James Sinclair Polite: From Slavery in South Carolina to the Union Army and Mount Vernon

A soldier of the 35th United States Colored Troops. NPS.

James Sinclair Polite, buried in the historic cemetery of St. Paul's Church National Historic Site in Mount Vernon, New York, was born into slavery in South Carolina in the 1840s and served in the Union army at the end of the Civil War.

The 35th U.S. Colored Troops

The United States Colored Troops were all-Black regiments created mid-war — a way to enlist African Americans, who had every reason to fight the South, without confronting Northern white opposition to integrated units. The 54th Massachusetts, though not technically one of them, won public support for Black regiments with its assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor in July 1863.

Polite's regiment began in the fall of 1863 as the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers and became the 35th U.S.C.T. in February 1864. Most recruits were freedmen from coastal Virginia and the Carolinas; the officers were white Northerners, among them Colonel James C. Beecher, half-brother of Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. With the 54th, the 35th guarded the Union retreat at Olustee, the largest battle in Florida, on February 20, 1864.

Private Polite

A historian of the regiment wrote that for some Black men the war was the defining event of their lives, bringing self-worth and pride, and a chance to learn skills beyond plantation work.

The 35th served as an army of occupation in the state where secession began. Through the summer of 1865 it guarded Charleston's rail lines against guerrillas; then it moved to the countryside, took occasional shots from resentful white residents, and helped the Freedmen's Bureau settle land and labor disputes with former planters. Polite was present at every muster, never sick or absent. He may have stood guard near the plantation where he had been enslaved. He was honorably discharged on May 7, 1866, when the regiment disbanded, with $24 in back pay.

North

Like many freedmen, Polite followed the rail lines north — apparently the only one of six siblings to leave the South.

• 1872: living on Grand Street in lower Manhattan and working as a waiter in Tenafly, New Jersey, a long commute by streetcar and ferry. His wife, Anna R., was from Georgia. He could now write — perhaps learned in the army — and signed an application to the Freedman's Bank, created during Reconstruction to safeguard Black Americans' savings.
• By the 1890s: with Anna and their son, James, in Mount Vernon, about 20 miles north of Manhattan, as its Black community grew. They lived on Mount Vernon Avenue; he worked as a clerk.

He died on November 19, 1903, aged 58, and was buried in the City section of St. Paul's cemetery. His grave carries a marble veteran's headstone — a sign of the pride his family took in his service.

Sources

Based on "Formerly enslaved man from South Carolina buried at St. Paul's Served with Union army in Civil War," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The regimental historian is paraphrased. The source names the novelist "Harriet Ward Beecher"; she is Harriet Beecher Stowe.