Epilogue

In July 1886 George Washington Williams penned the last words to his “military history of Negro troops in the War of the Rebellion.” Although he was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, he had spent most of the previous decade in Ohio. The Civil War veteran of the 41st USCT, who preached at the Union Baptist Church when he moved to Cincinnati, became active with local black veterans, and held the rank of colonel when he served as the judge advocate of the Ohio Encampment of the GAR. By 1877 Williams had entered politics, and after losing his bid for a seat in the Ohio General Assembly, he began to study law with Alphonso Taft, used the pen name “Aristides” to write for the Cincinnati Commercial, and clerked for a time at the Cincinnati Southern Railroad. In 1879 he ran for office again and became the first African American elected to the Ohio House of Representatives.¹

After serving only one term, Williams devoted his time to the writing of history, and in 1882 he published his two-volume History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens. Subsequently moving to Boston, Williams attempted another foray into politics, and though he was appointed minister of Haiti by President Chester A. Arthur, he lost the position when Grover Cleveland took office and decided to offer the post to another prominent black leader. Williams then turned his full attention to the recognition and preservation of the black contributions to the Union victory in the Civil War, something he had alluded to in a speech he gave at a celebration in honor of the nation’s centennial just after he moved to Ohio. He predicted that “when the history of this country is written in truth … the negro will be there.” He participated in the unsuccessful attempt to erect a monument to African American soldiers and sailors, and then in 1887 he published A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865. His “pioneering book … underscored black agency and determination” and demonstrated the desire of black veterans, such as himself and those in Ohio, to receive “the proper recognition … as a man and a citizen.”²

Williams wrote in the face of a formidable challenge; by the end of the nineteenth century the memory of the United States Colored Troops was being threatened. Nationally there was a growing trend toward a more reconciliationist commemoration and remembrance of the Civil War. Americans focused on the noble and brave character of white soldiers, both Union and Confederate, and the cause of the rebellion, slavery, had little place in the revised story. This intentional amnesia also excluded the role of black men, both free and enslaved, during the war. Similar to the lack of a prewar and wartime consensus on the causes and meaning of the national conflict, the Civil War remained a contested event in postwar America.³

But black soldiers and veterans had been part of Northern society’s attempts to make sense of the Civil War during and immediately after the conflict. In addition to the issues of slavery, emancipation, and the preservation of the Union, Americans understood that the Civil War had been a rite of passage for the men who fought in it. The definition of nineteenth-century masculinity expanded to include those who held political power, citizenship, and an honorable character, and the epitome of this was the American soldier. Soldiering, citizenship, and manhood became “inexorably linked,” and black men who served in the USCT claimed this identity. Before the war, most African American men had defined masculinity based on the ideals of freedom and equality. Although shaped largely by the economic and social institution of slavery, free blacks shared this interpretation. But Northerners also made duty, responsibility, and full access to citizenship rights part of their goals for full African American manhood. In an 1857 resolution from the Ohio State Convention of Colored Men, attendees declared that rights “are not created by Constitutions, nor are they uncreated by Constitutions…. They are a constituent element of manhood—whether that manhood be found encased in ebony or ivory.” Despite the demands of activists such as Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, antebellum whites continued to restrict and forbid black male access to the economic, political, and military tenets of manhood. Once the Union army began to accept black volunteers, an 1863 broadside reminded potential USCT recruits of the momentous opportunity before them, as “for generations … our manhood has been denied, our citizenship blotted out.” In postwar America, the black veteran represented evidence for the African American community that this should no longer ring true.⁴

Despite the fact that black soldiers had fewer opportunities to prove themselves in combat, the military participation of the soldiers of the 27th United States Colored Troops and other black regiments affected the restructuring of nineteenth-century Northern society. As a result of the contributions by African Americans, white Northerners had to reconcile the legal denial of black rights formalized by the 1857 Supreme Court decision, Scott v. Sandford. In large part due to the assistance of the United States Colored Troops, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were added to the Constitution. While imperfect, this was a tangible change and offered the promise of much more. In the decades after the rebellion black Ohioans had little reason to believe otherwise.⁵

Although the majority of black soldiers contributed mostly through back-line support during the rebellion, the 27th USCT served in two important Union campaigns, the siege of Petersburg and the capture of Fort Fisher, and they experienced the day-to-day realities of war in many ways similar to white Ohioans. While second-class treatment pervaded their tour of duty, they did not focus on issues of race in their private letters. Like most soldiers, they participated in excessive marches, suffered from poor diets, and tolerated unbearable physical conditions. They died from disease, were killed in battle, and experienced broken hearts when they left families behind. And in the postwar years in Ohio, many similarities continued. White and black, men returned home in reduced health, and if they were privates, few earned any significant economic, political, or social advancement from their service. Racism was not the sole determining factor that shaped black veteranhood, because the men who served in the regiment from Ohio returned home as United States veterans, who sought the benefits and rights due to them and their families.

