BLACK AMERICAN PATRIOTS | CIVIL WAR

A JOURNEY OF COURAGE, RESOLVE, AND FREEDOM
Black American Patriots of the Civil War

During the American Civil War, Black Americans—whether enslaved, escaped from slavery, or born free—demonstrated extraordinary courage and determination in the struggle for freedom and the preservation of the Union. As soldiers, sailors, physicians, scouts, spies, abolitionists, recruiters, and advocates, their service and sacrifice helped shape the outcome of the Civil War and the future course of American history.

The Democratic Party emerged as a major national political force with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and remained one of the country's dominant political parties in the decades preceding the Civil War. As the nation became increasingly divided over slavery, Southern Democrats strongly defended the institution and its expansion, while divisions over slavery also developed among Northern Democrats. In the 1850s, the collapse of the Whig Party helped give rise to the Republican Party, a new political coalition organized principally around opposition to the expansion of slavery into the nation's western territories. By 1860, the political conflict over slavery had fractured the country and the Democratic Party itself along increasingly sectional lines.

Many events intensified the growing division between the free and slaveholding states in the years preceding the Civil War. Among the most consequential was the legal struggle begun in 1846 by Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet. Enslaved in Missouri, the Scotts filed separate freedom suits in the St. Louis Circuit Court, arguing that their residence in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory—where slavery was prohibited—had entitled them to freedom. Their eleven-year legal battle ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court and produced one of the most controversial and consequential decisions in American history.

PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN
16th President of the United States of America

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States and became the nation's first Republican president. The election occurred amid an escalating national conflict over slavery and its expansion into the western territories. The Democratic Party had divided along sectional lines, with Northern Democrats nominating Stephen A. Douglas and Southern Democrats nominating John C. Breckinridge. Lincoln won a majority of the Electoral College despite receiving less than 40 percent of the national popular vote.

Lincoln and the Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery into the federal territories, although Lincoln maintained during the 1860 campaign that he did not intend to abolish slavery in states where it already existed. Nevertheless, his election was viewed by many Southern leaders as a direct threat to the future of slavery. South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860. Its official declaration of the causes of secession specifically condemned growing opposition to slavery in the free states and described Lincoln's election as the elevation of a president whose views were hostile to slavery.

Before Lincoln took office, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed South Carolina out of the Union. Representatives of the seceded states organized the Confederate States of America in February 1861. By the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, seven Southern states had already left the Union, confronting the new president with the gravest constitutional crisis the nation had faced.

AMERICA ERUPTS INTO CIVIL WAR

The crisis became war at Fort Sumter, a United States military installation located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on the fort. Major Robert Anderson and the United States garrison endured the bombardment until Anderson agreed to evacuate the fort. The surrender of Fort Sumter marked the beginning of open warfare between the United States and the Confederacy.

Lincoln responded by calling for troops to suppress the rebellion and preserve the Union. Four additional slaveholding states—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—subsequently joined the Confederacy. What had begun as decades of political and constitutional conflict over slavery, its expansion, sectional power, and the future of the Union had become the American Civil War.

For Black Americans, the outbreak of war created both profound uncertainty and an unprecedented opportunity. The conflict had begun as a struggle to preserve the Union, but the institution of slavery stood at the center of the sectional crisis that produced it. As the war progressed, Black Americans would increasingly force the question of freedom into the nation's military and political future—not merely as people awaiting liberation, but as advocates, recruiters, intelligence operatives, physicians, sailors, and eventually soldiers willing to fight for it.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Abolitionist, Orator, Author, and Advocate for Black Military Service

Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom in 1838 and became one of the nation's most influential abolitionists, writers, and orators. By the beginning of the Civil War, he was among the country's most prominent Black voices, using his speeches and writings to argue that the conflict must become not only a war to preserve the Union, but also a struggle to end slavery and secure freedom and citizenship for Black Americans.

