I'm going to be talking about letters from the Philippines written by a soldier named Andrew Wadsworth from Nebraska between the years 1898 and 1900.

Andrew Wadsworth is born in New Lebanon, NY, in 1869; he moves out to Beatrice, NE, to live with his uncle in 1887. He works in his uncle's jewelry shop. In the meantime, he enlists in Company C of the Nebraska National Guard. In 1897, tensions are heating up between the U.S. and Spain over the status of Cuba. At that point, the United States had long standing interests in Cuba in terms of sugar, in terms of the U.S.'s larger strategic objectives. When a humanitarian crisis erupts over Spain's attempt to suppress a Cuban rebellion, this inflames a humanitarian crusade in the United States to do something. The American public begins to be prepared for some sort of intervention. As is well known, the U.S.S Maine is sent to the Havana harbor in the spring of 1898 to protect American options and also to protect Americans in Cuba, and it's blown up. This inflames the American public for war.

Wadsworth in Nebraska is learning about what's happening. He sees that his company is about to be mobilized. He is not sent to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-Cuban-American War, but in fact he's sent west. He's sent west because the first campaign of the war against Spain is in fact—the decision to send Commodore Dewey and the Pacific Squadron to Manila, which was in Spain's last and largest colony in Asia at that time. This was very much part of a larger strategic plan to extend U.S. power into Asia; to get U.S. bases and naval power close to China. So Wadsworth is sent along with his company first to San Francisco—where he's mustered out—and then he's sent to Honolulu, and then they end up in Manila, after Dewey has defeated the Spanish navy. He's part of an initial group of about 13,000 U.S. soldiers that are sent after the Spanish fleet is destroyed. He finds himself in Cavite, near Manila, and spends several months kind of wondering what his forces are in fact doing there: the Spanish have been defeated in terms of naval power.

At that time a Filipino revolution has—which had initially been defeated by Spain in 1897—has been renewed, has successfully overthrown Spanish power on the mainland of Luzon. The U.S.'s relationship to that revolution is unclear. Wadsworth is able to see the revolution's battles against Spain at a distance, but he's not really sure exactly what U.S. forces are doing there. He says this in his letters. He says, "It's strange that we're here because, as far as we're concerned, the battle against the Spanish has been won at sea."

In August, the United States basically coordinates with Spain to have the Spanish surrender the capitol city of Manila. There's a battle—it's very brief—U.S. forces occupy the city, and importantly they make sure that the revolution stays out of the capitol. Again, there's this very ambiguous relationship between U.S. and Filipino forces. On the one hand, there's a kind of tacit understanding that the U.S. is there to liberate the Philippines from Spain, but it's not clear whether that's to liberate it for the United State's purposes or Filipino purposes. Then it becomes very clear—when U.S. forces basically take the capitol and occupy it, protecting Spaniards from Filipino insurgents—that they’re there to occupy the isles.

Wadsworth and his unit end up in Manila—which is a highly armed area—and he says we can walk around here without weapons it's so locked-down, against both internal disruption and also in terms of outside Filipino forces.

You can see Wadsworth's perceptions of Filipinos changing over the time period that he's in the Philippines. From the mid-1898 period when he arrives—when he has kind of this ambiguous relationship to the campaign in the Philippines—to the early part of 1899, when the war against the Filipinos starts.

In the pre-war period, when he's in Manila, he and other soldiers have a set of very complex interactions with the Filipinos on the ground. Filipinos run a lot of the shops in the area—there's casual commercial contact in terms of bars, in terms of buying fruit, buying food. Wadsworth in his letters reflects a certain ambivalence about Filipinos and about Filipino society. He reflects on the fact that Manila is not as highly hygienic as he'd like it to be. When it comes to Filipinos, he has a lot of nice things to say actually. For example, Filipino bands will come to the military bases in order to play to entertain these troops that aren't fighting. Wadsworth writes about these very lively evenings in which Filipino bands will play, soldiers will sing, it will be this lively several hours, and then he'll say Filipinos are natural-born musicians and artists, for example. At one point, even before he lands in Manila, he reflects casually upon his first real encounter with Filipinos. He says Filipinos are "as bright and intelligent as the average run of people." So it's this kind of offhanded, yeah, they're sort of like us, they're kind of like everyday people that I know.

