Freedom, Protection, Pay, and a Call to Military Duty: African American Soldiers in the Civil War

0:00 Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of Bridge from the Past. I’m your host Mary, and this series is all about using primary source images as a starting point to think about important topics in American history and civics. Today we’re looking at images of African American soldiers who served in the Union Army during the Civil War. What do these images tell us about the power of freedom and patriotism?

0:23 Let’s jump in and see. Once again, we’re thinking about what these images of African Americans who served in the Union Army can tell us about the power of freedom and patriotism. Whenever you have a primary source image, it’s important to just make some observations. If you’re using the handout that came

0:44 with this video, go ahead and pause here and make some observations of your own. Here are some things that I notice. First of all, I noticed a couple of sort of superficial things that are different about these three men. I haven’t given you names or dates, which doesn’t quite seem fair. But I can tell you that all of these men were photographed around 1863 and all of them are unidentified.

1:07 So their names have been lost to history. I noticed some differences in the uniforms and differences in the hats that they’re wearing or a lack of the hat. This man in the middle appears to have some sort of rank on his sleeve that I don’t see in the man on the left or the right. And of course, this man is standing and it looks like he has some sort of a sword at his side.

1:28 So the man in the middle here is a corporal. That much we do know based on the uniform that he’s wearing. And this man over here on the right would have served in the cavalry because of his uniform. But something that’s really striking to me are the frames that these pictures are in. I noticed the gold. It’s kind of detailed. There’s scroll work. It’s very beautiful.

1:49 I can also see there’s a little hinge on the side of the picture, as if it could have opens and closes like a book. And this man again, the corporal in the center, I can see at the bottom of his frame, it says, the Union now and forever. So I’m already wondering, I don’t know their names, but who are these photos for?

2:09 What was their purpose? These are all questions that come to mind just from looking at these drawings. I’m going to show you one more, which is my favorite. Again, this image is from 1863. The man and the woman and children in the picture are unidentified, but it’s in a very similar frame with the gold surrounding it.

2:29 And this picture, like the three before it, come from the collections in the Library of Congress. What I love about this picture is that you have not only the soldier, but you have his wife and his two daughters with him. I think this is super powerful because you have these men who are going to go off to war and possibly give their lives, and it’s a good reminder that the women

2:52 were left behind, families were left behind, and wouldn’t know if they were going to see their soldier again. So this, I think, is a really powerful image about the cost, the human cost, the human element of war more broadly. Going back to our questions of freedom and patriotism, up here at the top of my slide, I’ve written freedom, protection, pay, and a call to military duty.

3:15 So this phrase comes from a recruiting poster, recruiting African American men to fight for the Union Army. In our last Bridge from the Past video, we talked about the Emancipation Proclamation. And the Emancipation Proclamation was a huge step towards ending slavery. It really signaled a change in the purpose of the war. It wasn’t just a war to preserve the Union.

3:37 Now it was a war to preserve the Union without slavery. Several months later, in May of 1863, the War Department created allowed African American men to fight for the Union Army. And that’s where you see these men joining the army, signing up to fight in a war to end slavery. And again, for every man that signed up to fight, you had a wife, a daughter,

4:00 a grandmother, a sweetheart, a mother that they were leaving behind. So the human cost of this war and what it meant just in terms of principle and of the human heart and human sacrifice, I think is a really powerful question to consider. We started by asking what these images could tell us about the power of freedom and patriotism.

4:20 Roughly 179,000 black men served as soldiers in the US. Army during the Civil War, and another 19,000 served in the US. Navy. We learned how the Emancipation Proclamation signaled a shift in the goals and purposes of the Civil War. And we saw some of the faces whose names are lost to history, but we saw some of these men,

4:42 and in one case, his family, that was a part of this war and a human element. When we’re talking about the sacrifice it takes to create a union without slavery, but as always, there’s so much more to the story. So now I’m going to turn it over to you. What questions do you still have? What do you want to know more about? Leave any thoughts or comments in the section below.

5:05 If you learned something, be sure to like this video and subscribe to our channel to learn about other resources that can help you through the school year. I’ll be back soon with another primary source image for us to consider. Until then, keep your eyes open, look closely at those pictures and keep asking questions. Take care, everybody. So did you learn something new? Do you know?

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