Highlights Archives
Company F: Wisconsin's Black Civil War Soldiers
Today the Wisconsin Legislature takes up consideration of Assembly Resolution 5, introduced by Representatives John Gard and Barbara Toles. The resolution honors Company F of the 29th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops, the largest contingent of black soldiers assigned to Wisconsin during the American Civil War.
During the Civil War, 272 African-American men from Wisconsin served in various military units while another 81 men from other states served as “substitutes” (in place of white Wisconsin draftees). Groups of men enlisted not just from cities such as Milwaukee and Janesville but also from rural Grant and Vernon counties, where former slaves and free blacks had built communities.
Company F’s unit history includes fighting in the bloody July 1864 Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, Virginia, where they sustained heavy casualties. Some soldiers in Company F went on to witness one of the most dramatic moments of the war, the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee to the Union’s Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.
You can view the roster of African-American soldiers in Company F and read letters written about Company F by their commanding officer, Colonel John A. Bross, who was killed July 30, 1864, while leading an assault on Petersburg.
After the war, only a handful of African-American Civil War veterans from Company F returned to settle in Wisconsin. Thirty years after the war, 45 black Civil War veterans were still living in Wisconsin. One Wisconsin African American veteran, Peter Thomas of Racine, told his story to reporters in 1922.
You will find more pictures and documents on our black history in Wisconsin page.
:: Posted February 15, 2005
|
