Book Review: The Kinship of War: Stories of the United States Colored Troops
The Kinship of War: Stories of the United States Colored Troops. By Jerilyn James Lee. Lakeway, TX: Sentia Publishing 2025. Softcover, 309 pp. $55.00.
Reviewed by Dr. Barbara A. Gannon
While many scholars and academics are familiar with the story of United States Colored Troops in the Civil War, the broad public is not. I say this confidently as a university teacher whose students know little or nothing about their service and sacrifice. Despite the profound impact of the movie Glory (1989) and its portrayal of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry in the memory of Black units’ wartime contributions, it premiered thirty-six years ago, and few of my students seem aware of this film. While scholars and academics continue to publish these men’s stories, they sometimes find it difficult to communicate with the broader public. Accomplished independent scholar Jerilyn James Lee’s well-written and brilliantly researched The Kinship of War: Stories of the United States Colored Troops, combined with her impressive social media effort as creator of Facebook’s “Stories of United States Colored Troops” page may help bridge that gap.
As a follower of Lee’s page, I assumed this book would continue in that vein: brief entries highlighting the stories of Black regiments and their soldiers. Instead, I found a fascinating series of short essays on Black soldiers and their allies. These allies included loyal white and Black Americans, men and women, who supported the Union and Emancipation.
Among the 20 essays are the story of more famous Americans such as Martin R. Delaney, a Black nationalist commissioned as a U.S. army major. While his rank is impressive, the highest-ranking Black officer at the end of the Civil War was a Canadian-trained doctor: Alexander Augusta. Enlisted Black soldiers are recognized; Lee chronicles the heroism of Christian A. Fleetwood and Powhatan Beaty, both African American Medal of Honor awardees for their actions at the battle of New Market Heights. One of these men she studies, Luis Emilio—a teenaged Hispanic officer, chronicled the story of the 54th Massachusetts in his memoirs.
Some of these men and women were unknown to me, such as Anna Bradford Stokes Bowman, a formerly enslaved Black women who served on a naval ship as a “First Class Boy” receiving a pension for her naval service. White Americans also belong to this “Kinship”; William Birney, a white U.S. Army officer, commanded a Black division in the Petersburg Campaign.
These biographies would be, on their own, an outstanding contribution to Civil War studies, but this book includes images of the primary sources for these stories so that the reader can see the original information. Most readers would recognize the value of these images to genealogists searching for their Civil War ancestors.
I believe the true value of these essays and these images are found in the classroom. Students prefer to read shorter essays; teachers need examples of primary sources. This book provides both, facilitating primary sources writing assignments. Given the digitized availability of all USCT service records in the U.S. National Archives catalog alongside a subset of Civil War widows’ pensions, teachers can have students write history, not just read it. Overall, this book is an outstanding contribution to the critical task of reminding American of the Black Civil War experience.
Dr. Barbara Ann Gannon is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.A. from Emory University, an M.A. from George Washington University, and a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University. She published The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic in 2011, which is an examination of the Black and White members of the Union Army’s largest veterans’ organization. This book received the Wiley-Silver Prize (University of Mississippi) for the best first book on the Civil War. Her second book, Americans Remember their Civil War, published in 2017, examines Civil War memory from 1866 to the present. Currently, she is completing a study of the Battle of Olustee and its aftermath. White and Black US soldiers killed in the largest battle that took place in Florida remain near this battle site in an unmarked mass grave. She is the coordinator for UCF’s Community Veterans History project, an oral history project that records the experience of Central Florida’s veterans. She is a veteran of the United States Army.
