African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War by Richard Reid (review)

In May 1862, the self-emancipated Garland H. White of the British Methodist Episcopal Church in London, Canada West, wrote to the US Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, offering to raise a fighting force of African Canadians “to serve as soldiers in the southern parts” and aid in the “eternal overthrow of the institution of slavery.” Men such as White, who had a profound stake in the outcome of a civil war not quite their own, are at the heart of Richard Reid’s engaging work, African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War. Writing of the almost 2500 black British North American sailors and soldiers who fought on the Union side in the American Civil War, Reid documents a remarkable and understudied aspect of the conflict. The book reaches further than the title suggests, drawing attention to the transnational character of African-Canadian communities where the “permeable border allowed ideas and people to flow in both directions” (6).

Despite the importance of the topic, African-Canadian volunteers in the Civil War have not drawn scholarly attention and have seldom been considered as part of a fluid story of borderland culture, community, and migration. A recent exception, in addition to Reid’s work, is Byran Prince’s My Brother’s Keeper: African Canadians and the Civil War (Dundurn, 2015), which uses a narrative framework to explore the experiences of individual soldiers and the impact of the war on African-Canadian life in Canada West. Because Reid includes the Canadas as well as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, the methodological challenges of cross-border research are multiplied. Using combined military service records, pension files, and census records, Reid compiles an impressive accounting of African-Canadian participation in the war. To add layers of meaning and complexity, he contextualizes quantitative data with material from print and unpublished sources, giving voice to black volunteers and the communities they left behind. As a result, while the book offers authoritative data about black soldiers, sailors, recruiters, and veterans, we learn much more than the tables tell us.

Reid points out that African-Canadian soldiers and sailors moved quickly to volunteer as soon as the Union army and navy were opened to them, even though their service made them vulnerable to prosecution under the British Foreign Enlistment Act. Soldiers, sailors, and a small, but important, complement of physicians faced challenges beyond those encountered on the battlefield, including racial prejudice from their compatriots and race-based reprisals from the enemy. African Canadians in Union Blue goes beyond military history by asking what military service illuminates of a broader history of African-Canadian political, social, and intellectual life.

This is important, because the field of nineteenth-century African-Canadian history is just beginning to move beyond the constraints of a narrative so defined by the Underground Railroad that it has left little room for asking questions about what happened next. Reid situates his research in the expanding historiography of African-Canadian life that pays attention to the political and ideological meanings attached to place, migration, borders, location, and dislocation. He provides detail about cross-border volunteers and the ways in which they participated in the war, but he wants us to think deeply about the implications of both movement and motivation – not just how many – and why such men chose to serve – not just where they served.

Men are its subject, and the book remains a very manly account, with little exploration, for instance, of the ways that African-Canadian motherhood viewed its sons in Union blue. The wartime recruiting of Mary Ann Shadd is not mentioned, leaving unaddressed the important question of African-Canadian feminism and its interaction with the highly gendered construction of freedom attained through military service. Shadd’s travels during the war years also draw attention to the fact that the recruiting of black soldiers, including those...