The Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored,) in the War to Preserve the Union, 1861-1865

Providence: Snow & Farnham, Printers and Publishers, 1898. Very good plus.. xi,343pp., plus thirty-nine photographic portrait plates. Original red cloth stamped in gilt. Floral endpapers. Minor edge wear, slight dust-soiling to spine but boards bright. Internally clean. An unusually nice copy of Chenery's scarce history of the African-American Fourteenth Rhode Island Regiment of Heavy Artillery. The unit saw their main combat in Louisiana and Texas during the Civil War. The present work begins with an overview of African American service beginning with the American Revolution, but rightly, most of the work is devoted to the unit's actions during Civil War. The book is particularly useful for tracking the troops comprising the Fourteenth Regiment; as Nevins points out, "half of this unique history of a Negro unit consists of muster rolls and short biographical sketches." Almost forty photographic portrait plates are peppered throughout the book, and feature the regiment's white officers.

"In an attempt to prove their worth as soldiers and to defeat the slave-holding South, both northern and southern blacks enlisted by droves in the Union army. Naturally, they also wanted to be active in securing the emancipation of slaves and ending slavery as an institution. When Colonel Thomas J. Morgan of the Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery took the opportunity to ask one of his black soldiers why he wanted to fight when he might very well lose his life, the artilleryman replied, 'But my people will be free'" - smallstatebighistory.com.