Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War's First African American Combat Unit by Ian Michael Spurgeon (review)
Ian Michael Spurgeon has written an interesting monograph about one of the earliest of the more than one hundred African American Civil War regiments, the First Kansas Colored. While mainly focusing on the combat activities of the unit, Spurgeon, through extensive research, also describes the creation and officering of the regiment and, briefly, the African Americans who fought for their freedom. The author begins with chapters on the prewar politics of Kansas and Missouri as they related to black people and on the federal government's wartime manpower policy, which opposed using African Americans as soldiers. Spurgeon describes how Kansas senator James H. Lane pushed for the formation of a black regiment and the obstacles that he faced in doing so. When the federal government finally approved recruiting African American manpower, the First Kansas Colored was one of the first companies to be mustered in. The unit was initially employed in garrisoning frontier posts, before being sent on expeditions into Arkansas and Indian Territory. In some detail, Spurgeon describes the battle of Poison Spring and the subsequent massacre of members of the regiment who had surrendered. In a later section, Spurgeon notes that the First Kansas Colored suffered more casualties than other black units, while recording fewer deaths from disease, but he does not explain why. After the war ended, many of the men who had joined while they were still technically slaves had the difficult task of trying to find their wives and families. The last section of the book contains a detailed roster of the officers and enlisted men of the regiment, including their ages and where they were born. Overall, this monograph is very interesting and informative, although its impact is reduced by the author's propensity to fill the narrative with direct quotations from primary sources. The description of the problems that the creation of the regiment occasioned, including the efforts of Senator Lane to get the U.S. government to accept black soldiers, is quite well done. The battle narratives, especially that of Poison Spring, are well written and illustrated with good maps. One of the great difficulties that Spurgeon faced was that almost none of the enlisted men left records of their wartime service. He tried to fill this gap with extensive research in pension files, but, as he acknowledges, this approach had limits. The purpose of including the extensive regimental roster is unclear. The monograph would also have benefited from placing the experiences of recruiting, officering, and combat in the First Kansas Colored in the context of other African American units, especially in