From the beginning of the war, Douglass strongly advocated allowing Black men to serve in the United States military. President Abraham Lincoln initially resisted the enlistment of Black soldiers as he attempted to preserve the loyalty of the Union's slaveholding border states and maintain support for restoring the Union. Douglass challenged that policy, arguing that Black Americans should be permitted to participate directly in the struggle for their own freedom and the preservation of the nation.

As the war progressed, federal policy changed. The Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, declared enslaved people in areas still in rebellion to be free and formally authorized the enrollment of Black men in the armed forces of the United States. Douglass immediately became an influential recruiter, urging Black Americans to enlist and prove through military service their claim to freedom and citizenship.

His efforts became closely associated with the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North. Douglass helped recruit men for the 54th, and two of his own sons, Lewis and Charles Douglass, joined its ranks. Their service made Douglass's appeal deeply personal: he was not asking other Black families to accept a sacrifice that he was unwilling to accept within his own.

Douglass believed military service represented more than participation in the war. It offered Black Americans an opportunity to demonstrate publicly that they were prepared to defend the United States and had earned the rights of American citizenship. Speaking in support of Black enlistment in 1863, Douglass declared that once a Black man wore the letters “U.S.”, carried a musket, and served beneath the American eagle, no power could deny that he had earned the right to citizenship.

Douglass also demanded that the nation honor the men it called into service. When Black soldiers confronted unequal pay, limited opportunities for promotion, and unequal treatment if captured by Confederate forces, Douglass suspended his recruiting efforts and met personally with President Lincoln in 1863 to press their concerns. Their relationship developed despite significant disagreements, and Douglass continued advocating for emancipation, equal military treatment, and full citizenship for Black Americans.

Douglass never carried a rifle into Civil War combat, but his contribution to the struggle was substantial. He used the weapons available to him—his voice, his pen, his influence, and his extraordinary determination—to help open the ranks of the United States military to Black Americans and to argue that saving the Union and securing Black freedom could not ultimately be separated. After the war, he continued that struggle by advocating for equal citizenship and civil rights during Reconstruction and throughout the remainder of his life.

HARRIET TUBMAN
Nurse, Scout, Spy, and Liberator

Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore around 1822, Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom in 1849. But securing her own freedom was not enough. Over the following decade, she repeatedly returned to Maryland at extraordinary personal risk, making approximately thirteen missions and helping about seventy family members and others escape slavery through the Underground Railroad.

When the Civil War began, Tubman's fight for freedom entered a new phase. In 1862, she traveled to Union-held South Carolina, where she served the United States Army in several capacities, including as a nurse, scout, and spy. Drawing upon skills developed during her years guiding people out of slavery, Tubman worked behind Confederate lines and helped develop a network that gathered valuable intelligence about Confederate positions, waterways, and defenses.

Her most significant Civil War operation came along South Carolina's Combahee River in June 1863. Tubman and Colonel James Montgomery helped plan a military raid intended to disrupt Confederate resources and liberate enslaved people working on plantations along the river. Intelligence gathered by Tubman, Black scouts, freedom seekers, and local boatmen helped United States forces identify Confederate positions and dangerous mines placed in the waterways.

On June 1, approximately 300 soldiers, including Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, departed with Tubman and Montgomery aboard three gunboats. After one vessel ran aground, the remaining gunboats continued toward the Combahee River. In the early hours of June 2, the raiding force moved upriver, destroying Confederate supplies and plantation infrastructure while hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children fled toward the United States vessels and freedom.

By the conclusion of the Combahee River Raid, more than 750 enslaved people had been liberated. In the days that followed, Tubman helped recruit more than 150 of the newly freed men into the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, transforming liberation into an opportunity for those men to participate directly in the fight against the Confederacy and slavery.

