Remembering the approximately 180,000+ free and self-emancipated African Americans fighting for their Freedom, who became Union soldiers and were helping to suppress the confederate rebellion, 40,000 of them died in battle or from disease.

Image: District of Columbia. Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln, between 1863 and 1866. Library of Congress
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"No doubt there were reasons why this particular war was an especially favorable test of the colored soldiers. They had more to fight for than the whites. Besides the flag and the Union, they had home and wife and child. They fought with ropes round their necks, and when orders were issued that the officers of colored troops should be put to death on capture, they took a grim satisfaction. It helped their esprit de corps immensely. With us, at least, there was to be no play-soldier. Though they had begun with a slight feeling of inferiority to the white troops, this compliment substituted a peculiar sense of self-respect. And even when the new colored regiments began to arrive from the North my men still pointed out this difference,—that in case of ultimate defeat, the Northern troops, black or white, would go home, while the First South Carolina must fight it out or be re-enslaved..."

-From "Army Life in a Black Regiment" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson; 1869.
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July 11, 1863, in Norfolk, Va.,
Lt. Alanson B. Sanborn, a white officer with the 1st Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops, is fatally shot by Doctor David Minton Wright in Norfolk.

The 1st U.S.C.T. Regiment, recruited in Washington, D.C. from “Contrabands” and refugees from slavery, had arrived in Norfolk on July 1.

Like most Confederates, Wright was outraged that formerly enslaved people were treated as capable of bearing arms, later saying: “Is it to be supposed that a citizen…, himself an owner of slaves, ...would submit to be arrested by Negroes [and] marched off?”

As Sanborn’s troops marched past, Wright insulted Sanborn and the Black soldiers under his command. Sanborn rebuked Wright and drew his sword, and Wright responded by shooting Sanborn.

Wright was arrested, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to be hanged. Wright’s wife attempted to make an appeal to Maj. Gen. John G. Foster at Fort Monroe, U.S. commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, but the appeal was denied, and Wright was executed in October.

Narrative source: Hampton, Va. History Museum