Stories of Black southerners’ wartime gumption reflected an important strain of African American memory, a strain juxtaposed against Dunningite histories. Black southerners celebrated their ancestors’ grit to counter these derisive accounts, which asserted that enslaved men and women did little to claim liberty. The heroic strain of remembrance became increasingly prominent in scholarship amid the civil rights movement. And rightfully so. Over 130,000 Black southerners braved enormous peril in the U.S. Army. Their families also contributed, furnishing labor for the Union despite struggling in their men’s absences.[ii] As a fan of the film Glory during boyhood, I knew the cinematic expression of this tale. As a student of the past, I also appreciated the rich scholarship since the 1950s. So, when I first encountered a Black deserter about a decade ago, I was flummoxed.
“Why would an enslaved man desert the army?” I wondered. “Service gave him the chance to fight for freedom and to punish slavers.” The stakes seemed too high. “Hadn’t Frederick Douglass declared, ‘Who would be free themselves must strike the blow’”? I wrestled with how to interpret these men and understand accounts of their desertion.
I was ultimately able to grapple with Black deserters’ decisions by expanding on Wright’s observation that Black political action is often not as it seems. Reading the sources as evidence of more than desertion, I came to understand an untold part of the freedom struggle. I uncovered Black men’s diverse expressions of masculinity, which I described in my recent JAH article. I also discovered the emancipatory tale of Wright’s paternal grandpa—a deserter who acted upon his views of freedom by decamping.
Records of Black deserters are housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in courts-martial transcripts. Part of Record Group 153, these documents prove especially valuable because army regulations mandated that cases be accurately detailed. As such, officers’ words were consigned to paper. But so too were the perspectives of alleged criminals. These voices were not typically preserved in archives, as Lorien Foote notes in work on white soldiers. She observes that such transcripts provide the beliefs of men not aligned with the most powerful, and those often incapable of documenting their version of the events due to illiteracy.[iii] Similarly, the transcripts of Black soldiers offer the historian otherwise unrecorded perspectives. Yet words of Black deserters, alleged criminals, prove to be even more remarkable because they are so difficult to access.