Redemption and Dejection in the Black Military Experience

Despite the fact that Thunder at the Gates and For Their Own Cause both examine African American regiments in the Union Army, the authors take strikingly different approaches to uncovering and recounting their subjects' history. In Thunder, Egerton tells the story of the three African American regiments organized in Massachusetts during the Civil War, the 54^th and 55^th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5^th Massachusetts Cavalry, through the lens of fourteen individual soldiers, including both white officers and the black rank and file. He gives equal attention to famous, familiar, and forgotten soldiers from the three units. Thunder masterfully weaves together the stories of Brahmin officers like Robert Gould Shaw and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., ambitious black leaders like Medal of Honor recipient William Carney and Lieutenant Stephen A. Swails, who served as the first commissioned officer of African descent in the Union Army, and lesser-known privates like Central African-born Nicholas Said. Egerton takes advantage of the rich documentary trail left behind by his small band of protagonists to follow them from their antebellum lives through their service in the war and (provided they survived) into their involvement in the political contests of Reconstruction and beyond. This is an intensely intimate type of history that aims to convey to the reader, in Egerton's words, "just what the war was like, particularly for those soldiers who embraced black liberation as their paramount goal, sought to transform a white man's war into a revolutionary struggle for freedom, and then ventured their lives on the battlefield in pursuit of that dream" (p. 9).

By contrast, Kelly Mezurek's For Their Own Cause offers an exhaustive study of the nearly 1,300 black Ohioans who served in the 27^th United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiment, one of two USCT units recruited from the Buckeye State. Based on Mezurek's research in thousands of compiled military service records and pension case files, For Their Own Cause scrutinizes black Ohioan soldiers' wartime experiences and postwar lives in comparison with other USCT soldiers and white Union soldiers. Like Egerton, Mezurek grounds the reader in the antebellum lives of her subjects before following them into the war (although her chapter on the antebellum period consists of a narrower, deeper analysis of black life in Ohio). But unlike Thunder, For Their Own Cause eschews a straightforward narrative approach. Mezurek devotes two chapters to a technical, bugle-and-drums analysis of the 27^th USCT's involvement in Union campaigns to capture Petersburg, Virginia and Wilmington, North Carolina, as well as the occupation of North Carolina. She then doubles back to evaluate the daily life of black soldiers in the 27^th USCT, with attention to their health, pay, and treatment in the military's justice system, before concluding with a chapter on veterans' lives.

Throughout For Their Own Cause, Mezurek emphasizes the absence of a grand cause or a revolutionary struggle in the experiences of Ohio's USCT soldiers. Instead, the 27^th USCT's service was marked by "a preponderance of fatigue duty but limited battle experience and even less recognition" and yet Mezurek maintains that the war had a positively transformative effect on her subjects' lives (p. 5). Even if they were not immortalized in bronze and made the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster like the soldiers of the 54^th Massachusetts, the black Ohioans who served in the 27^th USCT "contributed to a redefinition in the relationship between race and citizenship" in post-Civil War Ohio (p. 231).

When explaining their subjects' impact on the outcome of the war and their reasons for joining the Union's ranks, Mezurek and Egerton find very little in common. Although the campaigns and battles in which...