4.1: Freedom and Reconstruction - Readings and Media

The selected readings, images, and videos of this module will inform students about African Americans fight for freedom, the reconstruction era, and their early years of freedom.

Readings and Videos

African Americans in the Civil War: Civil War

About 178,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Before 1862, those who sought to serve openly were turned away. However, some Black soldiers definitely served as members of their local units. Nick Biddle, one of the "First Defenders" who arrived at Washington, D.C., from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to secure the national capital immediately after the war broke out, was a Black man. He was the first casualty of the war, being hit by a rock and wounded as Confederate sympathizers jeered his column as they marched across Baltimore, Maryland, to change trains.

Only as white volunteers became scarce were Black volunteers welcomed to enlist. Benjamin Butler, military commander of Louisiana, organized the Louisiana Native Guard when the Union conquered New Orleans and much of that state in 1862. He employed Black officers who had served with distinction in earlier battles, but when Butler was replaced so were the Black officers. The 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments were the first Black regiments mustered in the North, and they accepted recruits from other Union states as well as those who escaped slavery.

About a quarter of all Black enlistees were from the North; the rest were mostly formerly enslaved men from the South. As with all other Black units during the war, they were segregated and commanded by white officers. About 19,000 Black men served in the U.S. Navy, which had always had Black sailors. All in all, at the end of the war, 9% of about 2 million soldiers and sailors who were mustered out of the service were Black.

At first, Black soldiers were given noncombatant duty, building camps and roads, repairing rail lines, and driving wagons as white officers feared they would not do well in combat. One Black soldier wrote to U.S. secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton that "we expected to be treated as men but we have been treated more like dogs." Black soldiers were originally paid $10 per month regardless of rank. They mainly served as corporals and sergeants, although 111 were commissioned officers by the end of the war. They had $3 per month deducted from their pay where white privates, in contrast, earned $10 a month in addition to a $3 clothing allowance, and higher ranks earned more money. The Massachusetts regiments refused to accept any pay at all rather than an inferior wage, even when Massachusetts offered to make up the difference. A few soldiers mutinied and were executed.

By the end of the war, Black soldiers had proven themselves, most spectacularly in the heroic but disastrous assault on Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina, where two-thirds of the officers and half the men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment lost their lives. Large numbers of Black soldiers were used in combat by Gen. Ulysses Grant in the war's final campaign against Richmond, and by Gen. George Thomas in the final battles of Franklin and Nashville against John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee. Over a fifth of the Black troops—36,000—died, 80% from disease, as opposed to 60% of the disease-related deaths of white soldiers, because of inferior camps, as well as the fact more Black soldiers were in poorer heath than their white comrades when they had enlisted. However, despite poor treatment, only about 5% of Black soldiers, as opposed to 15% of white soldiers, deserted.

The war provided Black men with some of the skills needed for civilian occupations. 16% became noncommissioned officers, and thus became leaders. Although there was no general policy, Northern abolitionists and white officers established schools to teach the mostly illiterate Black soldiers to read and write. The corporals and sergeants were taught and they, in turn, taught the privates. Their protests for equal pay and combat duty, along with the pride of marching and fighting alongside large numbers of other Black soldiers, instilled pride and a willingness to use their rights as Americans.

Most Black soldiers had enlisted in 1863 or later, and their three-year enlistments had not expired when the war ended. Thus, the Union regarded them as ideal occupation troops for the defeated South. Most Black soldiers resented this; they wanted to return to their families, correctly fearing that Southern white people not policed by Union troops would retaliate against African Americans. Those sent to Texas for garrison duty along the Mexican border mutinied as the United States was pressuring the French to leave that republic. Black troops in Jacksonville, Florida, mutinied and several were executed. The Black troops who remained on garrison duty in the South proved targets for the governments reconstituted by ex-Confederates that President Andrew Johnson allowed to take power.

After the war, Black veterans suffered more from poverty and unemployment than white veterans. Over four times as many Black as white veterans were jobless in the immediate postwar era. The Freedmen's Bureau had to feed and clothe thousands of homeless Black veterans discharged in Washington, D.C. Largely because Black Southerners did not obtain land at the end of the Civil War, most remained poor. In 1890, half of all African American veterans were unskilled workers, as opposed to just over 21% of Union and just under 10% of Confederate veterans. Most of the rest were farmers, usually tenants or sharecroppers. Over half the white Union soldiers were still alive in 1890, only 30% of Black soldiers survived. Average life expectancy for white people was about 50, for Black people about 40. Only 1% of Black veterans ever stayed in the Soldiers Homes for Disabled Veterans.

Nevertheless, the 1890 census shows there was a significant degree of geographic and economic mobility for Black veterans. Although most remained in their region of birth, there was a pronounced movement from the South to the North, and from the country to cities—in short, to places where opportunity and freedom would be greatest. A combination of army pay, pensions, and skills was the path to upward mobility. 13% held high-status occupations as opposed to 7% for other African Americans. Realizing the power of the church in the African American community, high-status veterans tended to become clergymen--844 occupied pulpits as opposed to 93 for the second highest high-status category, teachers.

