Reluctant freedeom fighters: coercion and negative recruitment experiences of African Americans in the United States Civil War

During the United States Civil War, African American men recruited throughout the United States, fought alongside white men in an attempt to secure their freedom. Over the past fifty years, historians have devoted a great deal of research to blacks Civil War experience, but that scholarship has tended to focus mostly on positive aspects of their service. By contrast, this thesis examines negative recruitment experiences of African Americans throughout the United States during the Civil War. It argues that blacks’ experienced various forms of mistreatment such as impressment, theft and other questionable recruitment practices. Geography is an important factor in this thesis because not all blacks felt the impact of recruitment alike, and most of the differences are based on regional peculiarities. Northern free states, border states, southern Atlantic states, and Louisiana and Mississippi all had unique recruitment experiences based on the commanders, geography, military necessity, the applicability and execution of emancipation policy, and numerous other factors. This research concludes that African Americans’ recruitment experiences, although positive in some cases, was much more negative than leading histories of the Civil War claim. This investigation seeks to provide a fuller and more factual understanding to the black military experience.