The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice by Holly A. Pinheiro Jr (review)

Reviewed by: The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice by Holly A. Pinheiro Jr Brian Taylor (bio) The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice. By Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. 242. Cloth, 114. 95; paper, 26. 95. ) In The Families' Civil War, Holly A. Pinheiro examines the lives of African American Philadelphians who wore the Union blue, detailing their prewar lives, wartime careers, and postwar exploits, and also enumerating the impact of their service on the lives of their families. In this focus, Pinheiro ranks with recent authors, such as Carole Emberton, who have sought to push the literature on Black soldiers beyond its longtime preoccupations with the battlefield, contributions to U. S. victory, and the use of Black service to prove the existence of Black manhood. Emberton, in an influential 2012 article, sought to determine what it meant that Black soldiers, in a country supposedly dedicated to equality, had to fight to earn rights and citizenship. 1 In a similar vein, Pinheiro, though he certainly gives Black troops their due for battlefield heroism and their desire to win legal and constitutional gains, portrays Black service less as a glorious struggle End Page 140 and more as a grueling undertaking involving gut-wrenching decisions to enlist, long absences from loved ones, negative economic consequences for Black families, disproportionate menial labor, and capriciously dispensed military justice. Pinheiro's realistic, comprehensive depiction of military life and its aftermath adds to the literature on Black service. More than previous scholars, Pinheiro focuses on how individual soldiers and their families dealt with less glamorous aspects of service and its long-term effects. After all, as Pinheiro reminds us in his introduction, while many scholars have focused on Black soldiers' use of service to establish Black manhood in the eyes of racist whites, the average Black soldier almost surely cared more about his family's material well-being and survival than he did about living up to white notions of manhood. Pinheiro also makes the important point that military service involved a choice between the family and the collective advancement of Black Americans. He demonstrates that the same service that helped to produce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments also tore vital breadwinners from Black families and left veterans scarred mentally and physically, making it that much harder for them to contribute to their families' struggle for survival in the face of oppression. Relying on pension files, military records, census data, and Black Civil War–era newspapers, Pinheiro traces the prewar, wartime, and postwar experiences of 185 Black soldiers from Philadelphia, all of whom served in one of three regiments: the Third, Sixth, or Eighth U. S. Colored Infantry. This is microhistory, full of detail and based on copious research, though it is unclear exactly how representative the experiences of these 185 men were in relation to the experiences of the tens of thousands of Black northerners who joined the U. S. Army. The book proceeds like something of a collective biography. The reader hears about the experiences of a soldier at a given stage in his life and is then reintroduced to that soldier in a later chapter. The reader might wonder if Pinheiro's book would have flowed better had he turned the book into a series of minibiographies of individuals, teasing out key themes by looking at the lives of individual soldiers in isolation. Such an approach, however, might have taken away from Pinheiro's ability to analyze trends among the soldiers on whom his study focuses. One of the major themes of Pinheiro's work is that when historians lump the experiences of soldiers together, what is lost is appreciation for the variety of individual experiences and outcomes. He makes the useful point that there was no one "Black military experience" of the Civil War, nor a singular Black experience of the Reconstruction-era North. As Pinheiro details, some men received furloughs while others were refused permission to return home to family; some men chose formal marriage End Page 141 while others preferred common-law unions; and some soldiers received pensions while others met denial. . .