Jonathan’s forthcoming book, Valiant Men of War (Yale University Press), recounts how Black Civil War soldiers and their families used military service to not only destroy slavery and save the Union but also to revolutionize the South. His first book, Freedom Soldiers (Oxford University Press), recounts formerly enslaved soldiers’ fight for freedom and justice during the US Civil War.

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Valiant Men of War: Black Soldiers’ Fight for Family, Honor, and Nation in the Civil War South tells the story of Black Civil War Soldiers who fought for their manhood in numerous sites. They served the nation as warriors while caring for enslaved and recently emancipated family members struggling to find shelter, food, and warmth. The troopers also clashed with irregular fighters, enforced federal authority on prisoners of war, and resisted army officers who treated them as little more than slaves. These soldiers ultimately disproved–in various spaces–those who dismissed them as unmanly cowards and remade the South into a region where they could raise a family and enjoy liberty.

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Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons 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

“Lande provides one of the most original studies of Black troops in the Civil War in the last five decades. In the end he unveils the tribulations of Black freedom seekers as they challenged their own circumstances and treatment-what the soldiers considered the challenges and limitations of their own freedom while fighting to liberate their Black brethren. …This excellent book opens new windows onto the Black emancipation experience.” — John David Smith, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

“Lande’s nuanced analysis rests on his prodigious research and careful assessment of army courts-martial transcripts. … Lande does what many of us seek to do, using archives intended to document official voices to give voice to the voiceless, in this case, to understand what freedom meant to people at the center stage of one of America’s most significant historical events, the emancipation of four million enslaved Americans.” — Barbara Gannon, H-Net Reviews

“Freedom Soldiers provides an important perspective to emancipation studies and to Black military service historiography. Lande’s contention that “On and off the battlefield, they marched toward freedom, fighting a war for liberation against enslavers—and within the ranks” is well argued and backed by impressive evidence.” — Tim Talbott, Emerging Civil War

“Lande makes excellent use of letters, court martial testimony and prison petitions to give voice to these marginalised men, often stigmatised with the deceptively simple label of deserter. Even if court martial members and reviewing officials were unmoved by the soldiers’ explanations and defences, their words provide historians with unique insights into their private lives, struggles, grievances and priorities. Throughout the book, Lande weaves personal stories of court martial cases with a clear analysis of the broader labour and military contexts in which the accused individuals served. For Civil War and Reconstruction era scholars and students, Freedom Soldiers is a compelling and essential read with thought-provoking conclusions about the deeper meaning and implications of emancipation for many of the Black Americans who served in Union blue.” — Matthew Barrett, Canadian Military History

“Freedom Soldiers provides a fresh perspective on the issue of Black military desertion.” — Dwain Coleman, American Historical Review