Army Life in a Black Regiment Book

Although certainly well meaning, the author -- a white Harvard educated abolitionist -- comes off as paternalistic. There is not much you can really criticize because that's just how it was back then and he was certainly light-years ahead of his contemporaries; nevertheless, the number of times Higginson refers to his recruits as "child-like" seems not only repetitive, but condescending to today's reader.

However, there are a lot of fairly interesting observations. For instance, his background in linguisitics allowed him to to distinguish between say, South Carolina and Florida dialects based on the unique verb sequences found in those regions. He also devotes an entire chapter to writing down the various "spirituals" sung by the troops. It's too bad there is not an audio companion to actually hear the tunes.

Overall I enjoyed it, but the regiment did not see a lot of action (and of course there is a lot of detail about army regulations and troop maneuvers which is lost on me much of the time). When I first picked this up, I had assumed it was written by one of the black soldiers in the regiment. It might have been a lot more interesting if it had been.