The operation represented an extraordinary moment in American military history. Tubman's knowledge, intelligence network, leadership, and courage contributed directly to a successful United States military operation that simultaneously weakened Confederate resources and brought hundreds of people out of slavery. The National Park Service identifies Tubman as the only African American woman to lead troops in a military operation during the Civil War and describes the Combahee operation as the first armed raid in United States history planned and led by a woman.

Tubman's service did not end with the raid. She continued working for the United States during the war, including nursing Black soldiers and other wounded and sick people. After the Civil War, she returned to Auburn, New York, where she continued advocating for the rights of Black Americans and later became active in the movement for women's suffrage. She died in 1913 and was buried with military honors.

Dr. ALEXANDER T. AUGUSTA
Physician, Union Army Surgeon, and Pioneer

Born free in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1825, Alexander Thomas Augusta wanted to become a physician at a time when racial discrimination placed formidable barriers between Black Americans and medical education. After being denied admission to medical school in the United States because of his race, Augusta moved to Canada, where he studied medicine at Trinity College in Toronto and earned his medical degree in 1856. He established a successful medical practice and became active in efforts to improve educational opportunities for Black Canadians.

The Civil War brought Augusta back to the United States. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote to President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in January 1863, offering his medical services to the United States Army and requesting an appointment as surgeon to one of the newly forming Black regiments. His initial effort was rejected in part because he was a Black man. Augusta refused to accept the decision and continued pressing for the opportunity to serve.

His persistence prevailed. On April 14, 1863, Augusta was commissioned as a surgeon with the rank of Major in the United States Army and assigned to the 7th United States Colored Infantry. He became the first Black physician commissioned in the Union Army and, at the time of his appointment, the highest-ranking Black officer in United States military service.

The uniform and rank of a United States Army officer did not shield Augusta from racial discrimination. White surgeons serving with him objected to being subordinate to a Black officer and petitioned government officials to have the arrangement changed. Augusta was subsequently transferred to Washington, D.C., where he was placed in charge of a hospital serving Black patients at Camp Barker—making him the first Black American to head a hospital in the United States.

Augusta also challenged discrimination outside the hospital. In 1864, while wearing his Army uniform, he was denied equal access to a Washington streetcar and physically forced from it after refusing to ride outside in the rain because he was Black. Rather than quietly accept the humiliation, Augusta formally reported what had happened. Senator Charles Sumner subsequently invoked Augusta's treatment while advocating legislation against racial discrimination on Washington's streetcars; in 1865, Congress enacted legislation prohibiting such exclusion.

He also confronted unequal military pay. When an Army paymaster attempted to compensate Augusta according to the substantially lower rate paid to Black enlisted soldiers rather than the salary due a commissioned Army surgeon, Augusta protested to Senator Henry Wilson. His own pay dispute was corrected, while Congress subsequently established equal pay for Black soldiers in 1864.

By the end of the Civil War, Augusta received the honorary brevet rank of Lieutenant Colonel, making him the highest-ranking Black officer in the United States Army at that time. His achievements continued after the war. He worked with the Freedmen's Bureau, practiced medicine in Washington, and in 1869 joined the faculty of Howard University's medical department, becoming the nation's first Black professor of medicine.

Alexander Augusta's patriotism was demonstrated not merely by wearing the uniform of the United States, but by insisting upon the right to serve his country when others attempted to deny him that opportunity. He served wounded and sick Americans, challenged discrimination while wearing his nation's uniform, and opened doors that had been closed to Black physicians and military officers before him. When Augusta died in 1890, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery—the first Black officer to receive burial there.

SERGEANT WILLIAM HARVEY CARNEY
The courageous American Civil War soldier who, in the heat of battle, would not allow the flag to fall...

William Harvey Carney was born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, on February 29, 1840. As a young man, he escaped slavery and made his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his father had previously found freedom. When Black Americans were finally permitted to enlist in the United States Army during the Civil War, Carney answered the call. On February 17, 1863, he enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North. He was soon promoted to sergeant in Company C.

