Research

I seek to answer what happened to captured Black Union soldiers during the American Civil War.

In the fall of 2014, I began researching the American Civil War's African American soldiers who became prisoners of war in the Confederacy (who I call "Black POWs"). After continually confronting silences in historical records surrounding their experiences in captivity, I began to look into a variety of sources dedicated to military service and postwar activities of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). 

Black POWs, however, can be difficult to find, even with the increasing availability of archival sources through digitization. When looking at the military service records of the USCT on Fold3.com, for example, one can only search by regiment, name, and sometimes by company. The documents that note whether a Black soldier fell into the hands of the enemy (such as "Memorandum of Prisoner of War" slips) are not searchable. In the course of my research, I examined the service records of approximately 50,000 individual soldiers from the United States Colored Troops across 51 regiments. This has led me to identify more than 2,200 African American soldiers who became POWs. 

The story doesn't end there, however. It is one thing to know names and places, but I wanted to discover, where possible, what Black POWs had to say about their experiences. I cross-referenced my list of names with the Pension File Index to see how many Black POWs applied for a pension from the U.S. government after the war. Pensions helped support veterans (and their families) who struggled to earn a living wage due to the effects of wounds, injuries, and illnesses from their time in the U.S. armed services. Veterans often conducted oral interviews with agents from the Bureau of Pensions wherein they discussed the origins of their ailments, called "debilities" in the pension records. Many Black POWs spoke to varying degrees about their captivity, and so I set out to collect as many pensions as possible to gain a better understanding of how Black POWs navigated captivity throughout the Confederacy from the earliest captures of Black soldiers and non-combatants in 1862 to 1865. To date, I have collected more than 360 POWs' pension files from 30 regiments. 

These men could speak at great length about what it meant to be a Black captive of the Confederacy. What struck me most about their accounts was how committed these POWs had been to sustaining one another and fighting to survive as a community. Most Civil War soldiers, Black and white, fought alongside kin and neighbors. They were therefore frequently imprisoned with kin and neighbors. Black POWs relied on one another to survive and fought for each other to the end of their days. 

For more information on the Civil War's Black POWs and the results of my research, see "Black Civil War Prisoners of War: History, Research, and Resources."