On July 17, 1862, the United States Congress authorized the enlistment of Black men into the Union Army. On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly authorized Black military service. By the end of the Civil War, approximately 180,000 Black men had served in 175 regiments of the United States Colored Troops — roughly ten percent of the entire Union Army. They fought in over 400 battles and engagements. Thirty-eight USCT soldiers received the Medal of Honor. Approximately 40,000 died — from combat, disease, and the particular brutality that Confederate forces reserved for Black soldiers they captured. They enlisted knowing that the Confederate government had declared that captured Black Union soldiers would not be treated as prisoners of war but would be re-enslaved or executed. They enlisted anyway. The question they were answering with their bodies was not only whether slavery would end. It was whether Black men were capable of the citizenship that freedom required.
The political context of Black military service was explicit and contested from the beginning. Frederick Douglass argued publicly that military service was the path to citizenship — that a man who had fought for his country had an undeniable claim to its protections. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” Douglass wrote, “let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship.” The Union Army’s reluctant acceptance of Black soldiers — who were initially paid less than white soldiers, assigned to segregated units under predominantly white officers, and given the most dangerous and degrading assignments — was itself a negotiation over that claim. Black soldiers pushed back. The 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863, in which the regiment suffered devastating casualties while demonstrating extraordinary courage, forced a national reckoning with the question of what Black soldiers were owed.
The treatment of USCT soldiers by Confederate forces revealed the stakes of the conflict with terrible clarity. At Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest — who would later help found the Ku Klux Klan — massacred Black Union soldiers after they had surrendered. Eyewitness accounts described soldiers being shot, clubbed, and buried alive. At least 300 Black soldiers were killed after the fort fell. Confederate policy was explicit: Black men fighting in Union uniform were not soldiers but insurrectionists, and insurrection was punishable by death. The massacre at Fort Pillow was not an aberration — it was a statement of Confederate ideology about the status of Black Americans, military or civilian.
North Carolina contributed significantly to the USCT. The 35th, 36th, and 37th United States Colored Infantry regiments were raised largely from North Carolina’s enslaved and free Black population. The 35th USCT was organized at New Bern, North Carolina in 1863 and served in operations across the South Carolina and Florida coasts. Black men from the Cape Fear region — including men who had been enslaved on plantations in Cumberland County — enlisted in these regiments. They were fighting for their own freedom, for the freedom of family members still enslaved, and for the claim to citizenship that Douglass had articulated. Many of them had been legally prohibited from learning to read under the same laws the Confederacy was fighting to preserve. They picked up rifles instead.
The legacy of the United States Colored Troops extended far beyond the Civil War. Their service made the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments politically possible — it was difficult to deny citizenship to men who had fought and died for the Union. The pension system that developed for USCT veterans was systematically less generous than for white veterans, and Black veterans faced bureaucratic obstacles to receiving the benefits they had earned. The cemeteries where USCT soldiers were buried were often segregated — in death as in life, the military maintained the hierarchy that the soldiers had died fighting against. But the record of their service was indelible. One hundred and eighty thousand men had answered the question of whether Black Americans would fight for their country. The country’s answer to what it owed them in return took another century to begin to arrive.