Only months later, Carney and the men of the 54th would face one of the most difficult tests of their courage. On July 18, 1863, the regiment led a United States assault against Fort Wagner, a heavily defended Confederate position guarding the approaches to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The 54th advanced across exposed ground under devastating Confederate fire as men fell throughout the regiment.

During the assault, the soldier carrying the United States flag was shot and began to fall. Carney immediately abandoned his musket, seized the flag before it could fall with its bearer, and continued forward with the colors. Despite being wounded repeatedly, he carried the flag through the battle and reached the parapet of Fort Wagner as the regiment pressed its attack.

The assault ultimately failed to capture the fort, and the surviving soldiers of the 54th were forced to withdraw. Carney, already suffering from multiple wounds, carried the flag back through enemy fire toward United States lines. Another soldier offered to take the colors from him, but Carney continued carrying them himself. When he finally reached safety, he told the men around him:

“Boys, I did but my duty; the dear old flag never touched the ground!”

Carney had sustained severe wounds during the battle. His injuries eventually resulted in his honorable discharge from the United States Army in June 1864. The 54th Massachusetts had suffered devastating casualties at Fort Wagner, but its courage had answered one of the central questions confronting Black military service during the Civil War. The regiment's performance demonstrated before the nation that Black American soldiers would fight—and sacrifice—for the United States with extraordinary courage. The 54th's service helped encourage further Black enlistment, and more than 180,000 Black men ultimately served in the United States Army during the Civil War.

Carney's heroism at Fort Wagner eventually earned him the nation's highest military decoration. Nearly thirty-seven years after the battle, he was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1900 for his actions on July 18, 1863. Although other Black servicemen had received Medals of Honor before Carney's award was formally presented, Carney's battlefield action occurred earlier. For that reason, he is recognized for the earliest Civil War action by a Black American ultimately honored with the Medal of Honor.

William Harvey Carney's story embodies the central theme of this article. Born into slavery, he escaped to freedom, voluntarily put on the uniform of the United States, and then risked his life carrying the American flag through one of the Civil War's fiercest assaults. His words after Fort Wagner were characteristically modest—he had only done his duty—but his actions helped demonstrate the courage, patriotism, and sacrifice of the Black Americans who fought for a nation in which their own rights and citizenship were still being contested.

THE ROAD TO VICTORY
Black American Soldiers and the Surrender at Appomattox

William Carney's courage at Fort Wagner represented only one story among tens of thousands. By the end of the Civil War, more than 180,000 Black men had served in the United States Army, organized largely within the United States Colored Troops. Black Americans served throughout the conflict as infantrymen, artillerymen, cavalrymen, sailors, laborers, scouts, and in numerous other capacities essential to the United States war effort.

Their service came at considerable personal risk. Black soldiers endured many of the same dangers faced by other United States troops—battle wounds, disease, exhaustion, separation from family, and death—but they also confronted discrimination within the military. They initially received unequal pay, often faced restrictions on rank and advancement, and could face particularly severe consequences if captured by Confederate forces. Despite those obstacles, Black regiments fought in major campaigns across the Civil War and established beyond question their effectiveness and courage as soldiers.

Their contribution continued through the final campaigns of the war. After the fall of Petersburg and Richmond in April 1865, United States forces pursued General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia westward across Virginia. Among the soldiers participating in the Appomattox Campaign were thousands of Black American troops serving in the United States Army.

On April 9, 1865, United States and Confederate forces fought around Appomattox Court House, Virginia. More than 5,000 soldiers from seven United States Colored Troops regiments participated in the battle. Later that day, General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Black American soldiers who had entered the war fighting for a country in which millions of their people remained enslaved were therefore present on the battlefield when the Confederacy's largest army surrendered.

Appomattox did not technically end every Confederate military operation. Other Confederate forces remained in the field and surrendered during the weeks that followed. But Lee's surrender marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War and effectively destroyed the Confederacy's ability to continue the conflict on the scale it had previously maintained.

