While white generals are often at the center of Civil War archival research, Black Civil War veterans and their families remain largely overlooked. Furman University (S.C.) Assistant Professor of History Holly Pinheiro discussed his new book, “The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice,” during a colloquium at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library.
In the book, Pinheiro paints an image of Black Civil War soldiers’ lives to argue that their hardships are linked to their military service. Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference (JWJI) organized the talk as part of the Race and Difference Colloquium Series, which focuses on race in academic research.
Pinheiro’s research delves into the lives of soldiers in the third, sixth and eighth regiments of United States Colored Troops (USCT) from Philadelphia from 1850 to the 1930s, using census data, pension records and military records to explore how war impacted Black veterans. Specifically, Pinheiro researched how Civil War military service affected soldiers’ families, finding they were often left burdened with financial struggles while grieving the losses of fathers and sons.
“The mobilization of hundreds of thousands of able-bodied African American men into the service devastated these families left behind,” Pinheiro said. “Some of these families were left to grieve and struggle economically after their male kin died in service.”
While academia lauds figures like Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, who advocated for the enlistment of USCT as a means to fight for racial equality and Black agency, Pinheiro articulated this scholarship does not do justice to the lives of these veterans.
Pinheiro highlighted the harsh economic and social realities of many soldiers and their families through the story of a Philadelphia-born man named Andrew. According to Pinheiro, Andrew enlisted in the USCT but was denied his enlistment bonus and soon died from injuries he sustained in battle. Of all surviving family members, only Andrew’s mother Sarah applied for a pension, which amounted to Andrew’s pre-war salary of $8 per month and his $100 enlistment bonus.
“Historian Larry Logue argues that pensions were meant to only supplement an individual, not an entire family’s income,” Pinheiro said. “Members of Sarah’s local community … stated that throughout the late 19th century that Sarah frequently depended on the kindness of her neighbors to survive.
Experiences like Andrew and his family’s reflect Pinheiro’s research, painting a bleaker picture of USCT military service than dominant historical narratives. JWJI Director and Associate Professor of Political Science Andra Gillespie noted that the colloquium series focuses on research representing “the best of scholarship” relating to race in the United States.
“The idea is to be broad and to show folks the variety of work that’s being done on issues related to race and difference across many different disciplinary perspectives,” Gillespie said.
Gillespie chooses the JWJI speakers based on their completion of new academic work — to her, the challenge is to not rehash widely-established knowledge.
“It could be that there’s some new information that’s been unearthed that we need to process, or it could be there are things, stories that have not been told before, perspectives that have not yet been considered,” Gillespie said.
JWJI Postdoctoral Fellow Rosa O’Connor Acevedo discussed how Pinheiro’s research reflects the importance of representing untold stories in her own studies of philosophy and race.
“I really like this effort of recovering a lot of this history that has been silenced,” Acevedo said. “Not only recovering the history but humanizing the people and telling the story of those people and why it matters.
Pinheiro’s passion for researching the lived experience of America’s first Black veterans stemmed from his upbringing in a military family. When recounting stories of denied pensions, unconstitutional investigations and personal loss, Pinheiro expressed his own connection to his research.
“My mom was overseas at Desert Storm, and they were setting up bombs, I didn’t know if she was going to be alive,” Pinheiro said. “I think about my grandmother crying at that dinner table. That’s not intentional, but that’s how I process this. And for me, I write this for them, those descendants and those military people, to humanize military service.”
Pinheiro ended the talk by sharing a heartfelt comment from one of his students that resonated with his goal to research beyond dominant narratives and magnify overlooked history.
“One of my students said doing history and understanding these and other people’s realities makes her feel safe,” Pinheiro said. “Without it, we are disrespecting all of their and our sacrifices.”
