Ballot Blocked, Episode 1: Black Families, the Civil War and Citizenship

An African American soldier in Union Army uniform with his family. More than 180,000 African American men served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the Civil War. Library of Congress.

Ballot Blocked is a six-part National Park Service podcast on women's fight to vote, from the Civil War to the 2020 election, hosted by historian Eleanor Mahoney. Its premise: the path to the ballot has been neither straight nor steady — laws must be enforced, and new barriers keep appearing. Listen to this episode on the National Park Service's episode page, which has the audio and full transcript.

This episode

It goes back to the 1860s. The Nineteenth Amendment was half a century away, but free African American women in Philadelphia were already active in civic life — above all in supporting the Union Army. The guest is historian Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. of Augusta University, who studies free African Americans in Pennsylvania from about 1850 to 1930, and what enlistment cost soldiers and their families.

Camp William Penn

• More than 180,000 Black men served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT).
• Camp William Penn, outside Philadelphia, was the largest USCT training site — about 11,000 soldiers trained there between 1863 and 1865.
• For Black families, enlisting was a claim to belonging in a nation that denied them citizenship and the vote — but it carried risks that lasted generations.

Pinheiro's interest is personal: his mother served 25 years in the military, including in combat, and he grew up watching the news and wondering whether she would come home. He wants to strip the glorification from war and ask what it meant for families — the notification of a death, a soldier coming home disabled, the later effort to erase Black sacrifices from memory.

Black women at the camps

In his account, Black women were central:

• They came to the camp to watch relatives train and to say what might be a last goodbye. Some took jobs in the camp laundry; others found work nearby to stay close.
• Community leaders — women tied to the AME Church, schoolteachers, people linked to the Underground Railroad — saw the government failing to give Black soldiers proper care (in New York, men slept on dirt without stoves or clean water) and stepped in themselves.
• Historians have long credited white women's wartime relief work, such as the Sanitary Commission; Black women found their own ways to make themselves visible in military spaces.
• Pinheiro calls this a claim to cultural citizenship: belonging earned by action and sacrifice, not by the vote. Some couples even married on the camp grounds, as the Christian Recorder, the AME Church newspaper, reported.

What made someone a citizen?

• Before the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship was vague and mostly defined by states, many limiting it to white men. New York let Black men vote only if they held more than $250 in property.
• The 1866 act declared everyone born in the United States a citizen, with rights to make contracts, own property and sue, regardless of race; the Fourteenth Amendment wrote in birthright citizenship and equal protection. Indigenous peoples were excluded, and most were not recognized as citizens until 1924. State and local governments quickly moved to cut back the new rights.
• Pinheiro's point: Black Pennsylvanians were already paying state and city taxes, and soldiers signed contracts with the federal government and wore its uniform — doing a citizen's duties while racism denied them a citizen's rights.

Claiming a place

• In New York, abolitionist Julia Williams Garnet founded the Ladies' Committee to support the USCT. Calling themselves "ladies" — a word reserved for upper-class white women — was a deliberate demand for respect.
• When a regimental flag was presented to the 20th U.S. Colored Infantry in New York, the white women of the Union League Club who raised the money were not allowed to speak; in Pennsylvania, Black women raised money for and presented flags to at least one or two regiments.
• In the 1860s Black women sued to desegregate Philadelphia's streetcars, the lifeline to Camp William Penn (historian Judith Giesberg tells the story in Army at Home) — acts Pinheiro links to the sit-ins of a much later era.

From service to the vote

Black Americans saw wartime service as an investment in citizenship. Soldiers of the 60th U.S. Colored Infantry (from Iowa) demanded the vote because of their service, and postwar Colored Conventions across the country argued that Black men — and later Black women — had earned it.

Voting rights did not simply expand over time. Before the war, many Northern and Western states had taken the vote away from Black men; Pennsylvania's constitution of the 1830s limited it to free white men. Reconstruction brought a great expansion of the franchise, but Black Codes, vigilante violence and Jim Crow soon rolled it back.

Next episode: Mary Church Terrell, born during the Civil War, who fought for racial justice and women's rights worldwide and challenged the white-led suffrage movement.

Sources

Based on "Ballot Blocked Episode 1: Service, Sacrifice, and Citizenship," National Park Service (2021), produced and hosted by Eleanor Mahoney with research and interviews by Sylvea Hollis, produced and edited by Drew Himmelstein, and made possible through a National Park Foundation grant with support from the Mellon Foundation. The interview is summarized in this page's own words; the episode's audio, which includes licensed music, is on the NPS page.