In the immediate decades after the war, Northern black veterans participated along with other individuals and groups as they shaped and contested how the war would impact American society. The men who served in the 27th USCT continued to make decisions about how to use their military participation, just as they had exercised agency over their choices during the Civil War. Their actions complicated the public’s attempt to understand the implications of the four years of fratricide that had abolished slavery and created a more dominant federal government, therefore dramatically altering American society. Unlike Southern black soldiers, Ohioans who were free before the war were not directly affected by the Thirteenth Amendment. But their service created the opportunity to seek change unavailable to black men in the antebellum era. Those in the Northern USCT gained confidence from their military accomplishments and believed that their manhood should be recognized as carrying the same birthright of political and social justice as white soldiers.⁶ They and their families used their martial participation to negotiate an increased role in society and obtain the benefits of federal citizenship long denied to them by white Northern society.

It was the national conflict that provided African Americans the rare opportunity to exert their demands for citizenship and equal treatment from a position of power, albeit limited; the Union needed the assistance of black men to help preserve the United States. During Reconstruction and the years that followed, black veterans could still negotiate from a somewhat similar position. Their wartime service placed them within the new category of American men, as “veterans,” where the second-class status of being black was at times and to varying degrees not as discriminatory as the treatment afforded to almost all other African Americans in the mid- and late nineteenth century.⁷

From this position, men who served in the 27th USCT could choose how and where to best benefit from their status. Like Americans who understood and remembered the Civil War within the context of how it affected their own communities, Northern blacks often experienced veteranhood at the local level. In the immediate postwar years, African American activism in Ohio focused on the issues of suffrage, economic parity, and education. Once legislators ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, the black population focused on their children’s right and need for educational opportunities. Yet even Frederick Douglass recognized there was more when he proclaimed, “Education is great, but manhood is greater.” The veterans of the 27th USCT and their families expanded their attention as they optimistically sought full access to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and compensatory citizenship rights for their own wartime sacrifice. Although political in nature, their acts ultimately served their own causes and needs. This helped them to obtain federal pensions, seek GAR membership, access care in soldiers’ homes, claim their place in the public spaces related to wartime commemoration such as local parades and reunions, and plan for their final resting places to be located with other veterans, white and black.⁸

The men who served in the Ohio regiment shaped their commemoration within the veteran’s fraternal community in order to achieve as many of those rights as possible within the social and political climate of the late nineteenth century. Most Northerners accepted the patriotic Christian soldier’s use of the political arena to demonstrate his citizenship and manhood in the first decades after the war. This was not limited to suffrage rights or the holding of civil office but also included visible displays such as parades and petitions. Veterans of the 27th used these techniques to make sure that the role of the USCT was not relegated to the margins of reminiscences and commemorative activities. The men and their families decided what to remember and how they would interpret their role in the Civil War. They did not keep their focus on the centrality of emancipation and liberty in the realm of public remembrance as they had immediately after the war. Instead, they sought access to aspects of citizenship and constitutional rights that applied to the one category of men whose public debt could not be denied or perceived as a threat in the decades after the war. The veterans of the 27th USCT claimed the rights due to them as citizen soldiers. Their presence forced local white Ohioans to keep the black contributions toward Union victory as part of the larger community-defined culture of war, and their martial participation vindicated their claims of manhood.⁹ And although limited, the citizen rights they obtained succeeded at the state and national level.

After the Civil War ended, twelve of the men from the 27th USCT remained in the U.S. Army, where they were able to continue to provide evidence of black military contribution and sacrifice. They served in the 24th and 25th U.S. Colored Infantry and the 9th and 10th U.S. Colored Cavalry. In 1889, when William F. Fox published Regimental Losses in the American Civil War 1861–1865, he explained in his preface that “regimental affairs are of more importance to the average soldier than Corps or Army matters,” and he recognized the significance of black soldiers when he included an entire chapter on the statistics of the USCT. The federal government included African Americans in the 1890 Special Schedules of the Eleventh Census Enumerating Union Veterans and Widows of Union Veterans of the Civil War, and in September 1892 the GAR held a parade in Washington, D.C., a re-creation of the 1865 Grand Review of Union armies that this time included black veterans, who had been denied the opportunity in the original parade. The crowd, made up of whites and African Americans, gave a “hearty applause” as the USCT proudly marched by. Recognition of black service, by at least some white veterans, continued into the twentieth century. The National Tribune solicited requests from aging veterans who wanted to know about different Civil War regiments, and in 1910 the GAR publication printed a one-paragraph history of the 27th USCT. And two men from the 27th USCT, Alvin Smith of Company H who was living in Akron and Simpson Younger, Company A, of Sedalia, Missouri, attended the 75th anniversary at Gettysburg in 1938.¹⁰

