African-American Civil War veterans and their survivors tell their own stories in this compilation of excerpts from Civil War pension files. The pension file excerpts selected for each chapter reflect different aspects of the lives of these African-Americans who experienced slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction: their pre-war experiences, their military service during the Civil War, their post-war mobility, economic status, and health status, and their marriage and family relationships. An appendix provides full transcriptions of some of the documents excerpted in the text.

I've collected several complete Civil War pension files while researching my family history, so I was already familiar with the types of documents included in many pension files. Like many of these African-American applicants, some of my white ancestors could not document their age, and may not have known their exact age. One of the biggest differences in the African-American pension files are the questions concerning personal identity and relationship status. Many African-Americans enlisted under a slave name and took another name after the war. Pension examiners had to determine whether the applicant was the same person who served under a different name. Slave marriages were not recorded in county record offices, and marriage and family relationships were severed through the sale of slaves or the division of estates after a slave owner's death. The affidavits and special examinations excerpted in this book were attempts to establish the proofs of identity and marital status that were required for a pension to be issued.

The most memorable excerpt for me came from the deposition of a woman who had been married to a pension applicant. Her husband was involved in the murder of a white man, and, abandoning his family, he left his home and changed his identity to avoid being lynched. His pension was approved, and the federal Pension Bureau officials did not turn him in to the state authorities because, according to the special examiner, the murdered man "was a miserable white man who did need killing & got it."

The editors state that their target audience includes both lay and academic readers. I think the work is best suited for non-specialists. Most readers with an academic interest in the topic will want to access the pension files directly, either by visiting the National Archives or by ordering copies of individual pension files from the Archives. (Civil War pension files will eventually be available by remote electronic access upon the completion of a massive digitization project.) ( )