United States Colored Troops

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Colored Troops stood at one of the defining crossroads of American history. By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, 175 regiments of USCT soldiers had formed, constituting roughly one-tenth of the entire Union Army's manpower. These men fought, built fortifications, endured massacre, and died at rates dramatically higher than their white counterparts. Yet their story begins not with military orders but with a question: who had the right to bear arms for a nation that had not yet decided whether they were citizens at all?

  Frederick Douglass posed the stakes plainly in an 1863 speech. He argued that once a Black man had the brass letters U.S. on his person, an eagle on his button, a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, no power on earth could deny him the right of citizenship. What the USCT regiments actually faced on the ground tested every word of that claim. Approximately 20 percent of USCT soldiers were killed in action or died of disease, a mortality rate about 35 percent higher than white Union troops. Sixteen of these men received the Medal of Honor. And the questions their service raised about citizenship, equality, and the nature of American democracy would outlast the war itself.

• 2. The Road to Formation

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  Congress moved in July 1862 to reshape how the Union could fight its war. Two pieces of legislation arrived nearly simultaneously. The Confiscation Act legalized the practice of Union officers freeing enslaved people and putting them to work as army laborers. The Militia Act went further, empowering President Abraham Lincoln to use free Black men and former slaves from rebel states in any military capacity he saw fit.

  Lincoln was cautious. He worried about the four border states that had remained in the Union but still had large slaveholding populations. Northern Democrats who backed the war were far less enthusiastic about abolition than many northern Republicans. So Lincoln initially opposed efforts to recruit African American soldiers as combat troops, even as he accepted their work as paid laborers.

  In September 1862 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing that all enslaved people in rebellious states would be free as of the 1st of January 1863. That announcement broke the dam. Recruitment and training of colored regiments began in full force in January 1863. Then, on the 22nd of May 1863, the War Department issued General Order Number 143, establishing the Bureau of Colored Troops. That bureau would oversee the recruitment of African American soldiers across infantry, cavalry, engineer, light artillery, and heavy artillery units drawn from every state in the Union.

• 3. Inside the Regiments

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  More than 178,000 free Black men and freedmen served in USCT regiments during the last two years of the war. Initially the army assigned them menial duties: working as laborers, teamsters, and cooks. Even so, USCT engineers built Fort Pocahontas, a Union supply depot in Charles City, Virginia, demonstrating the range of work these soldiers performed before they ever entered combat.

  All USCT regiments were commanded by white Union officers. Black soldiers could advance only to the rank of non-commissioned officer. Approximately 110 Black soldiers did become commissioned officers before the war ended, primarily serving as surgeons or chaplains. One exception stands out: the Independent Battery from Kansas, the only artillery unit in the entire Civil War commanded entirely by Black officers.

  The selection process for white men who wanted to lead USCT units was deliberately harder than for ordinary Union postings. Military planners assumed that leading Black soldiers demanded a better officer than those commanding white troops. Candidates had to study at the Free Military Academy for Applicants for the Command of Colored Troops, opened by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Philadelphia at the end of 1863. After a brief period of examinations in mid-1863, only half of those who sat the test passed.

  Pay was another fault line. For a period, Black soldiers received less than their white counterparts. They and their supporters lobbied persistently until equal pay was granted. Among the notable figures who served were Martin Robinson Delany and the sons of Frederick Douglass himself.

• 4. Combat and Sacrifice

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  The 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers fought the first engagement by African American soldiers against Confederate forces at the Battle of Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri, on the 28th and the 29th of October 1862. Mostly made up of escaped slaves, the regiment accompanied white troops to disrupt Confederate guerrilla activity near Butler, Missouri. Outnumbered, they fought off the attack and won the engagement. The New York Times and Harper's Weekly both reported the battle. In 2012, Missouri established the Battle of Island Mound State Historic Site to preserve the ground where eight Union men were killed and buried.

  USCT regiments eventually fought across all theaters of the war, though they served primarily as garrison troops in rear areas. Their most famous engagement was the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg, where USCT regiments suffered heavy casualties attempting to break through Confederate lines. Fort Wagner was among their first major tests. At the Battle of Nashville they fought again with distinction. In April 1865, colored troops were among the first Union forces to enter Richmond, Virginia, after its fall. The 41st USCT regiment was present at the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

  General Ulysses S. Grant praised their performance. At Vicksburg he stated that Black troops were easier to preserve discipline among than white troops, and that all who had been tried had fought bravely.

  The total human cost was severe. USCT regiments suffered 2,751 combat deaths and 68,178 losses from all causes. Of approximately 180,000 soldiers enrolled, over 36,000 died, a rate of 20.5 percent compared to 15.2 percent among white volunteers. The mortality gap was shaped in part by the fact that USCT units were not enrolled until some eighteen months after fighting began, meaning they faced concentrated danger in a shorter span.

