Overview

This book tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. At least seventy-nine thousand African Americans served in northern USCT regiments. Many, including most of the USCT veterans examined here, remained in the North and constituted a sizable population of racial minorities living outside the former Confederacy. In The Families’ Civil War, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. provides a compelling account of the lives of USCT soldiers and their entire families but also argues that the Civil War was but one engagement in a longer war for racial justice. By 1863 the Civil War provided African American Philadelphians with the ability to expand the theater of war beyond their metropolitan and racially oppressive city into the South to defeat Confederates and end slavery as armed combatants. But the war at home waged by white northerners never ended. Civil War soldiers are sometimes described together as men who experienced roughly the same thing during the war. However, this book acknowledges how race and class differentiated men’s experiences too. Pinheiro examines the intersections of gender, race, class, and region to fully illuminate the experiences of northern USCT soldiers and their families.

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9780820361963

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Reviews

Like other ""dark turn"" interpretations of the Civil War, Pinheiro's examination of African American families' day-to-day lives underlines their incredible resilience as they confronted and battled the consequences of systemic racism. Pinherio's clear and compelling writing, as well as his thorough yet readable use of existing scholarship, makes this work appropriate and illuminating for scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general audiences alike.--Caroline Wood Newhall ""Journal of African American History"" Across each of these chapters Pinheiro highlights how racial discrimination affected families, from depriving them of early enlistment bounties to exposing them to humiliating interrogations about intimate matters. Pinheiro mines pension applications to offer vivid glimpses of how the costs of service--from delayed wages to permanent disabilities--compounded over the decades for some families...Beyond this valuable work of recovery and recentering, the book contributes to a larger scholarly reassessment of the Civil War's liberatory impact.--Catherine A. Jones ""Journal of Southern History"" With diligent work in census data, military service records, pension files, and local newspapers, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., has ably recovered the experiences of Philadelphia's working-class Black soldiers and their families before, during, and after the Civil War. A fine book, The Families' Civil War enhances our understanding of the war's lived consequences in general--and the African American military experience in particular.--Brian Matthew Jordan ""The Civil War Monitor"" The Families' Civil War is a very fine piece of scholarship that tells the story of people too little investigated by historians. The research is first-rate, and the stories recalled to life here are important, illuminating, and, sadly, too often tragic.--Douglas Egerton ""author of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America""

The Families' Civil War is a very fine piece of scholarship that tells the story of people too little investigated by historians. The research is first-rate, and the stories recalled to life here are important, illuminating, and, sadly, too often tragic.--Douglas Egerton author of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America

Author Information

Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. is an assistant professor of African American history at Furman University. He is the author of articles in American Nineteenth Century History, the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog, and the Journal of the Civil War Era's Muster blog.

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