FREEDOM'S SOLDIERS

Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War "In the final grueling operations of the eastern theater, General Ulysses S. Grant summoned every available Union soldier to assault the Confederate strongholds in Virginia. Grant's armies included the largest concentration of black troops engaged at anytime during the war, most of them eventually organized into the Union army's only all-black army corps. In the trenches before Richmond and Petersburg, black soldiers, like the white ones, dug earthworks, held the Union lines, pressed the rebel defenses, and at long last participated in the triumphant march into the capital of the vanquished Confederacy." P.37, FREEDOM'S SOLDIERS: THE BLACK MILITARY EXPERIENCE IN THE CIVIL WAR, edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (1998)