Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War

African Americans, including former slaves, served in the American Civil War. The 186,097 black men who joined the Union Army included 7,122 officers and 178,975 enlisted soldiers.^[1] Approximately 20,000 black sailors served in the Union Navy and formed a large percentage of many ships' crews.^[2] Later in the war, many regiments were recruited and organized as the United States Colored Troops, which reinforced the Northern forces substantially during the conflict's last two years. Both Northern Free Negro and Southern runaway slaves joined the fight. Throughout the course of the war, black soldiers served in forty major battles and hundreds of more minor skirmishes; sixteen African Americans received the Medal of Honor.^[2]

For the Confederacy, both free and enslaved black Americans were used for manual labor, but the issue of whether to arm them, and under what terms, became a major source of debate within the Confederate Congress, the President's Cabinet, and C.S. War Department staff. In general, newspapers, politicians, and army leaders alike were hostile to any efforts to arm blacks. The war's desperate circumstances meant that the Confederacy changed their policy in the last month of the war; in March 1865, a small program attempted to recruit, train, and arm blacks, but no significant numbers were ever raised or recruited, and those that were never saw combat.