The memoir of John W. M. Appleton, a field officer in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, provides the most in-depth account available of the lives of the first regiment of free Black soldiers recruited during the Civil War.
James Robbins Jewell is a professor of history at North Idaho College. He is the author of Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest during the Civil War (Nebraska, 2023) and the editor of On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War: Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment. Eugene S. Van Sickle is a professor of history at the University of North Georgia.
