The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861 - 1865, by Dudley Taylor Cornish (University Press of Kansas, 342 pp, 1987/1956)
They had to fight for the right to fight.
Hailed as one of the top one hundred books on the Civil War, The Sable Arm is a comprehensive history of accepting slaves* (and black freemen) into the Union Army, nearly 200,000 of them! The former slaves were a particular asset when the Army fought in the South, for they knew the land and could tolerate the heat.
President Lincoln was slow to accept and late to pay these new soldiers. He tapdanced for a long time, possibly believing, like many other Northerners that Blacks were not disciplined enough to trust with a rifle - they were so wrong! The Blacks proved their mettle. They were first used as cooks and in construction and loading box cars but soon some were sent to a leadership school which became the precursor of OCS (Officer Candidate School today).
The Sable Arm was selected for my veterans' book club and since one member's hobby is the Civil War while another majored in history, they particularly loved the book and added their own stories from other sources. As it was, I was the token female (with eight males) for the discussion and, being raised in the West, still get the Civil War and the Revolutionary War mixed up (I also have never taken a history course except in high school where we studied Washington State History rather than Maryland State History.)
Essentially this is a long report, replete with many many quotes, rather than a fascinating story well told: it reads like a dissertation and mentions units from Kansas in several places: the publisher is the University Press of Kansas.
*usually referred to as Negroes and sometimes as Colored. After all, this book was written in 1956 and contained many quotes from even earlier.
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