For Black Americans, Union victory carried consequences far greater than military victory alone. The preservation of the United States had become inseparably connected with emancipation. Men who had been denied citizenship—and in many cases had themselves escaped slavery—had worn the uniform of the United States, carried its flag, fought its battles, suffered its wounds, and helped secure its victory. More than half of the Black troops at Appomattox had escaped slavery in either the Confederacy or the Union's slaveholding border states.

Their service did not by itself resolve the nation's struggle over citizenship and equality. Those questions would continue into Reconstruction and far beyond it. But the Civil War had established something that could no longer credibly be denied: Black Americans had participated directly in preserving the Union and destroying the institution of slavery that had denied freedom to generations of their people.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
Freedom Becomes a War Aim

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in the states and portions of states then in rebellion against the United States to be free. The proclamation transformed the character of the Civil War by formally placing emancipation alongside preservation of the Union as a central objective of the United States' war effort.

The proclamation did not immediately free every enslaved person in the United States. It applied specifically to areas designated as being in rebellion and therefore did not abolish slavery in the loyal slaveholding border states or in certain Confederate areas already under United States control. Its immediate reach also depended upon the advance and enforcement of United States military authority. Nevertheless, the proclamation fundamentally altered the legal and military course of the war.

One of its most consequential provisions formally authorized the enlistment of Black men into the armed forces of the United States. Black Americans had already been pressing the government for the right to fight, and thousands would now enter United States military service. By the end of the Civil War, approximately 200,000 Black men had served in the United States Army and Navy, contributing directly to the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery.

For enslaved Americans within the Confederacy, the proclamation also gave the advancing United States Army an explicit mission connected to their freedom. As United States forces moved through Confederate territory, enslaved men, women, and children fled plantations and sought protection behind Union lines. Many of the men subsequently enlisted, turning the struggle for their own freedom into direct military service against the government fighting to preserve their enslavement.

But the Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime executive action; it did not permanently abolish slavery everywhere in the United States through a constitutional amendment. Lincoln consequently supported a constitutional prohibition that could place abolition beyond the uncertainties of wartime authority. Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865, and sent it to the states for ratification.

Lincoln would not live to see that process completed. On April 14, 1865—only five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox—President Lincoln was shot by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died the following morning. His assassination removed the president at the very moment the United States was confronting the enormous task of restoring the Union and determining the legal and political future of millions of newly freed Black Americans.

On December 6, 1865, the required number of states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Slavery and involuntary servitude—except as punishment for a crime following conviction—were constitutionally prohibited throughout the United States. The freedom proclaimed during the war had now been secured within the Constitution itself.

THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA
From Emancipation to Citizenship

The end of the Civil War confronted the United States with an enormous challenge. The Union had been preserved, and slavery abolished, but approximately four million formerly enslaved Black Americans were beginning lives in freedom while the former Confederate states faced political, economic, and social reconstruction. The nation now had to determine how those states would be restored to the Union and, just as importantly, what freedom and citizenship would mean for the people who had only recently been held in slavery.

The transition began even before the war formally ended. On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. Operating through the War Department, the Bureau provided food, clothing, medical assistance, and other relief while helping formerly enslaved people establish themselves in freedom. It supervised labor contracts, assisted families attempting to reunite after separation during slavery and war, helped establish schools, and later assisted Black veterans in obtaining military pay, bounties, and pensions.

Lincoln's assassination placed responsibility for the early postwar reconstruction of the South largely in the hands of President Andrew Johnson. Johnson favored relatively rapid restoration of the former Confederate states and granted pardons to large numbers of former Confederates. Under his approach, new Southern state governments were established primarily by white voters and given substantial authority over their own internal affairs, provided they accepted the abolition of slavery and other basic conditions for restoration.