During that window in late 1898, Wadsworth and his comrades are basically just hanging out in Manila. There's a lot of description of touring, seeing the sights, he's feasting; by the end of 1898 he's starting to get a little bored, they really are beginning to wonder what the heck they're doing there. Wadsworth says, "We came here to fight, and it doesn't look like we're going to get to fight anybody here." That reality changes towards the end of 1898.

U.S. diplomats settle the status of the Philippines at the Treaty of Paris, that begins to meet in the fall of 1898. No Filipino delegates or diplomats are allowed to participate. So this is basically the United States and Spain sitting down to negotiate the fate of the islands—not reflecting the fact that much of the islands are, in fact, not occupied by the U.S. or Spain, but in fact a Philippine government that's declared itself independent. When word gets back that the U.S. has basically pushed Spain to surrender sovereignty over the islands for a payment of $20 million, it becomes clear to the Filipinos on the ground that the U.S.'s formal statements that it is engaging in what was called "benevolent assimilation," were in fact not so benevolent—that in fact the U.S. is preparing a military occupation. So tensions on the ground begin to rise.

In February 1899, just on the brink of the Senate's ratification of the Treaty of Paris, fighting breaks out on the outskirts of Manila between U.S. and Filipino forces when U.S. sentries fire on some Filipino sentries. So suddenly there's war in the Philippines. It's not clear exactly what this conflict is going to be called. To call it a "war" would be to acknowledge that this is a [conflict] with an independent state. So, the official language that's used in the U.S. is that this is an "insurrection," this is in a sense a kind of internal problem of law and order against our legitimate authority.

Wadsworth finds himself fighting on the outskirts of Manila during the early months of the campaign. As I was tracking his letters in the archive from this period where he's hanging out in Manila, socializing, having a good time, into the war period, very quickly his language changes in terms of describing Filipinos. Within the span of a few months we've seen him basically talking about Filipinos as sort of bright and intelligent as other people, to using the most hostile and violent racial language to describe them. When I saw this, I was really struck by it, because it really went against the conventional wisdom which was that the soldiers on the ground were immediately going to apply racial vocabularies from the domestic context to the Philippines. It told me a lot about the way that context really mattered for these soldiers, that something about the setting itself and the kind of situation in which they found themselves was fundamentally shaping the way they understood their presence in the Philippines.

There's a whole series of efforts to minimize the conflict even when it's happening. There's this initial decision to call it the "Philippine Insurrection." But then one of the things that we see—which I think is very striking—is a whole series of declarations that the war is over. In any case, the war bogs down in 1900. In November 1900, there's a presidential election [and] McKinley is reelected. [It was] an election that had as one of its major themes the question of imperialism. This is seen as a referendum on imperialism by the advocates of the war; they say, "Well, the Filipinos can't possibly sustain any more resistance now that the American people have spoken, so the war is over yet again." Of course, the resistance continues. Then, in March 1901, Aguinaldo is captured; the declaration is, "Well, now the revolution can't proceed without its main leader." Resistance continues yet again. Then in basically May of 1902, Theodore Roosevelt makes a public announcement that the war is over.

I think one of the interesting things about U.S. colonialism at the turn of the century is that it's waged and promoted in the language of liberation, at least initially. This in some ways begins in the Cuban context, with the question of liberating Cuba from the oppressive Spanish. So [there's] this language of where the U.S. intervenes it's going to liberate. That really becomes quite powerful in the American public sphere. And I think this gets transferred to some extent to the Philippine context, because when the U.S. intervenes initially in the Philippines it imagines that it's going to be liberating Filipinos from oppressive Spanish rule. There's a sense that this liberation is going to be freeing, it's going to be benevolent, it's going to reflect positively on the kind of world power that the U.S. is going to be.

One of the important audiences for this kind of language is the European powers. Up until 1898, the U.S. has a kind of inferiority complex vis-à-vis the European powers. Here it is, it's this growing industrial giant that has conquered and consolidated its hold on the North American continent in the 19th century, but it doesn't have overseas colonies at a time when that is the measure of what it is to be a European power. 1898 is an important moment in terms of sending those messages out to the world. The U.S. is now on the world stage. But in doing so, it doesn't want to appear to be identical to the European powers. So, the language of liberation is also about trying to set some distance between the U.S. and the European powers. It says, yes we are going to be an empire-building nation, but in fact we're going to liberate our subjects rather than conquer them.

