A little-told tale of Civil War bravery gets deserved attention

All that changed in 1863 after staggering Union losses at Gettysburg. A desperate Washington openly recruited Fleetwood and his fellow African-Americans into the Northern ranks, though at unequal pay and with inferior provisions and assignments. In ``Uncommon Valor," Melvin Claxton and Mark Puls follow Fleetwood and his colleagues as they buttress Northern ranks for the war's grinding late offensives. The authors trace the recruits through a year in which they endure slights, earn respect, and emerge, eventually, with battlefield distinctions.

The capstone is the Sept. 29, 1864, battle of New Market Heights, outside Richmond. Though scarcely mentioned in the coffee table Civil War anthologies of Bruce Catton or of Geoffrey C. Ward, Ric Burns, and Ken Burns, New Market Heights is a signal event in African-American history -- 14 of the 16 blacks awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery in the war (out of 200,000 who served) were decorated for their actions in this bloody engagement.

What made the triumph so striking was that it followed a disastrous assault in which 365 of the black soldiers taking part were killed or wounded. A half-hour after that failed first attempt, a battle cry spread among Fleetwood's decimated regiment, and the remaining soldiers regrouped -- and advanced, directly into the enemy's line of fire. Years later, an admiring white commander, General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, wrote: ``With a cheer and a yell which I can almost hear now, they dashed upon the fort. But before they reached even the ditch . . . the enemy ran away and did not stop until they had run four miles."