Guy Emerson Mount: How did the African American Civil War Soldiers project come about?
John Clegg: For the past several years I have been trying to use the methods of digital history to explore some of the core themes of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Initially, I wanted to see if I could measure the frequency of slave self-emancipation during the war—effectively mapping what Du Bois called the “general strike.” I soon found that the Union Army kept few records on fugitives and refugees, but very detailed records on the 200,000 African American men who signed up to fight the confederacy, about 70% of whom had been enslaved at the start of the war. Their enlistment, which Du Bois called the “meat and kernel of the war,” presents us with a window through which we can trace the broader process of emancipation from below as it spread through the South from 1861 to 1865.
The scale and detail of these military records make them a very valuable source for historians, so I was surprised to find that so few scholars had made use of them. This is surely in part because you used to have to travel to the National Archives in DC to study them. However, this year the National Archives finally put scans of all the records online. With the support of the African American Civil War Museum, I launched a crowd-sourcing project to transcribe these records, building a comprehensive and searchable database of the soldiers. The database will be freely available to all researchers.
Mount: What kinds of information do the records contain?
Clegg: When I began this project I was mainly interested in the geographic locations contained in the records, which allow us to follow an individual soldier from birth to enlistment to their movements during the war and their place of demobilization (when we move on to transcribing the pension records we will also be able to follow the surviving veterans into the post-war decades). I wanted to map these individual movements in order to visualize Du Bois’s “general strike” and explore its impact on the politics of Reconstruction. As soon as I began to explore the records, however, I found that they were full of fascinating clues to the individual life stories of the soldiers, most of whom, as I mentioned, were enslaved at the start of the war. I thus concluded that it would be best to transcribe everything, because every bit of information can shed light on the lives of people who are otherwise largely invisible to historians.