Secondary Sources – Library

I went on the Dickinson library catalog to first familiarize myself with black soldiers and how they fought in the civil war. I wanted to know information like when they were first able to join the Union army, what positions they occupied, where they came from and what the typical experience was for a soldier in the United States Colored Troops.

I searched the catalog for a variety of mixed phrases to make sure I did not miss any possible books. I search for “civil war colored troops,” “civil war colored soldiers,” “civil war black troops,” “Pennsylvania black soldiers.” I also wanted to try an see if I could find some background material on how different soldiers were buried after the Civil War. Therefore, I searched for “civil war cemeteries,” “civil war dead,” “Pennsylvania black deaths,” “civil war troop deaths,” and “Pennsylvania soldier burials.”

For the most part, all of the books on blacks in the Civil War in the Dickinson Library are on one shelf. So I explored the ones I found on the catalog and then looked at others on the same shelf. I checked out these ones below:

Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland. Ed., Freedom Soldiers: The Black           Military Experience in the Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Blair, William and William Pencak. Ed., Pennsylvania’s Civil War. University Park:             The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

Hansen, Joyce. Between Two Fires: Black Soldiers in the Civil War. New York: Franklin    Watts, 1993.

Hargrove, Hondon B. Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.

Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of             Reconciliation. University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Redkey, Edwin S. Ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American            Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861-165. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Scott, Donald. Images of America: Camp William Penn. Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

After checking some book reviews on the authors I checked out and making sure the books were legitimate, I got a lot of background information from Berlin and Blair’s books. The major things were figuring out when it would have actually been possible for black soldiers from Carlisle to actually join up with a unit and where those regiments would have trained and been deployed. After finding all that, I started looking through the Camp William Penn book which has hundreds of photo’s of soldiers from the eleven different regiments that trained there. Looking through the photos really made me realize that I needed to find the names of who was buried at Lincoln Cemetery if possible, then come back and look at these photos again.

Lastly, the Blair book featured John Brock’s letters from April 1864 until March 1865, with some analysis as well. This is a good model for analyzing what an experience for a soldier in the USCT might be like, but it seems like it might be a little like the Equiano story where one person’s story becomes the story for an entire race because of limited primary documents. Therefore, I plan on saving the Brock letters and using them as an idea of what a black soldier may have experienced in the Civil War, but not the only story. One last cool thing about Brock is that he was from Carlisle, Pennsylvania; married a woman named Lucinda Jane Dickson, and then moved and settled down in West Chester, Pennsylvania. It’s interesting to me because I go to school here in Carlisle and I live in West Chester. Small world.