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4.5
I've eagerly read each of the Gettyburg Civil War Institute collections of essays as they've appeared, and I've enjoyed and learned from all of them (well, okay: maybe not War Comes Again; I couldn't quite see the point of it). Generally, the essays in each volume have been topnotch.This latest volume, I think, is the best of the lot. (It's also the most physically attractive volume in the series.) The authors know their stuff, and they take on a topic--slavery and the horrific war which ended it as a legal institution--the memory of which (as one of them, Ira Berlin notes) really does reveal much about who we 21st century Americans are.Although all of the essays are superb, for my money the three most noteworthy ones are co-editor Scott Hancock's reflection on the way blacks in the antebellum North constructed memory; Edward Ayers', William Thomas', and Anne Sarah Rubin's study of the fate of black civilian and soldiers from Franklin County, PA (just down the road from where I live), and Noah Andre Trudeau's sad tale of the 9th Corps' black division at the Battle of the Crater. Each of these essays speaks to the sometimes unbearable tension between pride and hope on the one hand and abuse and insult on the other experienced by free blacks in the Civil War era.Hancock, appealing to the incredibly rich notion of "postmemory," focuses on the way in which northern black oral tradition in the 1850s navigated communal recollections of black valor in the revolutionary and 1812 wars with lived experiences of social, economic, and legal oppression. The memory provided both a degree of pride that empowered free blacks as well as an anger at their subsequent treatment that led to conflicted responses to the outbreak of war. Hancock's essay is a thought-provoking meditation on the formation and meaning of collective memory.Ayers and his colleagues focus on the eagerness of Franklin County blacks to join the federal army (in this case, the famous 54th Massachusetts) despite local white skepticism about their potential as soldiers, and their willingness to endure abuse and mistreatment from northern soldiers in order to do their bit for the freedom of their own people. One of the most disturbing features of this article is the description of Lee's army rounding up blacks during the Gettysburg campaign--relatives of the very men who had enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts--to take them south. But Ayers & Co. don't romanticize the black role. The essay ends on a disconcerting note. Even as one of the Franklin County black veterans eloquently writes that he's fighting for future generations of black folks, another one boasts that he and his fellow soldiers are picking fights with conquered Southern whites in occupied Charleston just for the pleasure of beating them up.Noah Andre Trudeau's essay on black soldiers at Petersburg tells the familiar story of the debacle at the Crater, the massacre of black troops, and the criminal incompetence of their white commanders. But what makes Trudeau's telling especially poignant is his description of the spirit-breaking abuse the black soldiers endured from white federal soldiers. Their fighting quality was scorned by white soldiers, their own white officers seemed frightened of them at times and scornful of them at others, and there are reports that during the worst killing in the Crater, some of them were bayoneted by their own officers who were desperate (given Confederate warnings of what would happen to white commanders of black troops) not to be associated with black soldiers.During the days leading up to the Crater, when the black troops (mistakenly) thought they'd lead the charge, they proudly sang "We-e looks li-ik me-en a-a-marchin' on, We looks li-ike men-er-war." They were willing to endure abuse for the sake of contributing something to the war effort and showing that they, too, were "men." But after the Crater disaster, and after the black troops, on Grant's orders, were segregated from white federal soldiers, they never sang it again.How unspeakably sad.
