We Look Like Men Of War
Astonishing as it may seem, a number of people are still caught by surprise by stories of African American participation in the Union Army of the Civil War. Some 185,000 ex-slaves and free black citizens living in the North took up arms against the slaveholding Confederate States. One such regiment was the 28th Regiment of United States Colored Troops, the first black regiment recruited by the state of Indiana. William Forstchen, a member of the faculty at North Carolina’s Montreat College, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the unit and has now turned his hand to a fictional account of its wartime service. The tale is narrated by Sam Washburn, a young drummer boy with the 28th who had escaped with his friend Jim from the plantation that bound them. Sam’s introduction to the equally hard and strenuous life of freedom and his jarring entrance into the life of a soldier test his spirit and strength. Neither his life as a slave or as a child soldier prepare him for the horror of a Civil War battlefield. The 28th Regiment’s purgatory at the 1864 Battle of the Crater during Ulysses Grant’s siege of Petersburg, Virginia symbolizes the courage and sacrifice of the onetime slaves who risked all for the opportunity to change the world in which they lived. Through it all, Sam grows and matures from slave to soldier to man. A nicely crafted sample of historical fiction.
John R. Vallely
