Today the First Kansas Colored Infantry, the first African Americans recruited in the Northern states for service in the Civil War, experience their first battlefield engagement. At Island Mound in Missouri’s Bates Country, a detachment of some 225 Kansas African American soldiers clash with five hundred Confederates. Although ten Kansas soldiers are killed and twelve…
As the war grinds ever on, soldier desertions increasingly become a problem for the Confederate Army. Reasons for desertion include, among others, disillusionment among common men who believe they are fighting on behalf of large slave owners; homesickness; pressure from wives and other family members who are suffering on the Southern home front; and lack…
From the swelling ranks of freedmen, African Baptist churches are now forming in Union-controlled areas of coastal South Carolina. This month freed slaves form the First African Baptist Church of Bluffton, a community just across the inland waterway from Hilton Head Island. The new congregation is the first Baptist church formed in the community. The…