In some of the soldiers' letters you have that of sense of a kind of perverse sense of ingratitude—we're here to liberate you, and you clearly don't understand our good intentions. The way I see this manifesting itself most, though, is in very sarcastic use of a language of liberation in soldiers' letters. The soldiers are able to get a hold of newspapers from the United States that their families are sending them, so they know that senators who are defending the war are talking about uplift, are taking about civilization and benevolence, and they look at the kind of war they're fighting. For them this is a kind of degraded form of war, so they see this language of uplift and benevolence coming through in terms of justifying this war and their response is one of bitter irony.

I had been studying this war for a while by the time that I got to the archives and the fact that I was surprised by what I saw is something that on the one hand I think many historians experience. You go into the archives with one set of questions, and if you are really paying attention to what's in front of your face, it will inevitably change your opinion. It needs to change your opinion, because if it doesn't alter your preconceptions, then you are imposing them on the sources rather than letting the sources speak to you.

With that said, the fact that I was surprised by what I saw also says that the soldiers' opinions are not really well collected, they are not very available to students or to scholars even. And I think there may be a number of reasons for that. When I think of how an archive gets built, how is it that a soldier's letter goes from a shoebox in somebody's attic in to an excerpted box in a textbook? That happens, I think, in part because someone—usually a family member or a community member—is aware this is historically significant. Then it gets collected, it gets archived, and I think there's something about the way that this war [had] been kind of sidelined that prevented some of that communication from happening.

The first letter, first chronologically, was a letter written in October of 1862 by Jasper Barney, a private in an Illinois regiment. He fought for the Union Army, he was a farmer from Illinois and he is writing to his brother-in-law, another family member, about the state of the war and particularly about Emancipation.

The second letter is written the following month, November of 1862, but it is by a white Confederate soldier, prosperous farmer John White to his wife. And he is writing at a moment when militarily, the Confederacy is enjoying more success but Confederate civilians are living with the uncertainties of having a war fought in their own backyard. He's also writing about the Emancipation Proclamation and the fears that it has stirred up amongst Confederate civilians at home. His letter is a very personal letter too, in that he is quite forthcoming with his wife about how much he misses home and how torn he feels between his desire to be home and protect his family and the need to fight this war.

And then the third letter is written in February of 1864. It is by a black member of the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, a black regiment. And he is writing from the city of New Orleans, which his regiment is occupying at the time to really articulate what he and many other black soldiers see as the stakes, as why this war matters for black Americans in particular.

Men in a regiment, or at least in a company, tended to enlist together. So letters that come from home will be read probably by more than one person, will probably be read out loud. A letter to home will often include a passage that says, "Brother A says to say, 'X, Y, Z'" With Civil War soldier's letters the vagaries of letter survival can skew our picture a little bit. The letters to home have a much greater survival rate than the letters from home to the front.

The letters from home don't survive because soldiers have nothing that they can do with them. Also, before battle soldiers are likely to destroy any personal letters that they have on them. Their fear is if personal letters are found on them that the enemy will somehow use that information.

The Union has the U.S. Postal Service; the Confederacy never really has a very efficient or working postal service. There's travel back and forth between home and the frontlines all the time, so often somebody from home or nearby is in camp and going home and you send letters that way and when that person comes they bring letters. There are also private express companies.

Jasper Barney's in the hospital when he writes the letter. He is trying to recover from a wound so the first part of the letter is about recovering from his wound and that actually in one sense is typical because almost every soldier's letter talks about his health to almost excessive degrees.

The letter is written in October of 1862, and in the fall of 1862 there's quite a lot of turbulence on the Northern home front and regarding the Union Army cause in general. The war militarily had gone fairly well for the Union in the early months of 1862 and then in the summer of 1862 the war started going poorly for the Union militarily and the North sort of woke up to the fact that this was going to be a much longer war than anybody had anticipated. So by the fall of 1862 the Northern home front and soldiers are still trying to cope with that realization.

One of those new measures that is taken to fight the war is the Emancipation Proclamation. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had been issued on September 22nd of 1862 and the Emancipation Proclamation really changed the whole aim of a war that had been begun to save the Union. Now it becomes a war also to end slavery. Now those two goals had never been completely separable but the official line had always been "This is a war to save the Union" and not to have really much of anything to do with slavery. Those changes really rocked much of the Civil War North, particularly the Northern home front.

