Valiant Men of War

Over 135,000 Black Southerners defended the Union during the Civil War. This book tells the story of these soldiers, who fought their one-time oppressors with grit and gallantry to seize the manhood and honor that was denied them in slavery and to make the South a land of liberty, not bondage.

Jonathan Lande describes a fight that went far beyond the assaults and bayonet charges of the battlefield. While serving the nation as warriors, Black Southerners in Union blue also cared for enslaved and recently emancipated family members struggling to find shelter, food, and warmth. They clashed with irregular fighters on the war’s peripheries, chasing Southern guerrillas and liberating captives from slavery. They enforced federal authority on prisoners of war and in Confederate towns. While bivouacked, they took up arms and resisted army officers who treated them as little more than slaves. Amid this civil war within the South, Black soldiers disproved those who dismissed them as unmanly cowards as they fought to recast a republic predicated on inequality and human enslavement.

Valiant Men of War transforms the Civil War struggle of freedmen in Union blue into a fight not only for the Union but also for their manhood and control of the South.