Review Of Soldiering For Freedom: Coloured Troops By Bob Luke And John Smith

Soldiering for Freedom: How the Union army recruited, trained, and deployed the U.S. Coloured Troops by Bob Luke and John Smith discusses the recruitment, training process and deployment of blacks by the Lincoln government. In addition to this the struggles faced by black Union soldiers who fought in order to gain their freedom but who was only met by racial prejudice. The authors also focused on “how the government mobilised and utilised blacks in battle and how white circumscribed and shaped their efforts. In my review, I will be focusing on the topics that I believed to be very influential in the process of gaining the trust of blacks in order to encourage them to enlist and fight in the Civil War after their help was needed and seen as

However due to the enforcement of the Militia Act of 1792, which specified only white male citizens between the age of 18 and 45 could enlist into a militia company, blacks were turned away. Though they were prohibited from enlisting this did not stop the black northerners from believing that the soldiers in blue will gain their freedom, so they tried by the thousands in the spring of 1861. The main cause of the enforcement of ‘white male citizens’ only was due to the fact that “whites across the northern and border states interpreted the conflict as a white man’s war” (Luke and Smith 2014, 7) which had no place for blacks. In addition to this “white southerners considered the idea of black soldiers both reprehensible and vexing… ‘With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place’” (Luke and Smith 2014, 9-10). There was fear among them due to past brutal and bloody trails left behind by slave revolts which has convinced them that blacks are violent and possess a beastly side and thus arming them will “put their civilisation at risk of black insurrection and debauchery” (Luke and Smith 2014,