You have quite a lot of dissent among white Northerners over the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Northerners, there is no dissent. They think this is exactly what has been needed since well before the war began. There are a number of issues at stake in the 1862 elections. There are economic issues, there are issues having to do with civil liberties, what actions can and cannot the United States government take during wartime and there's the war and of course there's the Emancipation Proclamation.

Meanwhile you have a number of new soldiers entering the ranks. So you have elections, tumult and dissent, and a host of new soldiers coming into the army, all at about the same time. And that's when this letter is written.

This letter is written by Barney who has actually been in the army for a while. So he is writing as an experienced soldier to his brother-in-law who has just joined. Barney, who would normally show a certain modicum of deference or respect for his more socially-elite and older brother-in-law thinks that this is too important an issue to stand on ceremony and so he tells him straight up, I think that you're wrong, I think that the Emancipation Proclamation is exactly what is needed to end this war. And what is more, you're going to think so too as soon as you have been in the war for any length of time.

Barney is fairly typical, he certainly wouldn't have called himself an abolitionist, he certainly would not have predicted that in less than a year he would be calling for the end of an institution that's older than the nation itself. It's quite a radical thing to talk about ending slavery in the 1860s. He's undergone what is a huge transformation in his thinking. As you can see from the letter to his brother in law, his family has not really kept up with this transition. So a gulf has really opened between many soldiers and their families at home.

He is on the Emancipation question even on the first paragraph, he says, "Now my lady love is more attentive for I got a letter from her yesterday. She is all right on the goose question." "All right on the goose" means how you stand on the slavery question, she agrees with him about Emancipation so he is pleased about that.

Then in the next paragraph he's addressing what he sees as his brother-in-law's mistaken views. "You say in your letter that you or your regiment is not in for freeing the Negroes. I am sorry to hear it. You wanted to know what I and my comrades thought of the Negro question. I think Old Abe's Proclamation is all right and there is very few old soldiers that is against it. It is my opinion that yourself and the greater part of your regiment will be in favor of it before you are in the service six months. I was of the same opinion of yourself when I first came into the service but I have learned better. You said you thought the thing would come to a finish by spring if the Negroes was left alone, but I think you will soon find out different. For it is my opinion that the war will never come to a close while the Negroes is left where they are to raise supplies for the rebel army. Even if we could suppress the rebellion and leave the main root where it was before, it wouldn't be long before they would try the same game as before. But if we take away the main root of evil and confiscate all their property they will have nothing to fight for hereafter."

First of all, it's the war that has changed his opinion. Second of all, it's going to change his brother-in-law's opinion too. His reasoning is actually quite pragmatic, what he's talking about is the recognition that without the institution of slavery there never would have been a war. So if we want the war to end and if we want not to fight it again we have to get rid of the cause. That passage encapsulates quite well a major shift in thinking that goes on. It's a pretty astute analysis on his part and on many soldiers' part that there's no way that the Confederacy could have conducted a four-year war without a slave labor force. The Confederate workforce is mobilized, is in the army.

"Old Abe gave them 90 days and that was long enough for them to come to terms and save their property and Negroes, but it seems like they wanted to go the whole hog or none. Now, I think it is perfectly right to take the hog and leave them none and then if they ain't satisfied, I am in for banishing every rebel and rebel sympathizer from the U.S. I am a whole soul Union man and believe in giving the rebels a lesson to be remembered in after generations. Then we will never be troubled with civil war again."

He's talking about the precise terms of the Emancipation Proclamation here. The Emancipation Proclamation issued on September 22nd is actually more, probably the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and what it says is that the slaves in the states that are still in rebellion against the Union as of January 1st, 1863, will be freed.

And so essentially it's an ultimatum delivered to states in rebellion and the reverse of it would say, therefore if you return to the Union before January 1st, 1863, your slaves won't be freed. And the Proclamation says that because it is operating in a context of a Constitution that protects slavery.

And so, the Emancipation Proclamation can only justify itself as a war measure. So what he is saying is, Lincoln gave the states 90 days to come back. He gives them a chance to retain slavery and if they won't take that chance, if their demands in terms of greater protection for slavery are more important to them than coming back in the Union and keeping slavery where it is then they made their own bed and let them lie in it.

