# United States Colored Troops (1863–1865) The **United States Colored Troops** were the federally-organized Black regiments of the Union Army, created by **War Department General Order No. 143 on May 22, 1863**, which established "a Bureau… in the Adjutant General's Office for the record of all matters relating to the organization of Colored Troops." Roughly **179,000 Black men served in the Army — about ten percent of its total manpower** — with another 19,000 in the Navy. The USCT is the largest and least-narrated fact of the [[American Civil War]]. It is also the piece of the war that most directly connects to the KB's core subject matter: an army that was one-tenth Black by 1865 is the precondition for the [[Reconstruction Amendments]], and the century-long project of forgetting it is [[The Lost Cause]] doing its actual work. ## What General Order No. 143 Did The order was administrative, not visionary. It created a bureau to keep records — but in doing so it made Black enlistment a **federal program with a chain of command and a numbering system**, rather than a set of improvised state and departmental experiments. The [[Emancipation Proclamation]] had authorized Black military service on January 1, 1863; General Order 143 built the machinery, and the machinery is what produced scale. The lobbying that got there was done by Black men themselves — [[Frederick Douglass]] in the North, and [[Robert Smalls]], who carried the argument to Washington in August 1862 and came away with Stanton's authorization for 5,000 Black soldiers at Port Royal, months before the Bureau existed. The order also set the terms that would define the force and its grievances: - **Regiments were numbered federally** as U.S. Colored Infantry, Cavalry, Heavy Artillery, Light Artillery, and Engineers. - **Officers were white**, appointed by a board examination. Black soldiers could rise to non-commissioned rank; commissions were exceptional. Estimates of Black commissioned officers range from **"nearly 80"** (National Archives) to **~110** (Wikipedia), most of them surgeons and chaplains rather than line officers. - **Pay was unequal** under the Militia Act of 1862 — $10 per month less a $3 clothing deduction, against $13 for white privates — until Congress equalized it in mid-1864. ## The Four Exceptions This is the distinction that gets flattened everywhere, including in otherwise reliable sources. **Exactly four Black regiments kept their state designations and were never renumbered into the USCT sequence** (American Battlefield Trust): the **54th Massachusetts Infantry**, the **55th Massachusetts Infantry**, the **5th Massachusetts Cavalry**, and the **29th Connecticut Infantry**. Every other Black regiment became a USCT unit. > [!warning] Precision matters here > [[William Harvey Carney]] is routinely listed as a USCT Medal of Honor recipient. He served in the [[54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment]], which was **not** a USCT regiment. The conflation is common enough that it appears in reference works — use "Black Union soldiers" as the umbrella term and reserve "USCT" for the federally-numbered regiments. ## Scale and Cost | Measure | Figure | Source | |---|---|---| | Black men in the Army | ~179,000 | National Archives | | Black men in the Navy | ~19,000 | National Archives | | Share of Union Army manpower | ~10% | NARA and American Battlefield Trust | | Regiments raised | 166 (ABT) / 175 (Wikipedia) | conflicting | | Deaths, all causes | ~38,000–43,000 | American Battlefield Trust | | Of which disease/infection | ~30,000 | National Archives | | Mortality vs. other Union troops | **35% higher** | Wikipedia | > [!note] One figure to distrust > Some compilations give USCT deaths as **68,178**. That number is an outlier against both the National Archives (~40,000) and the American Battlefield Trust (38,000–43,000) and appears to aggregate a different category. Do not repeat it without running down its basis. **The mortality gap is the finding, not a footnote.** USCT soldiers died at a rate roughly a third higher than other Union troops, and overwhelmingly of disease rather than combat. That is not a fact about Black soldiers; it is a fact about assignment, supply, camp siting, and medical care. Black regiments drew disproportionate fatigue and garrison duty in unhealthy postings, received worse rations and equipment, and were attended by fewer and worse-resourced surgeons. **Discrimination inside the institution shows up in the death rate, not in the rhetoric** — a measurement approach the KB uses repeatedly. ## Combat Record The claim that Black troops were used only as laborers is false, and the record was established early and repeatedly. | Date | Engagement | Significance | |---|---|---| | Oct 28–29, 1862 | Island Mound, MO | 1st Kansas Colored — Black troops in combat *before* federal authorization | | May 27, 1863 | Port Hudson, LA | Louisiana Native Guard units assault fortified positions; first major test in the Western theater | | June 7, 1863 | Milliken's Bend, LA | Brutal hand-to-hand defense that changed Grant's assessment of Black troops | | July 18, 1863 | [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] | The 54th Massachusetts — the engagement that ended the War Department's internal argument | | April 12, 1864 | [[Fort Pillow Massacre]] | Confederate killing of surrendering Black troops under [[Nathan Bedford Forrest]] | | July 30, 1864 | The Crater, Petersburg, VA | USCT division committed after the mine assault collapsed; heavy losses, and Confederate troops gave no quarter | | Sept 29–30, 1864 | New Market Heights, VA | **Sixteen Medals of Honor awarded, fourteen of them to USCT soldiers** — the single largest concentration of the war | | Dec 15–16, 1864 | Nashville, TN | USCT brigades in a decisive Union victory | The USCT was **disbanded in October 1865.** ## The Prisoner-of-War Problem The Confederate government refused to treat captured Black soldiers as prisoners of war. Confederate policy — formalized in May 1863 — held that captured Black soldiers would be returned to slavery or tried as insurrectionists, and their white officers put to death for inciting servile insurrection. This had two consequences the KB should keep linked: 1. **It produced atrocities.** The [[Fort Pillow Massacre]] is the most documented, but the pattern of no-quarter against surrendering Black troops recurs, including at the Crater. 2. **It broke prisoner exchange.** The cartel governing prisoner exchanges collapsed over the Confederacy's refusal to exchange Black prisoners on equal terms. The resulting swell of prison populations — Andersonville among them — is a direct downstream cost of the Confederacy's insistence that Black soldiers were property rather than combatants. **The Confederacy chose worse conditions for its own captured soldiers rather than concede the point.** That choice is the clearest available measure of what the Confederacy understood itself to be defending. It is not a matter of interpretation; it is a policy decision with a paper trail. ## Why It Matters for the KB **One-tenth of the winning army is not a footnote.** The scale is the argument. [[The Lost Cause]] cannot accommodate a Union Army that was 10% Black by war's end, so it handles the USCT the way it handles [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] — by omission. Every Lost Cause treatment of the war's manpower question routes around this number. **It is the material basis of Reconstruction.** The [[Reconstruction Amendments]] did not arrive as a moral gift; they arrived attached to roughly 200,000 Black men who had just been armed by the federal government and who constituted an organized, trained, and politically conscious constituency. The Reconstruction-era Black militias, the Black officeholders of the 1868–1877 period, and the Union Leagues drew heavily on USCT veterans. **[[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] is, in significant part, the story of disarming and dispersing that constituency.** **The Black veteran becomes a standing target.** The postwar paramilitary campaigns catalogued in the KB — the Klan, the White League, the Red Shirts — targeted Black veterans specifically and disproportionately, because a man with military training and a claim on the federal government was the hardest kind of Black citizen to intimidate. This is the same dynamic that reappears with returning Black veterans in 1919 and 1946. **The discrimination is measurable inside the institution.** Pay differential, officer exclusion, fatigue-duty assignment, and the mortality gap are all quantifiable. When the KB assesses contemporary claims about equal treatment inside institutions, the USCT is the historical template for the method: *look at the outcome distribution, not the policy statement.* ## See Also - [[54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment]] — A state regiment, not USCT; the exception that proves the numbering rule - [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] — The engagement that converted authorization into scale - [[Fort Pillow Massacre]] — Confederate policy toward captured Black soldiers, enforced - [[Emancipation Proclamation]] — The authorization General Order 143 operationalized - [[American Civil War]] — The war in full - [[Reconstruction Amendments]] — The constitutional settlement USCT service underwrote - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] — The dismantling of the constituency USCT service created - [[The Lost Cause]] — The mythology that requires this force to be forgotten - [[Robert Smalls]] — Helped argue Black enlistment into existence, then lived the whole Reconstruction arc