The Rocky Road over Emancipation to the First Black Regiments: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in the American Civil War

Text Sample:
Chapter 1. Introduction:
Chapter 1.1 The Movie Glory as Inspiration:
Receiving huge credit among audiences and historians, director Edward Zwick, producer Freddy Field and screenwriter Kevin Jarre presented their war movie Glory in 1989 which recounts the story of the black soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the most famous black regiment, and their relation to the American Civil War.
Zwick consulted thousands of reenactors who were members of living-history groups and historically knowledgeable about this war, in order to make the movie as realistic as possible. Nevertheless, mistakes and lacks occur in Glory; for instance, it suggests that most of the Fifty-Fourth were former slaves, but the regiment was recruited in the North where most of these black soldiers had always been free. Zwick also decided not to include the two prominent sons of Frederick Douglass, probably the most influential black orator of the time, but let the Fifty-Fourth remain a crowd of nameless fictional blacks instead. Such historical figures could have told the story and the viewpoint of Northern blacks toward slavery and the war, finds the historian James M. McPherson, but Zwick chose another narrative: the focus is not on the Fifty-Fourth specifically but on former slaves fighting as soldiers for their freedom in the Civil War in general. The director chose the story of the most famous black regiment to tell the story of all black soldiers and their motives. The movie Glory is a narrative itself and shows one perspective in a specific historical moment, which is in this case the difficult path to the first black regiment and the recognition of black soldiers in the army. On behalf of cinematic art, Glory invents fictional scenes to deliver a specific message.
Watching Glory raised the following questions for me: Why did the North call for black soldiers? Why did it take until 1863 before the first black regiment was officially created? First and

Anne-Marie Schmidt, B.A., was born in 1990 in Zschopau. During her Bachelor Studies at Technical University Dresden she spent one year at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght in Dublin, Ireland, where she focused her studies on interacting political and economic influences between Ireland and the US, specializing in the Celtic-Tiger period. Having more interest in American Culture, she devoted herself to the emancipation of black soldiers in the American Civil War, a period which sustainably shaped American identity. Contemporary major points for discussion such as emancipation, integration and the question of how we want to live together are among others examined in her study, which had been supervised and inspired by Prof. Dr. Georgi-Findlay.