By the time Barney writes this letter he has no qualms at all about confiscating the property of even non-combatants. As he sees it now the only thing that's going to end this war is to take a much harder line, to take away the root of the war.

And in the next paragraph he wants to assure his brother-in-law that 'I am not some wild-eyed abolitionist here, I am not a crazy reformer, this is in fact what most of us hardened commonsensical soldiers think.' He says, "Well, I think I gave you a very good sample of the opinions of myself and comrades."

I think the next paragraph is a good clue into the sort of limits of growing Emancipation sentiment among the Union Army, in other words he is all for ending slavery, but ending slavery is quite different in his view from increasing rights of former slaves or anything approaching racial equality.

You see that when he says, "P.S. I am not in favor of freeing the Negroes and leaving them to run free and mingle among us. Neither is such the intention of Old Abe, but we will send them off and colonize them. The government is already making preparations for the same and you may be assured it will be carried into effect."

So he doesn't know what should become of former slaves, but he certainly doesn't want them living among his own friends and family in the North. He refers to a passage in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that does not mandate but suggests as a possible outcome for former slaves, 'maybe they'd be happier if we send them back to Africa or to some place in South America and they could start their own society.'

By the time of the final Proclamation all reference to colonization has been omitted. Slavery was Southern, but prejudice was nationwide. And so colonization was sort of a way of coping with the tension between the insistence that we really need to get rid of slavery and uncertainty about what do we do with real slaves?

The Confederate soldier is named John White. He is part of the army of Northern Virginia, which is the fabled army of Robert E. Lee and he is writing from Fredericksburg, VA, in late November of 1862. So he's essentially writing while Union forces are getting ready to try and take Fredericksburg. It's cold, it's miserable, it's wet, his letter may or may not make it outside of battle lines. He's writing to his wife, there are armies in her backyard. Moreover, White's wife lives in a part of the state where there are slaves and there is a terror that the war is going to inspire a slave insurrection. Those fears are present from the very beginning of the war but at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation they become even more acute.

There is more uncertainty and there is a lot more worry in his letter. Even though militarily the war's going a lot better for his side at this time than it is for Barney's side. The Confederacy is very centralized, much more centralized than the Union and the Confederate Government nationalizes the economy to a much greater degree than the Union could even dream of doing.

And there's major disagreement about whether the Confederate State has any authority to do this. The reason why that disagreement doesn't spill over into a massive rush to rejoin the Union is all that stuff stinks, but it's not as bad as the Union. And I think that's the calculus that goes on in the minds of most Confederate soldiers. It's not liking the Union more than liking or feeling any attachment to the Confederacy that keeps the Confederate army in the ranks. Civilians are ready to throw in the towel a lot earlier than soldiers are.

He starts off by talking about a local neighbor's and he explains that's how he got some letters from his wife and is able to send some letters to her. But then, he hasn't even gone through the state of his health or the health of all their children or their friends at home before he gets to his concerns about the possibility of slave insurrection.

So his two main concerns, right from the outset are one, we can't be in touch with each other as much as I would like us to be and two, you're worried and I'm worried about slave uprising.

He talks about the battle that he calls Sharpsburg and Union soldiers would call Antietam. The battle of Antietam took place on September 17th of 1862, right before the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederacy stages a number of invasions of Union soil in the fall of 1862. Robert E. Lee's army marches into Maryland and the Union Army meets the Confederate Army at Sharpsburg, the name of the town in Maryland, along a creek called Antietam Creek.

The Confederates tend to name battles after the town nearest where a battle is fought while the Union tends to name battles after natural features, most often bodies of water. Militarily that battle was a draw, but it counts as enough of a Union victory because the Confederates were trying to invade the North. Their invasion was stopped at Antietam. And so the Confederates retreat back into the Confederacy.

Confederates do not see this as a devastating defeat by any means, but the Union has been so desperate for a victory because Lincoln has been trying to find a way to issue the Emancipation Proclamation since the summer of 1862. But he did not want to do it at a time when the Union Army appeared to be failing because then it would just look like a desperate move and that's not how he wanted it to look.

As you can see from White's description of the battle, he saw it as a terrible battle. But he doesn't really see it as a major Confederate defeat.

