Fugitive Black Prisoners

There are at least 176 men from Black regiments who can be found in the Fugitive Federals Database.  A few of them are white officers of Black units, but the vast majority are Black soldiers.  These numbers hint at the intriguing story of Black Union prisoners in the Civil War and overturn the widespread misunderstanding that the Confederacy massacred most Black soldiers who tried to surrender.  Instead, Confederate officials wanted to enslave Black men and use their labor to further the Confederate war effort.  Confederates captured substantial numbers of Black Union soldiers.  Historian Caroline Newhall has identified the names of 2200 Black Union prisoners in the Confederacy.  70% of them survived the war.  

You can learn more about how to find and analyze sources on Black prisoners of war in these fascinating video interviews with scholars who have uncovered new information and sources about the Black experience in Confederate captivity.  

Free vs. Formerly Enslaved Captives

The fate of a captured Black Union soldier partially depended on whether he was born free in a northern state or had been enslaved before his enlistment.  Some Black regiments, such as the 54th and 55th Massachusetts and the 8th United States Colored Infantry, were comprised mostly of free-born northern Black citizens.  Most of them, such as the 1st South Carolina and the 44th United States Colored Infantry, were recruited from formerly enslaved populations in regions within the Confederate states where the Union army was campaigning and occupying territory.   

In May 1863, the Confederate Congress passed a resolution proclaiming that any Black man captured in Federal uniform, whether born free in a northern state or formerly enslaved, would be handed over to the state in which he was captured.  The assumption was that the state government would try and execute the captured soldier under state laws governing servile insurrection (a 19th-century term for slave rebellion).  President Abraham Lincoln was determined to protect Black soldiers who had been born free in northern states.  Confederates had captured Black soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts participating in attacks on Confederate positions on two islands off Charleston Harbor in June and July 1863.  Most of the prisoners were free-born northern citizens.  Lincoln issued a retaliation proclamation announcing the intention to execute a Confederate prisoner for every Black Union prisoner executed or sold into slavery.  The U.S. War Department set aside some Confederate prisoners from South Carolina as hostages in case any of the captured men from the 54th Massachusetts was executed.  

Confederate President Jefferson C. Davis, realizing that the international laws of war supported the U.S. position that it could enlist its own citizens of whatever color in its armies, backed down.  After the summer of 1863, free-born northern Black soldiers would be placed in military prisons with their white comrades.  There were Black prisoners of war in the Confederate prisons at Andersonville, Georgia, and Florence, South Carolina.  You can read more about their story in the award-winning book by Lorien Foote, Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 

Re-Enslavement of Captured Black Soldiers

But Lincoln did not use retaliation to protect men who had been enslaved before they enlisted in the Union Army. When Confederate officials captured these men, they re-enslaved them to work on Confederate military fortifications and transportation lines or published their names for enslavers to claim them.  Historians have only recently uncovered the story of these prisoners.  The Black soldiers and the information about them found in the Fugitive Federals database will help reconstruct their experiences.  One fascinating part of the story is that so many Black prisoners escaped their re-enslavement.  The last recorded Federal prisoner of war to escape did so in January 1866, when Corporal Henry Scott of the 44th U.S. Colored Infantry showed up at the camp of the First Iowa Cavalry stationed in Sherman, Texas. He was the last of 32 soldiers from his regiment to escape captivity.  The 44th was guarding railroad lines and supply depots in support of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s invasion of Georgia.  Their colonel surrendered the entire garrison when Confederate forces attacked Dalton, Georgia, in October 1864, and Confederates returned the captured enlisted men to slavery.  From January to December 1865, 31 of them fled from locations in Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina.  You can access several student-written biographies of soldiers from the 44th and other U.S.C.T. regiments here.     

The Black experiences told through the Fugitive Federals database centers on prisoners in Alabama and Georgia.  Fifty-four percent of the soldiers from Black regiments named in the database (94 of 176) were captured in Alabama.  Seventy-one percent of the Black soldiers in the database were captured in the two states of Alabama and Georgia.  

There are many opportunities to contribute research to the story of Black prisoners found on this site.  We need more biographies of soldiers from Black units.  Information on them is sometimes hard to find, but the videos provided on this website can guide students into documents and methods to research Black prisoners of war.  There are also trends that need explanation.  Of the 176 men from Black regiments in the database, government documents categorized 57 of them as “Released Soldiers” rather than “Escaped Soldiers.”  

We encourage students and researchers to use the database to investigate these and other stories to further the scholarship on Black prisoners in the American Civil War.