A Visit to a Monument for Murdered USCTs

The three men were likely exhausted, having been on the constant move for two weeks. Long, hot marches from Annapolis, Maryland, down to Washington, D.C., and then across the Potomac River into Virginia. Once in the Old Dominion, they followed the course of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad along with thousands of others until their throats were burning with the suffocating dust. And then sometime, as their comrades marched ahead, the three men fell out, too exhausted to go any further.

Straggling certainly wasn’t uncommon during the Civil War, but for these three, it would end in disaster. The three unidentified men belonged to the 9th Corps’s 4th Division, made up entirely of United States Colored Troops (USCT). And while their comrades got further and further away, the three Black men rested by the side of the road, trying to catch their breath. Then the Confederate cavalry found them.

Black soldiers in blue had already made their fighting prowess known by the spring of 1864. Honey Springs, Milliken’s Bend, Battery Wagner, and Jenkins Ferry were but a few examples that showcased the martial abilities of men finally allowed to enlist in their nation’s army with the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. But, until May 1864, there had not been any Black units with the Eastern Theatre’s most famous Federal force, the Army of the Potomac.

That changed when the division of Brig. Gen. William Ferrero was ordered to join up with the rest of the 9th Corps, under the command of Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Ferrero commanded two brigades, consisting of seven regiments of infantry. None of the regiments were very experienced—the division’s oldest regiment had mustered in only four months earlier. Other regiments were still recruiting, trying to fill up its ranks before the campaign got underway.[1]

Not everyone was sure of the fighting ability of these soldiers. Besides the usual racism extolled by white soldiers doubting the Colored Troops in combat, others panicked the thought of what would happen when they came into contact with Confederate forces. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Lyman, serving on the Army of the Potomac’s command staff, wrote of his fears that the soldiers would be “bayonetted by the unsparing Southerners,” and added, “God help them if the grey-backed infantry attack them!”[2]

Stories already abounded of atrocities and murder when Confederates had captured Black U.S. soldiers. The Confederate Congress had reacted swiftly to the Emancipation Proclamation’s provision allowing for the recruitment of Black soldiers. In May 1863, they had passed the Retaliatory Acts, promising to execute white officers and sell into slavery any captured Black soldiers. Especially fresh were the accounts coming out of Tennessee and the capture of Fort Pillow, when nearly 200 Colored Troops had been murdered in February of 1864.

Ferrero’s men, along with the rest of the 9th Corps, set off from Annapolis, Maryland, on April 23. They marched to Washington, D.C, and then through the dust and heat of Virginia, making their way to the rest of the army’s camp near Culpeper. Along the way, the Colored Troops were met cooly by secessionist sympathizers. Albert Rogall, a company commander of the 27th USCT, wrote that some spat on the soldiers as they marched by.[3]

The division of Colored Troops were assigned to rear echelon duty, guarding the Army of the Potomac’s nearly 5,000 wagons and ambulances. As the rest of the army fought at the Wilderness and then made its way towards Spotsylvania Court House, the heat and fatigue set in. Soldiers, white and Black alike, fell out of the ranks and sought shade.

History does not know the names or units of the three men this article began with. What is known, is that they made to near Madden’s Tavern, about seven miles from Germanna Ford, a crossing of the Rapidan River. As the main armies began to fight at Spotsylvania, Confederate cavalry scouted and raided towards the rear of the U.S. forces, scooping up supplies and prisoners as they went.

The 9th Virginia Cavalry heard rumors about the presence of Black soldiers. Private Byrd Willis wrote home, “Two Regts of negroes are reported at Brandy Station, & many think we are on our way to capture them.” The Virginians found them the next day, May 8.

Private Willis continued that the 9th Virginia captured “large numbers of stragglers from Grant’s army who surrendered without resistance.” The prisoners were sent to Gordonsville, and then onto places like Andersonville. But the rage of Confederate soldiers seeing Black soldiers with eagle belt plates and U.S. buckles reached its crescendo. “We captured three negro soldiers, the first we had seen,” Willis wrote. “They were taken out in the road side and shot, & their bodies left there.” Another trooper from the 9th Virginia wrote of the prisoners, simply, “It is needless for me to say what became of them.”[4]

The 9th Virginia Cavalry’s murder of the three unnamed Colored Troops, while soon forgotten as the bloody Overland Campaign dragged on, is indicative of the cruelty and changing societal implications of the ongoing conflict.

Two years ago, near the site of the killings, a small monument was dedicated to the memory of the three men. Standing at the monument, one can see both Madden’s Tavern, an antebellum traveler’s rest run by a free Black man named Willis Madden, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, one of the first churches established for newly freed people after emancipation in Culpeper. The memorial, flanked by these two landmarks, serves as a reminder of the trials and tribulations undertaken to preserve the Union, end slavery, and the work still yet to do stretching all the way to the present day.

The monument to the murdered USCTs is near Lignum, Virginia, on Madden’s Tavern Road. Its coordinates are: 38° 26.04? N, 77° 49.498? W. There is a small parking lot next to the monument. 

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[1] William A. Dobak, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2011), 338.

[2] Theodore Lyman, Meade’s Headquarters, 1863-1865, ed. George R. Agassiz (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1922), 102.

[3] Albert Rogall, “The Civil War Diary of Colonel Albert Rogall,” ed. Frank Levstik, Polish American Studies (Spring—Autumn, 1970), 35.

[4] Diary of Byrd C. Willis, May 7-8, 1864, Library of Virginia; Quoted in Robert Krick, 9th Virginia Cavalry (Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, 1988), 34.