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Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America by Douglas R. Egerton

2018; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 84; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2018.0130

2325-6893

Chandra Manning,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Reviewed by: Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America by Douglas R. Egerton Chandra Manning Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America. By Douglas R. Egerton. ( New York: Basic Books, 2016. Pp. [xii], 429. $32.00, ISBN 978-0-465-09664-0.) For years, many Americans owed their familiarity with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry to the movie Glory (1989), which took liberties but conveyed many things quite well, including the effects of the Fifty-fourth on northern attitudes and the ambivalence that some black Union soldiers felt about serving under a flag that had not served them. The film culminated with the dramatic attack on Battery Wagner in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, which took place on July 18, 1863. The battle resulted in a 42 percent casualty rate for the Fifty-fourth, including the death of its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, whose burial in a pit with his men constitutes the movie's closing scene. About three-fifths of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, in contrast, takes place after July 1863, and therein lies the book's greatest importance. Douglas R. Egerton leaves some crucial topics unexamined, but in telling the longer story of the Fifty-fourth and its two sibling regiments—the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry and the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry—Thunder at the Gates enhances what we know about several aspects of soldiering, and it situates the experiences of these regiments within current historiographical conversations about the costs of the Civil War. Drawing chiefly on published sources, like memoirs, autobiographies, published letter collections, newspapers, and periodicals, Thunder at the Gates [End Page 474] combines biographical profiles with chronological narratives. Early chapters include interesting locket-sized portraits of black and white soldiers who fought with Massachusetts's African American regiments. The lockets snap closed as successive chapters narrate mustering in, training, travel, camp life, and battle, occasionally opening the lockets for glimpses of individuals amid the action. Later chapters consider the war's aftermath and the long-term legacy of the regiments. The narrative detail dedicated to multiple aspects of soldiering makes for absorbing reading. Daily life in training camp at Readville, Massachusetts (in chapter 3), hospital conditions (in chapter 6), and payday in camp are vividly portrayed. Accounts of black Massachusetts regiments at the fall of Charleston and Richmond are particularly engrossing. Readers interested in some aspects of the regiments' history will want to supplement Thunder at the Gates with additional sources. For example, the book notes recruitment meetings in the North, but readers interested in the complicated calculus that went into northern black men deciding if they should fight for equal rights within the nation or wait until the nation recognized full equality should consult Brian Taylor's article, "A Politics of Service: Black Northerners' Debate over Enlistment in the American Civil War" (Civil War History, 58 [December 2012], 451–80). Because treatment of black soldiers and white officers is separate in Thunder at the Gates, readers interested in racial interactions among soldiers remain best served by Joseph T. Glatthaar's Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge, 1990). Thunder at the Gates intersects most with current historiography in its attention to the costs of war. Egerton's analysis of the battle of Olustee details the military and political aspects of that debacle, which not only failed to return Florida to the Union in time for the 1864 election but also resulted in the maltreatment and murder of black soldiers by Confederate captors. The ugly issue of black prisoner treatment receives careful attention, as does the plight of women who were raped by soldiers, soldiers' widows who descended into poverty, and Lewis Douglass, who incurred wounds that prevented him from becoming a commissioned officer and having children. Most of all, the book carries the story of Massachusetts's three black regiments beyond the assault on Battery Wagner and, in so doing, corrects the notion that the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry flared briefly, like a July firecracker that makes a showy flash but accomplishes little and is soon forgotten. Whereas the film...