Visualizing the Myth and Folklore of the USCT

Throughout the summer of 2023, I have had the opportunity to live and study at the University of Southern Mississippi as part of the "Mapping Freedom" National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). This story map serves as a brief and interactive summary of my research. I will provide a brief context of my topic, describe my further reading, and share some conclusions I learned.

Note: as this process is still ongoing, I do apologize for any "typos" and grammatical errors within this Story Map and the interactive maps below. They will be adjusted in the future.

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) has worked in partnership with the Mississippi Digital Library (MDL) and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) to create a database of letters sent to and from Mississippi governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project contains thousands of letters covering many years, people, and topics. When I first began my research process, I was struck by the thought of collecting and mapping the letters about the United States Colored Troops somehow. To preface, most of the letters from Mississippians are negative, meaning that they reflect some kind of racialized motivation in writing, including wanting USCT removed from a town, replacing them with a white militia, or accusing them of a crime with minimal evidence. After finding these letters, I began to do additional research to find more instances, both in primary and secondary sources, where authors or scholars describe how the USCT was perceived or how the USCT perceived themselves. How did people feel about them, how were they treated, why did members of the USCT think they were good soldiers, how did they perform in battle, and how did their performance change how citizens and military officers thought about them? Overall, I look to study how these points of view create a difference in opinion, further adding to the "myth" and "folklore" surrounding the USCT as an institution.

The United States Colored Troops first became widely introduced into the Union in 1862 after the Emancipation Proclamation, with enlistment and conscription efforts popping up nationwide, even in Southern states. One instance that caught my eye occurred in New Orleans with the formation of the Louisiana Native Guards. Gen. Order No. 63, issued by General Benjamin Butler in August 1862, created this opportunity. (1). These soldiers, made up of African American militia veterans, became some of the first regiments allocated into the Union Army. As time passed, these soldiers were sent to guard Ship Island, Mississippi, a barrier island previously occupied by the Confederacy during the beginning of the war. While on the island, the soldiers guarded the fortifications and conducted raids on the Mississippi coastline, earning praise from their superiors for the effort shown in battle.

The story of Ship Island inspired me to expand and discover other scholars who published how USCT was accepted in Mississippi and the greater South during the Civil War. I began by studying an article published by Brainerd Dyer (d. 1980) in The Journal of Negro History in 1935. Dyer prefaces how the Confederate States of America created laws to punish free and formerly enslaved individuals who were captured in arms and how they would be sent back to the state they "came from" and punished according to the laws of the state. Using the idea of "no quarter," Dyer notes that the Confederacy immediately set a straightforward precedent that African American soldiers would be treated differently based on ethnicity (2). I then studied an essay by Albert Castel (d. 2014) and an article by Kenneth Bancroft Moore, each discussing issues of misconduct directed towards the United States Colored Troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Castel prefaces his essay by giving context to Fort Pillow and how the "atrocities" committed against the USCT impacted how Union and Confederate militaries remembered/memorialized the events of the battle. At Fort Pillow, Confederate General and future founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, charged the Union lines and allegedly butchered the soldiers inside, murdering and torturing those who surrendered or were wounded. Castel notes the difference in the Confederate accounts as they supposedly kept fighting because it was impossible to discern any orders from Forrest (3). Kenneth Bancroft Moore elaborates on Castel's point by describing the confrontations between Forrest and the USCT at Brice's Crossroads and Tupelo, Mississippi. At these locations, Moore notes how the after-action reports are skewed, with some accounts praising the USCT troops for their bravery and other Confederate accounts mentioning that the USCT fled at first sight of danger (4). Joseph T. Glatthaar adds to how relationships formed between USCT and their commanding officers helped and hurt the narrative of race relations in Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. Often, Union officers were deceptive in their reasons for commanding USCT, with some hoping to act as emancipators or educators to assert themselves into a higher societal position. Glatthaar also writes that many officers supported African American soldiers and had genuine intentions while leading them. However, the shadiness around how soldiers were used as an advertisement created an untrustworthy environment (5). My final literature review helped inspire me to angle this project in another direction to understand better the voices of ordinary citizens across the U.S., from the North and South. In a collection of letters written by African American soldiers during the Civil War and Reconstruction era, Edwin S. Redkey looks to provide the opposite side of the story (6). While the letters from the African American soldiers are not necessarily the same as the CWRGM collection, they describe and outline similar issues like facing racism in Southern and Northern cities. Whether the accounts are positive or negative, the situations in both collections of letters carry many similarities, and having multiple points of view within this overall research project adds to its value as a whole.