• 5. Violence Beyond Battle

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  Confederate forces singled out USCT soldiers for a level of violence that went beyond the ordinary brutality of Civil War combat. At Fort Pillow in Tennessee, at the Battle of the Crater in Virginia, and at the Battle of Olustee in Florida, Confederate troops perpetrated battlefield massacres against Black soldiers.

  The legal framework behind this violence was explicit. On the 1st of May 1863, the Confederate Congress passed a law declaring that white officers commanding Black soldiers and Black men captured in Union uniform would be tried in civil courts as rebellious slave insurrectionists. The penalty was death. In practice, USCT soldiers were often murdered by Confederate troops without any legal proceeding at all.

  This policy shattered the existing prisoner exchange framework. The Dix-Hill Cartel, which had governed prisoner exchanges, collapsed over the Confederate position that Black prisoners of war held no protected status. The U.S. government, citing the Lieber Code, objected to the discriminatory treatment of prisoners on the basis of ethnicity. The Republican Party's 1864 presidential platform explicitly condemned the Confederacy's treatment of Black U.S. soldiers. Grant wrote directly to Confederate officer Richard Taylor, urging that captured Black soldiers be treated as sworn military men. The Confederacy maintained that they were escaped slaves who deserved no such consideration.

• 6. Medals and Recognition

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  Sergeant William Harvey Carney of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Volunteer Infantry earned the Medal of Honor for his actions at Fort Wagner in July 1863. During the assault, the color-bearer was shot. Carney grabbed the flagstaff and planted it in the parapet while the rest of his regiment stormed the fortification. Wounded once on the advance and twice more during the retreat, he carried the colors back to Union lines without relinquishing them. He received his medal 37 years after the battle.

  Fourteen African American soldiers, including Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood and Sergeant Alfred B. Hilton of the 4th USCT, received the Medal of Honor for their conduct at the Battle of Chaffin's Farm in September 1864, during the campaign for Petersburg. Hilton was mortally wounded.

  Corporal Andrew Jackson Smith of the 55th Massachusetts Colored Volunteer Infantry was recommended for the Medal of Honor for the Battle of Honey Hill in November 1864, where he prevented the regimental colors from being captured after the color sergeant was killed. A lack of official records delayed his recognition until 2001, over 130 years after the battle.

  Soldiers who served in the Army of the James were also eligible for the Butler Medal, commissioned by Major General Benjamin Butler. Butler had made his own mark in 1861 at Fort Monroe in Virginia, when enslaved people escaped to his lines. Their owner, a Confederate colonel, arrived under a flag of truce and demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Butler replied that since Virginia claimed to have left the Union, the Fugitive Slave Law no longer applied, and declared the refugees to be contraband of war.

• 7. After the War

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  The USCT was disbanded in the fall of 1865. When Congress reorganized the Regular Army in 1867, setting it at ten cavalry regiments and 45 infantry regiments, it authorized two regiments of Black cavalry, the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and four regiments of Black infantry, the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Infantry. Most of those soldiers were drawn from USCT veterans. Senator Benjamin Wade had to add the provision for Black cavalry regiments personally, as the House Committee on Military Affairs had left it out of the first draft of the bill sent to the full chamber on the 7th of March 1866.

  In 1869 the Army was cut to 25 infantry regiments, reducing the Black infantry complement to two regiments, the 24th and 25th Colored Infantry. The two Black infantry regiments represented 10 percent of all twenty-five infantry regiments; the two Black cavalry units represented 20 percent of all ten cavalry regiments. From 1870 to 1898, with total Army strength fixed at 25,000, Black soldiers maintained that 10 percent share. Deployed in the American West, they became known as the Buffalo Soldiers, a name reportedly given by Native Americans who compared their hair to the curly fur of bison.

  The six state volunteer regiments that had served as regular units, rather than auxiliaries, gained a specific postwar benefit: veteran status that allowed access to federal government jobs from which African Americans had generally been excluded. Recognition for combat honors, however, did not come until the turn of the 20th century.

  Historian Steven Hahn has proposed that when enslaved people organized themselves and worked with the Union Army, including through the USCT, their collective action constituted a slave rebellion that dwarfed all previous revolts in American history. The African American Civil War Memorial, featuring sculptor Ed Hamilton's Spirit of Freedom, was erected at the corner of Vermont Avenue and U Street NW in Washington, D.C., in 1997 and is administered by the National Park Service. The African American Civil War Museum opened nearby in 1999, with a new facility at 1925 Vermont Avenue Northwest celebrating a grand opening in July 2011.