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W. E B. Du Bois’s discomfort with the relationship between military service, manhood, and freedom seems at odds with the view held by many people at the time, particularly abolitionists, who imagined the military as not only the most direct path to political equality for African Americans and the swiftest route to slavery’s destruction but also as an indispensable vehicle for the internal transformation of slaves into free men and citizens. (Guy)
For the most part, historians have accepted Douglass’s equation of fighting and freedom. Shortly after the war, abolitionist-turned-historian William Wells Brown took the view of the army as a vehicle of black liberation and recounted the important contributions black troops made to the Union victory in The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and Fidelity.3 Brown’s history was part of a much larger movement to use black military sacrifice as leverage for political rights, particularly voting, which animated many of the postwar debates over Reconstruction on both the national and grassroots levels. The political importance of this history continued after Reconstruction’s disappointing end. (Guy)
Yet if military service ushered in a new world of freedom, it did so unevenly. Although soldiering enabled black men to make claims on the state in new and powerful ways, building a political identity on the foundation of military service proved unstable. As Mary Frances Berry notes in her study of how the legal status of African Americans changed as a result of their Civil War service, when black soldiers were no longer needed to secure a military victory for the Union, the impetus to sustain their rights as citizens faded. Thus, the gains won in large part through black men’s military sacrifice, including the right to vote, receded all too quickly. (Guy)