A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War by James G. Mendez (review)

The Civil War military records preserved at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., can be dense and bureaucratic, those for the Colored Troops Division of the Adjutant General’s Office particularly so. Patient gleaning may yield gems, the most precious of which include correspondence from soldiers and their families, neighbors, and friends to government officials. In A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War, James G. Mendez describes what his examination of scores of such letters reveals about the tribulations that northern black soldiers and their loved ones endured and the triumphs that they at times celebrated.

Mendez follows a chronological approach, beginning with the eve of the fighting and continuing through 1866, by which time most black regiments had been disbanded. He classifies the correspondence into three categories: general inquiries, expressions of financial distress, and requests for discharge. He fully appreciates the consequences when fathers and sons—nearly all of whom were breadwinners—enlisted. The government’s decision to cap the earnings of all black soldiers at seven dollars per month (instead of the thirteen dollars that white privates earned) only served to increase the pressure. Soldiers complained, expressing indignation over broken promises of equal treatment and shock over the government’s apparent nonchalance about their families’ woes. Wives and mothers plaintively narrated the adverse circumstances that warranted the discharge of their soldiers, but the War Department generally denied such pleas, claiming that the interests of the service would be ill served.

A Great Sacrifice notes the additional challenges that the families experienced due to the limitations of their letter-writing skills. Much of the surviving correspondence reflects the presence of amanuenses, or scribes, often comrades of the soldiers or literate neighbors and friends. But many an eloquent letter flowed directly from the hand of a soldier’s relative. “Will you see that the colored men fighting now, are fairly treated,” Hannah Johnson admonished Abraham Lincoln in July 1863 (p. 82). Johnson’s son, a member of the fabled Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, had survived the assault on Battery Wagner without being captured, but she understandably feared that the Confederates might treat black prisoners of war as insurrectionists without Lincoln’s strong intervention. Especially moving were references to the “‘pain of mind’” and other similar expressions of extreme distress that loved ones shared (p. 103). By war’s end, when the units whose enlistments had not expired were posted to various locations throughout the occupied South and even as far as the Rio Grande border with Mexico, families’ endurance often reached the point of desperation. The adjutant general received one request after another for information about the “health and whereabouts” of silent soldiers (p. 119).

For all its value as a window into an underexplored area of the black military experience during the Civil War, the book also has limitations. It approaches the subject largely through a set of records whose chronological and topical boundaries are narrow. The families of the black soldiers that Senator James H. Lane began organizing in Kansas during the summer of 1862 experienced suffering like that of the other northern-raised units, but for the first year of their service—when the pain was most acute—they lacked a Bureau of Colored Troops (established in May 1863) to hear their concerns. Other sources are necessary to round out the picture. And despite his overall sympathy with the men and their families, Mendez occasionally speculates unnecessarily about the personal and financial motives of certain actors, family members and amanuenses alike. Nonetheless, A Great Sacrifice offers a thought-provoking treatment of the painful trials that black soldiers and their families contended with far from the battlefield in the dusk of...