Colored Soldiers Civil War

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During the summer of , James Lane, the abolitionist senator from Kansas, organized the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers, ignoring orders to enroll white troops only.

Online archive to document African-American soldiers in Civil War

Later that summer, the members of several free black militia regiments in New Orleans, known as the Louisiana Native Guard, offered their services to Union authorities. General Benjamin Butler, now commanding in the city, eventually accepted their offer to serve. As Hunter, Lane, and Butler built their regiments in the field, Congress moved toward providing permission from Washington. On July 17, , Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act, both of which authorized the president to employ African Americans as workers or soldiers.

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Lincoln remained noncommittal, but in August his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, ordered Union general Rufus Saxton to organize a regiment of black soldiers in the South Carolina Sea Islands on an experimental basis. By the end of the year, Saxton had successfully raised the 1st South Carolina Colored Volunteers, and the regiment had participated in raids on the Atlantic coast.

Farther west, James Lane's regiments also fought in some skirmishes during the autumn of The Final Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, , explicitly authorized all black men to enlist as soldiers in the army. In the months that followed, recruiting moved forward at a rapid pace. In March , Stanton ordered Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to recruit black men from contraband camps and abandoned plantations. By the end of the war, Thomas's efforts had yielded as many as seventy black regiments. In the meantime, Northern states opened recruiting stations to African Americans.

Massachusetts was among the first states to act, organizing the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment filled with free blacks from across the North and former slaves from the South. Frederick Douglass acted as a recruiting agent, and his sons, Charles and Lewis Douglass, joined the regiment.

The 54th was led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a member of a prominent family of abolitionists in Boston. As recruiting began in earnest, the United States government took steps to centralize the administration of its new black regiments under the auspices of one agency. The Bureau issued guidelines for black regiments, staffed the units with officers, and oversaw recruiting and enrollment.

All existing and future black regiments mustered into Union service under the oversight of the Bureau. At that time, units received a regimental number under the designation USCT. An exception was made for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiments, both of which were allowed to keep their state designations and remain in state service. Despite objections from black leaders, the Bureau insisted on assigning only white men to commissioned officer positions.

Although a small number of black soldiers received commissions by the end of the war—including the Virginia-born Martin R. Delany —and many served as noncommissioned officers, the USCT remained primarily an organization led by whites. Officials in the army and in the government also initially assumed that black regiments would rarely, if ever, be used in combat.

As a result, black soldiers endured a disproportionate share of labor duty. The assumption that black soldiers were workers, not fighters, led to inequities in pay. Black soldiers were also often denied recruitment bounties routinely offered to white soldiers, and were rarely eligible to collect aid for dependents, a benefit that state legislation often made available to white men serving in the ranks.

Stanton insisted he opposed unequal pay, but he did nothing to challenge Congress's inequitable legislation. Black soldiers themselves, however, demanded equal treatment. Their protest led to the court-martial and execution of at least one soldier. The men of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments refused to accept any pay until they received equal pay. They even rejected a proposed compromise in which the Massachusetts state government would have made up the difference in salary. The black soldiers' protest succeeded. In June , Congress passed a bill equalizing pay retroactive to January 1, , for all men who had been free at the start of the war.

The Enrollment Act of March 3, , finally granted full and equal back pay for all black soldiers. Black troops in Virginia also demanded equal treatment. More than hundred USCT patients at the hospital signed a protest petition demanding to be accorded full status and respect as soldiers, and then began to buried in the Soldiers' Cemetery.

Virginia contributed at least 5, men to the United States Colored Troops. This figure takes into account only those troops mustered into service in Virginia; many African Americans native to Virginia joined units in neighboring jurisdictions, including Maryland, North Carolina, and Washington, D.

Because of Virginia's role as a slave-exporter during the antebellum period, thousands of the other black troops likely had been born in Virginia or had spent a significant portion of their lives there. Most Virginia USCT units were raised in the Tidewater or Northern Virginia, both areas where Union control had been established early in the war, thus allowing for communities of contrabands, free blacks , and escaped enslaved African Americans to form.

These two regiments had previously mustered in to service as the 1st and 2nd North Carolina Infantry, however, and just happened to be in Tidewater Virginia when their designations were changed. Colored Artillery, the 10th U.

Colored Infantry, the 23rd U. Colored Infantry, and the 38th U. Colored Infantry served in Florida. Several of these units were also deployed to Texas following the surrender of the Confederacy amid rising tensions with France over its intervention in Mexico.

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Although the army initially intended to use black troops in support roles only, the men of the USCT quickly made their mark on the battlefield. Early in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist and white colonel of the 1st South Carolina 33rd USCT took his regiment on raids in Florida, resulting in the capture and brief occupation of Jacksonville. The Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, was the most publicized action involving black troops in , and helped erase remaining resistance to using African Americans in combat.

On July 18, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry led a Union assault on the Confederate fortification, which commanded Morris Island and the approaches to Charleston Harbor. The men of the 54th advanced across an open beach under heavy fire and seized a portion of the works. They helped hold the position for almost three hours before being driven back with heavy losses. The regiment's colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed during the attack. Although the Union columns failed to capture the fort, the 54th won praise for the skill and bravery it showed during the charge, and the fallen Colonel Shaw was mourned throughout the North as a white martyr in the cause of black liberty.