Most CWRGM letters describe situations that explain the tense race relations between the Southern states and the occupying Union troops. Additionally, I chose letters that provide background context to Ship Island, Brice's Crossroads, and Tupelo. The reason is that even though they do not directly reference the USCT, they do a great job at showing the emotion and thought put into each communication. I also looked through Newspapers.com and Edwin S. Redkey's collection to find other primary source accounts of incidents like the ones in CWRGM to provide different points of view from similar situations.

How I mapped my points:

• Letters were selected based off tags about USCT
• Created Excel sheets and filled them out with appropriate metadata
• Joined Excel files to QGIS by the latitude and longitude of letter
• Created selections based off certain events and locations
  • Ship Island and Brice’s Crossroads.
• Symbolized different primary sources based off what source they came from
• Downloaded files from QGIS
• Joined them to a base map in ArcGIS Online
• Main point was to show location and allow further exploration
• Created areas of interest in Arc Online
• Added appropriate background information and organized metadata within points
• Symbolized and added appropriate visual details

From here, I created one map with multiple points in each, depending on which layer is turned on. I will provide all three of them below. Please click on each point and explore the information about each primary source.

By working on this project, I hope to lay the groundwork for future research. Consistent with the literature outlined above, we know how Union and Army military members felt about the USCT, but not as much from the regular citizen's perspective. I think it is vital for historians to synthesize available primary sources to better grasp how different geographic regions understood the United States Colored Troops and how those systems of belief created a variety of "folklore." This would be useful to compare with the letters written by African American soldiers, such as those in A Grand Army of Black Men. Regardless, when looking at the CWRGM letters, we can see how racism shaped certain opinions. Additionally, by highlighting the communications in locations where USCT was involved - Ship Island and Northeast Mississippi - the anxiety and fear of the Civil War can be understood in a larger context. This allows researchers to study race relations, racism, and the social history of the time in a new way, creating avenues for further research. The letters of the everyday Mississippian, whether "positive" or "negative," raised the value of the small communities who looked to share their opinions and voices that were important to them. In the end, my aim is for this research to provide two key questions/takeaways:

• What attitudes do you see in the primary sources referencing the USCT and the events they were involved in?
• Look to see where these sources are coming from. Given the availability of letters and newspapers in this project's current state, what kind of trends can we take away about what types of attitudes formed where?

Thank you for reading this story map! I hope that this provides a start to this kind of research and methodology and we can continue to visualize the way voices can shape widespread opinions.

Notes:

1. Edwin C. Bearss, Historical Research Study: Ship Island, Harrison County Mississippi, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Florida Mississippi (Denver: National Park Service, Department of the Interior) 215,  http://npshistory.com/publications/guis/hrs-ship-island.pdf .
2. Brainerd Dyer, “The Treatment of Colored Union Troops by the Confederates, 1861-1865,” The Journal of Negro History 20, no. 3 (July 1935): 275, 277-278, 286-286,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2714719 . 
3. Albert Castel, “The Fort Pillow Massacre: An Examination of the Evidence,” in Black Flag Over Dixie, ed. Gregory J.W. Urwin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 
4. Kenneth Bancroft Moore, “For Pillow, Forrest, and the United States Colored Troops in 1864,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 54, no. 2 (Summer 1995) 116,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/42627193 . 
5. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University of Louisiana Press, 1990).
6. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men (New York: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1992).