Dr. Jonathan Lande explores Lincoln’s recruitment of Black soldiers during Civil War in recent article

In his recently published journal article, Dr. Jonathan Lande, assistant professor in the Department of History at Purdue University, probes the political and societal forces influencing President Abraham Lincoln’s recruitment of Black soldiers during the American Civil War.

“Prompted by the Strongest Motive”: Enslaved Americans’ Role in Abraham Lincoln’s Decision to Arm Black Men was published in the latest edition of The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 

Dr. Lande says that Lincoln believed African Americans "were essential to Union victory" because they had the strongest motivation to fight as soldiers – freedom for their families and themselves.

Based on his research of extensive historical sources and accounts, Dr. Lande explains how Lincoln reached the decision to add a clause in the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation that permitted the enlistment of African American men in the Union Army.

Previously, Lincoln’s decision to arm Black men was in question. Drawing on a trove of period interviews and recollections of Lincoln, Dr. Lande shows that the president’s meetings with those who fled slavery and the reading of histories about Black Revolutionary War soldiers in the months before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation made the difference. “In these critical months,” Dr. Lande concludes, “Black freedom fighters persuaded Lincoln to arm liberated Southerners by convincing him of their courage and determination to be free.”

Dr. Lande joined the Department of History at Purdue in 2020. He earned his PhD at Brown University in 2018. Prior to joining Purdue, he was the Brown University-Tougaloo College Exchange Faculty Fellow (2017-2018) and the Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at New York Historical Society and the New School (2018-2019).

Dr. Lande is the author of Freedom Soldiers, a history of enlisted freedom seekers who fought for liberation in the camps, courts, and prisons of the US Army during the Civil War. He has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of African American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Civil War History, and the Washington Post. He has been a research fellow at, among other institutions, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Huntington Library, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition of Yale University.

Dr. Lande is currently completing Valiant Men of War: Black Soldiers’ Fight for Family, Honor, and Nation in the Civil War South, a book that details the battles of freed Southerners not only in combat against Confederates but also for their families, across the occupied South, and in prisoner of war camps during the nation’s great conflict.

Read the full article in The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association at this link: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jala/article/46/1/52/397400/Prompted-by-the-Strongest-Motive-Enslaved 

Learn more about Dr. Jonathan Lande: https://cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/jonathan-lande.html

Source: Dr. Jonathan Lande, jlande@purdue.edu

Engraving: Watts, James W., -1895, Engraver, Henry Walker Herrick, and Lucius Stebbins. Reading the Emancipation Proclamation / H.W. Herrick, del., J.W. Watts, SC., ca. 1864. [Hartford, Conn.: S.A. Peters and Co] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003678043/.

Photo: Smith, William Morris, photographer. District of Columbia. Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln. Washington D.C. United States Washington D.C. District of Columbia, None. [Between 1863 and 1866] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018667050/.