African American Soldiers in the Civil War
John Lawson, U.S. Navy, was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism aboard USS Hartford during the Battle of Mobile Bay, 5 August 1864
"Nearly 180,000 free Black men and escaped slaves volunteered for service in the Union Army during the Civil War" (Bill of Rights in Action, Winter 1996, Vol. 12, No. 1, p. 1). Another 9000 served as sailors.
- Initially, Blacks were not allowed to join the army, and once they entered the military (following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863), they were placed in racially segregated units.
- Black troops fought in 449 battles, one-third of all Black soldiers died, and a dozen were awarded Congressional Medals of Honor.
Men of Color: To Arms! To Arms!, Frederick Douglass (1863)
More information about African American soldiers in the Union Army.
List of photographs of African American Soldiers in the Union Army.
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Map of First Engagements by African American troops |
Click here for a The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War, a lesson from the National Archives on the experiences of Black soldiers.
Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment
Image to the right is a Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Boston Common, Boston Massachusetts. Sculpture created 1884-1887 by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), with memorial architecture by Stanford White.
- Click here for background the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment. In addition to heroism in battle (the 54th Massachusetts suffered 40 percent casualties in the Battle of Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor), this unit refused pay as a protest against federal government policies that paid White soldiers more than Black soldiers.
- See also 54th Regiment, an overview of the first military unit consisting of Black soldiers to be raised in the North during the Civil War from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Clip from Glory-54th MA regiment attacking Fort Wagner
Martin R. Delaney, the only black officer who received the rank of major during the Civil War (1865).
African Americans accounted for what share of the Union Army by war's end?
- 2 percent
- 4 percent
- 8 percent
- 10 percent
ANSWER: D (10 percent)
This region did not need a draft because there were enough volunteers to fight:
- South
- North
- Border
- Neither
ANSWER: Neither (Questions from "Obama era brings new angle to teaching the American Civil War," Valerie Strauss, The Recorder, April 25, 2009).
Other African American Experience During the War
Slavery During the Civil War from Encyclopedia Virginia
New York Divided: Slavery and The Civil War is an online exhibit focusing on the experiences of African Americans in New York City during the Civil War. New York City with its expanding trade in southern cotton and sugar was a center of pro-slavery sentiment and at the same time a center for anti-slavery abolitionist activity.
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