"Oh Matt, it almost makes me shudder to think of it. How will the 17th of September live in the memory of the 32nd Virginia Regiment and its friends? Oh, it was an awful day. Imagine my feelings, if you can, when I saw my comrades and friends falling all around me from the death-dealing shot and shell of the enemy and knew not how soon it would be my fate. Thanks be to a kind providence, I came out unhurt but narrowly escaped. A ball passed through my blanket between my body and right arm. I shot my gun until I could hardly get a cartridge down her. Finally, they gave way and ran, hotly pursued by our brigade, the 32nd leading the charge until pursuit was dangerous. They were said to be three to our one."

He's writing this more than a month later, but it's still a pretty fresh impression of his experience of battle. It's such an overwhelming experience to be in a Civil War battle. The impressions are roaring noise, and smoke, and a horrific smell. And those are hard sensations to really write precise words about. And so there are a series of stock phrases that soldiers tend to fall back on. There's nothing in her experience that he could compare it to. It doesn't so much make his description hollow as highlight the enormity of the experience, because he's clearly an eloquent man, and yet that's too overpowering for him.

But it's really important to him for two reasons, one, the enormity of the battle itself but two, it becomes the occasion for this Emancipation Proclamation. White and his wife aren't shocked by the Emancipation Proclamation so much, they sort of have expected it, they thought since the beginning that the Union was out to destroy slavery and all this talk of Union is really just a red herring. But the Emancipation Proclamation makes those fears more real for them. Moreover, they worry that slaves are going to hear about this Emancipation Proclamation and will become emboldened and as a result will start holding uprisings and possibly go on killing sprees.

"Dear Matt, I must tell you I am in a hard place and know not what to do. When I think of my sufferings, both in mind and body which are indescribable and how much my services are needed home, I am tempted to try and get there. I see no probability of getting there if I remain in the service. The war is likely to last for years yet and I cannot reasonably expect to survive it. Besides this, you are threatened with an insurrection," which is again a reference to the slave uprising that they fear is going to happen because of the Emancipation Proclamation, "and how better can I die than defending my family and fireside. To do this, I came in the war and now that you are threated, I consider it my Christian duty to come to your rescue and protection. Dear Matt, you know that I love my country but I love my family better."

And I think in that passage he captures the dilemma that's going to be a dilemma for a great number of Confederate soldiers. And the dilemma is this; most Confederate soldiers don't own slaves. Two thirds of white families in the Confederacy are not slave owners. But they're not stupid, they know full well that this war was begun to protect the institution of slavery and they're not embarrassed about that. In fact, they agree that it was important and the reason why is not necessarily that they own slaves, they live in a place where 40 percent of the population is black. Parts of the Confederacy, the majority is black slaves. And they honestly believe that the two races cannot live together harmoniously without the institution of slavery.

"Dear Matt, you know that I love my country but I love my family better." Now that sounds to me like a very unguarded moment. That's not the sort of sentence you would want anyone you didn't really trust to see. Particularly in wartime when there were questions of loyalty, when there were questions of patriotism, when your own honor rests in part on your reputation for fearlessly defending your country. There's no censorship, there's no official mechanism by which superior officers are going to read his mail. But you don't know that it's not going to go amiss, that it's not going to get dropped somewhere and have someone pick it up. So that he took that risk really underscores the sincerity of that line for me.

The problem is, that if the heart of the motivation is to protect what one sees as the best interests, the health and the safety of one's family. And then the war to protect one's family starts threatening one's family, what do you do? Does he best protect his family by staying in the army and trying to secure an independent Confederacy where slavery will be protected forever or does he best help his family and protect his family by going home so that if there is an insurrection he's there to take care of them? And that tension will haunt him and will haunt most Confederate soldiers really for the rest of the war and is at the heart of the war experience for a very great many Confederate soldiers.

The third letter is written by a black Union soldier to the editor of the most prominent African American newspaper during the Civil War, the Weekly Anglo-African and black soldiers throughout their term of the service in the Union Armies do this. They write to Northern newspapers, particularly black newspapers, about their soldiering experience. The majority of black Union soldiers were former slaves who could not read and write and so we don't have letters from them. Who we have letters from are the minority, who are Northern free blacks, who could read and write before the war. They sort of see themselves as having obligations, not just to their family, representing the war experience to their family, but to a broader, at least black, public.