A smaller percentage of Black veterans received government pensions. This was even more true of widows because many African Americans did not legitimate their unions with official marriage ceremonies. Until 1890, veterans had to prove disability, and this required assembling witnesses and paperwork, notarizing documents, and traveling to pension offices. With average yearly incomes of about $250, many Black veterans could not assemble the funds even to hire pension agents to take their cases. Others who did receive pensions often were obliged to take out loans at high rates, anticipating future checks.

For most Black veterans, the principal social reinforcement their services received was from the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Posts in small towns generally admitted Black members, although some did not. In larger communities where significant numbers of African Americans had enlisted, they usually had their own posts. In 1887, the GAR turned down requests from Louisiana and Mississippi to have separate Black and white organizations in those states. Subsequently, two Black veterans served as commanders of those states' united departments as most of the Union veterans from those states were Black. Even white Southern Union veterans opposed the segregation proposal.

Some African Americans used their war service to achieve distinguished careers. Most notable was Lewis Latimer, born in 1848, who served on the USS Massasoit in the Union Navy. He returned to his home city of Boston, where he learned mechanical drawing and later worked for Thomas A. Edison as one of his foremost experts on electric technology. Other well-regarded African Americans received patronage posts in the Republican Party. Sgt. William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts was one of 16 African Americans to win the Congressional Medal of Honor during the war.

Robert Smalls, who served as congressional representative from South Carolina for 10 years in the 1870s and 1880s, was perhaps the most famous of all the Black veteran politicians. He became known for leading the enslaved people who seized and captured the Confederate steamer Planter, on which they worked. Except when Democrat Grover Cleveland was president, Smalls held the post of customs collector of Beaufort, South Carolina, from 1887 until his death in 1913.

Black veterans became involved in politics, primarily during Reconstruction, when governments consisting of African Americans and southern Unionists were protected by Union troops. Six of the 16 African American members of the House of Representatives at this time were Union veterans. 37 veterans filled federal patronage positions in the South out of over 120 African Americans who held them. James Milton Turner was appointed minister to Liberia. One acting governor and three lieutenant governors of Louisiana were veterans of the Native Guard. Two of the men were the principal sponsors of Homer C. Plessy's lawsuit in 1896 that unsuccessfully challenged the segregation of railroad cars and led to the Supreme Court's famous "separate but equal" decision.

Black veterans were among the most active African Americans in the struggle for equal rights in the years after the war. Octavius Catto, who raised 11 companies of Black soldiers in Pennsylvania and rose to the rank of major, although he did not see combat, was killed in 1871 when he was shot by a supporter of the Democratic Party for organizing African American voters in Philadelphia. African American veterans successfully fought against anti-miscegenation laws in Rhode Island but were unsuccessful in their efforts in Ohio. In 1909, Black veteran John B. Anderson's lawsuit persuaded federal courts to invalidate Maryland's law disfranchising men whose ancestors had not been eligible to vote before 1868 unless they had the substantial sum of $500 in property.

Some African American veterans used their education to instruct their countrymen. John H. Murphy founded the Baltimore Afro-American, which at the time of his death in 1922 had the highest circulation of any African American newspaper on the East Coast. Alexander Augusta and Charles B. Purvis were African American medical professors at Howard University and founded the National Medical Society of the District of Columbia when white doctors would not admit them into the American Medical Association. Allen Allensworth and Henry Plummer went west with the African American regiments, the 24th U.S. Infantry and 10th U.S. Cavalry, respectively, as chaplains and used their posts to educate the troops, managing their libraries, gardens, bakeries, and treasuries, and defending them when they were court-martialed.

Other veterans saw migration as their solution to prejudice. Entitled to 160-acre homesteads, African American veterans were among the leaders of the Exoduster movement of Southern Black people to Kansas in 1879. Alfred Fairfax of Louisiana was the first African American member of the Kansas legislature. Henry McNeal Turner, chaplain of the First United States Colored Infantry, served in the Georgia state legislature and as postmaster of Macon before deciding African Americans could not live peaceably with dignity in the United States. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Turner never obtained many followers for his back-to-Africa movement because of lack of funds and reports of high death rates among those who emigrated.

For many years, the most notable monument to African American Civil War veterans was the frieze outside the State House in Boston. Executed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and completed in 1897, it shows Black soldiers led into battle by Col. Robert Gould Shaw. In 1998, the African American Civil War Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., at Vermont Avenue and U Street in the primarily African American Shaw community. Here several 11-foot-tall statues of African Americans entitled "The Spirit of Freedom" stand alone and do not share their glory with white officers. The names of more than 208,000 Black soldiers and sailors who served in the war are also etched into the memorial.

William A. Pencak

Pencak, William A. "African Americans in the Military: Civil War." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2025, africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1481856. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.

Read: "Reconstruction: Civil Rights Acts"