work will become essential reading for its scholarly audience--and it will probably fare well among popular readers.