About the Kentucky U.S. Colored Troops Project

Reckoning, Inc. is 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is to examine the legacy of slavery in America, and to create ways for communities to engage with this information through research projects, media productions, educational curricula, online content, and other means. Since the 2020 premier of our public radio and podcast series, The Reckoning, our organization’s activities have expanded to include several different initiatives.

While researching The Reckoning radio series, we stumbled on a pretty extraordinary resource at the National Archives. It is a set of ledger books that were created to keep track of African American men who joined the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) from Kentucky. There are roughly 11,000 soldiers listed in these ledgers, 9,000 of whom had been enslaved.

What makes these books so valuable is that, for every man listed who was enslaved, it provides us with an array of facts about him that would otherwise be preserved in no other document: his first and last name, his birth year, his birth location, when and where he enlisted, and it also lists the name of his enslaver, because Lincoln had promised those loyal to the Union that they would be compensated $300 for any enslaved man who joined the Union Army. We can think of this as a kind of Rosetta Stone that unlocks so much previously hidden information about enslaved people.

By knowing the name of the enslaver, it allows us to pinpoint where a particular enslaved person had been enslaved. For African American soldiers, all we knew about them prior to this point was where they enlisted. But in many cases, they had to escape from their enslavers and make a long and potentially dangerous journey to the nearest enlistment place. So this alone could be valuable information to African Americans who descend from these soldiers, not to mention future researchers.
By knowing the name of the enslaver and the age of the soldier (which is included in the ledger records), we can go backward in time, to the slave schedules from 1850 and 1860, and try to find the soldier on the list of the enslaved for that enslaver.
We can also look at wills, deeds, and estate settlements for the enslavers and their parents, to see if we can possibly reconstruct family units that include the soldier (many of these have already been digitized by some combination of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org). It is common in such documents, especially wills, to refer to a person by first name, and then the names of their children. In this way, we may be able to look for siblings and parents of the soldier in the 1870 census–further widening what can be known about these enslaved families.
By knowing the first and last name of the soldier, we can look for the soldier in their Military Pension Card. What makes these cards so important, is that they often show us the name that the soldier used in freedom, which may differ from the name they were known by in the Army (which was often their enslaver’s last name). So in the case of the soldier whose card we show below, he was known as James S. Dixon in the Army, but James Sanders in the rest of his life.
We also intend to get digital copies of the pension records for each soldier (and/or their widow) who applied for a pension. These records can be a treasure trove containing medical information, correspondence to and from the soldier’s family, death records, and burial information. For soldiers who died in the war, there are also pension files available for their widows. We have already found 525 such pension files online for African American Civil War widows from Kentucky.

By knowing the name the soldier went by in freedom (from the pension card), we can hopefully find him and other family members in the 1870 and 1880 census, and start to put together family groups around the soldier. Since many African American households at this time were multi-generational, we may be able to see the parents of the soldier, as well as siblings and in-laws either living in the same home, or next door to one another. With luck, we can construct a family tree for each soldier that extends forward in time to at least the 1950 census. These would then be available to African American genealogists to see if they connect with known relatives.

It is our vision that this research work should be done primarily by African Americans from Kentucky, especially students from local colleges and universities, and that they be paid generously for their work. It is also our vision that the fruits of this research should be freely available to the public into perpetuity, with no paywalls to inhibit access. We also plan to upload our work when completed to archive.org, which is perpetually endowed to preserve digital information. We are beginning this project by researching the lives of approximately 750 soldiers from nine counties that surround Louisville, going as far back in time as possible through slave schedules, wills, and estate settlements, and as far forward in time as possible, through pension documents, census data, newspapers, and other resources, to create a set of primary source documents for each man and his family, coupled with a detailed family tree. The results of all this research will be published on our website and will serve as a vivid demonstration of the power of this overall project. Our eventual goal is to document the lives of all 23,700 African American soldiers who enlisted in the Union Army from Kentucky. According to researchers, for each soldier who had children, there could be 1,700 descendants today. If that is so, this project has the potential to benefit over 40 million African Americans nationwide. To that end, we intend to place family trees for these soldiers on the free genealogical website FamilySearch.org, so that it is available to any descendant that has been actively seeking to learn the identity of their ancestors. In addition to the African American community, we believe this project could also benefit scholars researching various aspects of slavery and the African American experience, as well as K-12 educators and their students seeking to integrate primary source documents into their study of American history, especially around slavery, the Civil War, and the Jim Crow era. To meet those needs, we intend to engage with curriculum developers to create educational curricula around the soldiers’ stories, along the lines of what we have already done with oral histories of the enslaved. If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation of any amount to support this project, please go to our donation page. To learn more about the project, you can watch a presentation about the project that was done for the Filson Historical Society in Louisville.

About the Kentucky U.S. Colored Troops Project

We sincerely thank our funders for their generous support!