He is writing from New Orleans, LA, in February of 1864. This soldier is a member of the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. New Orleans has been under Union control since May of 1862 so he is really an occupation force.

He is also fighting two battles at once because initially black Northerners who tried to join the Union Army were refused. Black soldiers were not accepted into the Union ranks until 1862 and they didn't join in big numbers until 1863.

Once they're in the ranks, they're paid less. At first there are no black officers and at first they are barred from combat duty. So he is fighting to save the Union and to redefine it, to redefine it as a place where he and people like him are seen as citizens, are seen as invested with the same rights and promises as white Americans are. And you see evidence, I think, of both battles in this letter. The immediate audience for the Anglo-African is Northern blacks. However, all newspapers in the 19th century have a habit of picking up letters, columns, articles from one paper and running it in their own pages. There is always the chance that this could run in a white newspaper too.

So he always has a definite audience and a potential audience in mind.

"I will give a brief account of the battalion to which I am now attached, and to which I hope to belong until this cruel war is ended, and the nation enjoys once more the blessings of peace." Well there he's talking about Union versus the Confederacy but then the next passage after that he's onto the battle for respect for citizenship, for equality within the Union itself.

"The Battalion is composed of as good material and contains as brave hearts as any equal number of men that ever shouldered a musket in this war." We are just as good, we are just as brave as any other soldiers, including the white ones, is what he's saying there. "These men have left their own dear homes, their wives and children, of their own free will: why, then, should they not fight?" We have made the decision to fight in this war, just as white men have, so if one of the sort of hallmarks of fitness for citizenship is the ability to reason, to excerpt one's own free will, look, we have done that.

"Yes they will," fight, "as they know full well that this is the golden opportunity that they have given them to establish their manhood, and capability as soldiers before the world."

Manhood shows up all the time in black soldier's letters and it can have one of two meanings. Sometimes it means recognition of the full humanity of all black Americans. In this one, though, he clearly means the adult male identity of black men because one characteristic of the adult man in 19th-century American culture is the ability to take care of a family, the ability to support a wife and children. And its men who are entitled to full political rights and he has twice told his readers that 'we have characteristics of manhood. One is in the moral agency, that we of our own free will decided to do something and two is, we have wives and children, we support families. We therefore have the attributes of adult males and are entitled to the rights of adult males.' So he means manhood in that explicitly gendered way.

The next and final paragraph is a very conventional one. This is the sort of thing that shows up in a number of public letters. "If it be my lot to fall on the battle-field, I shall be content to die far from home and friends, if my ears are saluted by the shout of my comrades, 'The battle is over; the stars and stripes wave triumphantly, and the slave is free!' This is a letter that is not just telling loved ones how he feels but is really also fighting this very public campaign for respect for black soldiers and for African Americans in general.

He signs it with the name Macy and this is another challenge of working with black soldiers' letters. They take pseudonyms all the time. I don't know who this soldier is. That could have been a nickname, it could have been his first name, and he in fact does give his company and his regiment. But he doesn't sign his full name and so positive identification is a lot harder with black soldiers than with white soldiers.

I think juxtaposition works pretty well with letters. The Union and Confederate and the white and the black letters really do sound different. Students I think generally like reading letters too. They feel like real people that seems interesting to them. But having them read the letters against each other, just asking them what jumps out to you, what are they talking about, what strikes you, what surprises you, initial reactions.

With these particular letters it'll work pretty well. If what you want them to talk about is the Emancipation Proclamation it's all over those first two letters. Another strategy, a sort of teaching assignment might be to imagine the letter in response. You could talk about home front and battlefield using these letters because you could ask students to imagine how might Jasper Barney's brother-in-law have responded to this letter. Asking them to imagine responses I think also really makes them really engaged with the questions and the issues that are raised by the letters.

There's not a lot of talk about politics in the Union letter and there's often politics in Union letters. There's not overt criticism of Jefferson Davis or some aspect of the Confederacy in the Confederate letter which there often is in Confederate letters. At the time black soldiers are fighting for equal pay and you'd expect that to show up and it doesn't. In February of 1864 that's a hot issue and it not showing up is a little surprising. That is the drawback to using one letter. Of the letters that went amiss from John White, 12 of them might have talked about something that you would expect, but this letter doesn't. So, it's hard sometimes to resist the temptation to think we know everything about him from this one letter. We don't.