Description
Junne describes the history behind the African Americans who fought in the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. His contention is that there are very few resources for scholars and laypeople to fully understand the impact that African-Americans had on American military history, and that this book will fill in that gap. In documenting a historiography of black oppression prior to the Civil War, Junne shows why African-Americans have been left out of the discussion, and then argues why they must be included to understand the wars entire story. His claim, and it is provocatively argued, is that African-American soldiers played such an important role in the Union Army that the outcome of the war would have been tipped in favor of the Confederacy had they been forbidden from fighting. What is lost in contemporary discussion of the war is that this was a hotly debated question at the time, with Lincoln deciding in favor of letting them fight which secured thousands of men (and their wives who cooked and did laundry for soldiers) which had an immeasurable impact on the war, and forever changed the future of America.
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