According to the National Park Service’s Soldiers and Sailors System, there were twenty enlisted men named George Washington in the 5th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. These all would have been black men, the vast majority, former slaves. The 5th U.S. more »
Researching early regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) can sometimes be difficult. Unit names may have changed several times throughout their service. The earliest regiments, organized between the fall of 1862 and the creation of the Bureau of Colored more »
A line from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is the very first sentence in my book: “‘The only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity,’ writes Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam War classic, The Things They Carried. He could have been writing more »
Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 by Richard B. McCaslin remains one of the most thorough treatments of this violent effort to bring in and subdue draft dodgers and perceived Unionists in an area of Texas that more »
It wasn’t until I was reviewing a document featured in my “Chaos of Emancipation” post at the National Archives blog, “Rediscovering Black History” that I rediscovered the story of a lone freedom fighter in northeast Louisiana early in 1863. In more »