African Americans, the Civil War and Civil Rights in the National Capital Area

After the 54th Massachusetts' assault on Fort Wagner, Black soldiers served throughout the national capital area and beyond. Photographer unknown, 1863–1865. Library of Congress.

This National Park Service timeline follows how African Americans in the national capital area helped save the Union, fought for their own freedom, and turned the struggle from emancipation toward equal rights. It draws on the NPS historic resource study Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area and the historic context African American Experience Before Emancipation.

Toward war

In his last words, John Brown declared that he was "now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood." His failed raid on Harpers Ferry, meant to rally enslaved people and their allies, has been seen as a rehearsal for the Civil War.

Abolitionists attacked slavery on moral grounds, while economics kept slave states committed to it. The South's agricultural wealth rested on enslaved labor, and Northern factories were key markets for Southern cotton. As the nation expanded west, the question of which new states would allow slavery grew bitter. Compromises such as the Missouri Compromise failed to settle it, and "Bleeding Kansas," the violence in Kansas Territory from 1855 to 1859, foreshadowed the war. Lincoln's election, the secession of Southern states and the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, set it off.

Racist laws had barred Black men from enlisting since 1792. The Confederacy won the First Battle of Manassas, and at Antietam on September 17, 1862 — the bloodiest day in American history, with more than 23,000 casualties — Union General George B. McClellan stopped Robert E. Lee's advance. That stalemate gave President Lincoln enough of a victory to make a radical change.

From slavery to liberation, 1860–1863

• 1860. Twenty percent of free Black people owned real estate, worth on average $317 — down by a third since 1850 — while the average farm was worth $8,700, up 15 percent.
• 1861. After Virginia seceded, delegates from 25 counties met at the First Wheeling Convention to repudiate secession, and a second convention six months later made West Virginia's formation official. In August, Union Major General Benjamin F. Butler ruled that people who escaped to Fort Monroe were "contraband of war" who need not be returned — the Contraband Decision.
• 1862. On April 16 the Compensated Emancipation Act ended slavery in Washington, D.C. The Militia Act of July freed enslaved people in Union-held areas whose enslavers could not show "continuous loyalty," and people escaping to the Union Army were no longer returned. After Antietam, Lincoln announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22: slavery would end in the rebelling states on New Year's Day, 1863.

Union soldiers were promised $13 a month, but Black troops received $7 after a $3 clothing deduction from $10. Their protests helped win equal pay for the U.S. Colored Troops in 1864. Library of Congress.

From liberation to mobilization, 1863–1865

The war began over secession and the spread of slavery, but after Antietam's heavy losses it served the Union to strip the Confederacy of its workforce. The Emancipation Proclamation, in effect January 1, 1863, declared that all persons held as slaves in the rebelling states "are, and henceforward shall be free," and that such persons "of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States." It did not free enslaved people in the national capital area or the loyal states, where slavery ended at different times — Maryland abolished it in 1864.

Free and enslaved Black men seized the chance to fight. Frederick Douglass urged them on: "Better even die free, than to live slaves." The U.S. Colored Troops, formed shortly after the Proclamation took effect, grew to more than 170 regiments. The 54th Massachusetts, recruited from free and self-liberated men, inspired regiments in the capital area and border states; its assault on Fort Wagner failed but proved how fiercely Black soldiers fought. Some 19,000 African Americans served in the Union Navy, where close quarters meant ships were racially integrated. Sojourner Truth, Douglass, Harriet Tubman and other abolitionists backed the war effort.

• 1863. Maryland raised the 7th and 19th U.S. Colored Troops, and Black troops trained on Theodore Roosevelt Island, also a refugee camp for the newly freed. In May a Freedman's Village was established on part of the Arlington plantation seized from Robert E. Lee, offering shelter, food, clothing, medical care and schooling. The 4th U.S. Colored Troops organized in Baltimore in July, fought in Virginia and at Monocacy, and served in Washington in 1865–66; the 28th was attached to the Defenses of Washington.
• 1864. Frederick Douglass founded the National Equal Rights League in Syracuse, New York, to press for equal rights, an end to segregation and Black men's right to vote. In Alexandria, Harriet Jacobs organized the city's first celebration of British West Indian Emancipation, at a hospital renamed L'Ouverture for the Haitian liberator, declaring, "We are passing through times that will secure for us a higher and nobler celebration." At Monocacy on July 9, Union forces under Lew Wallace slowed Jubal Early's march on Washington — "the battle that saved Washington" — and at Fort Stevens, the only battle fought in the city, outnumbered Union troops held until reinforcements arrived.
• 1865. The Freedmen's Bureau, headquartered in Washington, was created to help the newly free, largely by protecting their civil rights. Around the turn of 1866, Black citizens of Leesburg founded a "Colored Man's Aid Society," one of many mutual aid societies that became the backbone of civil society.

Susie King Taylor served as a nurse with the 33rd Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops. From her 1902 memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. Library of Congress.

By the war's end, an estimated 40,000 African Americans had freed themselves and come to Washington alone. Though Reconstruction is often judged a failure, it laid the foundation for the long fight for civil rights and against racist laws.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Capital Area: "Civil Rights and the Civil War in the National Capital Area," drawing on Cheryl LaRoche, Patsy Fletcher, Caroline Spencer and Lauren Hughes, Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area, and John Bedell and Andrew Wilkins, African American Experience Before Emancipation.
• The source dates the First Battle of Manassas to both 1861 and 1862 and gives the number of African Americans who served both as "nearly 200,000" and "over 200,000"; neither is given here. A few other details in the source are left out.