Richard M. Reid's African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War (2014) gives the black experience a more central position in our understanding of the Civil War. Reid makes a strong case for the further consideration of the Civil War as a universal struggle for freedom, justice, and equality played out on the United States’ stage, and for seeing black military personnel as agents of their own liberation. This is an endeavour to be welcomed and applauded. Although there exists a substantial body of scholarship of the role of black Americans during the Civil War, scholars too often relegate the black experience to a peripheral position in our perception of the conflict.

The book explores the “historical agency of the various black communities across British North America,” arguing that these communities were not “mere pawns, manipulated by external forces,” but agents capable of making well-informed decisions for the advancement of their social position within a “largely white and hostile society” (9). In a war in which over three million men were mobilized north and south, the contribution of Reid's estimated 2,500 African Canadians may at first seem marginal. However, their determination to serve in dangerous, unfamiliar circumstances detached from their home communities reveals the acute awareness of people of African descent that military service could earn civil equality and liberty. This awareness was not limited to the United States, but crossed national boundaries in North America.

Like volunteers in all modern wars, not all African Canadians fought for political reasons. Reid's excellent research provides the reader with a clear insight into the plethora of motivations that encouraged African Canadians to serve in the Union Army and Navy. Even the motives of those who enlisted for financial reward or professional advancement suggest an attentiveness to the transnational social environment. Those African Canadians who served had to simultaneously grapple with the risks of British legal action through the Foreign Enlistment Act, as well as racial discrimination and unequal treatment when serving in the US armed forces. Through an extensive variety of primary sources, including letters and enlistment records, Reid presents a varied cast of characters, from runaway slaves who returned to the US to battle their former masters, to perceptive African Canadians who saw opportunities for financial security through army bounty payments and naval prize money.

Reid's exploration of African Canadian doctors who served during the war in response to the Union's desperate need for trained surgeons and physicians offers a significant case study. These black professionals attempted to challenge the institutionalized racism implicit in the nineteenth-century American military and society. Virginia-born African American Alexander T. Augusta was the first black doctor to graduate from a medical school in British North America. In April 1863, he recrossed the border to be commissioned as a US Army surgeon, combating prejudice from Unionist civilians, southern sympathizers, and the army's command structure throughout his service. He remained in the United States in the postbellum era, ceaselessly opposing discrimination within the medical profession. Reid's insight into the experiences of medical professionals like Augusta encompasses the complexities not only of race during this tumultuous period, but also of class.

Reid's transnational lens therefore offers far more than the book's title might suggest. His meticulous research and his engaging style have produced an important contribution to the archive of the ordinary black American experience. But as the first comprehensive study of African Canadians in the Civil War, the book also contributes to a broader scholarship on the shifting notions of black citizenship throughout North America, on the United States’ porous borders during the nineteenth century, and on the increasingly apparent universal desire of African-descended peoples to resist the ideologies of white supremacy.