Marked by Valor: The “Lost” History of the 6th United States Colored Troops, Heavy Artillery
“Marked by Valor: The ‘Lost’ History of the 6 th U.S.C.T., Heavy Artillery,” argues that the camaraderie of having been a Black Union soldier solidified a sub-culture of Black veterans and their families in Natchez, Mississippi, that cohered throughout the Reconstruction period using the tools and the affiliations first gained in slavery and strengthened during the soldiers’ time in the army. Underlying this narrative is an interpretation of Southern history that maintains that we cannot understand the events of the postwar period—not only for Black veterans, but to some extent all freed people—if we do not understand all that came before: all the suffering, negotiation, and community building of slavery; all the difficulties, discipline, training and death of military service; all the political organizing and struggle for federal remuneration of the early Reconstruction period; all the paramilitary activity when white rule resurged. All of which resulted in an uncertain legacy of material gains and losses from having been Black Union soldiers, but which certainly led to a solidarity and remembrance culture that these men and their families nurtured into the late 19 th century and beyond. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of this solidarity being the fact that many of these men’s final request was to be buried with their comrades in the National Cemetery at Natchez. Past studies of Black Civil War soldiers emphasized battlefield glory. Recently, several historical monographs have addressed what happened after the fighting, but this dissertation is an attempt to connect the experiences of enslavement with the military service of these men and all that came in the decades that followed. I have relied on a diverse array of primary source materials: census, marriage, legal documents, and contemporary newspapers held by the Historic Natchez Foundation in Natchez; letters and diaries by white Natchez residents held at the Louisiana State University archives; land deed and probate records from the Adams County Court House in Natchez; and various manuscripts, and other pertinent holdings located at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History Records. However, the core of this study of one regiment of African-American Union soldiers from Natchez, Mississippi, is the 321 military pension files that expand this dissertation beyond most accounts of Black Civil War soldiers. Civil War pension files are mini biographies of the applicant veteran. Thousands of individual depositions by the soldiers, friends, neighbors, and army comrades provide an abundance of biographical detail not available in any other archival source. The 6 th Heavy Artillery enlisted about 1400 men in 1863 and ‘64. I have chosen a case study of one regiment of Black soldiers for several reasons. First, the 6 th Heavy Artillery was well led and trained and experienced a variety of military engagements that turned the regiment into a well-seasoned fighting force. This battlefield success contributed to an esprit de corps not found in every Union regiment, a factor which a purely social history of a Civil War regiment might miss. Second, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, has significant archival holdings dating back centuries, because, among other reasons, it was not destroyed by the Union army during the war. By addressing each phase of their lives from slavery through their military service and into the Reconstruction period, as well as separately addressing the subject of the wives and families of these soldiers as they confront the challenges of the postwar period, “Marked by Valor: The ‘Lost’ History of the 6 th United States Colored Troops, Heavy Artillery,” sheds new light on this understudied subculture of African Americans. The men of the 6 th Heavy Artillery and their families were marked by a sense of solidarity that they displayed both publicly and privately and would cherish and perform as a group for decades. In the shared experiences of slavery, wartime struggles, and in the coalitions that these men of the 6 th Heavy and their wives subsequently formed, we can detect not just a cooperative survival strategy, but the lingering traces of a patriotism and pride in having participated in this struggle for freedom—a pride that stayed with the survivors long after federal Reconstruction failed them.
Black Soldiers, Black Veterans, Civil War, Mississippi, Natchez, Reconstruction, African American Studies, History, Military History
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