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

Through the examination of African Canadians’ participation in the U.S. Civil War, Richard M. Reid engages a much larger question: the complexity of black mobility and community formation across the Canada-U.S. border. The author’s primary concern is the scope and context of African Canadians’ volunteering for the Union cause, which he reconstructs by inventively harnessing the few primary sources available: U.S. and Canadian censuses, military records, and pension applications, as well as newspapers and personal documents. This substantive account of black volunteers from British North America (first published in hardcover in 2014 by University of British Columbia Press) is divided into seven chapters. Together, they cover topics such as the volunteers’ divergent backgrounds, their numbers, their motivations, their recruitment and wartime experiences in the navy and army, their postbellum lives, and black medical doctors from Canada West who offered their services to the Union army.

In addition to the commendable work of tallying the number of navy and army recruits born in British North America—almost 1,200—Reid’s contributions include his illustration of the bilateral flows of African Americans and African Canadians before the Civil War. Such recognition complicates the standard narrative that only acknowledges black migration from the United States to Canada. According to Reid, during the 1850s hundreds of black British Americans proceeded to northern states, especially the region’s urban areas. Boston was one of those cities that drew African Canadians, with a large segment of its foreign-born black residents coming from the British provinces. This finding leads to another important revision—that some black recruits had already lived in the United States when they volunteered—a revelation that debunks the widely held view that black recruits came rushing from Canada only after the Civil War began. The author’s attention to black Canadians’ prewar movements into the United States can also be seen in his discussion of black navy volunteers. By 1861 it had become commonplace for black sailors from British North America to serve in the U.S. Navy. This practice points to a long-standing transnational context that set the stage for wartime black enlistment. Furthermore, this story should especially intrigue those interested in Canada’s place in the intricacies of the African diaspora, for it suggests black Canadians’ incorporation into the cosmopolitan world of black seafaring, as detailed by W. Jeffrey Bolster in Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

While these contributions are all compelling, the book fails to adequately address the question of identity. Reid does not discuss the category of the historical subject he creates here—African Canadians—in relation to the protean understandings of self as glimpsed in his telling of their mobile existence. Examination of the malleable politics of African Canadians indeed requires a unique paradigm of subjective formation that accounts for their versatile way of being. In that sense, the book would have benefited from existing work on the plasticity of self among black residents in Canada, such as Afua Cooper’s “The Fluid Frontier: Blacks and the Detroit River Region, Focus on Henry Bibb” (Canadian Review of American Studies, 30, no. 2 [2000], pp. 127–48). Still, African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the complex lives of people of African descent in British North America.