By the Civil War, most Americans had forgotten the Black soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. While portraits of George Washington and Andrew Jackson hung in parlors across the country, the Black soldiers serving under the famed generals had scarcely been remembered.  Yet by the 1880s Black soldiers became so prominent that African American writers sought to unmoor racial uplift strategies from military service. Veneration of the soldiers continued into the twenty-first century. So, how did Black wartime heroes go from laying in the unmarked graves of American memory to a time-tested means of civil rights activism only a couple of decades later?

As Jonathan Lande shows, Americans recalled Black Civil War soldiers and saw their service as a crucial moment in the freedom struggle. Within five years of the war’s end, William Wells Brown and Frances Rollin identified the significance of the war to the nation’s survival and dedicated themselves to the value of history as a political tool. Building on the example of abolitionist William Cooper Nell, who had reshaped Black historical writing to stress military service in the 1850s, Brown and Rollin continued their prewar struggle against racism writing histories of Black Civil War soldiers’ gallantry. In doing so, Brown and Rollin crafted an enduring symbol—a veritable Black badge of courage—that helped secure African Americans a new place in the polity and cemented Black soldiers as extraordinary if not unrivaled liberators in American history.

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