Freedom Soldiers

Jonathan Lande’s Freedom Soldiers is a persuasive and unflinching account of what it meant to escape slavery and seek liberation in the highly disciplined world of the U.S. army during the Civil War. Lande’s sensitive reading of Black soldiers’ testimonies reveals an unmistakable truth: That the fight for liberation was all-encompassing and sometimes meant resisting one’s own allies too. A welcome and original portrait of the hard-fought battle for Emancipation in the United States. * Amy Murrell Taylor, Author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps *Freedom Soldiers draws on a terrific array of sources to reveal Black Union soldiers as enlisted freedom-seekers whose flight from slavery did not end in the ranks of the Union Army, but rather continued as they contested the terms of their employment and challenged strictures that impeded their sense of what freedom should mean. Jonathan Lande engages scholarly conversations about wartime emancipation, desertion, and labor history and tells us something new about each. Most of all, Lande brings Black Union soldiers alive, not as unidimensional tropes, but as fathers, siblings, husbands, dreamers, protestors, friends, advocates * in short, as fully realized individuals.Chandra Manning, Georgetown University *Jonathan Lande has written a gripping new account of Black soldiers’ curation of their freedom. Freedom Soldiers reinterprets how we should think about the wages of war and liberation for Black men who fought gallantly to dismantle slavery on their own terms. Sometimes these men left posts to tend to their families, heal themselves, and decamped their units when they determined their work had been completed. Black soldiers exercised autonomy in their resistance. In Freedom Soldiers, Lande reveals how Black male soldiers reconceptualized honor and duty via elegant prose, convincing arguments, and extensive archival research. It is a book that is not only needed but should be a required read in Civil War History. * Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of Connecticut *Freedom Soldiers draws on a terrific array of sources to reveal Black Union soldiers as enlisted freedom-seekers whose flight from slavery did not end in the ranks of the Union Army, but rather continued as they contested the terms of their employment and challenged strictures that impeded their sense of what freedom should mean. Jonathan Lande engages scholarly conversations about wartime emancipation, desertion, and labor history and tells us something new about each. Lande brings Black Union soldiers alive, not as unidimensional tropes, but as fathers, siblings, husbands, dreamers, protestors, friends, advocates. * Chandra Manning, Georgetown University *Freedom Soldiers provides an important perspective to emancipation studies and to Black military service historiography. Lande’s contention that “On and off the battlefield, they marched toward freedom, fighting a war for liberation against enslavers—and within the ranks” is well argued and backed by impressive evidence. * Tim Talbott, Emerging Civil War *Freedom Soldiers represents a valuable resource for undergraduates, faculty, and anyone else interested in Civil War history. * C. V. Waite, CHOICE *

Jonathan Lande is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. His work has received numerous awards, including the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History.