The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice
Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.
University of Georgia Press
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 79,000 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.