But the abolition of slavery did not automatically produce equal citizenship. Beginning in 1865, Southern legislatures enacted laws that became known collectively as the Black Codes. These laws varied by state, but their purpose and effect were to severely restrict the freedom and economic independence of formerly enslaved Black Americans. Restrictions involving employment, labor contracts, movement, property, occupations, and vagrancy threatened to place many freedpeople under systems of control that preserved important features of the old plantation labor structure even though slavery itself had been abolished.

The Black Codes and the treatment of freedpeople contributed to an escalating confrontation between President Johnson and the Republican-controlled Congress over the direction of Reconstruction. Congressional Republicans increasingly argued that abolishing slavery alone was insufficient if the former Confederate states could deny basic civil rights to the people who had just become free. Congress consequently moved toward a larger federal role in protecting Black Americans and defining citizenship under United States law.

The result would become one of the most consequential constitutional transformations in American history. During Reconstruction, Congress and the states would establish new federal civil-rights protections and adopt constitutional amendments addressing citizenship, equal protection, and voting rights. Black Americans also began participating in American political life on a scale previously denied to them, including voting, holding local and state offices, and serving in the United States Congress.

The battlefield struggle had ended, but the struggle to define the freedom won through emancipation had not. The next challenge was whether freedom would exist merely as the absence of slavery—or whether Black Americans would possess the enforceable rights of American citizenship.

THE BLACK CODES
Freedom Restricted by Law

he ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States, but the transition from slavery to freedom immediately produced another struggle. Beginning in 1865, legislatures in former Confederate states enacted a series of laws commonly known as the Black Codes, designed to restrict the rights, movement, economic independence, and opportunities of newly freed Black Americans.

Mississippi enacted the first comprehensive Black Codes in November 1865, and other Southern states soon adopted similar legislation. The specific laws differed from state to state, but many imposed special restrictions upon Black Americans that did not apply equally to white citizens. Mississippi's laws, for example, required annual employment contracts, restricted the leasing of rural land and certain occupations, prohibited interracial marriage, and subjected those classified as “vagrants” to fines, imprisonment, or forced labor.

Vagrancy laws became one of the most powerful mechanisms of control. Black Americans who were unemployed or unable to demonstrate employment could be arrested and fined. Those unable to pay could in some circumstances have their labor hired out, creating a system in which poverty or unemployment could result in coerced labor. Other provisions sought to bind freedpeople to annual labor contracts and restore much of the labor discipline that had characterized the plantation economy before emancipation.

The consequences reached beyond employment. Black Codes could restrict where freedpeople could live or work, what property they could lease, what occupations they could pursue, and how they were treated within state legal systems. National Archives records also document that freedpeople could receive harsh punishment for relatively minor offenses and sometimes lacked equal access to state courts.

Black Americans did not simply accept these restrictions. Across the South, freedpeople organized conventions, petitioned governments for basic civil rights, established communities and institutions, pursued education, negotiated labor arrangements, and asserted the independence that emancipation had promised them. Their demands for meaningful freedom became an important force in the developing struggle over Reconstruction.

The Black Codes also intensified the growing conflict between President Andrew Johnson and the Republican-controlled Congress. Johnson's Reconstruction policies had permitted newly established Southern governments considerable authority over their internal affairs. When those governments enacted laws restricting the rights of freedpeople, congressional Republicans increasingly concluded that abolition alone could not adequately protect Black Americans if individual states remained free to deny them fundamental civil rights.

Congress responded by moving toward federal protection of citizenship and civil rights. In 1866, that confrontation would produce one of the most important pieces of civil-rights legislation in American history—the Civil Rights Act of 1866—and would soon contribute to an even more permanent constitutional answer through the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Civil War had destroyed legal slavery, but the Black Codes demonstrated that freedom required more than emancipation alone. If the rights of newly freed Black Americans could be restricted by state law, the nation still faced a fundamental question:

Would American citizenship carry rights that no state could simply take away?

