They knew all too well how it felt to be freed but not yet free. Following the Civil War, the shackles of slavery had been undone, but the reality of the master-slave relationship still reigned across the land. Black Americans had little or no access to the mainstream economic system of their country, yet there was always room for them in the military. All nations need fodder for the battlefield, for their ongoing campaigns to slaughter other human beings in war, and the US government was no exception. Of the two million men who put their lives at risk to preserve the Union, 10 percent of them were African Americans.

Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew commissioned one of the first black units in March 1863, with the encouragement of Northern abolitionists including Ralph Waldo Emerson and the two younger brothers of Henry and William James, Wilkinson and Robertson. The "all-colored" Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment trained at Camp Meigs outside of Boston and then was sent south on May 28 of the same year. After arriving in Beaufort, South Carolina, it joined up with the white Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought Confederate forces with them on James Island on July 16, stopping a Southern assault and losing forty-two men in the skirmish. Sergeant William H. Carney with the Fifty-Fourth later received the Medal of Honor for carrying the Union flag up to the enemy ramparts, singing, "Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!"

Two days later, the Fifty-Fourth led an attack with fixed bayonets against Fort Wagner near Charleston, the birthplace and bastion of the Southern rebellion, which was defended by Confederate soldiers under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the "Little Napoleon of the South." The black troops surged over the sharpened wooden stakes ringing the fort and continued into a water-filled ditch. Two of their captains were killed immediately, and Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass, the son of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, was wounded when his sword was ripped from his side by a canister shell. "Men fell all around me," Douglass wrote later. "A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet." The vicious battle cost the Fifty-Fourth dearly, with a loss of 281 men in all.

Major-General James G. Blunt, who led the First Kansas Colored Regiment in combat, described the fighting skill of the units under his command in a letter to Congress: "The Negroes (First Colored Regiment) were too much for the enemy, and let me say here that I never saw such fighting as was done by that Negro regiment. They fought like veterans, with a coolness and valor that is unsurpassed. They preserved their line perfect throughout the whole engagement, and although in the hottest of the fight, they never once faltered. Too much praise cannot be awarded them for their gallantry. The question that Negroes will fight is settled; besides, they make better soldiers in every respect than any troops I have ever had under my command."

They took up arms to win their own rights as free and equal citizens of the rapidly growing country, but the effort succeeded only in keeping the states together without attaining the main goal of abolishing slavery. Of the nearly 200,000 African American men who fought in one of the bloodiest wars in American history, 36,847 lost their lives. The cost to the nation was heavy, and the country remained as racially divided as it had been at the start.

And then the War Between the States was over, and the question of what to do with the discharged soldiers — how to employ them, how to keep them economically viable — rose from the stink and wreckage as it does after every war. The question was all the more pertinent for black soldiers being mustered out of uniform, since their options were more limited. The whites in the South considered them an inferior species, and those in the North didn't welcome the competition for available peacetime jobs.

Future president James A. Garfield, a staunch abolitionist, was ahead of his time with regard to civil rights. Is freedom "the bare privilege of not being chained?" he asked in a speech delivered right after the war, when he was serving as a congressman. "If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion. ... Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty."

What was the answer to the nation's dilemma?

Again, war came to the rescue as the country looked for new territories to conquer, more enemies to fight. Greater numbers of strong young bodies were needed on the frontier as the government looked westward to push its boundaries into uncharted regions. But the Native Americans, who had occupied much of that land almost since time had begun, had other ideas. This was their land, they believed. They lived, hunted, fished, and practiced their spiritual rituals there, a situation that the US government had considered problematic for decades. As the expanding nation encroached farther onto those native lands, the inevitable clashes became more and more frequent. In this, African Americans had a new role to play, another military calling: to serve the cause of white America's dreams of empire.

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"There is no greater civilizing agency for the Negro, whether we look upon the conservative or advancing side, than the army," wrote Theophilus Gould Steward, an ordained chaplain who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina and Georgia. Steward believed that black Americans would eventually emerge from their parlous condition in American society and take their place alongside whites, in part by proving their mettle against the gore and strife of mortal combat in service of the country.

There is some disagreement about the origins of the term "buffalo soldiers." Some attribute it to the Cheyenne in the 1870s, who compared black men in combat to the wild buffaloes they fought on the plains. Others believe the phrase originated with the Comanche, who were intrigued by the black men's dark skin and tight curly hair. Possibly, the truth is a combination of the two accounts. One Cheyenne warrior said that this new type of soldier had "a thick and shaggy mane of hair" and "fought like a cornered buffalo." Also like a buffalo, he "suffered wound after wound, yet had not died." In truth, the African Americans who signed up for service during the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century quickly earned a reputation as some of the fiercest fighters the Native Americans had ever encountered.

After the Civil War, the United States Colored Troops were organized into two regiments of black cavalry — the Ninth and Tenth — and four regiments of black infantry — the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-First. The Tenth was the original, activated at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1867. In April 1869, the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth were regrouped as the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment, based in Fort Clark, Texas, which they regarded as a soldier's paradise. "Beautiful rivers, grass and...