Jonathan’s Freedom Soldiers (Oxford University Press) recounts formerly enslaved soldiers’ fight for freedom and justice during the US Civil War.

Freedom Soldiers explores how the soldiers’ flight from the army, deemed “desertion” by government officials, and the defenses of their actions within military courts and prisons shaped freedom as emancipation unfolded during America’s bloodiest war.

Here are reflections on Freedom Soldiers from scholars of the war, slavery, and emancipation.

“Jonathan Lande’s Freedom Soldiers is a persuasive and unflinching account of what it meant to escape slavery and seek liberation in the highly disciplined world of the U.S. army during the Civil War. Lande’s sensitive reading of Black soldiers’ testimonies reveals an unmistakable truth: That the fight for liberation was all-encompassing and sometimes meant resisting one’s own allies too. A welcome and original portrait of the hard-fought battle for Emancipation in the United States.”—Amy Murrell Taylor, author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps

“Freedom Soldiers draws on a terrific array of sources to reveal Black Union soldiers as enlisted freedom-seekers whose flight from slavery did not end in the ranks of the Union Army, but rather continued as they contested the terms of their employment and challenged strictures that impeded their sense of what freedom should mean. Jonathan Lande engages scholarly conversations about wartime emancipation, desertion, and labor history and tells us something new about each. Most of all, Lande brings Black Union soldiers alive, not as unidimensional tropes, but as fathers, siblings, husbands, dreamers, protestors, friends, advocates—in short, as fully realized individuals.”—Chandra Manning, Georgetown University

“Freedom’s Soldiers explodes conventional narratives about the U.S. Colored Troops, the Union army’s segregated branch during the Civil War. Focusing primarily on formerly enslaved men who ran afoul of military regulations, Jonathan Lande illuminates a second front in the struggle to defeat the Confederacy and destroy slavery, one in which they fought for respect and recognition of their status as free men who cared deeply about their families, their comrades, and the nation. Here the enemy consisted not of gray-clad soldiers but of the blue-clad officers who viewed them as modeling clay to be molded into an image of northern middle-class manhood that bore little resemblance to the men’s reality. The history of Black Civil War soldiers will not look quite the same again.”—Joseph P. Reidy, author of Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

“Jonathan Lande has written a gripping new account of Black soldiers’ curation of their freedom. Freedom Soldiers reinterprets how we should think about the wages of war and liberation for Black men who fought gallantly to dismantle slavery on their own terms. Sometimes these men left posts to tend to their families, heal themselves, and decamped their units when they determined their work had been completed. Black soldiers exercised autonomy in their resistance. In Freedom Soldiers, Lande reveals how Black male soldiers reconceptualized honor and duty via elegant prose, convincing arguments, and extensive archival research. It is a book that is not only needed but should be a required read in Civil War History.”—Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of Connecticut