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866
From Freedom to American Citizenship

The abolition of slavery ended the legal institution that had held millions of Black Americans in bondage, but the Black Codes demonstrated that emancipation alone could not guarantee the rights of freedom. Congress increasingly concluded that federal action was necessary to establish and protect the civil rights of the people who had only recently emerged from slavery.

In 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaring that people born in the United States and not subject to a foreign power were citizens without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude. The law sought to guarantee fundamental civil rights, including the ability to make and enforce contracts, sue and participate in court proceedings, and purchase, sell, hold, and inherit property.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation. Congress rejected his objections, and on April 9, 1866, the House joined the Senate in overriding the presidential veto, allowing the Civil Rights Act to become law. The action marked the first time Congress enacted major legislation over a presidential veto and represented an extraordinary expansion of federal responsibility for protecting the civil rights of Black Americans.

But Congress also recognized a fundamental vulnerability: a federal statute could potentially be changed or repealed by a future Congress, and questions remained about the constitutional authority supporting the law. Congressional leaders therefore sought to place the principles of citizenship and equal legal protection within the Constitution itself. The result was the Fourteenth Amendment.

Ratified on July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment established that persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction were citizens of both the United States and the state in which they lived. It also prohibited states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or denying any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The constitutional transformation continued with the Fifteenth Amendment. Ratified on February 3, 1870, it prohibited the United States and the states from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. For Black American men, whose citizenship had only recently received constitutional protection, the amendment established a constitutional prohibition against racial discrimination in voting.

Together, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments fundamentally changed the Constitution. Slavery had been abolished. Birthright citizenship had been constitutionally established. States were bound by requirements of due process and equal protection. And racial discrimination in voting was constitutionally prohibited. These guarantees would not always be honored or effectively enforced in the decades that followed, but they established constitutional principles that could be invoked in the continuing struggle to make the nation's promise of liberty a reality.

For the Black Americans whose journey this article has followed, those achievements had come at tremendous cost. Some had escaped slavery and challenged the nation through its courts. Some used their voices and influence to demand freedom and the right to serve. Some gathered intelligence, healed the wounded, recruited soldiers, or carried the American flag into battle. More than 180,000 Black men served in the United States Army, while thousands more served in the Navy. Many never returned home.

They had entered the Civil War in a nation where the Supreme Court had declared in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black Americans descended from enslaved people could not be citizens of the United States. They emerged from the Reconstruction era with slavery abolished and American citizenship written into the Constitution.

That transformation did not erase the injustice that preceded it, nor did it end the struggle for equality that would follow. But it represented an extraordinary change in the constitutional meaning of American freedom—made possible in part by Black Americans who refused to remain spectators in the struggle for their own liberty.

They escaped. They spoke. They served. They fought. They sacrificed. And they helped change the Constitution of the United States.

Author: Adonis Shifflett
Black American Patriots of the Civil War

REFERENCES:

National Park Service — U.S. Department of the Interior

• Dred Scott — Gateway Arch National Park
• Harriet Robinson Scott — Gateway Arch National Park
• Frederick Douglass — National Park Service
• Harriet Tubman — National Park Service
• Dr. Alexander Augusta — Ford's Theatre National Historic Site
• William H. Carney — National Park Service
• 54th Massachusetts Regiment — National Park Service
• The 54th Massachusetts and the Second Battle of Fort Wagner — National Park Service
• The Emancipation Proclamation — National Park Service
• United States Colored Troops at Appomattox — Appomattox Court House National Historical Park
• Reconstruction — National Park Service
• Reconstruction Era — National Park Service
• Reconstruction and Repression, 1865–1900 — National Park Service

National Archives and Records Administration

• Freedmen's Bureau Records
• Reconstruction Amendments and African American Voting Rights
• 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868)
• 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870)

United States Senate — Senate Historical Office

• The Civil War: The Senate's Story — Historical Chronology
• Landmark Legislation: The Fourteenth Amendment