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Kelly D. Mezurek - For Their Own Cause, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2016

For Their Own Cause

The 27th United States Colored Troops

Av Kelly D. Mezurek

Del i serien Civil War in the North

495 kr

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Beskrivning
The 27th United States Colored Troops (USCT), composed largely of free black Ohio men, served in the Union army from April 1864 to September 1865 in Virginia and North Carolina. It was the first time most members of the unit had traveled so far from home. The men faced daily battles against racism and against inferior treatment, training, and supplies. They suffered from the physical difficulties of military life, the horrors of warfare, and homesickness and worried about loved ones left at home without financial support. Yet their contributions provided a tool that allowed blacks with little military experience, and their families, to demand social acceptance and acknowledgment of their citizenship.Their service did not end when their enlistment was over. After the men of the 27th returned to Ohio, they and their families sought full access to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and compensatory citizenship rights for their collective sacrifice. Despite their constant battle against racism, this public behavior benefited the men and their families. It also meant that the African American role in the Union victory remained part of local community remembrance and commemoration. As a result, the experiences of these men from the 27th USCT gave the late-nineteenth-century Ohio black community legitimate hopes for access to equal civil and social rights for all.For Their Own Cause is the first comprehensive history of the 27th USCT. By including rich details culled from private letters and pension files, Mezurek provides more than a typical regimental study; she demonstrates that the lives of the men of the 27th USCT help to explain why in the wars that followed, despite the disappointments and increasingly difficult struggle for African American equality that continued for far too many decades after the promise of the three Civil War–era constitutional amendments, blacks in the United States continued to offer their martial support in the front lines and the back.
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Kelly D. Mezurek is an associate professor at Walsh University, where she teaches United States history. Mezurek is on the advisory board for the Emerging Civil War Book Series with the Southern Illinois University Press, is a speaker for the Ohio Humanities Speakers Bureau, and served as a member of the Ohio CW 150 Advisory Committee.

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By the [American Civil] war's end, 178,975 African Americans, constituting roughly one-twelfth of all the soldiers who fought for the United States, had filled 145 infantry regiments, seven cavalry units, thirteen artillery groups, and one engineering battalion. An astonishing 74 percent of northern black men of military age enlisted to fight for a nation that denied them citizenship. Despite this, the black soldiers who donned blue have been curiously understudied.... Kelly Mezurek's impressively documented and clearly written study of the 27th USCT does far more, however, than merely address that unfortunate omission. Unlike the fabled 54th Massachusetts, the 27th was neither a pioneering unit nor did it see a good deal of action (although several of its companies played a supporting role in the disastrous Battle of the Crater). Whereas 140,313 of the USCT soldiers were black southerners born into slavery, the Ohioans who volunteered for the 27th had been free for all or most of their lives. It was not even the first Ohio-based USCT regiment, an honor that went to the 5th. But its wartime experience, Mezurek demonstrates, was in many ways far more typical of life in the USCT than that of more celebrated regiments. Its soldiers did more than their share of fatigue duty, and when they returned home no grand parade welcomed their return. No bronze relief sculpture was erected in their memory. A good many volumes explain why white soldiers, both North and South, fought for their respective nations. Mezurek's study does that as well, but it also chronicles what these soldiers' lives were like." — Civil War History

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