THE BLACK CIVIL WAR SOLDIER

Documentary survey of the last days of slavery and the Black troops who helped end it.

At the beginning, MacArthur fellow Willis, the director of the NYU Institute for African American Affairs and the Center for Black Visual Culture, observes that “the photograph became the mechanical visual evidence that slavery existed, as did its resistance.” Memorable images abound in the historical catalog of American photography. First in the images of Black soldiers are cartes de visite, in which many are depicted standing ramrod straight with rifles in hand or seated with thoughtful, resolute looks on their faces. Though most soldiers couldn’t afford it, they proudly sent them home nonetheless. One such posed photograph is less formal though no less thoughtful, depicting 65-year-old Nicholas Biddle, a Pennsylvania soldier wounded by a hurled brick while marching through pro-Confederate Baltimore—and thus earning the distinction of being the first soldier to be wounded in the Civil War. As Willis notes, thousands of Black soldiers served the Confederacy, mostly in ancillary positions. One she highlights was a young Mississippi man, enslaved from birth, who served alongside the son of his owner in battle until the hostilities ended, whereupon he was awarded a pension as a Confederate veteran. “The perplexing relationships between slave masters and enslaved soldiers reflect the mystery of the human condition in this period,” Willis writes. Otherwise, most of the photographs depicted free Black soldiers in Union uniforms, soldiers and sailors who fought in large numbers for the cause of abolition and national unity. That they had cause to do so is self-evident, though the point is driven home by the image of “Whipped Peter,” a Union private who, while enslaved, had been scourged to the extent that he had horrific permanent welts on his back, providing a powerful symbol demanding an end to enslavement. The carefully constructed text, often incorporating letters and diary entries, is a winning complement to this superb collection of documentary images.

Essential to any Civil War collection and a book that invites rereading.