But these events and actions played out within the context of national events. Despite their status, black veterans had to deal with bigotry, condescension, and Jim Crow. In 1888 Simpson Younger attended the North Street Theatre in Kansas City. He had purchased tickets for the orchestra section, but when it was discovered that he and his female companion were “colored,” they were redirected to the balcony. After Younger objected, they were “unlawfully, maliciously, and insultingly ejected from the theater.” Although he filed a lawsuit against the owner for violating his constitutional rights, the veteran lost his case in the 1892 Supreme Court of Missouri decision, Younger v. Judah, because he had not been denied access to the theater.¹¹

As Civil War veterans passed away, so did the need for most Americans to commemorate their contributions and sacrifice. By 1896 the Republican Party no longer sought the support of the aging soldiers by “waving the bloody shirt.” That year, presidential candidate William McKinley told a group of Confederate veterans at his home in Canton to “remember now and in all the future that we are Americans, and what is good for Ohio is good for Virginia.” By the early twentieth century, veterans lost their “cultural capital.” During World War I, Bruce Catton, who later wrote what have become classic narrative histories of the Civil War, the Army of the Potomac trilogy, considered how the “gallant old Civil War veterans had been left behind by time.” The number of survivors of the War of the Rebellion had dwindled, and many of those still living depended on county, state, and soldiers’ facilities for their care and support. Some Northern citizens, both white and black, began to see Union veterans as “impossible nuisances” who reflected a backward vision for the United States instead of a more progressive future.¹²

Although black Ohioans who served in the 27th USCT continued to display and seek rewards for their wartime service long after the conflict had subsided, the meaning of those experiences changed for the larger African American community. As a result, the Civil War veteran’s importance faded. Susie Taylor King, a black nurse during the rebellion, noted that the younger generation failed to recognize the importance of the soldiers who had helped to preserve their liberty. In 1902 King lamented that “we do not, as the black race, properly appreciate the old veterans, white or black, as we ought to.” In the early twentieth century, African American community leaders found themselves no longer believing that the image of the Civil War veteran could help them to achieve their goals, because those who fought and killed during a war had become associated with notions of violence. Not only was there increasing white opposition to blacks’ demands for the protections and rights provided by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the number of race riots and lynchings had increased. As a result, many African Americans began to promote a more “respectable” image: black middle-class professionals, including ministers, lawyers, physicians, and teachers, replaced black veterans as evidence that African Americans deserved equal political and social rights.¹³

Racism in the state and nationwide swelled at the same time that American citizens dealt with the changes wrought by modern industrialization, increased immigration, and the growing role of the United States in world affairs. The nation united in 1898 to fight the Spanish American War, and support for imperialistic action, defended in part by Anglo-American racial superiority and backed by sectional reconciliation, grew among citizens as the United States sought to become a world power. As a result, groups that shaped the nation’s public iconography no longer needed or wanted the image of the black Civil War veterans as part of their remembrance and commemoration. By the early twentieth century, textbooks, statuary, and visible participation at nationwide military reunions included few of the African Americans who helped to preserve the nation. Pervasive racism throughout the entire nation, demonstrated through segregation, discrimination, and violence, made it difficult for the men who served in the United States Colored Troops to remain part of the history of the American Civil War. By the mid-twentieth century, their role had all but disappeared from our national collective memory.¹⁴

David Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, ended his essay “The Civil War Isn’t Over” with a quotation from the twentieth-century historian Marc Bloch. “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.” We need no better example of this danger than the 2015 political and social battles over the public display of the Confederate flag. It is therefore critical that we delve into the rarely acknowledged lives of individuals who contributed to and shaped past events so that we might better comprehend the ever-shifting interpretations of “causes won and lost.” If we truly want to understand the Civil War and its impact on how Americans shape this country, past, present, and future, we must include the story of all people who participated in and were affected by the most significant event in the history of the United States.¹⁵

Because of their military service, members of the 27th USCT helped to redefine the meaning of American citizenship to include themselves and their families. During the Civil War, the men served as soldiers for their nation, and as veterans they lived as citizens of the United States. The strength of people at the local level who did not allow the role of the USCT to be marginalized gave the late-nineteenth-century Ohio black community legitimate hope for access to equal civil and social rights for all. George Washington Williams concluded the preface of A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 with just that hope. He wrote, “I commit this story of the Negro’s martial prowess to my countrymen, regardless of section or race, creed or party; entertaining the belief that neither sectional malice nor party rancor can ever obliterate a record that is now … not only the proud and priceless heritage of a race, but the glory of a nation.”¹⁶ Unfortunately, the Northern veterans who lived into the twentieth century witnessed a persistent and in many ways an increasingly difficult struggle for African American equality that continued for more than a century after the promise of the three Civil War constitutional Amendments. Yet despite the disappointment, too many had witnessed evidence of the possibility for change. And so in the wars that followed, blacks in the United States continued to offer their martial support in front lines and in the back. Their service helped achieve the goals of political and civil equality for all African Americans that were first experienced by a few, such as those soldiers in the 27th United States Colored Troops.