Abstract
Existing historiography on Black memory of the American Civil War has not adequately addressed the role of Black northern veterans in shaping their own remembrance narratives. This dissertation argues through the venue of New England that Black veterans worked to create their own memory structures that not only served to further emancipationist explanations for the conflict but were also used to extend their own citizenship benefits. By building upon wartime successes over equality in pay, Black veterans are shown to have successfully fought for the fair disbursement of bonus payments, for integration of schooling, and for a stake in public expressions of Civil War memory. Building upon this, New England’s Black veterans faced the end of formal Reconstruction in 1877 by engaging in a complicated negotiation with white veterans who were in search of a new meaning for their own wartime service. A white meaning that became unmoored from a connection with the punishment of the south following the end of federal occupation. It is argued that New England’s white veterans only turned to integration of the war’s principal northern veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, after 1877, by adopting elements of an emancipationist narrative for the war that had been sustained and promulgated by the region’s Black veterans. The work furthermore makes critical interventions through the use of little-utilized local Grand Army of the Republic records, along with a wide breadth of other primary material, to reconstruct the lives of New England’s Black veterans. Interventions that seek to explore further Black activism by looking in detail at the lived realities of Black veterans, and argues how these ex-soldiers were more than symbols of the citizenship struggle, but were men deeply concerned with how their daily experiences could enhance their own attempts at extending their citizenship rights within a continuum of Black military service.