New Bedford's Civil War examines the social, political, economic, and
military history of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth
century, with a focus on the Civil War homefront from 1861 to 1865 and
on the city's black community, soldiers, and veterans.
Earl Mulderink's engaging work contributes to the growing body of Civil
War studies that analyzes the "war at home" by focusing on the bustling
center of the world's whaling industry in the nineteenth century. Using
a broad chronological framework of the 1840s through the 1890s, this
book contextualizes the rise and fall of New Bedford's whaling
enterprise and details the war's multifaceted impacts between 1861 and
1865. A major goal of this book is to explore the war's social history
by examining how the conflict touched the city's residents--both white
and black.
Known before the war for both its wealth and its antislavery fervor, New
Bedford offered a congenial home for a sizeable black community that
experienced a "different Civil War" than did native-born whites. Drawing
upon military pension files, published accounts, and welfare records,
this book pays particular attention to soldiers and families connected
with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the "brave black
regiment" (made famous by the Academy Award-winning 1989 film Glory)
that helped shape national debates over black military enlistment, equal
pay, and notions of citizenship. New Bedford's enlightened white
leaders, many of them wealthy whaling merchants with Quaker roots,
actively promoted military enlistment that pulled 2,000 local
citizen-soldiers (about 10 percent of the city's total population) into
the Union ranks.
As the Whaling City gave way to a postwar landscape marked by textile
manufacturing and heavy foreign immigration, the black community fought
to keep alive the meaning and history of the Civil War. Joining their
one-time neighbor Frederick Douglass, New Bedford's black veterans used
the memory of the war and their participation in it to push for full
equality--a losing battle by the turn of the twentieth century.
