Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War by Brian Taylor (review)

“Why... should black men fight for the United States?”—William H. Newby, a free Black man who migrated to California during the gold rush, posed this question at the Second Annual State Convention of Colored Citizens in 1856 (p. 15). Newby went on to emphatically state that “he would welcome a foreign army if ‘that army provided liberty to [him] and [his] people in bondage’” (p. 15). In Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War, public historian Brian Taylor pivots the narrative away from the foregone conclusion, traditionally argued by historians, that northern African American participation and support for the Union in the Civil War were guaranteed.

For Black northerners at the start of the American Civil War, memories of the past few decades stood fresh in their minds. The Militia Act of 1792, which prohibited Black men from serving in militias, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision all culminated in a reluctant and skeptical population of Black northern men and women, unenthused over another “white man’s war” (chap. 2). Taylor’s study demonstrates how “black Americans strategized about how to use military service in the Civil War to fundamentally transform the nation and served with an eye toward using their service to confirm black citizenship” (p. 14). The “politics of service,” as labeled by the author, became the driving force behind the ongoing and strategic public and private debates in Black northern communities (p. 6).

During the 1862 advancement of the Confederacy through Kentucky, the Black community of Cincinnati publicly discussed its resentment at being dragooned into fortifying the city’s defenses. One unnamed Black resident stated, “I confess...I am not patriot enough to fight or dig trenches for ‘the Union as it was,’ ‘the Constitution as it is,’ and the negroes as they are” (p. 47). The reluctance expressed by this individual stood in stark contrast to Frederick Douglass’s “Men of Color to Arms!” poster so often quoted by scholars to illustrate Black northern support of Black military service.

Building on the scholarship of Chandra Manning’s Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York, 2007) and Martha Jones’s Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018), in the first two chapters Taylor methodically dissects the polarizing and troublesome dialogues occurring in Black newspapers, churches, and community events throughout 1861 and 1862. Taylor has thoroughly researched and examined the newspapers, speeches, and writings of Black northern leaders and contemporary historians to craft this original scholarship. He provides a window for the reader to grasp the desperate and frustrating position of a betrayed people strategically forcing and changing the course of a nation to live up to its noble proclamations of freedom, liberty, and justice for all.

Brian Taylor’s Fighting for Citizenship brilliantly encapsulates the nuances of how Black northerners turned the service and sacrifices of Black soldiers into gains and growth for the entire Black community. The author astutely observes “the troubling reality that black men had to kill and die in large numbers to win citizenship” (p. 13). The strength of Taylor’s study lies in his balanced analysis of this overlooked debate over Black military service during the Civil War. The fluidity of Taylor’s writing and the importance of the subject matter make this book useful to a wide range of scholars seeking a fresh analysis of the African American experience during the Civil War.