In the spring of 1863, two months after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote an editorial exhorting black men to support the war and benefit from serving in it. "Let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket," he wrote, "there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."
Elizabeth Leonard's ardent history of the black men who took up arms in the Civil War and the Indian wars that followed illustrates that, in fact, there were powers on earth, one in particular - "repeated examples of race prejudice," the author says - aimed at thwarting the hope Douglass expressed. The great reformer died in 1895; his dream of true citizenship for blacks would not come true for many years.
The author, a history professor at Maine's Colby College, underscores the impressive evidence of the black soldiers' influence on the Civil War: 180,000 men designated "U.S. Colored Troops" (10 percent of the Union Army) scattered in 150 regiments, taking part in 450 engagements, suffering 37,000 casualties.
Then, with President Andrew Johnson signing a bill for a postwar army of 54,000 men, six regiments - four infantry and two cavalry (the cavalrymen becoming known as Buffalo Soldiers) - were reserved for the USCT. Under the command of such renowned white Civil War officers as Benjamin H. Grierson, Ranald Mackenzie and Nelson A. Miles, these troops fought in virtually all the important Indian battles of the West, from 1866 through the Wounded Knee campaign of 1890-91.
Leonard has assiduously compiled the triumphs of the black soldiers of the last 40 years of the 19th-century American army, including the exploits of a dozen Medal of Honor heroes.
But Men of Color to Arms! is flawed by frequent authorial intrusions, which at times reduce the narrative to the status of moralistic lecture. "Just as the hard labor and personal sacrifice of the men of the USCT had helped ensure the nation's very survival during the Civil War, so had the dedication, toil, and blood of USCT soldiers on occupation duty in the vanquished south," the reader is told after the facts have already spoken.
The tendency to state the obvious becomes glaring in its naiveté when Leonard recounts the story of Henry O. Flipper of Georgia, the first black graduate (in 1877) of West Point. She informs that upon graduation he was commissioned a second lieutenant, "the lowest commissioned officer rank in the U.S. army, but the same rank accorded to the academy's white graduates."
Leonard's enthusiasm for her subject, including her exasperation over the racism black soldiers suffered a century ago, does not ameliorate the weaknesses in this historical treatment.
Dale L. Walker of El Paso is author of many historical books.
Men of Color to Arms!
Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality
Elizabeth D. Leonard