By , black troops had earned the grudging respect of their white comrades. In May, large numbers of black soldiers entered Virginia for the first time. In one of their first engagements in the state, on May 24, , a Union force composed mostly of black troops repulsed Confederate general Fitzhugh Lee 's cavalry at the Battle of Wilson's Wharf also known as Fort Pocahontas.

Grant 's Overland Campaign. Black troops were among the first to seize outlying Confederate works at Petersburg when the Union army made an unsuccessful push to capture the city in June USCT regiments played increasingly important roles during the nearly ten-month siege of Petersburg. They participated in the fighting at the Battle of the Crater and were subject to a massacre in its wake. Late in September , an all-black division of the Eighteenth Corps fared better when it captured a Confederate fortification at New Market Heights. In a related action, General William Birney's all-black brigade, a member of the Tenth Corps, reached the parapets of the imposing Fort Gilmer before being driven back.

Of these fourteen Medals of Honor, five went to Virginians: Union general Benjamin Butler was so moved by the heroism of the African American troops that he commissioned medals from Tiffany's of New York to distribute to the troops. USCT regiments were also present in the final campaigns of the war.

In December , the Union army organized the all-black Twenty-fifth Corps under General Godfrey Weitzel, which took part in the amphibious assault on Fort Fisher off Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the last ports to be seized by Union troops. In the West, black soldiers fought at the Battle of Nashville in December and assisted in the capture of Mobile, Alabama, in The 21st USCT and elements of the 54th Massachusetts were among the first soldiers to enter Charleston, South Carolina, early in , and, after the evacuation of Richmond in April , the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry and Weitzel's Twenty-fifth Corps joined lead elements in taking possession of Richmond.

The presence of African American soldiers on the battlefields afforded them opportunities to win glory and acceptance, but also exposed them to racially motivated violence. The order indicated that the Confederacy would not treat black men as soldiers, but would instead view them as slaves in a state of insurrection, making them liable to execution or sale into slavery. White officers captured while leading or training black troops would be tried for a felony, for which they could receive the death penalty.

Confederate president Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress ratified these policies in subsequent pronouncements. On July 30, , the Lincoln administration ordered retaliation for the mistreatment of black prisoners, pledging to execute one prisoner of war for every member of the USCT sentenced to death, and to put captured Confederates to hard labor for any black soldier sold into slavery.

In , the Confederate government's refusal to exchange black prisoners led to a breakdown in the practice of parole and exchange for white prisoners of war. In the meantime, atrocities occurred on the battlefield. Many Union troops, mostly black soldiers, were shot down as they attempted to surrender.

United States Colored Troops, The

At the town of Saltville, Virginia , Confederate soldiers executed scores of black prisoners of war after a battle in the vicinity on October 2, , in what is often regarded as the second-most-deadly massacre of black troops by Confederates after Fort Pillow. The victims included sick and wounded men who had fallen into Confederate hands. Although African American soldiers continued to face discrimination, by the time the war ended, they had won a permanent place in the military. By the fall of , black regiments made up as much as one-third of the Union forces occupying the South.

These became the 73rd, 74th and 75th United States Colored Infantry. These unofficial regiments were officially mustered into service in January Early in February , the abolitionist Governor John A. More than 1, men responded. They formed the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first black regiment to be raised in the North. Many of the 54th soldiers did not even come from Massachusetts: It was the first time in the Civil War that black troops led an infantry attack.

Unfortunately, the men of the 54th were outgunned and outnumbered: Almost half of the charging Union soldiers, including Colonel Shaw, were killed. In general, the Union army was reluctant to use African-American troops in combat. This was partly due to racism: There were many Union officers who believed that black soldiers were not as skilled or as brave as white soldiers were. By this logic, they thought that African Americans were better suited for jobs as carpenters, cooks, guards, scouts and teamsters.

Black soldiers and their officers were also in grave danger if they were captured in battle. Even as they fought to end slavery in the Confederacy, African-American Union soldiers were fighting against another injustice as well. Congress passed a bill authorizing equal pay for black and white soldiers in By the time the war ended in , about , black men had served as soldiers in the U.

This was about 10 percent of the total Union fighting force. About half of the rest were from the loyal border states, and the rest were free blacks from the North. Forty thousand black soldiers died in the war: We strive for accuracy and fairness.

Black Civil War Soldiers

But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The election of Abraham Lincoln in caused seven southern states to secede and form the Confederate One of the most important aspects of Reconstruction was the active participation of African Americans including thousands of former slaves in the political, economic and social life of the South.

The era was to a great extent defined by their quest for autonomy and equal In many ways, the coming of the Civil War challenged the ideology of Victorian domesticity that had defined the lives of men and women in the antebellum era. In the North and in the South, the war forced women into public life in ways they could scarcely have imagined a On this day in , with the main Rebel armies facing long odds against must larger Union armies,the Confederacy, in a desperate measure,reluctantly approves the use of black troops.

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