New book examines the families of Black Civil War soldiers
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: November 30, 2022
Most books written about African-Americans in the Civil War focus on battles and the hardships and discrimination the soldiers faced. Historian and author Holly A Pinheiro Jr. has written a book about the soldiers and their families. It’s called The Families’ Civil War — Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice.
The book chronicles the lives of three U.S. Colored Troop regiments that were recruited in Philadelphia and what their lives were like before, during and after the Civil War.
Dr. Pinheiro is an Assistant Professor of African American History in the Department of History at Furman University. He has also started preliminary work for a new monograph that will examine all Pennsylvania born soldiers who trained at Camp William Penn. He’s also been interviewed by the History Channel, Curiosity Streams, the Washington Post, and New York Times. He’s also a Senior Editor for Black Perspectives.
Pinheiro recently spoke with The Spark‘s Scott LaMar as part of the Dauphin County Library System’s Hari Jones Hidden Histories Collection. Part of that conversation aired on The Spark Wednesday.
Pinheiro talked about how Black families were living before the Civil War, “They are literally fighting for survival every day and that’s throughout the state, not even just Philadelphia. That was a northern experience, like literally fighting, whether that’s including because of the things like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which, as I tell my students, we need to acknowledge with that policy, for example, that congressmen in free states are condoning a war against all Black people because that policy essentially allowed anyone to be suspected of being a refugee or a runaway enslaved person. And so in places like Philadelphia, but without question, throughout Pennsylvania and other locations, Black children were often the targets. So Black communities, especially Black women, would essentially were key actors in the vigilance committees, but they would have essentially watching to make sure their children or even just children in general could go safely to school or just the location. There was also discrimination on public transit because there were many city policies that made it legal to discriminate up to physical violence against Black individuals. When they wrote down what were called Negro cars, which were essentially exposed platforms in which it was it was hellacious. There were instances of people experiencing life threatening situations.”
In the book, Pinheiro writes about the challenges families had getting pensions,”Those who eventually would become freed (dealt with) issues of literacy, lack of funding, lack of resources to document their marriages to the satisfaction of various state and federal agents. So being able to prove you are the legitimate widow or child of these peoples, that was a battle and the pensions. And that’s where the book’s title actually comes from, that these families were battling in the Civil War context through the pensions to be seen the way that they defined themselves. Civil war, actually, pensions date all the way back in the United States context to the Revolutionary War. And as many other scholars have noted, they were technically the first federally funded social welfare program. So I often throw that out when I hear people in modern context talking about critiquing, you know, social welfare. So do you not like the military? Because that’s kind of what you’re saying. But the fact is that the one of the good things about the pensions is that they did not discriminate racially. Which is really fascinating, given everything we’ve been talking about, and even more so because they never said anything about race, particularly about a civil war. It technically meant anyone who served, especially African-Americans, indigenous people, could apply for a pension. It did not mean you would get one, but you could at least start that process and the process to get either an invalid or veteran pension or a dependents pension, which ranged from fathers, mothers, widows to children up to about 16 years old, could span generations. In fact, I believe one of the last, if not the last Civil War widow pensioner was she died a few years ago. Right. So it’s like this. People are still with us. But the pension process was complicated, highly bureaucratic, extremely invasive, because once you submitted that application, you’ve essentially open yourself up to scrutiny for the federal government to look into nearly, if not all, aspects of not just your military service your entire life. Nothing is out of balance during that investigation. Nothing.”
