Civil War History

The remarkable story of US Colored Troops (USCT) is familiar to most Americans—the 1989 film Glory made sure of that. For decades, scholars of the American Civil War have also published on USCT experiences, examining their recruitment, training, combat, and struggles against racism. Historians have also considered Southern formerly enslaved people’s attempts to serve and support the war effort, their postwar trials, and the nascent civil rights movement. What historians have overlooked, however, are the experiences [End Page 94] of Northern-born free African Americans and their experiences throughout the Civil War era. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. seeks to remedy this oversight and examine the lived experiences of Philadelphia-born USCT soldiers and their kin from before the war and into the 1930s. For him, the Civil War is only part of the story and to understand African Americans’ fight for racial justice, historians must look beyond the war and even beyond the soldiers.

To uncover the lived experiences of native-born African American Philadelphian men and their families, Pinheiro focuses on soldiers from Pennsylvania’s first three USCT regiments: the Third, Sixth, and the Eighth USCT Regiments. Although the state raised eleven USCT regiments, the author explains that the first three received much more local and national attention, thus warranting his focus. From these, Pinheiro creates a sample of 185 USCT soldiers and 771 of their multigenerational family members. Using this sample as his focal point, he traces their experiences over seventy years. He supplements his sample with the Compiled Military Service Record, pension applications; the US Census; letters, diaries, newspaper articles; and stories from other USCT soldiers and their families across the United States. As a result, Pinheiro constructs a collage of African Americans’ experiences, which enables the reader to see how these individuals fought and persevered against racism throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

To begin, the author details prewar African American familial experiences in Philadelphia. He chose the City of Brotherly Love because it was an important Northern city with the nation’s largest population of free African Americans, almost 4 percent of the city’s population of 22,185 in 1860 (5). Moreover, the city’s significance to nineteenth-century industrialization and wartime mobilization and production made it an epicenter of racial, class, gender, and citizenship issues. With Philadelphia as the backdrop, Pinheiro surveys life for working-poor African Americans in both private and public spaces. He illustrates that African Americans, regardless of gender, occupation, education, or socioeconomic status struggled against systemic racism. He uses the census and enlistment records to determine the USCT soldiers’ prewar occupations and familial situation. Here, he introduces the concept of fictive kin. In many of the households he analyzes, people lived together without being bound by law or blood. He reasons that they are better understood as fictive kin, a term for individuals treated as “family” or “kin” without adoptive, biological, or marital ties (6). Pinheiro argues that African American families often welcomed fictive kin into their homes to assist with finances [End Page 95] and share limited resources. Although these relationships—and not to mention nonlegal marriages—did not fit into white ideas of family and gender responsibilities, Northern African Americans accepted and applied models that helped them survive, and even possibly thrive, in a racist system.

Pinheiro then shifts to the war and the Federal government’s recruitment of African American men to serve in newly created USCT units. Just as before, African American men and their families looked for opportunities to find security, fight for equality, and earn citizenship. Many saw military service as an avenue for socioeconomic and political advancement. Yet, Pinheiro warns the readers that military service also brought hardship on families at home, and service to one’s country did not mean an escape from racism. In chapters 2, 3, and 4 he...