STRINGING BEANS
“ Our Guys ” force a confrontation
By Sarah Plummer
This past fall I taught Appalachian Community Research , an upper-level research class meant to connect students with community projects .
My students partnered with the Franklin County , Virginia , NAACP and a project called “ Raising the Shade ” to conduct research to support a monument in Rocky Mount honoring 70 African American men who fought for the Union in the Civil War as USCT soldiers ( United States Colored Troops ). My students researched these soldiers ’ lives between 1850 and 1910 , tracing them as much as possible through slave schedules , U . S . Census records , military records , The Freedmen ’ s Bureau , and Pension records through The National Archive .
The U . S . Colored Troops played a pivotal role in the war — 186,000 served in the Union Army , 94,000 of whom are believed to have been former slaves . They made up 10 percent of the Army and they contributed to key victories including the Battle of Tennessee , the Battle of Appomattox , and the Battle of Fort Blakeley , where they represented nearly one-third of all troops present . Despite these contributions , USCT history is underresearched and under-recognized in museums and public memorials .
But how Black soldiers came to be soldiers in the 1860s was far more complex than anyone could imagine . I wrongly believed that all USCT were free at the time of their enlistment because they were born free , had liberated themselves , or were freed and enlisted as the U . S . Army
Photo by Mathew Brady , Special Media Archives , National Archives at College Park
Jones Landing , James River , 1864 .
advanced . We learned that some of our men were enslaved in the North and their enslavers received a bounty for enlisting them in the war effort . That means there were Black soldiers who were forced to fight for their own freedom and the freedom of other enslaved people .
The research process itself forced my students and me to consider individual lives and confront the racist conditions that limited their lives before , during and after the war . The process of archival research ( including confronting what documentation did and did not exist ) was itself an education in privilege and power . For students who had never examined primary documents , even seeing a signature expressed as an “ X ” on enlistment papers because a soldier could not read or write was an enlightening moment . They had never searched slave schedules on the chance
Sarah Plummer is a postdoctoral associate at Virginia Tech funded by The Mellon Foundation , teaching in Tech ’ s Appalachian Studies Program . She works with Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia , a group sharing untold histories across the region . She worked as a journalist for seven years in West Virginia at The Register-Herald and the Associated Press . As a Giles County , Va ., native , she is proudly Appalachian and acutely invested in the stories shared about the region . Courtesy photo
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