The Colored Regulars in the United States Army

Before the history of Black soldiers in America could be written, someone had to write it. T.G. Steward did. Published in 1899 by an army chaplain who understood that the heroism of Black troops in Cuba demanded documentation before it faded into the same silence that had swallowed their Revolutionary War service, their Civil War sacrifice, their frontier campaigns. This book was an act of preservation and defiance: Steward gathered formal military records, personal accounts, and the diary of Medal of Honor winner E.L. Baker to construct the first comprehensive narrative of men who fought for a country that had not yet agreed to fight for them. The scope spans from the Revolutionary War's Rhode Island Regiment through the Civil War's United States Colored Troops to the Buffalo Soldiers of the frontier, men whose courage the Apache and Comanche respected enough to name them. But the book builds toward its climax in 1898: four Black regiments charging at El Caney, rescuing Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, serving as nurses in yellow fever camps while the nation that praised their valor at home enforced Jim Crow and tolerated lynchings. This is the central paradox Steward illuminates with careful documentation: the country that sent Black men to die in its wars had not yet decided whether they deserved to live as full citizens in peace.