Product Description

1869 188 pages

During the Civil War Thomas W. Higginson was a captain in the 51st Massachusetts Volunteers.

Higginson was retired because of a wound received in August 1862. He was then made colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers from November 1862 to October 1864. This regiment was the first regiment recruited from former slaves for the Federal service.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #206096 in eBooks
• Published on: 2008-03-23
• Format: Kindle Book

Review
"Higginson's picture of the battle which was the origin of 'praise the Lord and pass the ammunition' and his reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to the black regiment are unsurpassed for eloquence."

About the Author
Howard N. Meyer is a civil rights historian and author of a biography of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Colonel of a Black Regiment.

Customer Reviews

GLORY II
Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually think about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. And those heroic fighters deserve those honors. Glory, indeed. However, other units were formed from other regions that are also noteworthy. And none more so than the 1st South Carolina Volunteers commanded by the arch-abolitionist Theodore Higginson one of John Brown's most fervent supporters and an early advocate of arming the slaves during the Civil War. He desperately wanted to lead armed blacks in battle and got his wish.

I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner)that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And Higginson's book is prima facie evidence for that position.

One should note that, unlike the Massachusetts 54th which was made up primarily of freedman the 1st South Carolina was made up of units of fugitive and abandoned slaves. Thus, one should have assumed that it would have been harder to train and discipline uneducated and much-abused slaves. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story Higginson tells compares very favorably with those units. While Higginson's use of `negro' dialect in the telling of his story which may not be to the liking of some of today's `politically correct' readers of this book it is nevertheless a story worth reading told by a `high' abolitionist and Civil War hero.